Big investors are crowding into agriculture and land – By Wolfgang Mulke

It was a small but heartening victory for Foodwatch, a German consumer advocacy group, in its fight against speculation on agricultural commodities. In April, the Deka investment fund unit of Germany’s state-affiliated banks announced it was pulling out of the controversial segment. “We have decided to stop listing the price development of basic foodstuffs such as wheat, soy and livestock,” Deka’s statement said.

Earlier, Deutsche Bank likewise yielded to public pressure. Germany’s biggest bank said it would reevaluate its activities in the sensitive trade of food and refrain from opening any new funds that include agricultural investments during that time.

A year after the Fukushima disaster, clean energy pioneer Germany is slowing its shift to renewables. Other countries are increasing their use of fossil fuels and nuclear power – By Hannes Koch

The solar power industry is ailing in Germany. Four important domestic producers of photovoltaic technology have filed for bankruptcy in the last few months. And in mid-April, the US company First Solar announced that it was ceasing production in Frankfurt (Oder), on the German-Polish border.

What is going on? Didn’t Chancellor Angela Merkel announce just a year ago, after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, that all German nuclear power plants would be shut down over the next ten years?

Germans have not forgotten the past, but some of them find dealing with it difficult: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in central Berlin.

The debate over Günter Grass’ poem again lays bare Germans’ troubled relationship with Israel, Jews and their own history – By Peter H. Koepf

He wanted to remain silent no longer, he wrote, and that he was weary of the “West’s hypocrisy.” Germany, itself burdened by history, could not be permitted to become a “subcontractor for a crime.” Thus spoke Günter Grass. The nuclear arms power Israel threatens world peace and wants to exterminate the Iranian nation. Because Germany is to deliver another submarine to an Israel “specialized in directing all-obliterating warheads toward an area in which not a single atom bomb has been proven to exist,” the Nobel Literature laureate (The Tin Drum) felt compelled to say “what must be said.”