After an exciting couple of years, tapmag has decided it’s time for a break. In the past years of reporting, live-blogging, and commenting on transatlantic relations, we have become part of a network of fellow transatlantic minds, and we hope we’ve helped bridge the gap for some of you and maybe even inspired some of you to cross the pond.

We have been privileged to have meet and work with great transatlantisists and  journalists. A special thanks to all of the guests and participants at our “Reporting America” seminar at the Free University Berlin (read more about it here)!

We will be using our time off to work on various projects ranging from Bachelor’s theses to getting to know Zurich or Chicago. We will check in from time to time and let you know where tapmag is headed.

In the meantime, you can follow us on Twitter or stay in touch with the individual editors through their social media presence:

Kolja is currently studying in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s finding out university can actually teach you things, and that the Swiss are a very nice and helpful people. All the while, he’s analyzing media trends and developments in journalism on his blog, All Things Considered.

Jessica has moved to Chicago to study at the Medill School of Journalism. She is roaming the Windy City for stories and moving steadily into multimedia reporting. You can read about her experience being Curious in Chicago on her blog of the same name.

Semir is working hard on his thesis at Free University Berlin and will soon be a proud Bachelor.

Dirk and Peter are moving in the same direction as Semir. They look forward to taking that to the next level at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute’s graduate school, and will thus stay true to North American Studies.

Thanks to our great readers, fellow bloggers and students for sharing this experience with us, for your inspiration and contributions. Please keep in touch!

We are always open for new ideas. If you want to get involved with the tapmag team, please contact one of the team members in Berlin.

Keep your eyes and ears open – we’ll be back!

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It is highly recommended reading for everyone trying to keep up with transatlantic culture, global politics, and European and American perceptions of the significant other. Edited by a three men team, including an alumnus of the Free University of Berlin, Atlantic Review has drawn a sizeable audience, as evidenced by the lively discussion surrounding each post in the comments.

tapmag: Who’s blogging on Atlantic Review? What is your background, are you American, European, or both?

Joerg: One American (Kyle Atwell, California) and two Europeans (Nanne Zwagerman, Netherlands and Joerg Wolf, Germany)

tapmag: Which topics do you write about? Who do you write for?

Joerg: All things transatlantic, but especially security issues (NATO, Afghanistan, Russia) and US commentaries on European policies and what Europeans say about the US.

Nanne: We don’t have a detailed concept of a target audience. We write for anyone who is interested in transatlantic relations. I think the blog does a good job of staying accessible but also a bit serious, and I know we have a lot of interesting readers.

tapmag: Why are you blogging? Why did you start in the first place?

Joerg: To promote critical, but fair analysis about the United States and Europe, which is needed to strengthen transatlantic relations in the 21^st century.

tapmag: Soccer or Football?

Joerg: Soccer.

Nanne: Snooker for watching, pool for playing.

tapmag: Which one is your favorite article on “Atlantic Review”? Which one is the most clicked?

Nanne: Our top two posts are about murder rates in the US vs. Germany and a youtube video from the EU that shows European sex. This only shows what people who come to us through search engines care about.

Our third most clicked post is also one of my favourites, and that’s a detailed post about how a German passenger was defamed in the ‘United 93’ movie. This is about addressing stereotypes that exist on both sides of the Atlantic, which is also an important part of what the Atlantic Review has done.

tapmag: Jesus or Obama?

Joerg: Nope, Forrest Gump it is.

Nanne: You’re sure you don’t mean Senator Fulbright, Joerg?

tapmag: Which question would you have liked to answer?

Nanne: Can German bands rock?

Joerg: Can the Dutch win in soccer?

tapmag: Tatort or The Wire?

Joerg: Neither for me.

Nanne: I haven’t watched The Wire.

tapmag: What is your favorite blog?

Nanne: talkingpointsmemo.com by Joshua Micah Marshall & team. This is actually the first blog I started reading, which was in 2003. It’s an example of how far you can take blogging and one of the best sources on DC politics.

Joerg: Tapmag, of course. There are so many blogs that I like for different topics and moods. Here are some of them: New Atlanticist, The Moderate Voice, USA Erklärt, Lifehacker.

tapmag: Thanks.

You can find all blog posts of this series on transatlantic blogs here.

In Germany, the organization is named Teach First Germany, and is thus, at least by name, closer to its British equivalent Teach First. But the mission is the same as the US orginial’s: Sending highly motivated candidates with strong academic credentials and active community involvement to poor and disadvantaged communities. There, the “fellows” will teach for two years, trying to engage and motivate the children in their schools who have been left behind by the public educational system.

