There is another issue, however, and rather a German one: Kultur means a little more than the English "culture"; it suggests a rich density, almost a metaphysical truth. The term took its modern meaning from German thinkers and writers such as Herder, Goethe and Humboldt (to a certain extent Adorno, too); Kultur is steeped in the idea of the Enlightenment.

This, I tried to explain to my friend, is why a certain type of German holds on to his newspapers so obsessively. His reply was of a kind common in the UK or the US, but rare in Germany: how, he asked, can this Kultur have any claim to universal recognition in a globalised world? He added that Germany seemed to lag behind multicultural countries like Britain or the US in its intellectual development, not having had a comparable influx of immigrants. To him, Kultur seemed a one-dimensional concept. You have all kinds of Kultur-foundations here, fellowships, organisations, ministries, he went on, in some admiration of the Old World's ongoing obsession with reflecting upon itself in art.

I told him I saw it almost the other way round: Kultur in the old sense of the word isn't an exclusive idea, but an elitist one. And the foundations my friend so admired more often than not give money to mediocre artists as long as they paint "provocatively" or exhibit "diversity". We have never had a Tory-style debate about the limits of culture and the funding of arts councils, so we haven't really defined what is and what isn't part of our culture. It is made more difficult by the very idea of culture being so horribly abused by the Nazis. 

I don't think Germany is quite the open society it prides itself on being. At the same time it is curious enough not to turn into the dystopian fantasy of elitist and one-dimensional boredom my friend had evoked. The fact that many newspapers are suffering an identity crisis as much as an economic one is proof of that, at least as long as we consider them as organs for thinking in democratic societies. What does it mean to be cultured or cultivated? To know your Thomas from your Heinrich Mann, to recite the beginning of The Odyssey in the original, or to tell if Kate Moss is wearing McQueen? 

These are the type of questions that the culture sections of newspapers have indirectly addressed, ever since they started to provide the educated classes with their daily dose of knowledge in the 19th century. Today, however, newspapers face a double bind: to provide culture, to reinvigorate discussion about what it constitutes—and to be interesting enough for people to pay for it, online or not. The old saying still rings true: we are only as cultivated as the paper we read.