German interest in the darkest chapter of their history
seems stronger than it has ever been as the country marks
several key anniversaries this year linked to the Nazi era.

On TV talk shows, in newspapers and online, people endlessly
debate the Nazi era – from what their own grandparents did and
saw, to how the regime’s legacy constrains German peacekeepers
on overseas missions today, or why unemployed Greek and Spanish
protesters lampoon Chancellor Angela Merkel as a new Hitler.

Next month, Germans will also be painfully reminded that the
Nazis can still pose a threat today, when a young woman
allegedly inspired by Hitler’s ideology goes on trial over a
spate of racist murders committed since 2000.

“The interest (in the Nazis) is especially visible just now
because of the anniversaries,” said historian Arnd Bauerkaemper.

January marked 80 years since Hitler became chancellor, May
will see the 80th anniversary of the Nazis’ symbolic burning of
books they considered “un-German” and November the 75th
anniversary of the ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom against German Jews.

Adding urgency to the commemorations is the realisation that
the war generation is dying off and young people interested in
what happened often have to seek information from other sources.

“Like the undead the demons keep coming back to life from
the darkness of abstract history,” said the Spiegel weekly in
one of its numerous recent articles on the Nazi era.

“It’s never over,” was the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s
headline on an interview with Nico Hofmann, producer of a
three-part TV drama about five young Germans in 1941-45, “Unsere
Muetter, unsere Vaeter” (Our Mothers, Our Fathers). The film
drew more than seven million viewers when it aired in March.

GETTING PERSONAL

Hofmann said he produced the series partly for his own
father, who volunteered to join Hitler’s army aged 18.

The focus on individual stories is typical of the current
interest in the 1930s and 1940s, said Bauerkaemper.

“This personalised drama really struck a chord, especially
among young people who asked themselves how they would have
coped if they had been alive at that terrible time,” he said.

The TV series does not shy away from depicting the cruelty
of the war or German guilt – prompting Bild to ask: “Were German
soldiers really so brutal?” It also drew criticism from Russia
and Poland, showing how sensitivity lingers seven decades on.

The Polish ambassador complained it showed Polish resistance
fighters as anti-Semites. About a fifth of Poland’s population,
including most of its Jews, perished under Nazi occupation.

With his novel “Er ist wieder da” (He is Back), Timur Vermes
taps into the perennial fascination with the personality of
Adolf Hitler. It has sold more than 400,000 copies, is being
translated into other languages and is being made into a movie.

The striking cover compresses the title into the shape of
Hitler’s trademark square moustache and the book sells for 19.33
euros ($25.14), a cheeky reference to the year the Nazis came to
power.

In the novel, Hitler wakes up in 2011 to become a celebrity
on German-Turkish TV and launch a new political career
campaigning against speeding and dog muck on the pavements.

“I want to show that Hitler would have a chance to succeed
today just as he did back then but in another way,” Vermes said,
lambasting what he called German complacency about the Nazis.

“DIVERSITY DESTROYED”

All year Berlin is staging exhibitions, plays, films,
readings and other events under the rubric ‘Diversity Destroyed’
to commemorate the rich artistic and intellectual life of Weimar
Germany destroyed by Hitler, and to provide glimpses into the
life of ordinary people.

An exhibition in the German Historical Museum uses posters,
newsreel, jazz, eyewitness accounts and artefacts from Nazi SS
boots and pistols to ration cards to recreate the drama, horror
and hopes of the time. Curator Simone Erpel said over 40,000
people visited the exhibition in its first three months.

“This strong interest in the Nazis is not new, of course,
but what is relatively new is the level of official backing for
such exhibitions,” she said.

“It has become part of our common political culture to face
the Nazi past. It is now very politically correct to remember
the various victims, the Jews, the Roma, homosexuals, physically
and mentally handicapped people and others,” Erpel said.

Information stands in the city recount episodes from the era
and the stories of opponents of the regime like Albert Einstein,
Marlene Dietrich and writers Thomas Mann and Bertold Brecht.

