When I sat down in downtown Wellesley’s Peet’s Coffee and Tea to interview Sabine von Mering, a professor at Brandeis University, I was incredibly nervous. This was our first meeting and I, over-thinker that I am, had managed to persuade myself that everything would go terribly. The worst scenarios flashed through my mind; I was convinced that I would stumble through the questions I had prepared and make a complete fool of myself. To my relief, none of that came to pass. Von Mering, who completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Germany before moving to the United States to obtain her Ph.D., was very friendly and easy to talk to.
Having lived in both Germany and the United States, she offers a unique perspective towards, and understanding of, the differences between the two countries. Germany, which since reunification has become more and more important in a variety of areas, fascinates many American students. It seems as if every week there’s a new article in The New York Times or The Economist discussing the political or economic importance of Germany. But as von Mering points out this is a somewhat limited view of the country; the vibrant German cultural scene, both historically and in the present, “appeals to students studying art, music, and theater.”
Of particular interest to von Mering, however, is Germany’s position in the world as a leader of green technology and environmental protection. I myself am no expert on climate change and the issues surrounding it but von Mering, who encouraged me to do more research on the topic, peppered our discussion with film and book recommendations. My “things to watch” list now has everything from Flow, a short 10-minute film by Germany’s Umweltbundesamt (the country’s main environmental protection agency), to Michael Moore’s most recent documentary, 2015’s Where To Invade Next. It may not be a traditional beach read, but Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, another recommendation, will likely be my first book of the summer. Her current research, which centers on climate change and how German/European and American attitudes and perspectives towards it differ, is something she’s clearly passionate about.
When we spoke about the current European refugee von Mering said something that has stuck with me. We cannot separate environmental crisis from human crisis. The European Union’s Schengen Agreement is, as she said, now dead, and things have the potential to get far worse; as the central regions of the world heat up due to climate change, the number of refugees pouring into Europe and the US will get larger and larger. Her comments left me to dwell on one question— If countries do not deal with the climate/refugee crisis now, what will they do in the future when it is far too late?
S = Katharine Starke
vM = Prof. Sabine von Mering
S: First thing, I really appreciate this and would like to thank you for being here… Since it’s been in the news recently I’d like to ask you about American students and German. Since there’s been so much talk about the German economy still being strong compared to other places and the country being in the news so much, have you noticed more people being interested in learning German and learning about Germany?
vM: Yes, definitely. Germany as a place, for example, that has shouldered the startup costs of the Green Revolution, the renewable energy revolution, engineering… there are students who are interested in politics who see Germany as an interesting place, not only because of its economic power but also because of its role in Europe and its role in possible shaping European politics… Students who are interested in economics see that Germany has a very successful history of supporting small businesses, something very different from the corporate model here in the United States. You have thousands of world-class tiny companies in Germany that are competing at the highest level, and they’re family-owned, they have been for decades, and their model is very different than what we here would consider success. They basically narrow in on a small niche and say “We’re going to make the best screwdrivers or pencils in the world.” It’s interesting to students who are going into business, and since so many students are broke by the time they graduate they are interested in going into business! But it’s not just about business; Germany also appeals to students studying art, music, and theater because it is a vibrant cultural place. Museum curators, film people… many of them come to Germany.
S: I’d like to ask you about what said about renewable energy… One criticism I’ve heard, and I’d be interested to hear your opinion of it, is that especially after Fukushima and the closing of the nuclear power plants, is that countries are simply going to be importing energy from countries with lower safety standards. Do you think that’s happening?
vM: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone other than Germany has decided to shut down their nuclear reactors. Not even France did. And the decision in Germany to shut down the reactors was made by the Red-Green coalition, long before Angela Merkel came around. Angela Merkel actually then campaigned with the slogan “Exit from the exit,” so she didn’t actually want to shut down the reactors. When she did shut them down after Fukushima it was a very spontaneous and badly-understood decision that was, you know… she’s a physicist, she knows what nuclear energy is about, and she decided that it was too risky to extend the lives of these old reactors. Germany is selling electricity to France. It’s not true that we need nuclear power. Nuclear power is excessively expensive… it’s interesting to me, by the way, that Americans… I don’t know what the physics textbooks say in high school but American students love nuclear energy. There’s no understanding of the danger of nuclear energy in this country.
S: They do kind of teach us that it’s the greatest thing ever.
vM: Yeah! Who is behind that? I’m really interested in that because it strikes me as so odd given that, for example, here in Massachusetts we have several nuclear power plants in our vicinity that are super old, that are leaking, that are constantly having to shut down because of failures in the safety systems and yet everybody has this idea that somehow nuclear energy is perfectly safe. It is not! I mean, the only countries that are investing in nuclear energy right now are China and North Korea. And China… it is a dictatorship! There’s no public discussion about it there.
S: They are subsidies to build solar panels in Germany, yes?
vM: It’s complicated… I honestly don’t know the exact situation right now because what the Merkel government has done is they’ve kept changing what they initially said the project was. I think there still are some subsidies, but they’ve been wound down quite a bit.
S: To switch focus a bit, let’s talk about the EU. How do you feel about the future of the EU? Do you think it’s going to survive the refugee crisis?
vM: (laughs) Well that’s a big question. Clearly the European Union Project was a peace project as well as an economic project. It started out as an economic project but it always was also meant to preserve the peace on the continent after decades of tensions and war, and I think that the mistakes that were made include growing too fast, and expanding too wide, and taking in countries like Greece and Portugal who were actually not quite ready to compete inside the free market… taking on the Euro probably too soon… so in a way there was an optimism that guided the process that probably should have been curbed a little bit. At the same time, if you look at the European Union, the states… yes, they are incredibly disordered and when they have come to make a decision they usually come out fighting and it usually ends up being a bad compromise, but if you look at the EU… well, just look at the Republican Party in the United States. That’s one party in one country and they can’t get their act together? And now you think of 28 countries with different cultures, different economic systems, different languages, different histories, getting together on a regular basis to try to fight it out with each other? That is a huge accomplishment, and if we look at the ties that actually tie the European Union together, everything from pens to paper to baking stuff… whatever it is, it’s regulated on the same basis throughout all European countries, so you can’t sell a pastry baked with twice as much sugar or charge so much more for an item than another country, so there’s really a lot of regulation that is very beneficial for people but no one has been good at explaining it, so people just see the money going to the central government and the negative aspects… I mean the fact that you can sue at the European Court and have a law changed… that’s a huge accomplishment. We can’t even get that done in this country from state-to-state! If you have health insurance in one state you can’t use it in another… it’s ridiculous! Americans are very critical of the European Union, but I think that underlying that there’s a lot of jealousy. There’s the whole “you can’t tell my state what to do…”
S: Like states’ rights?
vM: Yes! States’ rights! And I think it does make this country weaker. (Laughs) I didn’t answer your question though… the truth is nobody knows what will happen with the EU. The Schengen Agreement right now is dead because of the refugee situation and with climate change we will have more refugees coming, there is no question about that. And that will put more pressure on the same countries because they are coming from the south, and eventually you could see the European Union fortressing itself off. You could see England get out… I doubt it, I think they will stay in, but you could see Russia asserting itself again against the European Union, which could have two possible effects, it could bring the EU together or it could tear it apart. I hope that people keep in mind the achievements and I hope that the strong ties that exist will hold when other forces are against it.