Harry Stopes

Night train services in Europe, especially the west, have declined sharply in the last two decades. As short-haul flights boomed, sleeper carriages were allowed to age out of use without being replaced. All connections between Germany and France, Denmark and the Netherlands were cut in 2014, and in 2016 Deutsche Bahn quit the industry all together, selling its remaining sleeper carriages to the Austrian state railway company ÖBB. Since then, though, there has been something of a comeback: a ‘Nachtzugboom’, as a recent Die Zeit podcast put it.

South Africa has for some years been subject to scheduled power cuts as a way of dealing with a lack of electricity generation capacity. The ‘load shedding’ is staggered across the country to spread the burden, and the extent of it varies according to national demand, as well as with changes in the power supply caused by both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance in the country’s ageing, mainly coal-fuelled power stations.

The elections held in September 2021 for the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus, the state parliament, were marred by administrative problems at nearly a tenth of polling stations. There were shortages of ballot papers, unusually long queues to vote and ballots delivered to the wrong locations. Some voters were turned away, or offered only ballot papers for the federal elections taking place the same day (in which Olaf Scholz was elected as chancellor). After a long investigation, the state constitutional court ruled last November that the state election would have to be repeated. The date was set for 12 February.

The arrests of the so-called ‘Reichsbürger’ plotters highlights the serious and longstanding problem of organised and committed far-right activists in the German police and security services. But the country has also been slow to acknowledge more mundane, everyday forms of police racism. It is still unclear why Dortmund police shot and killed Mouhamed D., a 16-year-old asylum seeker from Senegal who was experiencing a mental health crisis in August this year. Two officers were recently charged over the death of a mentally ill man in Mannheim in May.

A scare story in Bild about poor people overrunning exclusive holiday destinations such as the North Sea island of Sylt ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Hamburg punk band Trümmer Youth released ‘Chaostage auf Sylt’ (‘Down with the bourgeoisie/On Sylt now anarchy rules/Off to the chaos days on Sylt’).