“The diversity of cosmopolitan Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s
was destroyed by the National Socialists in a short period of
time,” said Berlin’s openly gay mayor Klaus Wowereit.

“That we can claim today to have regained such a degree of
diversity is not a foregone conclusion. It is an achievement on
the part of our city that we must actively seek to preserve.”

($1 = 0.7689 euros)

(Reporting by Gareth Jones, editing by Stephen Brown and Paul
Casciato)

The complaints, seven in total, reflect German unease about
the mounting costs of dealing with the three-year debt crisis
and fears that the ECB bond-buying programme may violate the
taboo against direct central bank financing of state budgets.

The court, based in Karlsruhe, southwestern Germany, ruled
in a preliminary verdict last September that the ESM did not
violate German law and could go ahead, though it insisted on
veto rights for the German parliament.

That same month, the ECB announced plans to buy “unlimited”
amounts of bonds from stricken euro zone states to reduce their
borrowing costs, provided they sign up to strict reform
programmes from the ESM rescue fund.

The ECB has not yet activated the programme as struggling
euro zone states, already implementing tough austerity measures,
are reluctant to accept the onerous conditions of the programme,
but the pledge alone has been sufficient to bring down their
borrowing costs over recent months.

Speaking after the court’s statement on Friday,
constitutional law expert Gunnar Beck said he did not expect
Karlsruhe to uphold the complaints, given its past record on not
blocking moves towards European integration, despite the legal
concerns over the bond-buying programme.

“There is no doubt that the EU treaties … rule out bond
purchases whenever they might facilitate state financing through
the printing press and allow indebted states to obtain better
rates than they would otherwise,” said Beck, a German lawyer and
academic now based at London University.

“There is no historic precedent where the German
constitutional court has directly challenged the German
government over an issue of European policy,” said Beck, a
longtime critic of euro zone bailouts.

“I have no doubt the court will (submit to the government’s
wishes) in one form or another when it comes to the ECB bond
purchases,” he added.

Tanja Boerzel, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free
University, agreed that the court would probably not challenge
the ECB’s bond-buying plans, though she said it may also
reaffirm the role of the German parliament in the process.

“This is about whether the ESM and the ECB’s programme
undermine the budgetary sovereignty of the German Bundestag
(lower house). That is the essence of democracy and the judges
will probably emphasise this, as they have in the past, and
perhaps come up with something specific,” Boerzel said.

The court will not give a final verdict on the complaints at
the June hearings.

Political analysts say a verdict is unlikely before
Germany’s September election when Chancellor Angela Merkel, her
popularity boosted by what voters see as her competent handling
of the euro zone crisis, is expected to win a third four-year
term.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government is seeking a weapons-free pullout by militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) as part of a drive to end a three-decades long conflict which has killed more than 40,000 people.

The militants themselves however have expressed concern that they could be vulnerable to attack. Hundreds were killed in clashes with security forces in a previous withdrawal in 1999.

“Prime Minister Erdogan says disarmament must occur but even he knows that is technically impossible. He says, ‘Leave the weapons in a cave or bury them, do whatever you want,’ but who will regulate this?,” Selahattin Demirtas, co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), told Reuters in an interview during a visit to Berlin.

“So we shouldn’t get too hung up on this issue, and it appears that the government won’t turn this into a crisis.”

So far, the issue of disarmament has been the sticking point in the peace process. The PKK has said its forces will not withdraw as Erdogan has demanded.

The rebels declared a ceasefire with Turkey last month, in response to an order from their jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan, after months of talks with Ankara. The next step is a pullout of an estimated 2,000-2,500 fighters from Turkish territory to bases in the mountains of northern Iraq.

Demirtas said hopes for the peace process remained strong despite some hitches. He has been part of a BDP delegation visiting Ocalan, imprisoned on an island near Istanbul.

Only Ocalan and a few Turkish officials have direct knowledge of the peace plan, communicating through letters.

