TEKST
Deutschland: Why is everyone still mad at me?
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany is experiencing a Zeitenwende, a turning of the times, according to Olaf Scholz. But what does this actually mean? National security and defence concerns have gained in salience compared to Angela Merkel’s 16 year reign but changes in policy preference do not make for the historical turn promised by the Bundeskanzler. In fact, the headlines coming out of Germany recently have shown horrifying continuity: justifying and materially supporting genocide, criminalizing protest and locking up leftists, all the while a far-right party seems to steadily gain in support each year. Perhaps these developments are worrying but far from surprising to those outside Germany, who scratch their head at the Wolfgang Schäuble of countries announcing: “No more Mr. Nice Guy!”
Germans have no idea just how German they really are. This useful rule of thumb arguably makes Germans the least reliable source when discussing our country. It also however posits a discrepancy between the state’s standing in the world today and an idea of it that only exists in the minds of Germans. No other issue has revealed just how vast this gulf in understanding is better than Gaza. The rest of the world looks on in horror as Germany happily lends a hand in facilitating genocide. Meanwhile mainstream news publications debate who is to blame for the rise in anti-semitism: Muslim migrants or the left.
Almost a year into Israel’s ongoing brutalization of an entire people, support is wavering even in Germany. However, the “serious” position remains to imagine the Palestinians, Iran, Antifa or whoever else you blame for the imminent fall of the West, to be on the cusp of commencing a second Holocaust. Standing virtually alone, side by side with the USA against the world has done little to make anybody reconsider this position. If anything, this last stand of Israel’s most important arms dealers plays into the fantasy of the only democracy in the middle east besieged by the Muslim world, like the West besieged by refugee hordes, civilization’s last stand against savagery. The excitement to finally take a moral stand on the world stage turns past crimes into expertise: trust us, we know a thing or two about genocide and anti-semitism.
Germany, truly a land of contrasts, takes pride in having acknowledged and rectified past crimes but has a far-right party in parliament. We employ over a dozen Antisemitismusbeuftragte, but most of them are conservative German gentiles. We owe our unwavering solidarity to Israel, even as they commit genocide. But while the German-Israeli-Friendship is certainly beneficial to both states, it is just one part of our carefully crafted post-war identity that is now in crisis.
While previous generations had to uncover and reckon with the crimes of their parents, those born after reunification grew up in a different Germany. At the center of the Cold War its end offered a unique chance for a new start. Not even 50 years after the end of nazi rule the prospect of a strong Germany, reunited under waving flags, was to be a cause for celebration. Of course this was by no means uncontroversial, but this is how reunification has been canonized. A more complete telling cannot ignore the stake that the USA and “the West” had in our success. This was the prototypical success story of the liberal capitalist order that was to put all ideological questions to rest. Of course, the promise of and end to history is an appealing notion for a country with a dark past and an obsession with reaching its final form, one that would last a thousand years. So as the Soviet Union fell apart, Germany was finally reunited, and the best was yet to come.
In reality “reunification” was itself a euphemistic term, implying restoration of a previously divided whole. Previous iterations of a unified German whole can famously be counted on one hand and come with terrible historical baggage. I am not quite pessimistic enough to regard the West German state as a continuation of the nazi regime – despite a baffling overlap in personnel – post-reunification Germany, however, is a direct continuation of the federal republic in the west. The joining of the two halves was as much a hostile takeover as it was a reunion. The east was scrapped for parts and absorbed by the west. Whether this approach was ideologically motivated and intended as a disciplinary measure or simple economic short-sightedness, the result was the same either way.
By any given metric the East is still significantly worse off than the West to the point that they might as well be two different countries. Framing this brutal period of transformation in terms of reunification works by drawing from a particular German vocabulary. What was being restored was a fantasy from the 18th century of a strong Germany defined by unity. This romantic notion had been championed at different times for any and every political agenda before the nazis took hold of it, seemingly forever tainting it by association. Reunification offered a way forward for a country that had learned its lesson. A country unified not against foreign enemies, but for civil rights and liberty: Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit.
This is the Germany my generation grew up in. My first conscious experience of Germanness, the 2006 football world championship, came with a fitting tagline: “A time to make friends”. The sight of German flags on every house and car, wrapped around shoulders and painted onto faces was entirely unfamiliar and came with a sense of discomfort I was too young to fully grasp. Teaching children about the horrors of fascism had become a staple of modern education by then and made overt nationalist displays appear strange. New German Identity was about moving past our history, but never forgetting it; the lack of nationalism itself becoming a point of national pride.
