On the list of countries and nations that shouldn’t exist — for those keeping score at home, that’s all of them — Germany is pretty up there. By shouldn’t, I don’t mean in moral-political terms, but historically. Nothing is inevitable. Narnia has just as much a right to, chance of and perspective for statehood as, say, Canada. Inversely, Canada has little more reason to exist than Narnia.1
Germany, however, is a real lucky ente in this regard. Yet its existence is taken as such an inevitability — it was the Holy Roman Empire, after all — that it can be difficult to see just how much of an invention Germany actually is. Hardly a continuous, historical fact; to the contrary, a new and strange invention.
How lucky? Suggest, for example, to a group of mixed national company, as I recently have, that “Germany always wins,” and the eyebrow-raised response almost inevitably revolves around but the war. The cliché thinks it’s undermining the hypothesis when in reality it is unwittingly advancing it — while revealing the default setting in the West’s post-war programming, which flips an exceptional counterfactual into a deeply embedded premeditated fact.
That Germany lost a war — and a really big one — and still exists as a place with a name on the map should be a logical fallacy. That it isn’t is thanks to the ahistorical nature of the Second World War and its outcomes, which set us up for the correspondingly ahistorical period that we, at least in the Western context, have lived through since2. The Second World War singularly defied the norms of war-making that came before it, in which victors have erased the vanquished from time itself, or at least tried to.
Dress it up any way you like — freedom from tyranny, national defense, whatever — ultimately war is about extending your interests and imposing your politics on a foreign entity by force because you failed to do so by other means. Wars on the scale of the one Nazi Germany, with the help of Stalinist Soviet Union, instigated and failed to win tend to take the extra violent step of annihilation — denying the enemy’s autonomy, obliterating its borders, stealing its wealth and colonizing its territory.
Germany had a good run doing exactly that, especially in places farther east such as Ukraine. But when the exhausted country capitulated shortly after Hitler said tschüss, the reverse didn’t happen. At least not in the classical sense with the usual trappings of conquest.
With the United States already focused on its communist foe before it was finished up defeating its fascist one, almost overnight villainous Nazis converted to freedom-loving liberal globalists, as their new American ally enlisted (West) Germany in the fight against an even more Evil Empire. When that collapsed, with little thanks to the billions of dollars and thousands of lives thrown at confronting it around the world, it was only due to some quick-thinking Allied and specifically American diplomacy in 1989-1990 that opened the door to German reunification, which was hardly a foregone conclusion.
If that’s not winning, I don’t know what is. As a result, Germany today is an independent juggernaut with deep pockets, sterling credit, and economic prowess. It doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of its good fortune, even at the cost of the European “peace project” it professes to extol. Without the supranational patronage, Germany could not have soared to superpower status while keeping largely out of the way and under the radar.
At risk of oversimplifying (I am oversimplifying), what the Soviets got wrong that the U.S. got right is the understanding that it’s a lot easier to occupy a people and press them into the service of your imperial project if you convince them that doing so is in their best interest. Indeed, that your goals are not imperial in nature at all, but your march towards global primacy is, in fact, an act of spreading freedom and prosperity for all as a bulwark against a looming totalitarianism3.
You catch more flies with honey. The Marshall Plan, both in terms of what it actually was as well as the story we’ve since told ourselves about it, was extremely sticky. The result is a kind of geopolitical Stockholm Syndrome that persists to this day, not only in Germany but especially so. When Congress recently went several, raucous rounds to elect Kevin McCarthy as its next Speaker, based on the push messages I was getting you’d think Germany was the 51st state. German media were sending out as many breaking news alerts as The New York Times.
Germany’s affinity for America may be slightly more conflicted nowadays and among younger generations, as they work out whether America’s increasingly unbearable political shortcomings at home and policy abuses abroad are the rule or the exception. But talk to those who came of age in the age of occupation, and still dominate German Officialdom, and most will speak glowingly of the promise of the American Dream, couched in the highly romanticized terms of a child’s imagination rather than a more mature concept hardened by lived experience.
