Ldear readers, have you ever been to Oberkochen? The valley on the Ostalb, in which the town is located, does not impose itself as the scene of world politics. The nearest major city is more than an hour’s drive away. The village has almost 8000 inhabitants. For a long time here on the outskirts of Baden-Württemberg, people didn’t think it was necessary to get involved with politics, even to cultivate contacts in Berlin or Brussels, in Washington or Beijing. But more and more eyes are now turning to the venerable, 175-year-old Zeiss Group, which has been squeezed into the narrow, tranquil valley on the border with Bavaria since the end of the Second World War.
Hundreds of thousands watched the YouTube video of an English-language news channel, the translated title of which reads: “Without this German product, modern civilization would collapse”. Because Zeiss, together with the Swabian company Trumpf, is the most important supplier of the machine that produces the best chips in the world. Zeiss is supplying the mirrors for the machine, which is being produced by the Dutch company ASML, and Trumpf is supplying the laser technology. Gustav Theile, our business correspondent in Stuttgart, took a look behind the scenes. His conclusion: The triumvirate of Zeiss, Trumpf and ASML shows what is important in the struggle of the world powers in this century. While politicians worry about who is currently dependent on which markets, it is the work of developers of such companies that decide who will be technologically dependent on whom in the future. And they have long been working on the next generation of the machine that means the world.
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Good that these developers still want to work. In neighboring France, this is no longer entirely a matter of course, as Jürg Altwegg noted. Nobody wants to be a plumber anymore. But also bricklayers, cooks and waiters, domestic help, winegrowers, bus drivers. The young nurses often work only three or four years in the profession. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are open. But unemployment is falling only minimally. It’s an “employer’s nightmare,” writes “Le Figaro”: 523,000 employees resigned in the first trimester of the year. The trend is unbroken. The graduates are by no means interested in radical self-realization. As if poisoned, says a young engineer, he toiled after completing his studies. The La Défense business district was his world. The artificial light and filtered air bothered him. Competition at work, density stress in public transport. “Private life suffered as a result,” he married a year ago, “now we’re expecting our first child.” The prospective parents want to raise it in a “healthy environment”. They left the skyscrapers and went to the mountains. The engineer works in logistics in the provincial town of Chambéry and has no regrets: “Everything is more relaxed.”
Maybe it’s a wise decision individually. In any case, it is very likely that the person affected does not fall into the grid with which Dominik Schwarzinger, Professor of Psychology at the University of Media, Communication and Economics in Berlin, views the world. Schwarzinger explained to Katrin Hummel why so many psychopaths are successful, how to recognize them, even if they disguise themselves well – and why they are worse than narcissists: “A psychopath only ever focuses on his own benefit and needs, and in enforcing them he ignores all the rules of social interaction; he exploits other people. Psychopaths also have a severely limited emotional life, they have no compassion, know no remorse and are not afraid of punishment. That’s why they can act so antisocial in the first place. Narcissists are much more conformist, they try to achieve their needs for confirmation in a socially functional way, i.e. without causing much offense. They are not fearless and unrepentant, making a positive impact on others is very important to them. Psychopaths don’t care what others think of them.” If you want to estimate conservatively, you can assume that ten percent of people are subclinical psychopaths – i.e. with weakly developed psychopathic characteristics. True psychopaths, on the other hand, only make up one to two percent of the population. I don’t think that’s really reassuring.
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Many greetings
Yours, Carsten Knop
editor
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