The idea is based on the peace corps, which is why participants in the US are referred to as “corps members”. In Germany, the less military-sounding “fellow” was chosen. This was not the only change necessary to translate the program to the Germany environment. Kaija Landsberg, the energetic 29-year old founder of Teach First Germany, makes sure to point out that unlike in the US, Teach First participants will not fill regular teacher positions in Germany. They are there as additional support, to organize after-school activities, extra help, parent-teacher meetings and the like. Teaching classes will be a side activity, not the focal point of the engagement.

Participants often have no former teaching experience

The young professionals, while excellent students, will mostly hold degrees not related to teaching. They’ll receive a three-month intensive training before they are placed in the schools. Feedback sessions, mentors and professional development are planned to help them improve their skills throughout the two years.

Still, teacher unions are critical of the approach. They fear that regular jobs will be cut nonetheless and demand that the money spend on Teach First be used to hire recent graduates that went through the official teacher training programs (on a side note, teacher training is more standardized in Germany. You have to have a college degree in education in order to get into the teaching profession).

Who profits from Teach First, asks the teacher’s union

Essentially, the teacher’s union in Berlin brands the program as more of an assessment centre for socially handicapped upper-class kids than an effort to help disadvantaged schools and children. (I’ve written a more extensive report on this subject at Tagesspiegel.de)

Also, it is no easy task ahead of the junior teachers. Corps members of Teach for America blog on teachfor.us about their experience, detailing hardships and joyous moments alike. Stolen computers, constant disruption, more than a year behind the expected reading level – but getting students involved in activities they always rejected and seeing their progress seems to make the downsides worth it.

“Mr. D”, teaching music in the Mississippi delta, tells of participating in a debate contest and writes of his students:

“They were in the zone for the entire 2 hours, scrambling at the end to try to finish. They couldn’t stop talking about it after they handed in their work and one student said “Mr. D!!! My brain hurts after doing that!!” You have no idea how happy it made me to hear that.”

Program to start in three German states in the fall

Apparently, the applicants in Germany hope for similar experiences. I talked to one who said she wanted to be “a cool teacher” – a valid goal considering the German teaching force has a median age of about 50. She also wanted to empower the children, giving them enough knowledge so that they wouldn’t be kicked around by the system.

Teach First Germany moves state-by-state, unlike Teach for America, who targets specific areas. Berlin will be one of the first three German states to employ Teach First participants in the fall, the other two being Hamburg and Northrhine-Westfalia. Unfortunately, there are quite enough schools in the city that’d need some encouragement.

By Jessica Binsch

Head to teachfirst.de for more information and application materials.

Feininger had been a student at Bauhaus and never meant to become a photographer. Initially he was trained to be a cabinetmaker and then later worked as an architect with Le Corbusier. At some point he gave up on architecture itself and focused on its photography, which led him to become a key photographer at Life magazine for over 20 years.

When he immigrated to New York in 1939 he found his urban utopia, a place even more bursting with life than Paris and Stockholm, where he had lived before. Besides his work as an alround photographer capturing everything from fashion events to car accidents, he found time to walk the streets of New York and portrait it in all its facettes. But unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa he never waited to capture the one decisive moment. He rather tried to built the perfect impression by craftfully staging the picture he had in his mind.

As one of a few photographers of his time he was capable of successfully mastering craft and techiques with art and design. He considered craftsmanship to be the basic tool for his artistic expression—he saw the camera as the photographer’s typewriter. And this, in the end, made him an expert among experts. He wrote a number of standard references to photography, one of which you will probably know if you ever got serious with this artform: The Complete Photographer from 1978.

His work continues to define the image we have of New York until today. This probably explains the nostalgic feeling of ours when we saw the exhibition. If you have ever been there or not – Feininger’s pictures still feel strangely familiar.

Andreas Feininger
New York in the Forties
18.02.09 – 18.05.09

Bauhaus-Archiv
Museum für Gestaltung
Klingelhöferstraße 14
10785 Berlin

[Show as slideshow]

tapmag: When did you start “The Yes Men” and what’s your concept?

Mike: We started in 1999. Originally, we were doing an anti-corporate corporation called RTMark. We were setting up fake websites for other companies, trying to make fun of them. One of the fake websites we set up was for the World Trade Organization (WTO). We found that people were coming to the website, not realizing it was fake, and inviting the General Director of the WTO to conferences. Of course, we weren’t the General Director of the WTO but we offered to send a substitute to their conferences and then we just started going. We started pretending we are the WTO and making outrageous lectures that made fun of their ideas, basically. We made fun of the policies of the WTO that were hurting people in the developing world, mostly.

tapmag: Did nobody object?

Mike: No, you know the surprising thing is, no matter how extreme our presentations got, because we were the most powerful people in the room, nobody wanted to oppose that. They accepted these really strange ideas […]. We suggested that workers in the Third World get controlled by managers using a […] golden phallus—basically a penis that they wore on their hip—that the managers could use to administer electric shocks.