The soll-ist gulf — between a projected and real America — often expresses itself in confused German policymaking and policy rhetoric, as the country’s leaders struggle to maintain some semblance of social democracy and notion of public good, while wooed by American buzzwords such as individualism, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit without fully appreciating the social havoc they wreak when overly relied upon to spread wealth and safeguard socioeconomic equity. That includes particularly American pathologies such as mass shootings, the anxieties of identity politics, and the growing divisions that gave rise to Donald Trump.
One result: A political culture that simultaneously feels inferior on the American-directed global stage, but too superior to remedy its own flaws. The failure to appreciate the fluke of Germany’s existence is institutional. Having companies and systems that have soldiered on, despite it all, further aid the illusion that Germany always was and must be. The arrogance of longevity lives side-by-side with the humility of a dark past.
To carry on a popular quote repeated and paraphrased throughout Western history: You get the government you deserve. It hardly feels like coincidence that Germany is now under a three-party coalition consisting of two liberal parties that strive to appear as liberals wish to be seen — inclusive, compassionate, just — and another liberal party that presents as liberals have actually become: individualistic leaning narcissistic.
In other words, we have ourselves a very German state of affairs, in which process reigns supreme precisely to avoid fallible human behavior that involves taking chances and possibly getting it wrong. When it works, it works pretty well. When it doesn’t, there is rarely Plan B because no one anticipated a need for one. The pandemic re-confirmed just how un-German improvisation is; Russia’s war in Ukraine and pressure from allies have given German policymakers no choice but to attempt it.
Zeitenwende is a reflection of that dissonance. Formulating its own foreign, and troubleshooting its domestic policies remain rather new, especially in an era of crisis, risk and uncertainty that demands Germany do more than just export stuff and stash money away for a rainy day.
Look out your window, folks: It’s raining.
By the lethargic standards of technocratic German politics, at least this governing coalition has some ideas to rattle a status quo long in need of a shake up, especially following nearly 16 years of conservative rule dressed up as inclusive Merkelian politics that did very little and then only reluctantly. A belated and ass-backwards vote on same-sex marriage comes to mind as just one example of nearly two decades of foot-dragging towards any definition of “progress.”
One bright idea the “traffic light” government has is an overdue overhaul of migration and naturalization policies, to entice more people to come to Germany and make it easier for them to stay. Given Germany’s desperate need for warm bodies, especially skilled ones, you’d think the idea would be widely well received. And given Germany’s hellish history, harking back to a period when who stayed and who fled, who lived and who died, was based on nonsense notions of “blood” and “purity,” you’d further think that German law today would be the most lax in the world on that point.
Yet German citizenship remains largely rooted in “blood,” getting it is appallingly arbitrary and profoundly difficult, and in almost all cases you are forced to surrender your other nationalities4. Because however much Germans love their humming economy, they are really serious about their notions of Volk, and are loath to sacrifice the latter for the former. This has been the case almost since Germany was forcibly converted from Nazism to liberalism, a point in time when the bombed-out and defeated country needed huge numbers of foreign workers to rebuild its cities and restart its economy.
Whereas in some countries it may come off sounding like a political slogan, in Germany you can literally say that immigrants built the country as we know it today. For export-rich Germany, its Wirtschaftswunder is an import. In return, Germany did little to help these foreigners stay and hoped they wouldn’t.
To this day, the Turks and other southern and eastern Europeans who came to Germany, worked and then settled here, remain woefully unseen and underrepresented. Poles are one of the largest national-ethnic groups in Germany, and Berlin is so far east that you could describe it as a mid-sized city in western Poland, yet you wouldn’t know it walking around here.
Germany will sooner import and embrace American ideas of race and racism — as it did in the summer of Black Lives Matter-related unrest — than engage in a substantive discussion of its own. While the black-white divide is a component of German socioeconomic inequity, it pales in comparison to other majority-minority dynamics. Millions of people of Turkish descent have lived in Germany for decades, yet it took until the current government for Germany to have its first cabinet minister of Turkish descent.
If you’re looking for a blunt, albeit unscientific, visual of this uniquely German phenomenon, take a German train to Strasbourg, then change to a French one. France has its own list of racial grievances to work through, no doubt, but at least not everyone on board will look alike. For its size, and global economic interconnectedness and dependency, Germany’s homogeneity is startling. If urban areas tend to be the most diverse, consider the ramifications of a country of more than 83 million people whose largest city and capital is home to fewer than four million of them.
