Interesting sign of the times:

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) — When Berlin resident Simone Klostermann returned from vacation and couldn’t find her Mercedes SLK, she thought it had been towed. Police told her the 35,000- euro ($45,000) car had been torched. “They’d squirted something flammable into the car’s engine block in the gap between the windshield and the hood,” said Klostermann. “The engine was completely destroyed.” The 34-year-old’s experience isn’t unique in the German capital. At least 29 vehicles were destroyed in arson attacks this year, most of them luxury cars, according to police. The number is already about 30 percent of the total for 2008. The latest to go up in flames was a Porsche, on Feb. 14, two days after a Mercedes was set alight in a public car park. While youths in Athens protest by throwing Molotov cocktails, in Paris by toppling barricades, and in Budapest by hurling eggs at politicians, protesters in Berlin rage at their economic plight by targeting the most expensive cars — symbols of German wealth and power. A group calling itself BMW — the initials stand for Movement for Militant Resistance in German — has claimed responsibility for several attacks in left-wing magazines and Web sites, police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said. One-third of the incidents are classed as “political,” prompting officers to assign a special unit to investigate, Schodrowski said. No arrests have been made. Schodrowski attributed the arson to “a protest against the world economy and rising rents.”

At the same time, it’s worth noting that these attacks appear to building on an existing (pre-crisis) trend:

Likewise, arson attacks on cars are not new: a Web site, “Burning Cars” was set up to track the incidents in May 2007, one month before a summit in the northern German resort of Heiligendamm of the Group of Eight industrialized nations. There have been 290 attacks on cars since then, among them 55 Mercedes and 29 BMWs damaged or destroyed by fire, the site records. “I wouldn’t advise someone to park their Porsche on the street” in Kreuzberg, Berlin police commissioner Dieter Glietsch told the Taz newspaper in June last year.

Call me negative if you like, but Berlin police commissioner Dieter Glietsch does not inspire a great degree of confidence.