“Dear English, Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish and new British citizens, we want to continue having you on board,” he said. “We need your experience as the oldest parliamentary democracy, we need your traditions, your sober-mindedness and your courage.”

He said that to encourage more commonality, Europe needed a common language as well as encouraging multi-lingualism. “I am convinced that, in Europe, both can live side by side,” he said, “the sense of being at home in your mother tongue, with all its poetry, as well as a workable English for all of life’s situations and all age groups.”

Appealing to Britons’ sense of historical responsibility he emphasised the formative role the UK had played in founding modern Europe by its fight against Nazi Germany; if only for that reason, he said, the UK had an important role to play.

“You helped to save our Europe with your engagement in the Second World War — it is also your Europe, and more Europe cannot mean a Europe without you. Only with you can we tackle the future.”

The remarks, which took two minutes of his hour-long speech, followed David Cameron’s pledge to call a referendum on Britain’s EU relationship, calls that have caused much consternation and criticism in Berlin.

Gauck used the much anticipated, nationally televised address to call for “more Europe” and greater communication between member states, but he also sought to allay fears that Germany was becoming too powerful in the union and aspired to impose a “diktat” on the rest of the continent. He said, the time had come for Europeans to have a more active relationship with the Union. “Don’t ask what Europe can do for you, but ask what you can do for Europe,” he said.

By arrangement with the Guardian

But other than that, Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag hardly triggered the curiosity of any but the most avid curtain twitchers in the community of Marburg, west Germany, where they lived for years.

That was before their spectacular arrest in October 2011 on suspicion of spying for Moscow, when a special forces commando stormed their house.

Heidrun was in the middle of receiving encoded messages on shortwave frequency at the time, prosecutors said. She was reported to have been so shocked she fell off her chair, pulling the connection cable with her.

The trial of the couple opened in Stuttgart, southern Germany, recently. The pair is accused of passing confidential documents, procured from a Dutch foreign ministry official, to Russian intelligence services.

Over 23 years they are said to have passed thousands of EU, Nato and UN secrets to the former Soviet Union and then Russia, using “dead letter boxes”, as well as communicating via satellite and the internet.

According to prosecutors the pair received about €100,000 a year from Moscow. Allegedly they passed on information pertaining to the relationship between the West and countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The court will hear how the couple built up what prosecutors described as a “bourgeois existence” in Germany at the end of the 1980s and convinced their neighbours that they were Austrian of South American descent — when in fact they were Russian.

Andreas, a car engineer, now 54, worked in various companies, while his wife, now 48, kept house. Even their daughter, a medical student, was said to know nothing of their true existence.

They spoke in court just to confirm their “cover names”.

The court does not know their true identity, only that they were known to their spymasters in Moscow as Pit and Tina. Their real forenames are believed to be Sasha and Olga. Pictures of them in the courtroom had to be pixellated for legal reasons.

The couple’s most important source of information is believed to have been the Dutch foreign ministry, where a source handed them information once a month. The information is believed to have been placed in special hiding places, known as “dead letter boxes”, from where Andreas collected them.

The couple are believed to have transmitted some texts via satellite and to have concealed secret messages in commentaries on YouTube where Heidrun communicated with her controller using the name Alpenkuh1 (alpine cow 1).

Heidrun is believed to have received detailed directives from Moscow twice a week, using a shortwave receiver which was connected to a decoder and computer. While the couple received their messages via radio, they replied via satellite.

Some of their neighbours were believed to have been present in court, keen to learn the full story of the Anschlags and how the Cold War had effectively continued right under their noses until 2011.

Mika Beuster, a local journalist, said the story had “all the ingredients of an exciting spy thriller”, adding: “The neighbours thought nothing strange about them except for their Eastern European accent. There was nothing that would distinguish them from any other family in the town.”

He wrote in a commentary for the local paper that the trial would resemble a “tour round a history museum”, as the often old-fashioned spying methods the couple are alleged to have used came to light. — The Guardian, London

Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce”, approaching its 20th anniversary, probably serves as the best example in post-war Europe of a relatively smooth parting of the ways. Whether it can serve as a template for Catalonia is another matter.

“No divorce is a particularly happy experience but it’s part of life and this one has worked out well,” says Michal Zantovsky, the Czech ambassador to the UK, who was at the heart of the talks as spokesman and adviser to the Czechoslovak president, Vaclav Havel, in 1992 when dissolution was being hammered out by Prague and Bratislava.

“For Vaclav Havel, it was a very sad thing. He thought of it as his personal failure because he invested enormous energy into trying to keep the country together. Later he recognised the split had worked out reasonably well and that most Slovaks and Czechs were reasonably content,” he said.

The split came about for a range of reasons, though mainly due to historical grievances between the Czechs and the Slovaks that were arguably exploited by the political leaderships of both nations, which lacked democratic experience due to their long communist legacy.

While the Czechoslovak partition is widely seen as a model of how to divide a country peacefully, Abby Innes, a lecturer at the London School of Economics and author of Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye, argues against using it as the template for other dissolutions. “I think it’s a partition rather than a legitimate and mandated separation,” she says.
“It’s not a model you’d want to see copied, most particularly in a democracy.”

Describing the split as a “process manufactured by ruthlessly pragmatic Czech rightwing political forces and abetted by a populist and opportunist Slovak leadership”, she says the main problems were that separation was favoured only by a minority of people in both republics and it was never democratically mandated. The whole procedure “revealed the deep weakness of the post-1989 federal parliament and the constitutional order”, she says. Zantovsky recalls the practical headaches of deciding who got what, just like the average divorce but rather more complicated.