Demirtas said two BDP lawmakers had collected a new letter from Ocalan on Sunday, which was now with the Turkish Justice Ministry. That letter, which includes the details of the withdrawal, would also go to PKK leaders in northern Iraq, who would then write an answer to Ocalan and the Ankara government.

Ocalan could then make an announcement in the next week to 10 days, he said.

“If this begins in 10 days, then I think that by autumn we will see most of the withdrawal complete,” he added.

Questions of disarmament and reintegration of combatants have tested peace efforts from Northern Ireland to South Africa, often proving extremely difficult to solve due to the amount of distrust on both sides.

Foreign mediators could be brought in to oversee disarmament and reintegration, as happened in Northern Ireland in the run-up to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which ended three decades of violence that cost 3,600 lives.

OCALAN “IN GOOD HEALTH”

Demirtas, 40, said he had found Ocalan to be in good health, energetic and keen to move forward with the peace plan.

The PKK, branded a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and European Union, launched its insurgency with the aim of carving out an independent state in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey, but later modified its goal to political autonomy.

Pro-Kurdish politicians are focused on expanding minority rights and winning stronger local government for the Kurds, who make up about 20 percent of Turkey’s 75 million people.

The war has drained state coffers, stunted development of the southeast and scarred Turkey’s human rights record.

Demirtas said the peace plan comprised three stages, first a withdrawal, then legislative changes and a third stage that would include political talks and “normalization”.

“The second phase is critical for the settlement. During that time the government must take certain steps for democracy in Turkey and the rights of Kurds. In particular the legal articles in the constitution which deny the Kurds’ (existence) must change,” he said.

The government has pledged to draw up a new constitution to replace a charter drawn up 30 years ago under military rule. But a parliamentary commission working on the draft has been unable to agree on many of the key issues, delaying the process by months. The BDP’s support could break the deadlock.

Asked about the constitution, Demirtas said the BDP had four key demands. It must not define all citizens as “Turks” as at present, it must grant citizens the right to education in their mother tongue, recognize Turkey’s diversity and include a right to some form of communal self-administration.

Demirtas urged Ankara to expand democratic rights and freedom of expression and to boost financial support for opposition parties. He also urged the government to limit the scope of anti-terror laws, often used to incarcerate Kurdish politicians and close down Kurdish political parties.

“Police and authorities’ treatment of demonstrators needs to be overhauled … We need measures to free the politicians and mayors who are incarcerated and political prisoners,” he said.

Thousands of Kurdish activists, including dozens of elected officials, are held in prison on charges of backing the PKK.

The BDP hopes once regional tensions ease, the southeast can finally enjoy the economic boom seen elsewhere in Turkey.

(Additional reporting by Istanbul, Ankara bureaux; Writing by Alexandra Hudson; Editing by Jon Hemming)

The tax inspections of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) appear to be part of a wider ongoing investigation by Moscow of Russian and Western NGOs that activists say is aimed at stifling political dissent.

The KAS is linked to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the FES is close to Germany’s main opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD).

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle called in the number two diplomat at Russia’s embassy in Berlin to relay his “concern over the concerted action” by Russian tax authorities, the foreign ministry said on Twitter.

“Hampering the activity of German foundations could inflict lasting damage on bilateral relations. We have made this clear to the Russian side,” a German diplomat told Spiegel Online.

Since returning to the Kremlin last May, President Vladimir Putin has signed laws to tighten controls on NGOs, requiring those with foreign funding to register as “foreign agents”, a term that evokes espionage and echoes Cold War era hostilities.

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement on Tuesday that she was “concerned with the ongoing actions of the authorities against the NGO community” in Russia.

She said what she described as “raids” on NGOs, as well as legislation “that curtails the civil freedoms of Russian population, an upsurge in prosecution of civil society activists” and other issues “constitute a trend that is deeply troubling”.

The Kremlin says the NGO legislation is needed to prevent groups from spying for foreign governments, but Putin’s critics see the unannounced visits by state authorities ranging from tax officials to fire inspectors as harassment.

