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This chapter outlines the organization and allocation of functions at the meso-level of government in Germany (states/Länder administrations). Furthermore, we shed light on the carriers and qualification profiles of the top bureaucrats in meso-level administrations. These high-rank territorial administrators/executives—state appointed heads of administrative districts (Regierungspräsidenten) on the one hand, elected heads of county administrations (Landräte) on the other hand—can be regarded as the German ‘equivalents’ of the prefects in countries with a Napoleonic administrative tradition. Finally, we analyse major reforms that have led to (at times, profound) transformations in territorial administrations, raising the question of to what extent alternative models of territorial bundling and coordination functions are sound and sustainable.
Temperature-related excess mortality in German cities at 2 °C and higher degrees of global warming
(2020)
Background: Investigating future changes in temperature-related mortality as a function of global mean temperature (GMT) rise allows for the evaluation of policy-relevant climate change targets. So far, only few studies have taken this approach, and, in particular, no such assessments exist for Germany, the most populated country of Europe.
Methods: We assess temperature-related mortality in 12 major German cities based on daily time-series of all-cause mortality and daily mean temperatures in the period 1993-2015, using distributed-lag non-linear models in a two-stage design. Resulting risk functions are applied to estimate excess mortality in terms of GMT rise relative to pre-industrial levels, assuming no change in demographics or population vulnerability.
Results: In the observational period, cold contributes stronger to temperature-related mortality than heat, with overall attributable fractions of 5.49% (95%CI: 3.82-7.19) and 0.81% (95%CI: 0.72-0.89), respectively. Future projections indicate that this pattern could be reversed under progressing global warming, with heat-related mortality starting to exceed cold-related mortality at 3 degrees C or higher GMT rise. Across cities, projected net increases in total temperature-related mortality were 0.45% (95%CI: -0.02-1.06) at 3 degrees C, 1.53% (95%CI: 0.96-2.06) at 4 degrees C, and 2.88% (95%CI: 1.60-4.10) at 5 degrees C, compared to today's warming level of 1 degrees C. By contrast, no significant difference was found between projected total temperature-related mortality at 2 degrees C versus 1 degrees C of GMT rise.
Conclusions: Our results can inform current adaptation policies aimed at buffering the health risks from increased heat exposure under climate change. They also allow for the evaluation of global mitigation efforts in terms of local health benefits in some of Germany's most populated cities.
Taming Nuclear Power
(2017)
In 2011 a broad majority in the German Federal Parliament voted to abandon nuclear energy. This article explores the origins of the change in attitude towards nuclear energy and argues that seven years before the Chernobyl disaster, the accident at the U.S. power plant Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979, had a profound impact which nowadays seems to be largely forgotten in Europe. The article identifies the structural causes underlying the transnational reception of the Three Mile Island accident and explores international reactions, particularly in the Federal Republic of Germany. The accident near Harrisburg led to a loss of public confidence and created unease about nuclear expansion in many industrialized nations. Reactions to the accident can be understood as an attempt to tame nuclear energy both technically, by increasing safety measures and abandoning plans for new nuclear power stations, and politically, with a more critical appraisal of nuclear energy and with semantics that encouraged a long-term withdrawal from nuclear power. Critics were now also accepted as experts. Nuclear policy in all countries became closely dependent on public opinion, indicating a high level of political responsiveness. Various factors, however, including the contemporaneous oil crisis put the brakes on this critical approach to nuclear power, while safety improvements and the limited expansion of nuclear power created new confidence in the early 1980s.
In this article, I give an overview on nativist street protests in Germany from the early nineteenth century to the present from an historical perspective. In a preliminary re-mark, I will reflect on some recent developments in Germany, where nativist protest campaigns against immigration took place in the streets when voters were turning towards the populist radical right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In the first section, I will outline an older tradition of anti-immigration protest in nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany, which is closely connected to modern antisemitism. In sections two and three, I will retrace how, from the late 1960s onward, the far right in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) discovered concerns about immigra-tion in the German population, addressed them in protest campaigns and developed narratives to integrate such sentiments into a broader right-wing extremist ideology, itself deeply rooted in antisemitism. Studying nativism and the radical right from an actor-oriented perspective, I will focus on traditionalist movements, including the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and neo-Nazi groups.
