trollercoaster

Oh yes, definitely. Die Sendung mit der Maus is a national treasure.

Only on paper. In practice, the genitive is virtually extinct, much to the despair of a few grossly overrated zealots.

Practically, German has only three cases, though, even if some uptight formalists (who also likely use a pair of pincers to pull up their pants) will greatly bemoan the simple fact of life that the genitive does not exist in the wild.

Don't worry about the formalities too much. Read lots of German, listen to lots of German, try to find people to speak German with, and it'll come to you naturally. Especially don't try to be too perfect. Spoken German is way more lax than the rules for written German. High German, as it is written and taught, barely exists out there as a spoken language in its pure form. The German language area has a plethora of different regional dialects, which will sneak into the spoken German of even the most fervent formal high German speaker.

Ich schick mein Kuseng der holt das ab der ist dumm.

Unfortunately, language learning in schools seems to be firmly in the hands of theoretical literature people. Of course, knowing the formal rules of a language helps with speaking it, and knowing the fancy scientific names for some linguistic constructs might even be entertaining to some, but in order to understand and speak a language, its understanding needs to be on a more personal and intuitive level you can only develop through frequent use of that language.

Wo mein geld?

Was letzte Preis?

Not only that, some of the defensive plans during the Cold War were pretty destructive for the defended countries. One big part of the planned response to an all-out Warsaw Pact assault on Western Germany, for example, would have been to detonate several truckloads (in total 141) of nuclear mines on choke points along strategically advantageous routes in order to slow down the attack.

There were prepared shafts for deploying those mines on important choke points near the East German border along the most likely avenues of attack.

Heavy equipment is pretty hard to conceal during transport, there is still a lot of effort involved in evaluating and interpreting satellite images, though. Potentially those efforts can be, at least partially, be thwarted by moving around dummy equipment, or driving around in circles, with repeated unloading and loading in areas invisible to the surveillance (e.g. under a roof) in order to sow confusion about the real numbers. Anything that's small enough to be loaded into a container, or can be easily broken up into small enough parts, is quite easy to hide from direct observation. Nobody looking from the outside can tell whether a shipping container contains a bunch of Taurus Cruise Missiles, or just a lot of rubber ducks.

Of course, access to relevant paperwork will reveal pretty much anything you can think of. But that's what counter espionage is for, most countries operate entire government agencies with that task.

I guess having a secret bank account in the same tax haven creates a certain familiarity that transcends all potential political differences.

Which is unfortunate, but still a pretty unlikely niche phenomenon, and no reason to do stupid things out of blind panic.

Do we really have to view them as such, or do only a few deranged individuals want us to? ("deranged individuals" explicitly and especially includes hysterical "security" politicians with ulterior motives)