That Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister in his recent, pre-ministerial life, wrote a children’s book in which a girl called Emily experiences “how exciting a night-time power cut can be” may yet come back to haunt him.
These days, Habeck is charged with the daunting task of ensuring that the lights do not go out in for real in Europe’s largest economy. And even if Germans have been hoarding candles and camping stoves, just as not so long ago they were doing with toilet paper and pasta, they consider the prospect of a blackout and cold homes to be scary rather than exciting. Reports of people illegally felling trees for fuel have brought back memories of postwar squalor, when Berlin’s Tiergarten park was stripped bare as Germans tried to keep warm.
