#Fairytale #setting #dark #summit #Germany
G7 leaders will gather from Sunday at a quintessentially German venue handpicked by former Chancellor Angela Merkel and refurbished by her successor Olaf Scholz – a luxury hotel with a fairytale setting and a turbulent past.
Nestled in the Bavarian Alps, Schloss Elmau is a five-star resort converted into a fortress for the three-day gathering of the Rich Nations Club.
If the stormy weather forecast holds, Scholz will have a fitting backdrop for the meeting, which will have the Ukraine war, the global food crisis and the health of the world and planet’s democracies on the agenda.
“This discussion club started as a G6 with six countries (in the 1970s) to discuss how to deal with the oil crisis at the time,” Scholz said on Saturday.
“Now it is important that we talk about the situation today and ensure that we stop man-made climate change.”
At the last summit here in 2015, US President Barack Obama arranged a village tour with Merkel amidst the bonnet farmers and dirndl women who make Bavaria famous, including a break with a soft pretzel and a large glass of beer.
Scholz, also known as Scholzomat because of his often robotic style, is expected to stick to a tighter schedule given the crisis-ridden program.
– arson, derailment –
G7 Presidents tend to choose picture-postcard locations when planning their annual summit, ideally in a remote location that’s easier for police to cordon off than an urban center. Schloss Elmau is no exception.
The sumptuous accommodation includes 115 rooms and suites, swimming pools and spas.
To ensure security, high-ranking guests will be taken to the castle by helicopter, while a steel ring keeps the expected thousands of anti-G7 protesters at bay in the ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 15 kilometers away. down the street.
Around 18,000 police officers from all over Germany were mobilized, some housed in mountain huts near the venue for days.
Scholz will strive to avoid the violent demonstrations that overshadowed the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg and almost cost him his job as the city’s mayor at the time.
Despite the heavy security presence, red-faced Bavarian authorities admitted this week that eight buses used by federal police for the summit had been destroyed in an arson attack.
State Interior Minister Joachim Hermann blamed “left-wing extremists” who wanted to disrupt the event.
A train crash earlier this month on the Garmisch route that claimed five lives also had local officials on edge. The Bavarian police have opened an investigation on suspicion of negligent killing against three railway employees because of the derailment.
– Home for Holocaust Survivors –
Merkel said she chose Schloss Elmau partly because of the way the site’s owners view its Nazi-era history.
The Protestant theologian and philosopher Johannes Müller built the palace during World War I, and when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Müller swore allegiance to the new leader, although he never joined the Nazi Party.
But he openly criticized the Nazis’ rabid anti-Semitism as a “disgrace to Germany,” according to the hotel’s website, which led to close Gestapo surveillance.
After the start of the Second World War, he prevented his beloved hotel from being confiscated by the Nazi leadership for their own use by renting it out to the Bundeswehr as a resort for vacationers from the front.
Mueller was prosecuted and convicted after the war of “oral and written glorification of Hitler” and lost ownership of the hotel.
Schloss Elmau served as a US Army hospital in the immediate post-war years and later as a refuge for displaced persons and Holocaust survivors.
“Events that contribute to German-Israeli and German-American understanding” are now regularly held there, including lectures and debates.
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