Russian state prosecutors and the justice ministry could not immediately be reached on Tuesday for comment. The justice ministry said on Monday the searches authorities have been conducting were aimed at checking the groups’ “compliance with (their) statutory goals and with Russian law”.

Germany’s Christian Democrats said Russian authorities had seized computers from the KAS’s St Petersburg office in what it said was a “totally unacceptable” action.

“The political foundations from Germany are making an important contribution to the development of democratic structures, the building of a state based on law and the encouragement of civil society,” CDU general secretary Hermann Groehe said in a statement.

“INTERFERENCE”

“We urge the Russian authorities to immediately stop interference with the work of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation,” he added.

A spokesman for the FES in Berlin told Reuters the foundation’s Moscow office had received another visit from tax inspectors on Tuesday, though he added he would not call it a “raid” but a previously agreed appointment.

“We expect that after these checks we will be able to continue the full range of our activities in the Russian Federation,” FES’s Reinhard Krumm said in a separate statement.

On Tuesday, tax authorities and prosecutors also searched the offices of Memorial, a respected human rights group founded in the Soviet era, for the third time in a week. Memorial said it had lodged a formal query with prosecutors asking what specific grounds they had for the searches.

The Moscow offices of human rights advocacy group Amnesty International were also searched on Monday.

Economic ties between Germany and Russia are booming and Putin has said bilateral trade in 2011 totalled $72 billion (47.5 billion pounds), but Merkel has sharply criticised Moscow’s clampdown on dissent.

Russia is also angry over the euro zone’s handling of the financial crisis in Cyprus where uninsured depositors in the island’s banks – many of them wealthy Russians – will now lose billions of euros under the terms of a bailout.

Germany, long critical of Cyprus’s status as a tax haven for Russians and others, has led calls for wealthier bank depositors to contribute to the plan to rescue the island from bankruptcy.

(Additional reporting by Steve Gutterman in Moscow; Editing by Jon Hemming)

The tax inspections of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) appear to be part of a wider ongoing probe by Moscow of Russian and Western NGOs that activists say is aimed at stifling political dissent.

The KAS is linked to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the FES is close to Germany’s main opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD).

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle called in the number two diplomat at Russia’s embassy in Berlin to relay his “concern over the concerted action” by Russian tax authorities, the foreign ministry said on Twitter.

“Hampering the activity of German foundations could inflict lasting damage on bilateral relations. We have made this clear to the Russian side,” a German diplomat told Spiegel Online.

Since returning to the Kremlin last May, President Vladimir Putin has signed laws to tighten controls on NGOs, requiring those with foreign funding to register as “foreign agents”, a term echoing Cold War era hostilities.

The Kremlin says the legislation is needed to prevent groups from spying for foreign governments, but Putin’s critics see raids by state authorities ranging from tax officials to fire inspectors as harassment.

Russian state prosecutors and the justice ministry could not immediately be reached on Tuesday for comment on the raids. The justice ministry said on Monday the searches authorities have been conducting were aimed at checking the groups’ “compliance with statutory goals and with Russian law”.

Germany’s Christian Democrats said Russian authorities had seized computers in the KAS’s St Petersburg office in what it said was a “totally unacceptable” action.

“The political foundations from Germany are making an important contribution to the development of democratic structures, the building of a state based on law and the encouragement of civil society,” CDU general secretary Hermann Groehe said in a statement.

“INTERFERENCE”

“We urge the Russian authorities to immediately stop interference with the work of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation,” he added.

A spokesman for the FES in Berlin told Reuters the foundation’s Moscow office had received another visit from tax inspectors on Tuesday, though he added he would not call it a “raid” but a previously agreed appointment.

“We expect that after these checks we will be able to continue the full range of our activities in the Russian Federation,” FES’s Reinhard Krumm said in a separate statement.

