The crime series Tatort first aired on 29 November 1970 with the episode Taxi nach Leipzig. From the start, it was a fixed Sunday evening slot that the participating broadcasters were to fill on their own. Each regional broadcaster of ARD is responsible for its own area and sets its episodes there. Since the late 1980s, every episode has run about ninety minutes. The opening credits have hardly changed, and Klaus Doldinger’s theme music from 1970 was modified only in 1979 and 2004. Inside this frame, some episodes break completely with the usual form. One, Murot und das Murmeltier, is set in a time loop.
What Moltke Actually Wrote
The line “No plan survives contact with the enemy” is usually credited to Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke. He did not write it in that form. In his essay Ueber Strategie of 1871, Moltke wrote: Kein Operationsplan reicht mit einiger Sicherheit über das erste Zusammentreffen mit der feindlichen Hauptmacht hinaus. (No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main force.) The next sentence reads: Nur der Laie glaubt in dem Verlauf eines Feldzuges die konsequente Durchführung eines im voraus gefaßten in allen Einzelheiten überlegten und bis ans Ende festgehaltenen, ursprünglichen Gedankens zu erblicken. (Only the layman believes that in the course of a campaign he sees the consistent execution of an original idea, thought out in advance in every detail and held to the end.) Moltke saw strategy as a system of expedients. He gave his subordinate commanders wide freedom of action in carrying out their mission. The familiar English wording, “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, is found in 1961, attributed to Moltke, in Correlli Barnett’s book The Desert Generals.
You Set the Rule Yourself
In the third act of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the young knight Walther has already failed the masters’ singing test. He wants to write a new song, and he asks the shoemaker and master singer Hans Sachs: Wie fang’ ich nach der Regel an? (How do I begin according to the rule?) Sachs answers: Ihr stellt sie selbst und folgt ihr dann. (You set it yourself, and then you follow it.)
Only Law Can Give Us Freedom
Goethe’s sonnet Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen (Nature and art seem to flee each other) ends with three lines: Wer Großes will, muß sich zusammenraffen; / In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister, / Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben. (Whoever wants great things must gather his strength. Only in limitation does the master show himself. And only law can give us freedom.) A few lines earlier, the poem says that unbound spirits strive in vain for perfection.
Flexitime and Core Time
Gleitzeit, flexitime, is the most widespread form of flexible working hours in Germany. Employees must be present only during the Kernarbeitszeit, the core time. Before and after it, they choose, within certain limits, when to start and when to stop. Who invented it is disputed. English sources credit the management consultant Christel Kammerer. In Germany, the entrepreneur Wilhelm Haller, founder of the time-recording company Interflex, is called the Vater der Gleitzeit, the father of flexitime. He took up flexible working hours at the end of the 1960s and promoted the idea with the half-Swabian, half-English slogan Ai laik Gleitzeit.
Trust-Based Working Time
About one in five employees in Germany works under Vertrauensarbeitszeit, working time based on trust. What counts is that agreed tasks are done, not that the employee is present. The employee organizes his own hours and records them himself. The employer remains responsible for compliance with the legal limits on working time. On 14 May 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that employers must record daily working time. The employers’ association Gesamtmetall called trust-based working time praktisch tot, practically dead. On 13 September 2022, the Federal Labor Court ruled that this duty applies to German employers unmittelbar und sofort, directly and immediately.
The Right to Direct
One sentence of the German Trade Regulation Act sets out how far a boss may give instructions. Der Arbeitgeber kann Inhalt, Ort und Zeit der Arbeitsleistung nach billigem Ermessen näher bestimmen, soweit diese Arbeitsbedingungen nicht durch den Arbeitsvertrag, Bestimmungen einer Betriebsvereinbarung, eines anwendbaren Tarifvertrages oder gesetzliche Vorschriften festgelegt sind. (The employer may specify the content, place and time of work in more detail at fair discretion, insofar as these conditions are not already fixed by the employment contract, a works agreement, an applicable collective agreement or statute.) The boss decides only in the space that the contract, works agreements, collective agreements and statutes leave open, and even there he must decide fairly.