Arab Spring

14 January 2011: After weeks of public unrest, Tunisia became the first Arab nation to oust its dictator. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. The Tunisian revolution sparked the Arab Spring, with uprisings in Egypt, Yemen and a civil war in Libya. The era of the dictators may be over, but what follows?

Nuclear Disaster

11 March 2011: A magnitude nine earthquake shook Japan, causing a tsunami that flooded coastal regions, claiming more than 10,000 lives. The quake and tsunami caused major damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant, disabling the reactor cooling systems, and causing nuclear meltdowns which led to radioactive releases. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, until then a friend of nuclear power, announced that the Fukushima disaster had changed her attitude to nuclear energy. On 30 June the Bundestag approved a plan to phase out German nuclear power plants. The energy turnabout in Germany – can it succeed?

Eurozone Debt Crisis

7 April 2011: After Greece and Ireland, Portugal became the next Eurozone country to ask for an EU bailout. The debt crisis had begun to spread. Chancellor Merkel warned that a failure of the euro meant failure for Europe. Germany’s share of guarantees for the rescue fund rose from 123 to 211 billion euros. On 9 December an attempt to reach a deal on the Eurozone rescue through EU treaty changes failed when Britain refused to cooperate. When will we see an end to the crisis?

What do you think: 2011 - Year of Crisis, Year of Hope?

Write us at: Quadriga@dw-world.de

Our guests:

Samir Said - Has been living and working as a freelance journalist in Germany for the last five years. Born in Egypt, he studied at Cairo’s Ain Shams University. In 2004 he and his family relocated to Germany, his wife’s home country. He works for Arabic and English medias. He is presently working as a consultant, assisting European media to gain a foothold in the Arab World.

Ulrike Herrmann – started her career in banking before taking up journalism at the Henri Nannen School afterwards studying history and philosophy at Berlin’s Free University. She then worked as a research assistant at the Körber Foundation and was the press officer for Hamburg’s Equal Opportunities minister, Krista Sager. In 2000 she became a political correspondent and business editor at the Berlin daily "taz". These days she is the responsible editor for the opinion page of this newspaper.

Nicholas Kulish was born in Washington in 1975 and raised in Arlington, Virginia. He graduated from Columbia College in New York with a bachelor’s of arts degree. He worked a series of odd writing and Internet jobs in Hong Kong and New York before landing as a news assistant at The Wall Street Journal. He worked his way up to staff reporter in the paper’s Washington bureau, covering everything from economics to the presidential recount in Florida following the 2000 election. Kulish embedded with a Marine helicopter squadron for the invasion of Iraq. He left the Journal to take a Fulbright creative-writing grant in Berlin, where he wrote a novel set during the opening weeks of the Iraq war, called Last One In. He spent two years on The New York Times editorial board, before moving back to Berlin in August 2007 to become the paper’s Berlin bureau chief.