You are right that 8 hours for 1000 km is rubbish for a train.

Modern trains can do that in 3 hours, on conventional rail (no maglev needed).

The trains can do that already for 40 years (the ICE could to 400 km/h in 1988):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity_Express

The problem is that in contrast to China, Japan, France, and Italy, Germany does not build straight tracks that allow that speed.

If you put a Chinese straight train track between Berlin and Paris, the travel time would be 3 hours, without sacrificing comfort.

Trains are more comfy, almost silent and way more convenient. You don't have to start traveling to the airport 3 hours in advance. There is also this little silly thing people talk about called global warming

You can't just compare flight time vs time on train: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42500989

Yes but the train from Manhattan to Newark is an additional hour and is terribly slow, taking almost as long as the subway to JFK. Going by car is as slow or slower if you get caught in traffic.

This is not really an apples-to-apples comparison. I just googled it and the flight time alone from EWR to BER is 8 hours. You'll need to add several hours for getting to the airport, security, immigration, checkin, waiting for luggage, etc.

Buy you'll have spent half of that flight time in traffic going in and out of airports, as well as in the actual terminal.

Taking a flight means losing a minimum of half a day, regardless of the actual flight time.

Of course we do value our travelling time greatly here in Europe, hence why RyanAir is a big thing, i.e. even though we're treated as worst than cattle people still choose it because of the (low) prices and because of those much shorter travel times.

News items like this one are just propaganda pieces pushed from top to down by the mainstream media in a futile (imo) attempt to convince the uncivilised and not-environmentally friendly masses that there is a good-enough alternative to cheap flights. There isn't, cause these train-rides are both a lot more expensive and they take a lot more time compared to taking RyanAir.

Basically the well-off middle-classes and higher have become a little scared that their summer properties located just a few meters from the seashore might get damaged in any one way (rising sea levels, stronger storms etc), ditto for their other properties located in the middle of forest somewhere close to a mountain (like forest fires), and hence why they try (through the mainstream media that they fully control) to tie us down to where we currently happen to live, no more tourist-ing to Cyprus, the Cyclades in Greece or to Southern Spain in order to have a cheaper glass of beer (or several more), and, God forbid, trying to have some (short-lived) proletarian fun in this stressful life.