www.cgerli.org seems to have vanished from the radar.
Here’s my post introducing it in 2008.
It had links to all sorts of translations of current German statutes and many other documents too.
I hope it is just being updated and has not been removed altogether.
There is a site with links to ‘official’ translations, Gesetze im Internet, but there are many more statutes out there in translation, good or less good, that can be useful to translators and lawyers.
There was an article in The Times on March 31: German obsession with privacy let killer pilot fly. The Times is not available free online but here is a link for those who can get it: Times article.
The article is by the Times Berlin correspondent David Charter and it argues that the crash could have been prevented if it weren’t for the confidentiality of German doctors.
German politicians have called for an overhaul of privacy laws that required doctors treating Andreas Lubitz to keep the killer co-pilot’s medical details secret from Lufthansa unless he obviously posed an “imminent danger”.
But that doesn’t mean that UK doctors would not be in the same dilemma.
It’s true that privacy law is stronger in Germany, as indeed the article goes on to say.
Under a German law that was passed in 1907, giving “the right to your own picture”, personal images may not be circulated or put on public display unless the consent of the person portrayed is given, which explains why the newspapers often pixillate some faces, and have not published pictures of Patrick Sonderheimer, the Germanwings captain, or members of Lubitz’s family.
General personal rights enshrined in the constitution lie behind the strict protection of individual identities in the German media, with many publications still referring to the co-pilot as Andreas L.
Andrew Hammel writes about the way German newspapers are loth to name Lubitz, whereas they were quick to name the Charlie Hebdo attackers in Paris: Respect our Privacy, say Germans About Germans. He links to a Washington Post article on the same subject:
Crash challenges German identity, notions of privacy
But at least by American standards, many Germans are expressing neither a strong sense of moral outrage nor a clamor to point the finger of blame.
The reason may lie in the sense that the crash is suddenly challenging some of the fundamental tenets of German life: that its titans of industry do not make mistakes. That well-thought-out rules — including those severely limiting the sharing of medical data — are things to be trusted in and strictly enforced. That in a country where Edward Snowden is nothing less than a folk hero, personal privacy must trump all else.
Andrew Hammel has a suspicion that the German media are keen to find fault with what they believe to be the US justice system, while overlooking comparable shortcomings of the German justice system. Goodness gracious – is he allowed to publish that kind of thing?
Bleg: German News Coverage of Failures of German Justice
Andrew is looking for evidence in the German-language press:
So what I am looking for is articles in the German-language press by Germans which deal with potential justice problems in courts in German-speaking countries including:
(1) wrongful convictions;
(2) racial, ethnic, or religious disparities in conviction rates or sentencing;
(3) allegations of racial or ethnic or religious bias among German prosecutors and professional or lay judges;
(4) interviews with prisoners currently serving prison sentences in Germany who claim that they are completely innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted; and/or
(5) detailed examinations of systemic problems in German criminal justice or prisons, things such as underfunding, outdated regulations, disproportionate penalties, or the use of unreliable evidence.
ENO Mastersingers frontcloth: 103 famous German(speaker)s.
Mastersingers at the ENO.
Can we please replace Simone Weil with Franz Kafka? This is getting silly.
I think at the end they produced placards with an even wider range. One libretto:
Beware! Evil tricks threaten us:
if the German people and kingdom should one day decay,
under a false, foreign rule
soon no prince would understand his people;
and foreign mists with foreign vanities
they would plant in our German land;
what is German and true none would know,
if it did not live in the honour of German Masters.
Therefore I say to you:
honour your German Masters,
then you will conjure up good spirits!
And if you favour their endeavours,
even if the Holy Roman Empire
should dissolve in mist,
for us there would yet remain
holy German Art!
Tories use picture of German road in ‘road to recovery’ election poster
A Conservative election poster with the theme ‘the road to recovery’ has a photoshopped version of a photo taken near Weimar six years ago.
In an email to Elaine O’Neill, the photographer said: “I think 35 percent of the picture is taken from my picture, the sky and other elements from other pictures.”
This has gone down well on Twitter.
LATER NOTE: And here’s Steve Bell’s take.
Here’s a photo taken earlier this week by my friend in Donzdorf, on the Schwäbische Alb. The shepherdess is carrying a newborn lamb up the hill to the place where the sheep are put in an electric fence. The mother ewe apparently headbutted the sheepdog aggressively. Up the hill, the lamb stood up and began to bounce around.
Even in the middle of Fürth I have seen shepherds and sheep – see earlier post. But I haven’t seen them moving along the roads.