GERMANY:The dust from last week's EU summit has hardly settled but the air between Warsaw and Berlin is crackling with recriminations.
Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has hit the roof over a caricature in Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper mocking his pre-summit remark that, were it not for the second World War, Poland would have had 20 million more citizens today and thus be entitled to greater voting power in the EU.
The caricature shows chancellor Angela Merkel presenting a voting compromise, the triple majority: "55 per cent of the population, 65 per cent of the population and 50 per cent of the square root of all second World War dead."
Mr Kaczynski was not amused. "I'm warning the German government: Germany cannot tolerate any remarks that could lead to the worst, to a disaster in Europe and one that will affect the Germans themselves," he said yesterday.
"A situation has come about in Europe in which one may no longer talk of German war blame, but very well talk about Polish concentration camps and Polish complicity in the Holocaust."
Yesterday Unesco gave the Polish government permission to change the official name of the Auschwitz concentration camp near Krakow to: "German Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945". Mr Kaczynski said Germany has hijacked the EU to achieve European dominance by stealth and, on Tuesday, appeared to equate modern Germany with the former Third Reich.
"Something negative is happening. Like in a long past epoch, when the large majority of Europeans didn't have the courage to speak about it, today is the same," he said on Polish radio.
Berlin caricaturist Klaus Stuttmann said yesterday that Mr Kaczynski's reaction was "very pleasant indeed".
"I don't make fun of our history, there's no reason to, but his logic was absurd, particularly the consequences if you followed it to its conclusion," he said.
"It's not my style to make jokes about an entire people like the Poles, but I've no problem making fun of two pretty stupid politicians."
Needling is nothing new between Germany and Poland, but since the Kaczynski twins came to office German media organisations have begun to respond to Polish provocation.
The left-wing Tageszeitung was the first publication to make waves when it compared the portly brothers to potatoes last year.
Earlier this year, a Polish magazine ran a cover image of Ms Merkel with a Hitler moustache.
Last week, Der Spiegel portrayed the Kaczynski twins - "The Unloved Neighbours" - riding on the back of Angela Merkel. That was an answer to a cover of Poland's Wprost magazine from 2003 showing a female German politician in an SS uniform sitting astride Gerhard Schröder in a dominatrix pose.
Wprost replied on Monday with a photo montage cover showing a bare-breasted Ms Merkel nursing the twins over the headline "Europe's Stepmother".
Germany's Bild newspaper was so incensed by the montage, combining the chancellor's smiling face with the ample breasts of a 21-year-old model, that it ran the image on Tuesday's page two.