Descendants of immigrants, born on German soil, face a spectrum of both de jure and de facto challenges to growing their roots in it. All the while, majority society looks at these groups with the cautious eye of self-fulfilling, fifth-columnizing prophecy. The darker the skin color, and the further removed from Europe, the more cautious the gaze.5
Even those foreigners who do manage to cross the threshold of naturalization, it’s an open question what exactly is waiting for them on the other side. They may be German enough to belong to the liberal state (Staatsangehörigkeit), but that says very little about the privilege of belonging to the exclusionary nation (Volkszugehörigkeit).
Germany’s thinking today in regards to who is and is not a member of the German nation, and who can and cannot become part of it, remains strikingly similar to the thinking of a bygone Germany. Institutional humility is reserved for Auschwitz and applies little to contemporary questions of representation, inclusion and pluralism. That leaves one to wonder what the point is of an outdated national cult of do-gooderism, except as public spectacle meant to reassure allies from without and demons from within that you really can teach an old Schäferhund new tricks.
Unfortunately, the old habits of old dogs die hard. While the German government’s legislative majority was able to push some of its migration reforms through the Bundestag at the end of last year, it was not without a bizarre food fight of red herrings stuffed with culture-war fearmongering, moral panic and a misguided overestimation of German greatness. The holy grail of immigration, dual citizenship, which some Germans quaintly believe is denied due to the other country’s laws — not their own restrictive and regressive ones — remains just a promissory note in the government’s quasi-binding, but largely aspirational, coalition agreement.
You do not need to travel too far to the right to reach the voice of the Übermensch crying out in opposition to a relaxation of residency and naturalization policies, regardless how necessary they are both as a matter of concrete economics and updated ethics6.
The Christian Democrats, finally acting like conservatives again under the leadership of Friedrich Merz7, has had some real zingers, including an almost surely intentional confusion of regular immigration that leads to citizenship and the kinds of migration, namely asylum, that can lead to deportation.
Merz and his conservative colleagues have long been on about unfounded fears of “welfare tourism” and warning of the foreign hordes coming for Germany’s generous system of benefits, regardless that it’s exactly those hordes the country needs to keep its blessed system going. Never mind the studies that show that welfare is less a pull factor than are good jobs for regular immigrants and safety for asylum seekers.
If the CDU is so concerned about the country’s welfare, it may want to invest some of its political capital into ensuring it works. Who wants to come to a country where millions of people already here leave billions on the table every year out of shame or the headache caused by the paperwork required to receive what they are entitled to? Meanwhile, German hospitals face staff shortages; doctor’s practices in many places are stretched so thin that they’ve stopped accepting new patients; appointments for important medical care can take weeks or months to get; preschools can’t keep up with demand, despite how old Germany is getting and families’ legal right to a spot at one; public health insurance still mostly covers bogus homeopathy, but not contraception; and then there’s the housing crisis, particularly acute in Berlin but a problem everywhere, that has exploded the homeless population.
If anyone is looking for where they left their dog whistles, best check with Merz’s flock. Talk of naturalization reform has brought out fears of “devaluing” German nationhood. I’m not exactly sure what that means, and am struggling to imagine Germany having made it, in one form or another, through two world wars, revolution, the Great Depression, and divided plaything of two nuclear powers only to break under the weight of foreigners becoming citizens after three years, instead of five-to-eight.
I have less trouble imagining “value” rhetoric appearing on a poster in the 1930s.
The CDU is in the opposition, so you could say it’s just doing its job opposing the government’s proposals. Then there’s the so-called liberal FDP, which is the smallest but often loudest party in the government’s three-way. Historically and ideologically, it’s at home in bed with the CDU, but after party leader Christian Lindner concluded in 2017 that a coalition with conservatives at the federal level was worse than “not governing” at all, he found a “new political imagination” in 2021 with the left-leaning Social Democrats and Greens.
The FDP literally has “freedom” in its name, and seeks to break down any regulatory barrier standing in the way of economic efficiency, market prowess and wealth accumulation. This is also the party with a long-running love affair with Germany’s political center, and their campaigns make sure you know that.