Strategic label
(2020)
The Afropolitan Berlin novel Biskaya by SchwarzRund (2016) is probably the first novel written in German which demonstratively wears this label – on the front cover of the book, the author announces it to be an Afropolitaner Berlin Roman underneath the title. While addressing quite a few particulars of the Berlin-Brandenburg area, the novel writes itself willingly into the globally popular, yet controversial realm of African inflected cosmopolitanism. In this essay, I will argue that the author uses the label strategically to negotiate the global and the local – or worldliness and cultural specificity – with the aim to increase the visibility of queer of Color critique in Germany.
SchwarzRund’s approach may seem contradictory at first: Even though she could have called her novel queer, neuro-diverse, diasporic or Black, she chose Afropolitan. While she wrote an outspokenly political novel, she labeled it with a term often critically denounced as apolitical. Using Afropolitanism, she seems to aim at a rather mainstream audience, but at the same time, she published with a small, activist publishing house. While attempting to tap into the transnational cultural and literary capital of Afropolitanism, the language of the book is German and restricts it to the German-speaking parts of the world.
This essay will explore the Afropolitanism depicted in Biskaya and elaborate on the strategic choice of label. I will offer one possible interpretation of the characters and settings which illustrate SchwarzRund’s vision and version of Afropolitanism. In my analyses, I am interested in political questions around the characters’ identities and the setting. The Black protagonists of the novel, Tue and Dwayne, live in Berlin, but grew up on the fictional island Biskaya. This island is located somewhere close to the European mainland and part of the continent; it had an entirely Black population until a destructive event forced many to move to the mainland. The protagonists, now living in a mainly white society, are depicted in a state of interrogation of their own sense of self, measuring oppressive societal norms against other possible ways of interaction. The novel shows how people are deemed strange and not fitting into a network of unspoken rules because of racialized bodies, sexual preferences and#shor lifestyle choices. However, SchwarzRund counters those structures of inequality with her characters’ playful ways to deal with queerness, femininity and blackness subverting imposed norms. The novel challenges imperatives of subordination, creates new visions and inscribes Black Germans as political subjects.
Risk perceptions of individuals living in single-parent households during the COVID-19 crisis
(2023)
The COVID-19 crisis had severe social and economic impact on the life of most citizens around the globe. Individuals living in single-parent households were particularly at risk, revealing detrimental labour market outcomes and assessments of future perspectives marked by worries. As it has not been investigated yet, in this paper we study, how their perception about the future and their outlook on how the pandemic will affect them is related to their objective economic resources. Against this background, we examine the subjective risk perception of worsening living standards of individuals living in single-parent households compared to other household types, their objective economic situation based on the logarithmised equivalised disposable household incomes and analyse the relationship between those indicators. Using the German SOEP, including the SOEP-CoV survey from 2020, our findings based on regression modelling reveal that individuals living in single-parent households have been worse off during the pandemic, facing high economic insecurity. Path and interaction models support our assumption that the association between those indicators may not be that straightforward, as there are underlying mechanisms–such as mediation and moderation–of income affecting its direction and strength. With respect to our central hypotheses, our empirical findings point toward (1) a mediation effect, by demonstrating that the subjective risk perception of single-parent households can be partly explained by economic conditions. (2) The moderating effect suggests that the concrete position at the income distribution of households matters as well. While at the lower end of the income distribution, single-parent households reveal particularly worse risk perceptions during the pandemic, at the high end of the income spectrum, risk perceptions are similar for all household types. Thus, individuals living in single-parent households do not perceive higher risks of worsening living standards due to their household situation per se, but rather because they are worse off in terms of their economic situation compared to individuals living in other household types.
