While the European Union gears up for another of its endless post-crisis bouts over spending, debt and deficits, Berlin's German Historical Museum has turned a microscope onto the mania for saving in Europe's largest economy.
"Merkel's bullying", "Queen of austerity", "German dogma": headlines from around the EU greet visitors to the baroque pile on the leafy Unter den Linden boulevard that houses the museum.
All are relics of Berlin's insistence that eurozone members stick to strict limits on debts and deficits at the height of the currency bloc's post-2008 financial blues.
Politicians and the public have been puzzled by the rage from other nations, while Spaniards, Italians and above all Greeks have cursed Berlin for soaring unemployment and slashed government services.
"These attacks meet with little understanding in Germany. Why is this conflict so highly charged emotionally?" questions museum chief professor Raphael Gross.
To most Germans, saving around 10 per cent of their income has long been an "unquestioned virtue" come war, inflation, famine or fortune, Mr Gross notes.
Witness to that fact are some 2.3 trillion euros ($2.8 trillion) socked away in savings accounts or under mattresses, according to a January report by Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank.
Curator Robert Muschalla says he deliberately wanted to provoke with the title of the exhibition, "Saving: History of a German virtue".
"The idea isn't to say that saving is good or bad, it's about opening a debate on a topic that is seen as self-evident in Germany ... saving has become internalised into a habit," he explains.
To understand Germans' nest-egg neurosis, visitors must look back to the 18th century, when the building that today houses the museum was the arsenal of militaristic Prussia.
Like neighbouring France, Prussia and other German states were roiled by emancipatory ideas spread by the Enlightenment thinkers of the time.
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But "while the French carried out their Revolution [in 1789], the Germans invented saving" as the foundation of personal autonomy and a means to pay for education, Mr Muschalla points out.
The first of the Sparkasse savings banks that dot cityscapes to this day was opened in free city Hamburg in 1778.
Prussia boasted some 278,000 savings accounts by 1850 and 2.2 million by 1875.
To a state that had asked citizens to fund its war effort against Napoleon by exchanging gold jewellery for iron rings, the savings system was a natural bulwark against enemies within and without.
Communist thinker Karl Marx raged in "Das Kapital" - a first edition of which can be seen among the exhibits - that workers' cash piles kept them invested in the capitalist system, giving them something to lose in case of a revolution.
And when World War I broke out in 1914, ordinary citizens' savings again helped foot the bill for the bloodletting.
At the heart of the exhibition stands the symbol of what came next - a replica of the wheelbarrows used to haul stacks of near-worthless banknotes through the streets during the hyperinflation of the early 1920s.
Adolf Hitler's Nazi party was quick to seize on the opportunity, placing "saving in opposition to lending," curator Mr Muschalla says.
Propaganda posters from 1938, five years after the Nazis seized power, hailed "those who work and save" as the guardians of "German tradition".
Under Hitler's Third Reich, a "Sparautomat" or savings machine was installed in many schools, allowing children to deposit pennies and pull a lever to mark their savings books.
Meanwhile, the regime began confiscating Jews' bank deposits in 1938, a few years before it began deporting them to forced labour and extermination camps.
After the Nazis' 1945 defeat, the new Federal Republic of Germany turned westwards and became a thriving capitalist economy.
But unlike Americans or western European neighbours, the new Germans still shunned purchases on credit, hoarding their deutsche marks until they could afford a car, fridge or television - and keeping the savings machines in schools, minus the Nazi propaganda.
A poster preserved in the exhibition blares the "Geiz ist geil", "stinginess is cool", slogan used by the Saturn electronics chain in the 2000s.
In a society still obsessed with discount supermarkets and money-off coupons, saving is a "German pathology" laments Die Welt newspaper columnist Henryk M Broder in a video.
"'Geiz ist geil' is really the worst phrase - except for 'Heil Hitler' ever invented in this country," he says.
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Chicago-based United Airlines: Reducing flights to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong
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Finnair: Suspending flights to Nanjing and Beijing Daxing until the end of March
Indonesia's Lion Air: Suspending all flights to China from February
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Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
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Spare
Profile
Company name: Spare
Started: March 2018
Co-founders: Dalal Alrayes and Saurabh Shah
Based: UAE
Sector: FinTech
Investment: Own savings. Going for first round of fund-raising in March 2019
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The biog
First Job: Abu Dhabi Department of Petroleum in 1974
Current role: Chairperson of Al Maskari Holding since 2008
Career high: Regularly cited on Forbes list of 100 most powerful Arab Businesswomen
Achievement: Helped establish Al Maskari Medical Centre in 1969 in Abu Dhabi’s Western Region
Future plan: Will now concentrate on her charitable work
RedCrow Intelligence Company Profile
Started: 2016
Founders: Hussein Nasser Eddin, Laila Akel, Tayeb Akel
Based: Ramallah, Palestine
Sector: Technology, Security
# of staff: 13
Investment: $745,000
Investors: Palestine’s Ibtikar Fund, Abu Dhabi’s Gothams and angel investors
In 2018, the ICRC received 27,756 trace requests in the Middle East alone. The global total was 45,507.
There are 139,018 global trace requests that have not been resolved yet, 55,672 of these are in the Middle East region.
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Lukaku (22', 44')
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Analysis
Maros Sefcovic is juggling multiple international trade agreement files, but his message was clear when he spoke to The National on Wednesday.
The EU-UAE bilateral trade deal will be finalised soon, he said. It is in everyone’s interests to do so. Both sides want to move quickly and are in alignment. He said the UAE is a very important partner for the EU. It’s full speed ahead - and with some lofty ambitions - on the road to a free trade agreement.
We also talked about US-EU tariffs. He answered that both sides need to talk more and more often, but he is prepared to defend Europe's position and said diplomacy should be a guiding principle through the current moment.
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Three ways to limit your social media use
Clinical psychologist, Dr Saliha Afridi at The Lighthouse Arabia suggests three easy things you can do every day to cut back on the time you spend online.
1. Put the social media app in a folder on the second or third screen of your phone so it has to remain a conscious decision to open, rather than something your fingers gravitate towards without consideration.
2. Schedule a time to use social media instead of consistently throughout the day. I recommend setting aside certain times of the day or week when you upload pictures or share information.
3. Take a mental snapshot rather than a photo on your phone. Instead of sharing it with your social world, try to absorb the moment, connect with your feeling, experience the moment with all five of your senses. You will have a memory of that moment more vividly and for far longer than if you take a picture of it.
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Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
