Yes, $534 million is a lot of money, and 1,100 jobs is a lot of jobs, but Solyndra represents just 1.3 percent of the Department of Energy’s loan portfolio. America’s investment in renewables, and particularly solar, lags behind that of many other G-20 countries as a percentage of GDP. Yet sheer investment isn’t enough to ensure a robust renewable sector; it has to be smart investment. And that doesn’t mean fussing over individual companies; instead of picking the right companies, we need to pick the right policies. We need to look at what’s worked elsewhere, particularly in Germany, which continues to blaze the trail in solar innovation, production and installation.

In December 2010 alone, Germany installed 1,174 megawatts of solar — more than America installed the entire year. Germany nurtured its industry through the 1990s and into the early 2000s by subsidizing rooftop installations, and by 2004 had installed 100,000 grid-connected photovoltaic systems. But the real driver of success has been Germany’s use of feed-in tariffs, which the European Environmental Agency defines as “The price per unit of electricity that a utility or supplier has to pay for renewable electricity from private generators.”

Essentially, Germany requires its utilities to purchase solar energy at a price fixed by the government for 20 years after installation. That ensures that anyone who invests in solar — whether homeowners who put photovoltaic panels on their roofs or companies that develop industrial-size plants — will get a return on their investment for years to come. The success of the policy in Germany has led to its widespread adoption throughout Europe, and while feed-in tariffs aren’t a fail-safe solution — if poorly designed, they can result in booms and busts, as happened in Spain — on balance they’re highly effective: Six of the world’s top 10 solar installers use feed-in-tariffs or an equivalent approach.

For all their demonstrated effectiveness, feed-in tariffs are controversial in the United States because we object to the idea of “fixing prices” and “interfering with the free market.” Of course, the idea that the U.S. energy market operates free from government intervention is laughable: The U.S. subsidized oil, gas and coal production to the tune of $72 billion between 2002 and 2008. At the same time we spent just $29 billion on renewable energy over the same period, with a huge chunk of that — $16.8 billion — going to corn ethanol, an inefficient energy source that contributes to deforestation but has been heavily advocated by agribusiness.

Still, most solar incentives take the form of rebates and tax credits, which reimburse individuals and businesses for a certain percentage of the cost of installation. The federal government offers a 50 percent tax credit for solar, and some states offer additional credits — although up-front financing still remains a challenge in many parts of the country. As with any state-by-state endeavor, some states have great policies while others have none; perhaps unsurprisingly, blue states tend to have better incentives for solar than red ones.

Many states also have renewable energy standards, which requires them to obtain a certain percentage of electricity from renewables; to meet these standards, states tend to sign contracts with big companies for industrial-scale projects. Indeed, American investment in renewable energy has largely taken place on an industrial scale, with the government guaranteeing nearly $16 billion in loans to 15 solar companies.

By contrast, Germany’s solar market is highly distributed: Since anyone with a solar panel on his or her roof can sell energy to utilities at the premium price, anyone can benefit from investing in solar, emphasizing small-scale, decentralized energy production. Yet despite the focus on a few big, high-visibility projects in the U.S., the hundreds of megawatts such projects produce are mere trifles in Germany, which puts thousands of megawatts on the grid annually, largely through rooftop systems requiring only a few solar panels each.

Of course, there are other important differences between the U.S. and Germany. Germany has a highly skilled labor force backed by strong unions, and a robust environmental movement with real political power, both of which are sadly lacking here. America’s abundance of oil, coal and natural gas makes it extremely difficult for renewables to compete with fossil fuels without some kind of pricing mechanism that accounts for the costs of “cheap” energy to health and environment, yet the stranglehold of fossil fuel industries on elected officials makes it unlikely that we’ll get such a mechanism any time soon. China’s massive investments in solar and other renewables over the past couple of years may yet prove to be a game-changer for the industry as a whole. But Germany still offers a useful demonstration of how a developed world with a history of manufacturing power can build a new industry with the ultimate goal of transforming the entire energy sector.

Whether we learn from their example is another story. What should be clear by now is that we’re not going to shift to a clean energy economy in a couple of years with a few hundred million dollars, especially when we’re already so far behind. Right now we’re fussing over the final moments of a multi-year deal that represents a tiny fraction of government investment in the U.S. solar industry and an absolute pittance in the global solar economy. There’s a lot to talk about with regards to our solar policy, but Solyndra isn’t it. 

Bahr said the death toll has risen to 26 — 25 in Germany plus one in Sweden.

