In February, Germany's Highest Court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht ruled on the motion of a German residing in the Swiss city of Zurich, to pressure the German government into trying to stop the operation of the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest machine ever built, and that also has an easy to misspell name.

Germans are known for their high degree of organisation, their bureaucratic mentality, and, of course, their Autobahn (which, in fact, did not originate with Hitler). When these three things come together, what do you get? Flensburg, that's what.

A battle is raging such as the world has never yet seen.
- The Times, Aug 29, 1914

The English language and culture know plenty of disparaging monikers for us Germans..

Investigation of the mechanism of decay reactions with single bond breaking and calculation of their velocity constants on the basis of quantum chemical and statistical methods - that's quite a complex topic to write about, isn't it? Well, someone wanted to write her doctoral dissertation about it, in the field of chemical physics, in 1986. Who? A certain Angela Merkel, whom some of you might also know as the current Chancellor of Germany [1].