When history refused to end with the Millenium and the flag waving became more aggressive in the United States, Germany still seemed content to channel all suppressed jingoism into cultural and economic avenues more befitting of a modern liberal state. A third-place finish at the world cup, winning at Eurovision or a strong export economy might seem like weak pillars of national pride, but you would not know it from the way they are talked about here: the 2006 “summer fairytale”, our team the “champions of hearts”, Lena is the “miracle of Oslo” and our country the “world champion of export”.
But suppressing German nationalism was not the same as overcoming it. We still feel the same unearned pride whenever “one of us” wins; the idea of a nation state hinges on it. Instead, New German Identity modernized the list of things to take pride in, from inherent racial superiority and military might to superior engineering and economic power or superior beer and athletic dominance. Enforcement was mostly left to social scrutiny and therefore highly dependent on region and class background. If you wrap yourself in a flag for the world cup some might scoff at you, to display it all year makes you seem out-of-step, but both are ultimately harmless – given it is the current flag.
When football returned to Germany on the heels of the European election this year it was in an entirely different context. The far-right party Alternative für Deutschland had surged in the polls, particularly in the east, becoming the strongest party in some regions. Originally an Anti-EU party for libertarian economists and cranks, the AfD turned hard right in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, positioning itself as the only viable choice for anti-immigration hardliners. Since then, they have profited from crisis after crisis, assembling the familiar coalition of comfortable “conservative” “intellectuals” and downwardly mobile suckers that has been fueling right-wing populism everywhere. This giant leap backwards for our country has, understandably, caused panic among the German public, but after a decade of fighting, the AfD is stronger than ever.
The AfD is a fascist party or at least a party run in part by fascists – if there is a difference. But the looming fear of fascism taking hold of Germany once more, however justified this fear may be, is drawing attention away from another worrying trend: it is not the AfD supplying Israel with the means for genocide, it was not the AfD who recently tried to extradite a German queer antifascist to Hungary, and they are far from the only party to campaign on promises of increased militarization and deportations.
As much as many in the West would like to believe it, fascism is not a uniquely East German problem, the Ossis not a uniquely backwards people, either to be vilified or pitied for their lack of a migrant-run gig economy that would surely de-nazify them. Their birth just placed them closer to the margins, not of actual German society but the one imagined for the 21st century. The people who could never expect to share in the economic benefits of our free-trading pan-European empire and felt nothing but dread for the free movement of peoples. The genuine fascists among them, many of them quite literally hailing from the West, have always been there on the margins, first protected for their usefulness and then ignored as long as possible. Their message found an audience in the east for the same reason the scattered and weakened left still performs much stronger here than in the west: they are not one of the established parties.
With the liberal order under attack, German identity is up for debate again. When political discontent could be contained locally in the east, it was easy enough to ignore. It was easy enough to overcome nationalism as long as it could be understood as progress. Sure, Germany had lost the war and had been utterly crushed by stronger nation states, but at least the lessons we learned allowed us to roll our eyes at the USA and their cheugy patriotism. But if the European post-national project fails to deliver on its promises – no longer just on its periphery or in the fail-east, but for the majority – then Germany’s post-national identity begins to crumble. What good is German engineering if you can not afford it? What good is a strong economy if you have no share in it? How long before you start to suspect the rest of the world had tricked you out of your national pride as a ploy to keep you down?
This is the sentiment channeled by the AfD using pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, while winking at elites for reassurance. Wealth transfer from the bottom to the top would continue, as would the genocide in Gaza and the mass-deaths of migrants in the mediterranean sea. Faced with the threat of conservative revolution the center – not just in Germany – has defaulted to a kind of liberal conservatism, resigning themselves to the rightward shift but hoping to be the ones presiding over it. Paraphrasing Bismarck: “If there is to be a revolution, we ought to be the ones doing it”.
This defeatist approach inevitably breaks the loose center-left alliance keeping fascists out of power, catering only to the ever-shrinking number of people with reason to believe in the future promised by Liberalism. As the recent election in France has shown, there is an actual alternative. However, it requires a real reckoning with the mistakes of the past, acknowledging your own role in creating the problem. Germany can not defeat the AfD for the same reason it can not change course on Palestine: both issues would require an admission of failure, an understanding that any path leading us to another genocide and fascists back in our parliament cannot possibly have been the right one. Such an admission would shake Germany’s self-image to the core and requires a humility that is incompatible with maintaining power. This likely means, we can expect Germany to hold its course until change is forced on it kicking and screaming.
Enno Jasper
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