German energy policy is a mess.

Obviously, we’re not the only country scrambling to do something about rising fuel prices right now — but here policymakers have done a particularly bad job — for decades.

Both left and right have been guided by particular ideologies and interest groups when it comes to energy.

Leaders from across the political spectrum have allowed Germany to become more vulnerable to global energy shocks than it needs to be.

Germany likes to brag about its climate-friendly policies — but continues to miss its climate targets — and punish consumers with some of the highest petrol and electricity prices in Europe. How did we end up here?

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Nuclear own-goal

I'll start with the left-of-centre parties: the Greens, the SPD, Die Linke.

Just yesterday in an opinion piece in the Guardian, our finance minister Lars Klingbeil (SPD) wrote:

“Those who fantasise about a nuclear revival are a threat to Germany’s sovereignty.”

Nonsense. Killing off nuclear was a terrible idea, especially seen from 2026.

Since the 1970s the Greens have been hellbent on shutting down the country’s 19 commercial nuclear power plants. Plants that were safe and produced zero CO².

The phaseout began with the SPD-Green coalition under the SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the early 2000s.

The last three nuclear power stations were finally shuttered — great timing — a year after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

Just as we were forced to wean ourselves off cheap gas from Putin’s Russia, we decided to shut down our last three operational reactors, extend the lifespans of dirty coal plants and import vast amounts of environmentally destructive LNG from the US and Qatar.

Full disclosure: I used to be a member of Die Grünen and I dabbled in climate activism in the pre-Covid days.

At some point it dawned on me: Germany was shutting down its last nuclear plants before it had a good plan to maintain the baseload on the power grid with just wind and solar. Nuclear was perfect for maintaining the baseload but without it we had to continue running climate-unfriendly coal and gas plants.

Demolition of a nuclear power plant in Bavaria:

Why did we shut down nuclear?

Pure fear.

Fear of a Chernobyl or Fukushima-type accident in Germany.

It was unfounded fear. We weren’t running dodgy old Soviet reactors here; we have no earthquakes in Germany; and when was the last time you noticed a tsunami on the North Sea coast?

Activists point to the unsolveable nuclear waste storage problem. That is and remains an issue but researchers in other countries are finding ways to recycle nuclear waste. It’s by no means an easy problem to solve but progress is being made. In Germany, the funding of research connected to the whole field has dried up.

Wind and solar power are fantastic. When the sun’s shining and the wind is blowing. But you can only build so many turbines without pissing off rural residents who are sick of seeing and hearing them near their homes.

And is covering vast areas of land with solar panels really such a great idea?

Every few months you see headlines like “Germany generated 100 percent of its electricity from renewables today.”

What these stories don’t mention is that when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, Germany imports nuclear power from France.

The German “energy transition” isn’t quite delivering what was promised: plentiful, cheap, nuclear-free, climate-friendly power for consumers and industry alike.

Some stats:

• Total electricity generation fell from 647 TwH in 2015 to 507 TwH in 2025. Why? A mixed bag of reasons: improved efficiency, economic stagnation, deindustrialisation — and imported nuclear-generated power from France!

• In 2015, German nuclear still accounted for 92 TWh — that fell to 0 TwH in 2025.

• Electricity generated by burning lignite coal (the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet) fell from 156 TwH to 74 TwH over the last decade. If we had left nuclear at 2015 levels, we could have completely replaced filthy, ecologically disastrous lignite by now.

• On days when there is so much wind and sun that the cost of power drops to zero, producers are compensated by the state to unplug their turbines and solar panels from the grid. Taxpayers and consumers shoulder the cost — to the tune of €1.2 billion per year.

• As a result, Germany has the highest household electricity prices in Europe (38 cents/KwH) — naturally industry gets a discount!

  

The right aren’t off the hook

First off, it was actually the conservative CDU’s Angela Merkel who fast-tracked the nuclear phaseout that the SPD-Green government had set in motion before her. All because of the 2011 Fukushima accident on the other side of the world.

However, my main gripe with the CDU is their obsession with maintaining the combustion engine.

