The visit of American President Bush to Europe monopolizes the attention of the international dailies. Many of them devote analysis and comments to the “post September 11” scenarios, in a world trying to come to terms with the new terrorist threats of Bin Laden. “A mixed chorus of voices awaits Bush in Europe”, is the front-page headline carried for instance by the Herald Tribune (22/5), describing the “climate” that reigns in Berlin, first stage of Bush’s European tour, as that of a city and nation that is a “friend” of America, but that is also coming to terms with a certain “resurgent unilateralism” in Europe. “Europe and American messianism”: that’s the title of an article signed by Patrick Jarreau (Le Monde, 22/5), in which the author reviews the relation between the new terrorist threats to the USA and the role of Europe in the “great world alliance” of the post-September 11 period. On the eve of Bush’s trip to our continent and a year after the first similar journey made by the American president, “many things have changed in the world, but not the relations between the USA and her European allies. The image that each has of the other, on the other hand, has deteriorated. In June 2001, five months after the new American president entered office, the Europeans had a poor opinion of the Bush administration and its head; now, since the Americans massively approve of their leaders, it is the USA that is perceived as arrogant, bellicose, and hostile to any criticism”. According to Jarreau, all this is happening because “America has now entered a new period in its history, dominated by what might be called American messianism”. The German weekly Spiegel of 18/5 continues with the second instalment of its series of features on the beleaguered education system in Germany. This time the focus is placed on education in the nation’s nursery schools. Ansbert Kneip, Cordula Meyer and Hans-Ulrich Stoldt in their report “ I can make it!” speak of the inadequacy of German nursery schools and their failure to respond to the new challenges of education. Why? Because “ money, personnnel and any notion that children ought to learn are lacking“, in other words these schools don’t know how to give, or make children accept, orders and instructions, even at the simplest level. “ These children says the report fail to learn because they have no staying-power. Parents and educators are almost incapable of making them learn because they can’t support the efforts and failures involved“. In the same weekly, “ Hotline with Paradise” is a report which gives the magazine its cover headline this week. The Spiegel investigates “ why people pray. Numerous scholars in the field of culture have hitherto cudgelled their brains in trying to solve this problem. But now scientific researchers are trying to do so; they want to find the origin of religion in the network of cells of our grey matter”. And the magazine reports: “ A precise cerebral region has already been identified as the seat of God.” Another controversial issue that continues to occupy the German press is the expulsion of German citizens from the Czechoslovak Republic at the end of the second world war following the decrees of president Eduard Benes (which still remain in force today). The occasion for heightened press interest in the issue was offered by the celebration of the festivity of the Sudetenland Germans in Nuremberg on 19 May. Thus on its front page the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 21/05 carries the headline “ Prague: the expulsion was a good thing, ‘just, far-sighted, and a source of peace’” citing the words of the current Czech prime minister Zeman, according to whom the Germans from the Sudetenland “ wanted to remain inside the Reich, and therefore supported it“. On the other hand, intervening on the question of the celebrations, Edmund Stoiber, who is running for the post of chancellor in the forthcoming elections, accuses “ a large part of the Czech political elite of failing to liberate itself of the nationalist idea” and, in his view, the attitude to these decrees “will be a measure of the capacity of the Czech Republic to stay in Europe”. The paper also devotes attention to the Pope’s visit to Bulgaria with an article on the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, described as “ weak and lacerated, but decorative“, in which Reinhard Veser explains that the fears of patriarch Maxim are represented by the fact that “ in the eyes of the intellectuals, who took the initiative in promoting the Pope’s visit, John Paul II represents an image antithetical to this Orthodox Church: that of an educated man, with a profound knowledge of the world, who retained his integrity even under Communist rule. Maxim seems to fear that this may be clearly visible, when he stands at the side of John Paul II“.
