It is the fourth parcel bomb in recent months blamed on the blackmailer, who has demanded €10 million worth of bitcoins from the parcel delivery service DHL.

The latest parcel containing explosive material was sent to the Berlin Chamber of Crafts and "can in all likelihood be attributed to the DHL extortionist or extortionists," a Potsdam police spokesman told AFP.

A female employee at the trade association contacted the police on Thursday after she noticed wires protruding from the package.

Specialists were able to defuse the parcel without having to carry out a controlled explosion.

German police have been hunting for one or more suspects ever since a DHL parcel containing nails, screws and explosive powder from Polish fireworks, was received by a pharmacy in the city of Potsdam, near Berlin, in December.

That package failed to detonate upon opening but nevertheless prompted police to clear the nearby Christmas market as a precaution.

The evacuation revived fears of the jihadist attack on a Berlin Christmas market a year earlier, which killed 12 people.

Police later discovered a message inside the package threatening further parcel bombs unless DHL made a €10-million, untraceable payment in the virtual currency bitcoin.

A similar package was sent to an online retailer in the eastern city of Frankfurt an der Oder in November, believed to have come from the same source.

Another parcel bomb linked to the extortion plot was delivered to a Berlin bank in January, containing a detonator and what appeared to be powder from fireworks. It too was defused by police.</s>A parcel bomb delivered to the Handwerkskammer trades association in Berlin last week was another attempt to blackmail German logistics giant DHL, investigators said on Tuesday.

"It is highly likely that the package was sent by the perpetrator or perpetrators who are trying to blackmail package delivery service DHL for millions (of euros)," said Torsten Herbst, a spokesman for the Brandenburg police department.

The approximately 15-centimeter-by-15-centimeter (6-inch-by-6-inch) package was found in the mailbox of the trade association in the Kreuzberg district last Thursday. A worker became suspicious after noticing wires protruding from the package.

A bomb disposal team diffused the bomb without an explosion being set off. Police said the size of the package meant that it could have seriously injured people had it exploded.

The bomb package was the fourth believed to be part of the extortion scheme against DHL in recent months.

Read more: Threats like DHL extortion plot in Potsdam more common than you think

In November, a parcel bomb was found in Frankfurt an der Oder. In December, a parcel bomb delivered to a pharmacy in Potsdam forced the brief closure of one of the city's Christmas markets. In January, a bank in Berlin received a package containing powder and fireworks.

Each evening at 1830 UTC, DW's editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. You can sign up to receive it directly here.</s>BERLIN (Reuters) - More than 1,500 police will be on duty in Berlin on Sunday, when Germany's capital faces the logistical challenge of organising an election expected to draw a large turnout - while ensuring its annual marathon also runs smoothly.

Police, election officials and race organisers have been in close consultations about security arrangements, especially following a deadly truck rampage on a Berlin Christmas market last December as well as an attack on the Boston marathon in 2013.

 Officials with the Berlin police and the BKA Federal Criminal Police Office said they had no indications of any specific plots to attack either the race or the city's 1,779 polling stations.

 Berlin's state election office said letters had been sent to around 44,000 of the city's 2.5 million eligible voters warning that some 30 stations might be difficult to reach because of the marathon. 

 The marathon is expected to end in early afternoon, while polls close at 6 p.m. local time.

 Voter participation is expected to exceed the 72.5 percent of 2013 largely due to a referendum about the fate of Berlin's Tegel airport that served the city through the Cold War.

 "Voter participation was already relatively high in 2013, but we think it will be even higher this year because of high interest in the Tegel referendum," a spokesman said. 

 

 (Reporting by Andrea Shalal; editing by John Stonestreet)</s>It is curious fact that certain times and places seem to have a particular hold on our popular historical imagination. Such is the case with Germany’s capital city, Berlin, during the short-lived Weimar Republic, recently recreated for TV in the critically acclaimed Netflix series Babylon Berlin. Based on a series of novels by Volker Kutscher, Babylon Berlin is reputedly the most expensive non-English language TV show ever made

Set in the dying days of the republic, its plot centres on a Vice Squad detective, Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), who is posted to Berlin to investigate a pornography ring run by an underworld syndicate. He quickly uncovers plans by reactionary political forces to thwart the disarmament conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, which settled the first world war.