For decades — over a century in fact — Germans made some of the best cars that go brum brum. Innovative, precision-machined motors that run on gasoline or diesel.

Hundreds of companies large and small — employing hundreds of thousands of workers — continue to crank out the complicated pieces of metal that make a Porsche engine growl.

The problem is that the future of cars is electric and everyone knows it. China knows this better than anyone. German brum-brum cars are losing market share as the Chinese mass-adopt Chinese EVs.

Meanwhile, German conservatives and their pals in the auto industry refuse to face the music.

They tried to ward off the shift towards electric with the lie about “clean diesel” — which ended, disastrously, in the biggest business scandal in German history: Dieselgate.

A decade later, conservatives still say we need to be “technologically open” — a euphemism for “let’s keep selling petrol-powered cars for as long as possible”.

Meanwhile, in Norway, 96% of new cars are BEVs (battery electric vehicles). In China that number is 48%. In Germany, it's just 22%, though interest in electric cars is rising rapidly as Donald Trump continues to wage war in the Persian Gulf.

The shift to electric is really happening and there’s nothing Germany can do to prevent it.

Electric cars make sense, from an environmental and energy-sovereignty perspective. Especially if we have renewables and nuclear to power them.

Tax break for drivers

Back to the current energy crisis. We’re not going to manage the shift to electric cars overnight. That takes political will and long-term planning.

But politicians are expected to react RIGHT NOW. To offer normal citizens some relief from the pain at the pump.

And so, the Merz government is axing the tax on fuel by 17 cents per litre for two months, starting May 1.

This latest Tankrabatt is peanuts and no guarantee that fuel costs won’t continue to shoot through the roof. Amazingly, oil companies aren’t required to pass on the rebate to consumers.

It’s the perfect opportunity for the AfD to score points with voters. The pro-car, pro-fossil-fuel, pro-Russian gas, pro-nuclear populist far-right party is thrashing Merz’s CDU/CSU in the opinion polls. The AfD has never been in power so it’s easy for them to blurt out easy solutions but to a lot of people their energy policies appear logical and sane.

The CDU/CSU-SPD coalition better come up with something more substantial to counter the energy crisis. Which is really just an economic crisis — since energy is part of every single thing we consume.

A real cut in taxes and socal contributions for lower and middle income people would be a good start that would go beyond reactive little rebates for drivers.

Other ideas to reduce energy dependence:

• Encourage cycling/walking

• Make the DeutschlandTicket cheaper

• Impose a speed limit on the Autobahn

• Reduce taxes on household energy bills not just petrol

And, in the long run, maybe think about getting some mini-nukes up and running — as Bavarian premier Markus Söder suggested in March. Not my favourite politician but he has a point.

Thanks for reading.

Maurice

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What else happened this week?

🩺 Billions in healthcare cutbacks

🔎 Nazi party membership search engine

🖥️ Germany launches quantum computing competition

📺 One of Germany’s biggest YouTubers on why he’s leaving Germany for good

💰 Money-Saving Tip of the Week from Smart Living in Germany

Is supplemental dental insurance (Zahnzusatzversicherung) worth it? It depends on how much dental work you realistically expect. Public health insurance covers routine checkups and basic fillings, but professional cleanings (€80–100 each), ceramic fillings, crowns, and implants are either partially covered or not at all. A single implant can cost up to €3,000, with public insurance contributing only around €460.

If your teeth are truly low-maintenance and you get one cleaning a year or less, paying out of pocket will likely cost less than years of insurance premiums. It starts to make more sense if you get two cleanings a year, have a history of fillings or root canals, or want a cushion against larger bills. Like most insurance, it comes down to how much risk you're comfortable with.

Interested in more tips on saving money and navigating life in Germany? Subscribe to the Smart Living in Germany newsletter.

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In this issue of Update Germany, journalist Josh Axelrod explores one of the German government’s more thorny figures.

I’ll be back next weekend!

But if you’re in Berlin on Wednesday, April 15th why not stop by my 20% Berlin News Quiz (no Trump questions, promise)?

