For example, upon learning that there was not a single complete edition of the Talmud in Germany, General Joseph McNarney, commander of the American zone of Occupied Germany, undertook an effort to print a Talmud for survivors.
Euro zone leader Germany saw its GDP fall by 0.6% from the previous quarter.
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But demand at a sale of 10-year bonds from Germany, the euro zone's safe haven, was surprisingly weak.
Germany, the euro zone's largest economy, is also headed for big wage increases.
Germany, the Euro Zone strongman, is borrowing just like the other constituent states making up those sharing the common currency, a lower amount, but borrowing none the less.
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It was a real jolt then to see that dismal figure for within the core of the sometimes stale and bureaucratic Euro Zone, Germany delivered a Q2 GDP growth level of 9%!
But the euro crisis has created something different: a strong Germany in a weak euro zone.
Germany, the euro-zone economy that counts, has not signed up to the plan.
He had been captured in the British zone of occupied Germany after the war but was allowed to go free.
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi warned Wednesday that recent data suggest the economic crisis engulfing the eurozone zone is impacting Germany.
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North-south divisions are hardly new in the EU. When the euro was planned in the 1990s many German politicians wanted a currency zone comprising only Germany, the Benelux countries and France.
At this critical juncture, is Germany a locomotive that will pull the EU or euro zone out of its financial crisis, or is Germany leading them to bigger trouble ahead?
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Germany, France and other euro zone states have so far described the 130bn-euro figure agreed in October as a red line that must not be crossed.
The only bright spots are Germany and Austria, growing 0.5 percent and 1 percent, respectively, in 2012 before improving to 1.7 percent in Austria and 1.3 percent in Germany in 2013 if the euro zone still stands as is.
Even if this was legally possible, which it isn't under current euro-zone rules, it was politically impossible: there is no appetite in some euro-zone countries, notably Germany, to create a transfer union, nor to bail out a country whose banking system is widely suspected to be a haven for money-laundering.
Yet even Mattel's attempts to portray Barbie as a quantum chemist who leads the euro zone have been mocked in Germany.
Germany's change of mind is born of twin failures, of the financial measures so far taken in the euro zone and of political strategy in Germany.
There's a chance those numbers could be revised upwards, but the country will still clearly lag behind the euro zone, and behind France and Germany in particular.
Economists, previously unreserved in their opinion that business in Germany is growing at a healthy pace, are also unified in a concern that a contagion from a meltdown in the euro zone will reverse the gains that Germany has made in the last decade.
Even if German banks gained deposits, their large euro-zone assets would be marked down: Germany, remember, is the system's biggest creditor.
In fact, the commission has little practical leeway to depart much from the emphasis on budgetary discipline laid down by the euro zone's paymasters, led by Germany.
We assume an average quarter-on-quarter growth rate of 0.3% in the euro zone and of 0.5% in Germany.
The zone's biggest economy by far, Germany, is in recession and, like France, is planning to cut taxes to kick-start its economy.
On July 24th, 1948, the Soviets closed the rail and road links between western Germany and west Berlin, located deep within the Soviet zone.
But while he continues to own German bonds, he's aware of the price Germany may eventually have to pay to keep the euro zone intact.
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Beyond the second half of this year, however, the scope for France and Germany to pull away from the rest of the euro zone seems more limited.
France, Italy and Spain clearly believe it will be easier to persuade Germany to underwrite their broken economic models with euro-zone bonds than to persuade their electorates to accept change.
As one observer in Berlin puts it, Germany's real fear is not that the euro zone unravels to the Alps, but that it collapses all the way up to the Rhine.
Luxembourg's Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who also heads the group of the euro-zone's 17 finance ministers, told Germany's Spiegel magazine in an interview pre-released Saturday that help for Greece won't be made at any cost.
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In Germany, whose exporters depend on the rest of the euro zone's economy, the stock market sank 3.4%.
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