On Tuesday, tax authorities and prosecutors also searched the offices of Memorial, a respected human rights group founded in the Soviet era, for the third time in a week. Memorial said it had lodged a formal query with prosecutors asking what specific grounds they had for the searches.

The Moscow offices of human rights advocacy group Amnesty International were also searched on Monday.

Economic ties between Germany and Russia are booming and Putin has said bilateral trade in 2011 totaled $72 billion, but Merkel has sharply criticized Moscow’s clampdown on dissent.

Russia is also angry over the euro zone’s handling of the financial crisis in Cyprus where uninsured depositors in the island’s banks – many of them wealthy Russians – will now lose billions of euros under the terms of a bailout.

Germany, long critical of Cyprus’s status as a tax haven for Russians and others, has led calls for wealthier bank depositors to contribute to the plan to rescue the island from bankruptcy.

(Additional reporting by Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Germany’s mainstream parties remain solidly pro-euro despite grumbling over costly bailouts of Greece and others. A German taboo on nationalism, rooted in atonement for the crimes of the Nazi era, has helped to muffle eurosceptic voices.

But the poll conducted by TNS-Emnid for the weekly Focus magazine showed 26 percent of Germans would consider backing a party that wanted to take Germany out of the euro and as many as four in 10 Germans in the 40-49 age bracket would do so.

The survey, which canvassed the views of 1,007 people on March 6-7, coincides with the launch of a new party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), that calls the euro a “fatal mistake”, though political analysts play down its election chances.

AfD and other German critics of the euro say it is unfair and undemocratic to expect Germany to bear the costs of other countries’ economic mistakes and call for a return to the Deutschmark. “Every people should be able democratically to decide its own currency,” the AfD said on its website.

Emnid chief Klaus-Peter Schoeppner said the survey results were partly a signal from conservative supporters of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition that they expected a strong defence of German interests in Europe and would not accept any moves towards “euro bonds”, a sharing of liability for euro zone debt.

“There is scope in Germany for a protest party to win two or three percent support but it would be very difficult for it to enter parliament,” he told Reuters, adding that much would depend on the wider economic situation.

A political party needs to win 5 percent to get seats in Germany’s Bundestag, the lower house of parliament.

Despite the euro zone crisis, which has pitched southern Europe into deep recession, Germany, the region’s largest economy, is faring relatively well, its exports to non-European markets are booming and unemployment is near two-decade lows.

GERMANY “IN CRISIS”?

The new eurosceptical party, the AfD, comprising mostly academics and business people, is due to hold its first meeting on Monday evening in a suburb of Frankfurt.

“Let’s put an end to this euro!” reads the message on the front page of its new website at www.alternativefuer.de.

“The Federal Republic of Germany is in the deepest crisis in its history. The introduction of the euro was a fatal mistake that is threatening our prosperity. The old parties are grizzled and worn out. They are stubbornly refusing to admit their mistake and correct it,” it said.

The AfD said the European Central Bank should not be allowed to buy up the debt of struggling euro zone members. It fears this could stoke inflation that will destroy the value of Germans’ savings.

But previous eurosceptic parties in Germany have made little headway. One of them, the “Free Voters”, have won seats in Bavaria’s regional assembly but have yet to win support at the national level.

Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University, said AfD was unlikely to gather much momentum because it was effectively a single-issue party and that Germans had more pressing concerns than the fate of the euro.

“Most of those who talk about the dangers of the euro and long for a return to the Deutschmark will still vote conservative in the end. They believe Merkel will protect them, they feel safer with her than voting for a new party,” he said.

Merkel’s conservatives are tipped to win most votes in the September election, helped partly by her tough stance on euro zone bailouts and her insistence that heavily indebted countries embrace harsh austerity measures.

The main opposition centre-left Social Democrats and Greens have broadly backed Merkel’s efforts to tackle the euro crisis.

The crisis has featured less on the front pages of German newspapers since the European Central Bank pledged last summer to buy up unlimited quantities of sovereign debt if necessary – in return for strictly binding austerity commitments – to save the European common currency.