Maurice

P.S. If you ended up here by chance, please subscribe. It’s free and just once a week.

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Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s cabinet has its fair share of… should we call them… quirky members?

Shout out to Dorothee Bär, Minister for Research, Technology and Space, who was roundly mocked for her efforts to get Flugtaxis or flying taxis off the ground (literally) in a country that struggles to provide basic Internet service.

And who could forget about Alois Rainer, the Bavarian butcher running Food and Agriculture, who called for Germany to create a national stockpile of tinned ravioli and who shut down his own butcher shop the moment food safety inspectors came knocking?

The big freedom guy

But, in Merz’s zany band of misfits, there’s one cabinet minister who deserves a closer look: Wolfram Weimer, the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media, a right-wing journalist with no background in the arts. Weimer was the editor-in-chief of Axel Springer’s Die Welt before founding the conservative magazine Cicero.

Here’s what the right-leaning newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said about his appointment last year: “His concept of culture and his understanding of history indicate that he is the wrong man in the wrong place.” Ouch.

The harsh criticism from FAZ focused on Weimer’s 2018 book “The Conservative Manifesto: Ten Commandments Of The New Bourgeoisie.” In it, he harkens back to the age of the “amoral Renaissance”, laments the “biological self-abandonment” of Europe forfeiting the “continuity of its own blood” and makes all sorts of other suspect pronouncements about history.

Plagiarism researcher Stefan Weber claims that large portions of that book were plagiarized. If you’re going to make racist claims about Germany’s Judeo-Christian roots, at least write them yourself!

The manifesto’s culture war grievances are no outlier. Since his appointment, Weimer has railed against wokeness in the arts, writing this 2025 op-ed titled “Defend Freedom” in Süddeutsche Zeitung: “In a social climate whose pace is driven by left-wing alarmism, preemptive obedience, paternalism, and language policing seem to be the ultimate solution.”

He adds, “anyone who confuses aesthetic categories with moral postulates and forbids everything that deviates from them must be accused of locking away the crown jewels of Western Enlightenment: freedom.”

So Weimer fancies himself a big freedom guy, against “rigid interventions in the visibility of artistic creation” from “zealots.” And yet, his actions paint a much different picture.

Berlinale backlash

Most notably, Weimer tried to oust Berlin Film Festival Director Tricia Tuttle after a particularly political festival this February, where Israel-Gaza politics overshadowed the films themselves. Tuttle’s offenses: allowing Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah al-Khatib, who had just won a best first feature award for his film Chronicles From the Siege, to make a speech criticizing Germany as being “partners in the genocide”; and posing with members of the crew, as is customary for the director during all film premieres, who were wearing keffiyehs and holding a Palestinian flag.

At the time, Weimer said, “The Berlinale must not be a place for incitement, threats or anti-Semitism. Hatred against Israel has no place there - especially not financed with taxpayers’ money.” But after widespread outcry from filmmakers — including this year’s Golden Bear winner İlker Çatak promising to never show a film at the Berlinale again — Weimer backed down from the fight and Tuttle has her job for now.

Other moves from Weimer:

• He referred three antifascist bookstores to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency for investigation over alleged extremist left-wing ties that were never shared with the bookstore or the public; and then had them removed from the jury list of the annual German Bookshop prize.

• His ministry intervened at the Capital City Cultural Fund to halt a €30,000 grant to translate the work of Palestinian authors; the translator was told she should make it “less one-sided” by including Jewish Israeli representatives.

• He’s banned the use of gender-inclusive language in official communications from his department and is strongly urging museums, foundations and public broadcasters to do the same.

So, we know what Weimer doesn’t want. All of which raises the question: What is Weimer actually for?

In February, the culture commissioner announced a boost in film investment, nearly doubling film funding to €250 million annually. The plan has a catch for streamers like Netflix and Amazon — they must reinvest at least 8% of their annual revenue back into the European entertainment industry.

