On 26 June, staff at the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels received an SMS: "BERL -- URGENT -- Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day." The Berlaymont building has thirteen floors. Ursula von der Leyen's office is on the thirteenth. Commissioners occupy the eighth floor and above. Their air conditioning stayed on.
Brussels had just recorded 34.6 degrees Celsius, its hottest day in fifty years. One Commission official, granted anonymity to speak to Politico, called the arrangement what it was: "It's like feudalism." Roughly one household in five across Europe has air conditioning at all. The Commission's own headquarters, it turns out, allocates it by floor number.
The Silence Cartel
Two hundred kilometres east, the same logic scaled up to a country. Germany spent the same week setting heat records and then breaking them again within hours: 41.3 degrees in Saarbruecken on Friday, 41.5 in Drewitz on Saturday, gusting toward 41.7 by Sunday. Autobahns buckled -- the A2, A10 and A93 all closed lanes to "blow-ups," where heat-expanded concrete lifts and cracks the road surface. National Express suspended its regional lines across North Rhine-Westphalia for six hours. Care home residents died in Krefeld and Dormagen. Doctors' representatives accused the government of failure on heat protection.
The government said nothing all weekend. "One has the feeling Friedrich Merz and his government agreed on a silence cartel," said Green co-leader Felix Banaszak, "and simply hoped they wouldn't have to say anything about this until it rains again." Asked whether the Chancellor should treat the heat as a matter for his own office, government spokesman Stefan Kornelius offered a version of the logic Brussels had already tested: "It's extreme weather, we know that, and making it a Chefsache won't change the weather." Environment Minister Carsten Schneider pointed to adaptation -- shade, school cooling -- as a job for the states and municipalities, and to Germany's emissions targets as the job that was actually his.
The country's own Federal Environment Agency has a list of what cities can do about heat: more trees, more shade, less paved surface. UBA president Dirk Messner read it out in full last week. It does not include the words air conditioning. Germany builds for the season it can already see coming -- insulation, heat retention, a construction code written for winter heating costs -- and has not yet finished the sentence for the season currently killing people.
Two Germans, Two Cool Rooms
Two Germans currently control access to a cool room. Ursula von der Leyen's floor stayed cooled while the floors under her did not. Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, Archbishop of Cologne, presides over a cathedral that is naturally cool for anyone able to pay for it. Neither fact explains the other. Both are true in the same week.
In Naples, the Archdiocese opened three of its largest basilicas -- San Giovanni Maggiore, San Giorgio Maggiore, Santi Filippo e Giacomo -- for the entire day, with free water, explicitly as shelter from the heat. "In difficult moments like these," the Archdiocese said, "churches are not only places of prayer, but oases of coolness and charity."
Cologne took the opposite approach. The Dom began charging up to 12 euros for admission on 1 July, a fee this publication reported was coming a month in advance ("Half a Cloak", 4 June). Dombaumeister Peter Fuessenich puts maintenance at 44,000 euros a day; some restoration sections won't be finished until 2070. That date has company. Cologne folklore has held since the Middle Ages that finishing the cathedral would end the world -- the same legend claims the architect, Gerhard von Rile, struck a bargain with the devil for a three-year build, and that the devil, cheated by a faked rooster's crow, cursed the project never to be completed. Seven hundred and seventy-seven years after the first stone, the curse is, technically, holding.
The Archdiocese can likely absorb the delay. Its own 2024 financial report puts total assets at 4.39 billion euros -- up 1.7 percent on the year before -- with 3 billion euros freely disposable once third-party obligations are deducted. Vatican finances are famously opaque, but by most published estimates, Cologne alone outweighs Rome. Archbishop Woelki formally withdrew from the German bishops' Synodal Path reform process in January, siding with Rome's caution over his own colleagues' appetite for change. On the available evidence, this is a diocese with neither a money problem nor a Rome problem. It is a diocese charging 12 euros a head to sit somewhere cool, the same week Naples decided not to.
This report was filed from Sussex, where the parish church charges no admission, has no air conditioning, and, so far, has sent no urgent SMS.
By X. Voidwriter and E. Halberd Filed from Sussex.