It was completely bogus, completely absurd. And yet people bought it because they thought we were really important and powerful—and that was the lesson we learned there: If you are in a position of power, you should definitely use it for good rather than bad.

tapmag: In your new movie, you pretend that you are the spokesperson of one the biggest chemical corporations in the world and you admit to wrongdoings in the past and that you are going to pay compensation for that. Why do you think it is so funny when you see a corporate spokesperson on the air saying: “O.K., we did something wrong and we have to take responsibility for it?”

Mike: That kind of thing is shocking because it hasn’t happened. I think a lot of CEOs probably want to say those things. They want to do the right thing. They learned right and wrong when they were children, just like the rest of us, and they know the difference. But they also know that if they say those things, their stock price will go down. And they are also obligated to keep their stock price up. It’s this catch-22; it’s contradictory.

Our whole point of this movie and what we have been doing for years is that we have to bring the system in line with our sense of right and wrong. We have to have a new system that is accountable to our moral and ethical values. Otherwise, the world is going to basically end. I mean we can see it coming: Climate change is guaranteed to cause massive catastrophes; pollution is guaranteed to continue to grow. At ten percent growth a year, the planet is eventually going to get used up; there is no denying that. We need to change sometime; it should be right now.

tapmag: What are your thoughts on the financial crisis? Do you have any friends who are investment bankers? What about the “Jump, fuckers!” photograph on the exhibition website?

Mike: I think they’ve done themselves in. [… ]We don’t have anything in particular that we can do to them or with them. We are just going to keep fighting for the right kind of regulation that will control what they will do in the future.

tapmag: From that, I draw that you are more an activist than a comedian. Do you have a set of political demands that you fight for and that you would like to see introduced into the political discourse?

Mike: I think that the discourse has lot of things in it already. […] Right now, we’re just interested in seeing change happen, because if it doesn’t, the predictions of scientists will probably come true. Sorry, I am a little out of it.

tapmag: That’s O.K. Thanks for talking to us and enjoy your stay in Berlin.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Foreign Minister, Vice-Chancellor,  Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor and all around Obama fanboy started the discussion by preemptively offering to accept some detainees even though the new U.S. administration hadn’t even asked (although they are expected to). This deeply offended Wolfgang Schäuble, Christian Democratic Minister of the Interior, who wasn’t consulted beforehand.  He apparently considers them to be a security risk to Germany, but then, people in general are a security risk in the eyes of Schäuble.

Schäuble got cover from his nerdy sidekick Wolfgang Bosbach, vice chair of the CDU caucus,  who essentially told the United States., and I’m paraphrasing here, “you break it, you own it” on the Gitmo situation. (Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, General Secretary of the Christian Social Union, also offered words of  support for Schäuble, but I’m only mentioning him so I can drop his incredibly hilarious name. Thank God we kicked the Kaiser out a long time ago!)

The debate exemplifies the difficulties Europe has in dealing with a post-Bush America. While the Europeans condemnation of Guantanamo Bay was nearly universal, they were equally glad that the U.S. was doing all the dirty work when dealing with captured terrorist suspects. For example, German Special Forces operating in Afghanistan were ordered to “restrain” captured individuals instead of arresting them because the latter would result in them being subjected to German law, which prohibits extradition when the individuals face torture or the death penalty. So when U.S. troops arrived at the scene, the Germans were supposed to “release” the captives for the Americans to arrest.

Now that President Obama by ordering the closure of Gitmo is actually doing what countless politicians in the Old World with good reason demanded, Europeans are mostly playing duck and cover. They don’t feel responsible for the 50 or so detainees that can’t be repatriated to their native countries for various reasons, never mind that many European governments participated in the war in Afghanistan and quite a few turned a blind eye to extraordinary rendition flights. Austria is hiding behind its laws, saying they limit asylum to refugees — and regrettably the Guantanamo inmates do not qualify. Great Britain says it has already done its share, by taking back British citizens held at Gitmo. Instead it graciously offered its expertise in dealing with the detainees.

But still, up to seven EU countries might be willing to accept a few inmates. At least some are doing their part. Others need to follow or Europe will once again show that it chickens out when things become difficult.

Obamas’s staff is planning a visit for the days following the NATO summit in early April. The President will be joined by his Secretary of the State, Hillary Clinton. Obama wants to thank the Berliners for their help during the election, the Focus assumes.

Back in July 2008, in the midst of the election, Obama drew a massive crowd to the Siegessäule, but did not deliver a particularly historic speech. The event will be remembered more for the passion he did spark with Berliners and maybe even for the provincial debate around the question where Obama will speak. His words were more directed at the television viewers and voters back home than at the 200,000 Berliners in front of him.