Germany’s national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said the number of reported cases in Germany rose by more than 300 to 2,648. Nearly 700 of those affected are hospitalized with a serious complication that can cause kidney failure. Another 100 E. coli cases are in other European countries and the United States.

The Koch Institute did not fully back Bahr’s optimism. It said there was a declining trend in new cases but added it’s not clear yet whether that’s because the outbreak is truly waning or whether it’s because consumers are staying away from the raw vegetables believed to be the source of the E. coli.

EU health chief John Dalli, meanwhile, demanded that German health authorities work more closely with international experts in fighting the deadly epidemic, saying they should use “the experience and expertise in all of Europe and even outside of Europe,” according to the Die Welt newspaper.

“The focus of this meeting is to ensure that all the steps are being taken to get to … the final elimination of this contamination as soon as possible and to see whether any more resources and efforts should be made,” Dalli told reporters as he went into the Berlin meeting.

Outside health experts and even German lawmakers have strongly criticized the German investigation, saying the infections should have been spotted much sooner.

Weeks after the outbreak began on May 2, German officials are still looking for its cause. Spanish cucumbers were initially blamed, then ruled out after tests showed they had a different strain of E. coli. On Sunday, investigators pointed the finger at German sprouts, only to backtrack a day later when initial tests were negative.

On Wednesday, the agriculture minister of Lower Saxony, who had first warned of eating sprouts on Sunday, said authorities are still expecting new lab results from an organic farm that has been the focus of their investigation.

Gert Lindemann said authorities still considering the farm in Bienenbuettel in northern Germany a possible source for the E.coli outbreak.

Bahr reiterated that the source of the infection may never been found, a stance U.S. experts have called a cop-out.

A warning against eating cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and vegetable sprouts is still in place.

Consumers across Europe are shunning fruit and vegetables, with EU farmers claiming losses up to euro417 million ($611 million) as ripe produce rots in fields and warehouses. On Tuesday, Spain, Italy and France angrily demanded compensation for their farmers who have been blindsided by the huge losses in the E. coli outbreak.

The outcry forced the EU farm chief to increase his offer of aid to over euro150 million.

Grocery stores in Germany are reporting losses up to 40 percent in sales of fresh produce, daily Bild reported.

In China, authorities ordered stepped-up health inspections for travelers arriving from Germany to prevent the super-toxic strain from reaching its shores.

David Rising in Berlin and Gillian Wong in Beijing, China contributed reporting.

It’s not as if the global wave of radical violence, extending from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground in the United States to the Irish Republican Army, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and various Palestinian and/or Arab groups in the Middle East, is a brand-new topic for film and literature. (I assume that various Ph.D. candidates have already noticed and explored the fact that the defeated Axis powers — Germany, Japan and Italy — produced the scariest varieties of left-wing wackos.) Headline-grabbing events like the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the murder of Italian premier Aldo Moro or the 1972 Olympic massacre in Munich have been retold several times. But as the global political chaos of that era has faded into collective memory — and if you weren’t there, it’s nearly impossible to convey the level of craziness — filmmakers have given themselves permission to reexamine it from formerly forbidden points of view.

“United Red Army” is at least the fourth major film of the last three years to explore the subjective reality of those who tried to foment global revolution by violent means, on the fringes of a Cold War world that teetered on the brink of nuclear annihilation. First of these was Steven Soderbergh’s messy, mesmerizing “Che” (originally a project designed for Terrence Malick), a great, sprawling, four-hour, two-part naturalistic novel of a movie that captures the iconic ’60s guerrilla as a brave and ruthless man of action, whose arrogance and ambition led to his greatest victory and his ultimate defeat. Some viewers accused Soderbergh of dewy-eyed left-wing nostalgia or ideological whitewashing, but I think those people misunderstand several things: the point of the movie, the ambiguous depths of Benicio del Toro’s performance and the historical character of Che Guevara himself, a figure who continues to resonate throughout Latin American political culture long after his death.

Uli Edel and Bernd Eichinger’s Oscar-nominated “Baader Meinhof Complex” set West Germany’s legendary student radicals against the vivid social context of a repressive American client state still suffering from Nazi hangover, where fervid Trotskyist rhetoric seemed to spread like herpes (and often via the same vectors). I don’t think anybody took “Baader Meinhof Complex” as an advertisement for its protagonists’ increasingly isolated and paranoid worldview. If anything, it may be too easy to view the film as a time-warp, rock ‘n’ roll freak show while missing its larger point: If ultra-radicals like the Baader-Meinhof group drove themselves crazy, the world around them was already plenty crazy, and their amateurish and petty acts of violence were small potatoes compared to the wars and proxy wars and acts of state terror being perpetrated all over the place by the Cold War powers, mostly for entirely cynical reasons.