And there’s a certain kind of German film Weimer specifically wants to see more of:

“We are world champions in arthouse funding — and that’s fine,” he said. “But in the field of popular audience films, we are too weak — we need to get better.”

Look out Christian Petzold, that’s a shot across the bow. For Weimer, that means more flicks like Das Kanu des Manitu, Germany’s biggest film of 2025, which helped boost domestic box office. For those who haven’t seen the Blazing Saddles-esque parody, it’s a sequel to Der Schuh des Manitu, a 2001 stereotype-laden hit widely criticized for its offensive portrayal of Native Americans and gay people.

There’s a tension here. Weimer wants the anemic German film industry to be a world leader, and is genuinely putting money where his mouth is. All the while, he’s picking fights with the very community he claims to support, making clear what kinds of content he finds acceptable or not, and undermining political expression by tampering with independent prizes and grants.

If Weimer really wants to see Germany’s arts scene thrive, maybe he should heed his own words in that SZ op-ed:

Thanks for reading!

Josh

What else happened this week?

✈️ Men under 45 allowed to go abroad again

🚊 Fare evasion is a crime that can send you to prison

📽️ German festival blocks prize for film linking 2020s genocide and 1930s fascism

⚡ Surge in electric car sales

🏭 Essen: Germany’s best kept secret?

📺 We call it techno: documentary about Germany’s early techno scene

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Maurice

Often I find myself wondering about words - and how they came to mean what they mean.

I believe that many of those who have learned a foreign language will be able to relate to my thoughts about the nature of an encounter with a foreign language.

We language students tend to notice things about a foreign language that natives don’t seem to notice because they were born into it.

In my case, I was born with Serbo-Croatian as my mother tongue and English as my father tongue. I consider German my stepmother tongue.

Being born into these first two languages, it would be difficult for me to say how they look from the outside or sound to anyone to whom they are foreign.

As for German, I landed in it from the outside, as an Ausländerin.

And as one, I learned to understand it piece by piece, by examining the individual parts of this composite language, and then assembling the parts to comprehend what is communicated.

This tactic was good as it helped me understand words individually, but it has also been proven inefficient when aiming for broader contexts.

Later, I learned that native speakers sometimes tend to say things “durch die Blume”, which literally means through a flower, or metaphorically using flowery language to soften criticism.

I imagine there must have been moments of cultural misunderstanding, in which, as I was being told something through the flowers, I didn’t get the message because I was too focused on wondering how it is that these flowers grow out of the cracks between the composite blocks, and perhaps missing the subtle nuance of the pollen-powdered point they are trying to make.

But that is how we were taught to learn the language at language school: not to be scared of the long words that German is notorious for, but rather to dismantle them, understand them as separate beings, and then put them back together - that’s when their meaning magically presents itself in its unambiguous form.

An example of such a long word many a German student must have heard early on in their learning journey is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän.

Admittedly, it does look intimidating, but once dismantled, it simply means a Danube steamship company captain. Taken apart, it really isn’t that terrifying, and suddenly we see that German is, in fact, a flexible, LEGO-language in which we can just shove nouns, adjectives, and verbs into a word to convey meaning.

As a foreigner, after having experienced this epiphany, communicating has become surprisingly easy.

Moreover, it is precisely this potency, which German is also famous for, that had me fall in love with it as a literature student.

That, and the allure of the words coined during literary Romanticism and the philosophy of German Idealism.

German seemed to have the magical ability to symbolize entire concepts in a single word.

I was a romantic and idealist, and the choice of studying literature had already made me highly susceptible to terms such as Weltschmerz, which literally translates to “world-pain” and describes the psychological state of being deeply melancholic about the discrepancy between the reality of the world and an ideal state.

Luckily, soon enough came Nietzsche with his Lebensbejahung, or the attitude of radically being life-affirming, of embracing and loving and living all of life’s aspects, pleasurable or painful, in Amor Fati or “love of fate”.

To love it all, the good, the bad, the painful, the known, and the unknown.

We are here, this is what we have, whether we understand it or not, we are human.