If he returns in April, there is no election holding him back on formulating a new understanding of transatlantic relations in the 21st century. Everything he might promise to the European public will be more than a campaign pledge; Obama’s word will carry the weight of his office. All that is a big if—it all depends on Obama’s intention to deliver more than a mere thank you note.

As the days of George W. Bush as President of the U.S.A. draw to an end, every part of the transition process takes on historic proportions. Nobody knows how many people will turn out on January 20 to see Obama take over the White House. It will probably be the biggest crowd ever at any Presidential Inauguration, which will also make it the costliest Inauguration ever. We tell you where to watch the celebration in Berlin!

Still-President Bush has declared the state of emergency for the District of Columbia during the weekend. 11,500 troops are assigned inaugural duties, aided by another 8,000 police men.

Meanwhile, Obama merchandise is in hot demand and might qualify as an economic stimulus. The Washington Post will print almost three times as many copies as usually and raise its cover price from 75 cents to $2 for the Inauguration issue. Needless to say, finding a a place to stay in D.C. borders on impossible.

Luckily, there are lots of alternatives in Berlin to join the festivities, so you can fall into your own bed at the end of the night.

UPDATE
I added the CARTA event, because they also screen the Inauguration.

• “Der Digitale Präsident” – Carta Diskussionsveranstaltung
  Haus der Bundespressekonferenz, Raum 0107
  Schiffbauerdamm 40
  10117 Berlin
  With live screening and a panel featuring:
  - Björn Böhning, Bundestagskandidat SPD
  - Mercedes Bunz, Tagesspiegel Online
  - Tobias Moorstedt, Journalist and Author (we interviewed him last year)
  6.00pm, free admission but you need to RSVP
  more info
• Inauguration Celebration of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy
  Amerika Haus Berlin (at Bahnhof Zoo)
  Hardenbergstraße 22-24
  10623 Berlin
  > 4.00pm
  doors open
  > 4.30pm
  Panel discussion on the significance of President Obama for Germany and Africa
  > 5.30pm
  Screening of the Inauguration
  > 7.00pm
  Panel discussion on the significance of the Obama’s presidency for the global African diaspora
  >8.30pm
  Concert, Jazz, R&B
  free admission, more info
  
• Democrats Abroad Inauguration Party
  GOYA ClubNollendorfplatz 5
  10777 Berlin
  > 4.30pm
  Doors open, projection of the entire ceremony on a large screen
  > 4.00pm
  Ceremony starts and ends at 20:00 (according to a press release from Washington D.C.)
  > 8.00pm
  Guest speakers from the different American abroad organizations. There is the POSSIBILITY the Governor Mayor of Berlin will make an appearance. THIS IS NOT CONFIRMED AT THE MOMENT!
  > 9.00pm
  Live Music from FOLKADELIC
  > 10.30pm
  DJ “Daddy-O,” Funky Soul Classics
  Tickets: 10-,€,  6-,€ after 21:00
  To reserve a ticket send a message to chair@demsinberlin.de
  There will be an after party at SURPRISE Club & Disco. A shuttle vehicle will be available for door to door transport from 10.00pm till midnight. Entrance and shuttle ride is free when you have a ticket for the Event in GOYA.
  more info
  
• Obama Kaffeklatsch at the JFK Institute
  Caféte at the John F. Kennedy Institute
  Lansstr. 5-9
  14159 Berlin
  There will be cake and coffee.
  free admission, starts 4pm
• Your place
  You can simply stay home and watch the Inauguration online. Read here where to access live streams of the ceremony and of several Inauguration parties in D.C.

Last week, the transition team announced that all politically-appointed ambassadors must vacate their post by January 20. Timken is totally cool with that. And the Ohioan businessman turned diplomat has some friendly words to say about his future Commander-in-Chief. He called Obama’s speech at Berlin’s victory column a “giant show”, which I’m sure is a compliment. Timken is even intimately familiar with the President-elect’s biography and appreciates his honesty: “That Obama so unabashedly admitted his drug usage is astounding. It would be more desirable if he and his wife were vanguards in the fight against drugs. Someone who has the top job in country should be a moral role model.”

But Timken, who according to malicious rumors got his job by raising $300,000 for the 2004 Bush campaign (earning him “Super Ranger”-status), is still rolling. He’s showing fond concern for Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton’s wellbeing, saying that her husband needs to be “thoroughly checked. A lot of tricky questions are probably coming his way.”

Nevertheless, he feels the obligation to say at least a few nice words about his current boss, pointing out Bush’s accomplishments in Africa, his successful fight against terror and the fact that Angela Merkel installed a video conference system specifically for her groping buddy George W.

What will she do with it now that Bush leaves office? Tapmag has a suggestion: Call up William Timken in Ohio!