You could say that the molecular decay of political idealism into cynical opportunism is the grand theme of Olivier Assayas’ miniseries “Carlos,” the undisputed masterpiece of this recent mini-genre. Once again, those who suspect some kind of radical-chic, rose-colored-glasses agenda either haven’t seen the film at all or are so ideologically poisoned they lack all critical judgment. In the amazing performance of Edgar Ramírez, notorious ’70s bomber and hijacker Carlos the Jackal begins as a committed Marxist revolutionary (and dashing ladies’ man) who modeled himself after Che Guevara, and slides over the course of the decade into a slovenly henchman for hire, working for the East German regime, Saddam Hussein, Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad and even the Iranian mullahs, before ending up as a fat, drunken, pseudo-Muslim exile in the Sudan.

Much of the appeal of this improbable era and its outsize characters is, I think, purely narrative: The world of Carlos and the Baader-Meinhofs, of hostage-takings and 747 hijackings and car-bombings on the streets of Paris and London, feels like a fictional alternate universe but is in fact a reality many of us have striven to forget. The events of these films also feel like a secret spider-web threaded through the underbelly of the Cold War world. They provide history and context to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida and 9/11, phenomena often presented as having appeared out of nowhere. (You know: They hate us for our freedom, etc.) They remind us that the global victory of technological consumer capitalism, which today seems as natural and inevitable as breathing air instead of water, looked far from a sure thing 40 years ago. It’s way too grandiose to say that these demented leftists from another day have a prophecy to deliver, or anything like that; it’s more as if they’re haunting us, like Hamlet’s ghost, and like the young prince we’re not sure what they’re trying to say.

In most cases these filmmakers are excavating news events they either remember dimly or not at all, but the case of Koji Wakamatsu is quite different. An eccentric Japanese cinema veteran best known as a pioneer of softcore erotica, or “pink” films, Wakamatsu is also a longtime political activist and a former supporter of the radical fringe. In 1971, he co-directed a manifesto called “Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War,” in which a pair of violent sects on the Japanese left officially joined forces with a group headed by Palestinian radical Wadie Haddad (Carlos’ boss and mentor) and declared war against the United States, NATO, Israel, the Japanese government and pretty much anybody else who might be standing in the way of worldwide Marxist revolution.

So it’s hard not to see “United Red Army,” a hybrid docudrama that depicts the group’s harrowing descent into cult-like insanity and self-immolation, as Wakamatsu’s 190-minute mea culpa. It’s as if the 76-year-old filmmaker were asking two interrelated questions: How could the idealistic tide of anti-American activism and socialist internationalism have led to this conclusion, with a handful of isolated zealots beating each other to death in the alleged spirit of Marxist “self-critique”? And how in the world did I fall for it so hard? Those are very big questions, and it’s a bit too easy to view them patronizingly from the 21st century, as if the entire history of the 1960s and ’70s were a collective hallucination en route to the invention of the iPad.

If Che and Carlos and the Baader-Meinhofs and the United Red Army are sending us a message, it isn’t anything as simple as “We were right all along,” because mostly they were wrong and even when they were right they drew the wrong conclusions. It’s more like they’re delivering some kind of opaque biblical wisdom, along the lines of “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see face to face.” We should not be too confident that we see the past clearly and understand it, or that our age of permanent electronic distraction and overwork and economic decline, when politics has become an idiotic circus of Newtonian reaction, is possessed of superior wisdom and does not, after its own fashion, contain the seeds of its own destruction.

“United Red Army” plays this week at the IFC Center in New York, with other venues and home-video release to follow. “Che,” “The Baader-Meinhof Complex” and “Carlos” are all available on home video.

In Melville House’s re-release of “The Essential Heinrich Böll” — a library that promises to contain eight works in all — the continuity of Böll’s themes appears especially stark. Taken together, the five novels published thus far map out Germany’s smooth, if morally uncomfortable, course from war-torn reprobate to complacent industrial behemoth. In “The Train Was On Time,” Böll captures the hopelessness of a war hurtling toward a gruesome, crippling end: Pvt. Andreas, a young soldier en route to the Eastern front, becomes convinced he’s going to die, the word “soon” becoming suddenly and unaccountably haunting: “Now and again,” Böll writes, “what appears to be a casually spoken word will suddenly acquire a cabalistic significance. It becomes charged and strangely swift, races ahead of the speaker, is destined to throw open a chamber in the uncertain confines of the future and to return to him with the deadly accuracy of a boomerang.” “Billiards at Half-Past Nine” and “The Clown” turn to the private ravages of war, exposing the fractures within families as characters find different, incompatible ways to heal. Finally, with “The Safety Net” and “Group Portrait With Lady,” Böll redirects his attention to the aftershocks of Germany’s unrepentant capitalism.

