First day in Berlin

    The senior political editor of the German "Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg" had breakfast with our journalist group today and told us he did not find Hillary Clinton appealing after covering her primary campaign trip to San Francisco in March. "I had the impression she was a master of political techniques but in a very chilly way." he said.   

   He told us George Bush, Sr was actually the strongest supporter of German unification and helped convince Maggie Thatcher to stop fighting against it back in 1989-90.  Bush senior gets to open the new American embassy in Berlin on July 4 (his son must certainly be in America on that day) and it will be, for him, a kind of political triumph.

    Next we had lunch in Berlin's "Little Istanbul" with a Turkish female politician named Bilkay Oney from the Green Party. She's a former journalist and now a Senator in the Berlin parliament.  The Turks are the biggest minority group in Germany.  She thinks that Turkish immigrants must learn to speak the German language better.  She says they tend to live in all-Turkish neighborhoods where they go to a Turkish butcher, hairdresser, etc... which never forces them to learn English.  

   She thinks it's unfortunate many Turks follow Turkish politics back home, but don't involve themselves in the politics of their new country.  Needless to say, Turks don't have a strong lobby here in Germany and face an uphill battle to be admitted to the European Union, since Germany is opposed.

   On a lighter note she told us Turkish men who immigrated here years ago were at first very attracted to the blond German women.  But now she thinks Turkish men have grown more conservative and try to find their wives from Turkey.   Meanwhile, she says modern Turkish women want German husbands.

   We ended our day at one of Germany's two public tv stations, ZDF.  Every German household pays 17 Euros per month to support public television.  No pledge drives here.   German newscasts begin with serious political and economic news, and have very little fluff or crime stories.  The biggest privately-owned competitor is RTL, or Radio-Tele-Luxembourg, which throws in Angelina Jolie updates with sports coverage and brief nuggets of news.  RTL is the most popular station among young people.  

    Our German public tv reporter Thorsten Alsleben told us he makes 57,000 Euros a year and is basically assured of his job until retirement.  He says the normal news story "package" runs about 1:30, just like in the US, and longer stories may go 3 minutes.  Investigative reports run about once a week on the German public tv stations.

  Unlike in the US, where morning news is now considered very important, Germans don't care much about it. In fact the two public tv stations take turns producing the morning show a week at a time and they both air the same program.  When I asked what Germans are doing in the morning instead of watching tv, Alsleben told us "eating breakfast, listening to the radio and hopefully talking to their partner."

    After the days events I walked into a drugstore and noticed some baby bottles on a shelf, which nearly made me cry.  I do miss little Quinn, lovely Larkin, and my husband Greg Ruthman, a man with Germanic roots, called "Roots".