Models for the predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly blend data deemed to represent a single flood type and region. Moreover, these approaches largely ignore indicators of preparedness and how predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German flood-affected households to explore how Bayesian multilevel models can estimate normalised flood damage stratified by event, region, or flood process type. Multilevel models acknowledge natural groups in the data and allow each group to learn from others. We obtain posterior estimates that differ between flood types, with credibly varying influences of water depth, contamination, duration, implementation of property-level precautionary measures, insurance, and previous flood experience; these influences overlap across most events or regions, however. We infer that the underlying damaging processes of distinct flood types deserve further attention. Each reported flood loss and affected region involved mixed flood types, likely explaining the uncertainty in the coefficients. Our results emphasise the need to consider flood types as an important step towards applying flood loss models elsewhere. We argue that failing to do so may unduly generalise the model and systematically bias loss estimations from empirical data.
Thema des ersten Potsdamer Textbuches sind Regionen als Subjekte der internationalen Politik, speziell innerhalb der EU. Die Bandbreite reicht von den österreichischen Bundesländern über Schottland und Katalonien bis zu den belgischen communautés. Der "Europäisierung" der deutschen Länder wird besonderes Augenmerk geschenkt. Namhafte Autorinnen und Autoren des In- und Auslandes beteiligen sich an der Diskussion. Theoretische Überlegungen zur Erklärung des Phänomens der transföderalen Beziehungen werden durch anschauliche und detaillierte Fallstudien ergänzt.
Diese Arbeit zeigt auf, wie historisch und rechtlich eine Ungleichheit zwischen Schwarzen und Weißen in Deutschland gewachsen ist und geht der Frage nach, welche Anforderungen das Verfassungsrecht, die Rechtspraxis und die Politik erfüllen müssen, um sie auszugleichen.
Eingangs wird die Entwicklung des Verbots der rassischen Diskriminierung im internationalen und nationalen Recht dargelegt. Folglich zeichnet die Verfasserin die Diskriminierungsgeschichte von Schwarzen Menschen nach. Zur Überwindung der nach wie vor bestehenden strukturellen Diskriminierung schlägt sie ein positives Recht vor, das sich auf Menschenrechtsstandards und Lösungsansätzen aus Rechtsvergleichen stützt und die Gleichberechtigung von Schwarzen Menschen bewirken soll.
Flash floods and debris flows are iconic hazards inmountainous regions with steep relief, high rainfall intensities, rapid snowmelt events, and abundant sediments. The cuesta landscapes of southern Germany hardly come to mind when dealing with such hazards. A series of heavy rainstorms dumping up to 140mm in 2 h caused destructive flash floods and debris flows in May 2016. The most severe damage occurred in the Braunsbach municipality, which was partly buried by 42,000 m(3) of boulders, gravel, mud, and anthropogenic debris from the small catchment of Orlacher Bach (similar to 6 km(2)). We analysed this event by combining rainfall patterns, geological conditions, and geomorphic impacts to estimate an average sediment yield of 14,000 t/km(2) that mostly (similar to 95%) came from some 50 riparian landslides and channel-bed incision of similar to 2 m. This specific sediment yield ranks among the top 20% globally, while the intensity-duration curve of the rainstormis similarly in the upper percentile range of storms that had triggered landslides. Compared to similar-sized catchments in the greater region hit by the rainstorms, we find that the Orlacher Bach is above the 95th percentile in terms of steepness, storm-rainfall intensity, and topographic curvatures. The flash flood transported a sediment volume equal to as much as 20-40% of the Pleistocene sediment volume stored in the Orlacher Bach fan, andmay have had several predecessors in the Holocene. River control structures from 1903 and records of a debris flow in the 1920s in a nearby catchment indicate that the local inhabitants may have been aware of the debris-flow hazards earlier. Such recurring and destructive events elude flood-hazard appraisals in humid landscapes of gentle relief, and broaden mechanistic views of how landslides and debris flows contribute to shaping small and deeply cut tributaries in the southern Germany cuesta landscape.