Auf Wiedersehen Athens?

As the German and French leaders met to discuss how to keep Greece in the eurozone some Germans seem indifferent to its fate.

A recent opinion poll show around 60 percent of them support Angela Merkel’s opposition to stimulating growth in Europe through new borrowing and in a Berlin food market a commonly expressed feeling was that Germany’s already given too much to Greece without getting anything back.

Flower seller Rudi Kalupa said: “I’m not worried about the situation in Greece. If they are not able to handle the euro, they have to leave the euro, as simple as that.

Vegetable seller Christine Neuendorf added: “I think Greece should leave the eurozone. We have to work hard here. We have to pay a lot of taxes and this and that and nobody ask us if we want all that.”

But if Greece does leave the eurozone, Charles Dallara of the International Institute of Finance, who negotiated the Greek bond swap, said the damage to the rest of Europe would be “somewhere between catastrophic and Armageddon”.

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