The Berlin Blog

I don't want to be all melodramatic, but I sometimes wonder how much time this blog has taken off my life. I ain't a doctor, but it can't be healthy, eating Rolos and drinking Jack Daniels deep into every single Thursday night, frantically hacking out some words about how Christian Wulff is still not dead, and has adopted the political tactic of standing very, very still in the hopes that no one sees him. It hasn't worked so far, and Der Spiegel has persistently put stories about him on the top of its website every day since Christmas, intermittently alternating it with stories about another beleaguered President – Bashar al-Assad in Syria – presumably in the hope that at some point the German people will get the two mixed up and start a revolution by mistake. That seems to have worked, as a bunch of Germans gathered outside Christian Wulff's palace last week to wave their shoes – or Adidas Sambas – at him, Arab style. At least, there is no mention of whiskey and caramel chocolates at 1am in any of the diet books I've read. On soul-wearying nights like these, I often like to look up German politicians on Facebook. And this week, my attention was caught by Erika Steinbach, the woman who thinks that Germans got a bad deal out of all that World War II business. For some reason, the Poles have never forgiven her for suggesting in the early 1990s that Germany's eastern border should be further east. Anyway, at some point in that dead time between Christmas and New Year’s, Steinbach was seized with such a fit of existential anxiety and emptiness that she actually joined Facebook. She then made one of the elementary mistakes of the FB rookie – she got all excited about all the people friending her, wanted to build up her friend bank too hastily and ended up establishing a virtual relationship with Thorsten Thomsen, a press spokesman for the NPD. He even managed to start a Nazi debate on her wall about Friedrich the Great. We've all been there – get bored, join Facebook, make friends with a Nazi. That's the problem with Facebook. It's like the first year of university all over again.