Read more: Friday essay: can art really make a difference?

The Weimar Republic was so-called because the German city of Weimar was where the first constitutional assembly of the Republic was held in 1919, after the collapse of the German empire. In the late-18th century it had also been home to great figures of the European Enlightenment such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Gottfried Herder.

Any hoped-for association between the spirit of that Age of Reason and the Republic, however, was to prove chimeric. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and specifically the passing of the Enabling Act on March 23 of that year, made him the effective dictator of Germany.

Understandably, we continue to seek possible explanations for this disaster in the culture that immediately preceded it. But there are other grounds for our continuing fascination with the Weimar Republic.

It was also something of a cultural “Golden Age” during which social and economic issues of the day came to be explored and debated through music, art, and literature of particular energy, acuity, and depth. And those issues, especially those originating in the social impact of new media technologies or the emerging global economy, seem close to many troubling us today.

This is not, of course, the first time that Weimar Berlin has found its way into mainstream popular culture outside of Germany. Many of us will have got our first “feel” for the period from the musical (and film) Cabaret.

Like Cabaret, based on on English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939), many of the clubs, cafes, brothels, and political personalities depicted in Babylon Berlin are based on actual historical places and people. With an unparalleled production budget and some 12 hours of broadcast time, however, the series is able to build up a more sophisticated picture of the physical, psychological, and geopolitical character of the city.

We also see techniques that particularly fascinated Weimar artists employed right from the show’s opening credits, such as the use of the cinematic device of montage (thought to approximate the similarly diffracted sensual experience of a bustling metropolis). Likewise, the plot that unfolds over the series’ 16 episodes fractures and splits in fascinatingly unexpected ways.

Babylon Berlin offers windows into the private and professional lives of the city’s inhabitants: not just the professional and aristocratic classes but also the working poor for whom debates over competing political visions for the country took on a visceral immediacy. (Could they find a safe place to sleep? Did they have enough to eat?)

The changing role and status of women is another recurring theme. Article 109 of the Weimar Constitution declared that men and women had the same fundamental rights and duties as citizens, including the right to vote and to hold public office. In the series we see how women now sought not only employment, but also forms of pleasure, that had hitherto not been open to them.

Older patriarchal elites viewed such cultural shocks with deep suspicion. When Germany’s fragile post-war economic recovery was fatally undermined by the Wall Street Crash in 1929, they were quick to claim that liberalism represented a profound social ill only a return to imposed social order could cure.

Another constant of the series is the shadow cast by the first world war and how it damaged both the psyches and bodies of those who survived it. For Detective Rath, relief from his ills is found in illicit drugs. But everyone, it seems, is struggling with demons of one kind or another. One strength of the series is that there are no straightforward “good” or “bad” guys (or girls).

In the series’ first 14 episodes, similarly, there is not a swastika in sight. This is perhaps grounded in the fact that at the 1928 general election, the Nazis had won just 2.6% of the vote. While this arguably underplays both the visibility and significance of the Party’s activities in Berlin at this time, it also makes it easier for the series to focus our attention on a broader message.

Read more: Romper Stomper reboot is a compelling investigation into Australia's extremist politics

Whatever the time or place, democracy is fragile and requires collective political effort and civic courage to be sustained and nurtured. Or, as one reviewer put it, “Babylon Berlin is less anxious self-examination than knowing warning to others”.

The series remains, of course, a historical drama, not a documentary, and is designed to be rollicking good entertainment (which it is!) It is ultimately no substitute for an in-depth study of Weimar history and culture.

But at a time when young people across the West are increasingly sceptical about liberal democracy, it offers a timely reminder of why that history still has lessons for us.
German police defuse a parcel bomb in Berlin. It is thought to be the fourth device sent by a blackmailer targetting DHL.