But many Germans, including at the Bundesbank, are deeply uncomfortable with this ECB pledge and last month’s inconclusive election in Italy, where anti-austerity parties performed well, has reminded Germans that the crisis is far from over.

(Reporting by Gareth Jones; Editing by Noah Barkin and Mark Heinrich)

U.S. authorities accuse the former hedge fund manager of orchestrating a market manipulation scheme to artificially improve the performance of his funds, a fraud that led to at least $200 million in losses to investors.

Homm, now 53, disappeared in 2007 from his luxury villa on the Mediterranean island of Majorca after, according to U.S. authorities, dumping tens of millions of dollars’ worth of his own shares in his company Absolute Capital Management Holdings Ltd and causing huge losses to investors.

The story of his arrest by Italian police on Friday, like so much else in Homm’s life, reads like a thriller. Acting on a tipoff from the FBI, the police followed his ex-wife and son to their rendezvous with the elusive Homm at the Uffizi.

There, as the three were admiring classical Greek sculptures, police said they arrested him “very discreetly”.

“Even the museum guards didn’t notice anything,” said the director of the Uffizi, Antonio Natali.

Everything about the cigar-chomping Homm, who stands over two meters (6 feet 7 inches) tall and is nicknamed the “steamroller”, seems larger than life.

In his native Germany, Homm is viewed by some as a symbol of the hubristic greed that helped trigger the global financial crisis of 2008-09.

But he is also remembered for saving one of the country’s most revered soccer teams, Borussia Dortmund, from bankruptcy and has more recently established a charity, Maximum Impact Medicine, that aims to save lives by providing cheap vaccines.

“Homm was definitely what you would call a colorful figure,” said Klaus Nieding, a lawyer and head of the German shareholders’ association DSW which has had dealings with Homm.

“Back in 2005-2007, he clearly fancied himself in the role of a tycoon who carried out a whole range of diverse investments. But, to put it mildly, there are numerous investors who feel their interests haven’t been served in the best possible way,” Nieding told Reuters.

UNDERGROUND

In a recent autobiography that bears the English title “The Rogue Financier: Adventures of an Estranged Capitalist”, Homm tells of how he boarded his private plane in 2007 with cash stuffed into his underwear and cigar case and fled to Colombia.

In German his book is entitled “Kopf Geld Jagd” (Headhunt for Money), a reference to a $1.5 million reward offered by a German private detective last year for information on his whereabouts. Homm said he saw this as an effective contract on his life.

“I had a long list of enemies,” he said.

Homm, who went to the United States as a young man to play basketball and ended up graduating from Harvard Business School, said he wanted to make amends for his past misdeeds by devoting himself to good causes.

“I used to be filthy rich, I had everything such a person has – villas, planes, a private zoo, yachts, everything. But I didn’t know what to do with it,” he said in a rare interview published last November in the now-defunct Financial Times Deutschland newspaper.

His book, dedicated to the two children he said he regretted having neglected as a father, was intended to discourage young people from giving in to “blind greed” as he had done, he said.

In the interview, Homm compared himself to Saint Paul in the Bible who sees the light and repents of his former life.

The paper described him as fit and tanned and said he was a keen skier and fly-fisherman, but added that the fugitive life – he said he had spent 18 months moving around the world and staying in cheap hotels – had left him nervous and suspicious.

The reporter who conducted the FTD interview wrote of having to follow elaborate instructions – ending in a metal detector scan – before finally interviewing him in a Paris hotel. Homm allowed no photographs or tape recordings.

The criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles alleges that Homm directed hedge funds to buy billions of shares of U.S.-based penny stocks and trade them among themselves to inflate their prices and the funds’ asset values while generating additional fees for him and his company.

There has been no indication from Homm as to how he will plead.

Italy is now expected to extradite him to the United States.

(Additional reporting by Andreas Cremer in Berlin and Gavin Jones in Rome; Editing by Jason Webb)

The movie, directed by Calin Peter Netzer, shines an unforgiving light on the casual corruption and flashy materialism of post-communist Romania’s upper middle class which expects to be able to buy itself out of any difficulty.