The families in Böll’s novels tend to orbit his native Cologne, where Catholicism — on its surface a kind of surrogate morality after the nihilism of war — provides cover for their participation in a vast horror. But beyond their common geography, Böll’s novels are united by a fascination with the postwar vernacular, the coded ways that language conceals the realities of wartime complicity. Like the word “soon,” echoing through Pvt. Andreas’ mind, fragments of language constrict the way Böll’s characters experience reality. In “The Clown,” Hans Schnier, the titular clown and Böll’s most memorable protagonist, has been abandoned by his girlfriend, Marie who, fed up with Schnier’s insistently squalid way of life, retreats to the religious platitudes of her upbringing. Marie insists that she needs to breathe “Catholic air.” Hans, spiraling into self-pity, observes, “Having a bath is almost as good as sleeping, just as sleeping is almost as good as doing ‘the thing.’ That’s what Marie called it, and I always think of it in her words.” Hans recycles these Catholic obfuscations even as he mocks them: They’re all he knows. “Billiards at Half-Past Nine” carries these phrasal appropriations almost into the realm of allegory. War divides a single family, the Faehmels, into two camps — those who have received “the host of the beast” and those who have received “the host of the lamb” — those for whom the war remains a living memory and those who have buried the past. These phrases ring throughout the novel, the Eucharist reimagined as a consecration of war.

Among the novels in the Melville House set, it’s these two — “The Clown” and “Billiards” — that give us Böll at his most raw, untempered by the sterility that takes hold of his later work. Böll breaks free of his habitual restraint, abandoning a circumspect irony for a frontal assault on his country’s eagerness to turn away from its past. (In “Billiards at Half-Past Nine,” he even makes a passing dig at the notion of “inner emigration” — the idea, advocated by some German authors, that writers who had stayed quiet on the subject of Nazism could construe their silence as a form of inward resistance.) In Hans Schnier, especially, he has found a character who gives voice to his own rigorous ethics. The scion of a coal-mining fortune, Hans has only this to say of his provenance: “This concern for the sacred German soil” — a phrase invoked by his mother to justify having sent her teenage daughter off to fight the “Jewish Yankees” — “is somehow comical when you realize that a good proportion of brown-coal mining shares has been in the hands of our family for two generations. For seventy years the Schniers have been making money out of the scooping and digging the sacred German soil has had to submit to; villages, forests, castles fall in the path of the dredgers like the wall of Jericho.” A principled madman, Schnier wields his ideological consistency like a weapon against those who would rather bend reality to their will.

The Melville House editions are beautifully designed, with witty, minimalist covers. But the books occasionally feel like a rush job. Rife with typos — Schnier’s surname appears in three different spellings — they represent an odd selection. Why the schematic character sketches of “Safety Net” rather than “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” Böll’s splenetic indictment of tabloid sensationalism? It would have been helpful to hear the logic behind what the publishers deemed the “essential” Böll. It’s also worth noting that these are re-issues, not re-translations. Leila Vennewitz, who has translated most of the novels here, renders Böll’s prose with impressive fidelity. But this edition of “Billiards at Half-Past Nine” — arguably the most complex of Böll’s novels, with its variable perspective and scattershot chronology — reprints a 1962 translation by Patrick Bowles in severe need of an update. Bowles converts the novel’s unbridled stream-of-consciousness into tidy sentences that, cut away from Böll’s heavily clausal syntax, can read awkwardly: “Mouths were wiped on granite visages that, one day, would be cast in bronze, from pedestaled monuments to give notice of their greatness to future generations.” It’s fair to say this makes no sense.

Still, the Melville House editions are commendable simply for the fact of their existence: Böll deserves the renewed attention, whatever form it takes. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he proves, throughout his career, willing to confront the ways in which the Germany of his present was continuous with the Germany of the Nazi past. For all his excoriating of Catholic hypocrisy, Böll hasn’t entirely abandoned the precepts of his childhood faith: It’s penitence he’s after.