After watching the news about the Paris robbery, managers at Böcker decided to make the most of the publicity

A family-run German business unwittingly became wrapped up in the crown jewel heist at the Louvre museum in Paris and is turning the use of one of its furniture lifts into a publicity coup.

“When you need to move fast” is the new tongue-in-cheek advertising tagline for the company Böcker, which is based in the town of Werne near Dortmund, in a campaign on Facebook and Instagram mounted within a day of the brazen thefts.

German chancellor accused of taking a page from extremist parties with ‘dangerous’ rhetoric on immigration

Critics have accused Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, of adopting “dangerous” rhetoric on immigration, after he championed “very large scale” expulsions of people from cities – and claimed that anyone with daughters would agree with him.

Merz, who took office in May with a pledge to beat back the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, chastised a reporter who asked if he wished to revise his hardline remarks on migration from last week in light of widespread criticism, or apologise for them.

Depiction of Shakespeare character by Friedrich Heyser believed to have inspired pop superstar’s new music video

A 200-year-old museum in Germany has found itself in the eye of a storm of delighted Taylor Swift fans when it emerged that one of the probable inspirations for the music video of her new song The Fate of Ophelia was hanging on its wall.

In the opening scene of the clip for the first song on Swift’s blockbuster new album The Life of a Showgirl, one of the world’s biggest pop stars assumes the role of the tragic Shakespearean character. The video, released earlier this month, was watched more than 27m times on YouTube in the first three days.