Netzer belongs to a group of young Romanian directors who have emerged since the death in 1989 of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who had controlled the arts with an iron hand.

With its black humor, social satire and a remorseless focus on its protagonists’ neuroses, the film stands firmly in the tradition of Romanian new wave cinema that has wowed Western audiences over the past decade.

But Gheorghiu said the film’s theme is universal, not local.

“I don’t think this is a problem specific to Romania. There are mothers like this everywhere … who are victims of their unconditional love for their child,” she told a news conference after the film’s world premiere on Monday.

Gheorghiu’s character Cornelia hopes to win back the love of her son Barbu by using her social connections and splashing cash around liberally after he accidentally knocks down and kills a boy while speeding along a road outside Bucharest.

Barbu, 30, traumatized by the accident, faces up to 15 years in jail if convicted but he is also desperate to escape a mother who has always tried to run his life and refuses to let him grow up.

Cornelia, 60, always immaculately turned out in designer outfits and jewellery, lives in a plush villa in Bucharest where the bookshelves are lined with unread works by, among others, Romanian-born Nobel literature laureate Herta Mueller.

BUYING OFF PEOPLE

Cornelia’s imperious attitude to the police, her arrogant disdain for Barbu’s girlfriend, and her awkward attempt to buy off the poor family of the dead boy provide an unflattering insight into the attitudes of Romania’s nouveau riche.

“People from this social class are perhaps more likely to suffer from this kind of almost pathological relationship between a mother and her children than the lower social strata,” said Netzer, who spent part of his youth in Germany.

But Cornelia’s blindness to her own selfishness is also both comic and tragic. In the emotional culmination of the film, during a visit to the humble village home of the dead boy’s parents to pay her condolences, she ends up speaking obsessively about her own son as though he were the one who had died.

Netzer said the film’s title “Child’s Pose” comes from a yoga position, a detail that was edited out of the film, and refers to Cornelia’s inability to let her son break free.

“Child’s Pose” is one of 19 films in this year’s competition at the 11-day Berlinale, the first major European film festival of the year.

Netzer is best known for “Medal of Honour”, an ironic movie about a pensioner who erroneously receives an award for his “heroic” actions in World War Two.

(Reporting by Gareth Jones, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

“In the Name of”, the first of 19 competition entries to screen at this year’s Berlin film festival, focuses on a priest’s struggle with his sexuality while working with troubled youths in a deprived corner of rural Poland where drug and alcohol abuse are commonplace.

The film takes a swipe at the Catholic Church, which still wields huge influence in Poland, and Szumowska said she expects Polish conservatives to react negatively, but she said her main concern was to depict the loneliness of a priest’s life.

“They (the Catholic Church) don’t want to change anything. The church does not fit in with modern society,” Szumowska told a news conference after the screening.

“Out of this conflict only bad things happen. I think they are extremely closed and intolerant… But I am not a politician or an intellectual,” she added.

“We did not want to make a movie about an oppressive church… We wanted to make a movie about love.”

The priest Adam, played by Andrzej Chyra, has a good rapport with the dope-smoking, hard-talking young men in his care, playing soccer and swimming in a lake with them. He wards off his growing sexual frustration with long runs in the forest.

After rejecting the advances of a young woman parishioner Ewa, Adam strikes up a friendship with the taciturn son of a simple local family who returns his affection.

In one of the more memorable scenes in a film characterized by furtive glances, whispered confessions and a tense mood that swings swiftly from joy to despair, Adam dances with a portrait of the Pope to loud music after downing a bottle of vodka.

“It is hard to imagine a more lonely person than a priest… I spoke to many priests and they told me that it is very hard,” said Szumowska.

“I wanted to understand my character (Adam), not judge him,” she told the news conference where she was joined by Chyra and Mateusz Kosciukiewicz who played his young lover.

