Henry Day

You can hardly turn a corner in Passau without stepping into a church. The town has dozens of them, large and small, old and new, some of them empty, most of them full. This is, after all, deepest Bavaria, the heartland of German Catholicism. The last pope was born a few miles up river in the village of Marktl am Inn.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the traditional left is alive and well in Berlin. My neighbourhood is full of posters printed with Marx's picture and slogans such as 'Marx is Back' and 'Permanent Crisis: we're not paying!' Thanks to the recession, Kreuzberg's May Day demonstrations were livelier than they've been for some time: more flaming mattresses, more paint-bombed buildings, more arrests. And at the Freie Universitaet the only party with any discernible campaign presence in the run up to the European elections was the uncompromisingly anti-capitalist Die Linke, a part-successor to East Germany's old SED.