We are alive. We are all here because of Geworfenheit, which literally translates to “thrownness”, according to Heidegger.

We are just thrown into this world without being given a choice. But still, choices need to be made constantly.

And unfortunately, bad choices can lead to horrific consequences.

Big ideas and ideals can be seductive, and verführerisch in German, or misleading, and can lead to horrific leaders instrumentalizing pompous, powerful ideas for populist principles.

Heidegger joined the Nazi party, and Nietzsche’s terminology has been criminally twisted and tarnished by the same powers.

False friends exist on all fronts, and this concept also exists in linguistics. In language, false friends are words that misleadingly look or sound similar but have different meanings, often leading to translation errors and misunderstandings.

Some of these misunderstandings could even have lethal consequences.

Das Gift, for instance, sounds like a present, doesn’t it?

People are mostly flattered to receive gifts.

But nein - don’t take it in German—it’s a trap and means “poison”.

Or take it carefully, as every poison can also be a cure (in moderation).

At the end of the day, we will all die from something eventually.

But only in English.

And this is because eventuell in German means “perhaps”.

So, as far as dying goes, whether you perceive life as a gift or das Gift, it is nice, in language at least, to keep the option of immortality open.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t like to be a lover misunderstanding the word “eventually”.

Will it happen perhaps, or sooner or later?

Then again, as they say, there is no fairness in love and war, and what is certain anyhow?

Only change is constant. The rules upon which languages function were made up only to try to normalize what is already there.

When we learn languages, along with the rules, we always learn the exceptions that confirm the rules.

And what is most alive and playful is precisely that which breaks the rules and transgresses, and shows us the translinguistic, playful nature of language. Just as we can wonder about words from the outside, some words wander off into another language altogether and take on a completely different life independently, like Gogol’s Nose.

In German, these are called ausgewanderte Wörter, or emigrated words.

One example originally stems from the question, was ist das? (What is this?) In German, that became a little roof window in French and Turkish.

And this was due to some soldiers in the 18th century or so pointing at a rooftop window, asking, “What is this?”.

The French then understood it as the name for this ventilation window. When or why it went to Turkey remains a mystery, at least to me.

Perhaps it’s just chic to say anything in French, even “vasistas”.

Isn’t it cute when something seemingly foreign wanders into our lives and our languages and opens a window into the sky?

I wish we could all be that free to cross borders and open upward-looking perspectives, instead of being verführt by some Führer to close borders, perspectives, and hearts.

On this note and for the end, I would like to share perhaps one of the most beautiful ideas I’ve encountered through German and Friedrich Schiller’s words:

Or in English: “A person only plays when they are fully human in the truest sense of the word, and they are only fully human when they play.”

So be fully human, don’t go astray, and don’t forget to play!

You can follow Ashley’s work at her Substack newsletter.

Thanks for reading!

What else happened this week?

✈️ Merz asks Syrians to “go home”

📊 German growth forecast cut

👩‍⚖️ Reichsbürger face trial

🐺 Wolf bites woman in Hamburg

📺 Disconnect, a 2013 Hollywood flick with three tales of early internet weirdness is streaming in original version on ZDF.

💰 Money-Saving Tip of the Week from Smart Living in Germany
You’re probably happy that winter is finally over – but now might be a good time to think about the next one. Prices for seasonal items usually drop once demand is gone, so while everyone else is focused on spring and summer items, you can often find better deals on things like coats, thermal clothing, ski gear, warm blankets and daylight lamps for next winter.

The same logic applies to second-hand too: people tend to sell seasonal items right after they’ve used them, which is when supply is highest and prices are lower, so there are some good deals to be had on Kleinanzeigen and Vinted. The idea is simple – things are often cheapest when they feel least relevant, so if you already know you’ll need something later, it can be worth buying it now. Looking for more tips on saving money and navigating life in Germany? Subscribe to the Smart Living in Germany newsletter.

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In 2024, Collien Fernandes made a ZDF documentary about the scourge of deep fake porn. The German actress and TV moderator was directly affected by the repulsive trend. AI generated videos of somebody with her likeness performing all sorts of sexual acts were uploaded onto PornHub and then spread across the online porn ecosystem.