CHANGING TIMES

“We have very strong discussions now in Poland, about the church, about homosexuality. We now have priests leaving the church,” she said.

The film’s premiere comes just weeks after the Polish parliament rejected draft laws that would have given limited legal rights to homosexual couples in a move that disappointed many younger, urban Poles with liberal views about sex.

And yet Poland – whose parliament includes its first transsexual lawmaker – is changing.

“It was not hard getting money to make the film. The Polish Film Institute is not afraid of controversial issues. Poland is a democracy and you can say whatever you want,” she said.

Szumowska, 39, is a graduate of the famous Lodz film school where some of Poland’s greatest directors including Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski also studied.

Asked why she thought there were so many films from former communist central and eastern Europe screening at this year’s Berlin festival, Szumowska said it may be because of the rapid pace of change in a region that has had to embrace capitalism and democracy in a short period of time.

“Everything is still fresh… There are so many things going on, always we have strong discussions. We are always talking about who we are,” she said.

Though somber in tone – one of the boys hangs himself after a homosexual affair with another boy – “In the Name of” ends on a disconcertingly ambiguous note, showing the object of Adam’s love joining a seminary to train as a priest.

“The ending is ironic and kind of confusing but realistic,” said Szumowska.

(Reporting by Gareth Jones, editing by Paul Casciato)

German opposition lawmakers said Annette Schavan, a close Merkel ally, should resign after the University of Duesseldorf said on Tuesday that parts of her 1980 doctoral thesis had been copied and that it was stripping her of her PhD.

Her case closely mirrors that of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who quit as Germany’s defense minister in 2011 over a plagiarized thesis. Guttenberg had been viewed before his departure as a possible heir to Merkel.

“I will not accept the decision of the University of Duesseldorf and I will file a lawsuit against it,” Schavan, 57, told reporters during a visit to Johannesburg, South Africa.

She declined to make any further comment for legal reasons.

The accusations of plagiarism are especially embarrassing for Schavan because she oversees Germany’s universities and had previously been scathing in her criticism of Guttenberg, who resigned a month after losing his doctorate.

“An education minister who is proven to have grossly violated academic rules cannot continue in the post,” said Renate Kuenast, a leading member of the opposition Greens.

“I assume that Frau Schavan will spare herself and education a prolongation of this affair by resigning.”

Merkel’s spokesman said the chancellor was in contact with Schavan and continued to offer her support.

“The chancellor values the minister’s performance highly and has full trust in her,” Steffen Seibert told a government news conference on Wednesday. Merkel and Schavan would have talks “in peace and quiet” after the minister’s return from South Africa.

POLITICAL RIPPLES

Some members of Merkel’s centre-right coalition said the minister had fallen victim to a politically motivated campaign to damage the government ahead of the autumn federal election.

Merkel, who holds a doctorate in physics, is Germany’s most popular politician and her conservatives are tipped to win the September vote, but there is uncertainty about the make-up of the next government.

Merkel’s current coalition partner, the liberal Free Democrats, may fail to clear the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament. That would force her to consider an unwieldy pact with the opposition Social Democrats.

German media were mostly critical of Schavan.

“If the education minister has cheated in her doctoral thesis, it is like the finance minister secretly hiding away his money in Switzerland or the traffic minister driving a car while drunk,” said the top-selling Bild newspaper.

“There is no alternative (to resignation) for her.”

The Duesseldorf university commission ruled that Schavan had “systematically and intentionally presented intellectual performance that in reality she did not generate herself”.

The decision left Schavan without an academic title, an important symbol of status in German politics and business, as her degree program in philosophy finished solely with a PhD.

Since the allegations first arose in May last year, Schavan has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and said she wrote her dissertation with a clear conscience.

Her lawyers have said the proceedings of the commission had been riddled with mistakes and were unlawful, not least because information was leaked to the public in the process.

(Additional reporting by Shafiek Tassiem in Johannesburg and Madeline Chambers in Berlin; writing by Gareth Jones; editing by Mark Heinrich)