“There were myriad sticking points,” he said. “Dividing the sports teams for one, though that proved easier than other things such as dividing the assets of the central bank, the weapons and munitions of the army, the currency and the embassies. In late 1992 I went to Washington as the last Czechoslovak ambassador, and three months later I had to divide the embassy and became the Czech Republic’s ambassador. For a while we shared the same embassy building with the Slovaks, until they got their own property. They in turn kept the UN properties in New York.”

The guiding principle to the division process was two-thirds to the Czech Republic, one third to Slovakia, based on the proportion of territory to population.

But, added Zantovsky — who is married to a Slovak — while he is happy the division worked out for Czechoslovakia (“both countries have done well and relations between them are very good”) he would not, he said recommend any other country follow the example.

“There are inevitably real downsides when a country is two-thirds or a third of its former size,” he said. “It’s obviously not as big or influential as it was before. And on a personal level, there’s still a lot of nostalgia for the country we grew up in and considered our own and liked very much. So it’s not all just a bed of roses.”

By arrangement with the Guardian

They are keen for the space between house numbers nine and 11 on Spreuerhofstrasse to continue being recognised as such, if only because the world’s narrowest street draws in tourists from around the world.

Visitors aren’t necessarily encouraged to squeeze through the 3.8 metre long divide, but if they insist on doing so are asked to consider in advance how they might extricate themselves should they get stuck. Many try it, despite the unpleasant experience of getting dripped on from the guttering above.

Anyone more than 1.8 metres is advised to stoop. Some locals are known to refer to the Spreuerhofstrasse Spalt (gap) when they go on diets. As in “once I can fit through the Spreuerhofstrasse Spalt I’ll be down to my desirable weight”.

The svelte street has existed since 1726 when a devastating fire swept through the city destroying it. Spreuerhofstrasse was rebuilt, but with little regard for the city regulations that stated dwellings should be built far enough apart to prevent any future fires from spreading too fast. Its status was in doubt for years until in 1820 a purportedly slender town hall official, who was able to squeeze down it himself without too much difficulty, declared it to be a public street.

But Reutlingen’s top attraction is in danger of losing its Guinness Book of Records status because the wall of No 9 is leaning dangerously into the passageway due to bulging, water-soaked beams. If the gap is no longer passable, and the building cannot be shored up, then it can no longer be considered a street, and its unique status will be revoked.

A decision on whether it will be closed has to be made by next year. “Let’s face it, if you can’t pass down a street then it’s no longer a street,” says Tanja Ulmer at the tourist office. “There would be no fun left in it then.”
— The Guardian, London

Inspired by Paul’s success thousands of animals across Germany, from elephants to pythons, are now working the pundits’ circuit and forecasting the results of Euro 2012.

Appearing on home videos posted on the Internet, television and radio shows, alpacas, bulldogs and even a Magalitza pig are under pressure to predict the tournament’s outcome.

But Germany’s animal rights activists have called on pet owners to think twice before parading their animals as sporting forecasters, saying the national phenomenon — which is now spreading around the world — is spiralling out of control.

The Deutscher Tierschutzbund (TSB), or Animal Protection Union, has said that many animals are being exploited, forced to do things that are unnatural to them, and suffering as a result of what it calls a ‘craze’.

It cites an Internet radio station which filmed a python called Ado being offered the choice of two live rats, one with a stripe which stood for Germany; another without, representing Portugal.

The snake latched its jaws around the rat representing Portugal and ate it, meaning, according to the radio station, that Portugal would win the championship. Despite the fact that the python was obviously wrong, and no animal appears to have come even close to matching the accuracy of Paul, the number of animals now being employed as soccer psychics is on the rise.

Marius Tunte of the TSB said: “There’s hardly an animal that’s not being used. From pigs and parrots to hamsters to dogs, everyone’s at it. We’ve got elephants kicking balls into nets, or forced to do handstands, chimpanzees dressed up and paraded on TV. In many cases the dignity of the animals is being completely ignored, and they’re being forced to do things that are totally unnatural to them and in some cases are causing them to suffer.”

He said zoos and animal parks have also joined in after realising the amount of positive publicity such oracles can generate. Paul the octopus drew hundreds of thousands of visitors to his hitherto little-known aquarium in Oberhausen in western Germany.“It’s not just during the tournament, but afterwards as well, when people say: ‘let’s go to see that animal that everyone’s been talking about’,” he said, adding that the trend had its origins in the era of Knut, a prized polar bear at Berlin Zoo who was saved from death as a newborn cub in 2006 and went on to become the most celebrated and highest grossing animal in the world.

Among the most engaging, though hardly reliable pundits are Xaver the bulldog, who, predictably, chose German sausages over a bottle of Portuguese red wine; a pair of otters called Mormel and Ferret; and a goat called Traudl, who is under contract at a Bavarian radio station.

Tunte welcomed a satirical take on the mania by Die Welt, which imagined a scenario where dogs who had made false predictions were abandoned at autobahn service stations by their disgusted owners, while failed pigs and parrots were sent for slaughter or stuffed and offered for sale on eBay.

“It’s not far from the truth and shows just how out of hand it has got,” he said.

Experts say the animal oracles served a wider purpose by giving people a sense of security and a feeling that they are in control of an unpredictable situation. “It helps them escape from the everyday,” Tunte said. — The Guardian, London