Who produced t…

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Sorry, I’m late with this Update. I’m in northern Sweden visiting my daughter, who’s doing an internship here.

Whenever I’m in Scandinavia, I have this sense that things just work better here than in Germany. Things feel more modern, more prosperous, more digitised and better organise…

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Last Sunday, in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, Green politician Cem Özdemir won the state election, with his party, Die Grünen scraping ahead of Friedrich Merz’s CDU. It looks like the Greens will be the senior partner in a coalition with the CDU, with Özdemir at the helm. The election was so close, the two parties w…

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Büttner accuses Peggy Lindemann, a member of the Schwedt city council, of sharing an Instagram reel with the following text:

“A painter from Austrian claims in his ‘propaganda’ that elite🧃drink the blood of our chil…

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As the father of three, I get emotional about this topic.

And impatient.

Ban social media for kids. Just like Australia. What the hell are you waiting for?

This week, Germany has finally been debating how to protect children from the harms of social media.

In an interview on the Machtwechsel podc…

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West of Frankfurt am Main lies the small town of Eppstein — possibly the etymological birthplace of the Jewish surname Epstein. By coincidence, just 30 minutes to the East in Frankfurt’s financial district lie the headquarters of a bank that played a pivotal role in sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's …

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A glossy, camouflage-colored piece of mail just went out to German teens across the country. But unlike the routine pizza delivery menus or fitness studio mailers stuffed in mailboxes, this letter can’t simply be tossed into the blaue Tonne.

The German boys must scan the letter’s QR code and fill out an online questionnaire within …

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A few years ago, my partner and I had to visit the Jugendamt (child welfare office) to get me officially recognised as the father of my son as I was not married to his mother.

We waited for an hour, then entered a dark chamber where a woman whose desk was covered in piles of folders held a mo…

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This week’s story is quite niche: German businesspeople exploiting a serious loophole in German traffic law. But it’s a fun one, and one has to admire the creativity of “Rene”, the man who first unlocked this apparently lucrative (if totally unethical) little business opportunity.

German …

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It’s one of the few things that a lot of expats and the AfD might see eye-to-eye on— at least superficially: German public media should be defunded or at least reduced to a size that doesn’t require forcing every household in Germany to pay a license lee of €18.36 per month.

Like rightwing populists the world over, the…

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When, as a kid, I heard about climate…

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As a German born and raised in the Anglosphere — a third culture kid of sorts — I’ve always considered any form patriotism or nationalism as a backwards worldview that needed to be phased out.

And as someone with a Danish partner, I…

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Josh Axelrod here, filling in for Maurice over the holidays, as he spends some much-deserved time with family in Denmark. There, he’ll join the Danes for their time-honored New Year’s Eve tradition: jumping off a chair as the clock strikes midnight.

Cross cut to Berlin’s end-of-year countdown for a j…

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As anyone who’s tried to rent an apartment in a large German city can tell you, the housing shortage is one of the pressing issues of our time.

Hundreds of people might show up to a single apartment viewing…

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If you’re here for the first time, Update Germany is a newsletter that goes out every Saturday morning. Each newsletter is a deep dive into a single topic related to Germany.

Today: Should the far-right AfD party be banned?

​💭Before we get going: If you’re in Berlin next Wednesday, I’ll be hosting the second 20% Berlin News Quiz. The first one was lo…

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It was a ice-cold January day a few years ago. A man in a wheelchair was trying to cross Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße in Berlin-Mitte but one of the wheelchair’s front wheels was broken — so he was just turning in a circle. The man had no winter jacket, no shoes, bandaged feet. He obviously couldn’t walk. I managed to get him to my office a few metres away. We…

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Germany hosted the European Digital Sovereignty Summit on Wednesday. A thousand people from tech, politics and business put their heads together to figure out how to make the EU less independent on US and Chinese technology.

So, what is digital sovereignty?

Joanna Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School in Berlin, says: “What dig…

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