Yet the FDP fell in largely with the CDU on this one — despite the free-market sense of liberalizing migration policy — but at least they tried to present their opposition with a bit more nuance. It’s not that they are against immigrants per se, you see, just that they want to make sure that the wrong ones get kicked out before the right ones get let in.
Bad news for the FDP, migration researchers will tell you that the two sides have little if anything to do with each other, and whatever problem Germany may have with deportation is foremost a result of its cumbersome bureaucracy. Sounds like a you problem.
The Free Democrats’ opposition to its governing allies’ bills is a reminder that, in Germany, when it comes to das Volk, freedom for one group is about freedom from other groups. And it always has been. That these are the positions of centrist and mainstream parties — the CDU has been in charge of Germany the most since the war, and the FDP went toe-to-toe with the Greens in the 2021 election in attracting the under-30 vote — should offer a decent reflection of where the German electorate stands8.
Mostly missing, or at least left unquoted, in this debate have been the far-right. Migration and defense of the Abendland are their Brot-und-Schmalz, after all, but the posturing has become superfluous. Who needs the far-right when so-called centrists are doing their job quite well without them?
The AfD sticks a tricky thorn into the side of public-facing Germany. Though weakening, the party has done well in pushing talking points to the right as the rest of the political spectrum rushes to counter its presence. The AfD’s persistence as the strongest far-right voice since the Nazis has forced Germany to give up on the fantasy of post-national politics and acknowledge that overcoming its history takes more than laying a wreath on January 27 every year.
Perhaps, um Gottes willen, Germany is not quite as evolved and enlightened as it would like to believe it is. Vergangenheitsbewältigung, dealing with the past, is not over; it has hardly begun. When then AfD leader, Alexander Gauland, called the Nazi period just a “bird shit on 1,000 years of successful German history,” the country lost its mind. In so doing, it lost an opportunity to turn his words of relativization against him by demonstrating how right he was, albeit for reasons he didn’t intend.
As the far-right wants to downplay that 12-year period, so too does the rest of the country want to downplay the 1,000 years leading to it. It is much easier to treat the Nazis as an exceptional, if not external, phenomenon in which ordinary Germans played no part. Everyone was resistance, everyone was Sophie Scholl, against a force that came out of nowhere.
Nowadays, Germany officially marks May 8 not as a day of capitulation, but as liberation day — the same liberation the Danes, the Poles and the Jews in camps received. Everyone was freed of the Nazi spell, and Germany reset the clock to Stunde Null — zero hour, a troubling terminology that suggests the end or even disappearing of a history for which what came after bears no responsibility. Counting up from zero also assumes that the proceeding national iteration is inevitable and indisputable.
There is a healthy 1,000-year view, but how the likes of Gauland and Merz see it aren’t that, respectively minimizing and absolving oneself of the Third Reich. The AfD has been a useful security blanket to this end, covering the latent racism and xenophobia that’s always existed around the center of German politics. The moral outrage, directed at outrages coming further from the right, is a convenient foil.
With the AfD, German politics enjoy a defined place to isolate the nation’s parochialism, just as German history enjoys the Nazi period as a defined place to isolate the nation’s criminal hubris. The rest of us can sleep easy at night knowing those guys are the real baddies, not us.
Definition and categorization have a long history in Germany. Who’s in and who’s out. Who counts and who doesn’t. Modern migration policy pokes deeply at a Volk that has always needed clear dividing lines to compensate for a streak of national insecurity. Ironically, it’s many kinds of foreign labor, from unskilled to diplomatic, that the German nation has to thank for still having a corresponding German state to represent it.
In history, there are no accidents. That Nazis became liberals wasn’t inevitable, and neither is liberals becoming Nazis in a history that just hasn’t happened yet. For all their rhetorical commitments to remembering their past, German centrists, which given the consensus nature of German politics is pretty much everyone, seem to have forgotten a key part of it: You can go to sleep a centrist, wake up next to a Nazi, and find yourself in a fascist home you helped build.
Up next, Part II: The racial scapegoating, nativist pandering and moral panic follow us into the new year, as Germany again reveals how quickly it reaches for obedience and authority to restore a sense of order and control. And don’t worry: For all the attention given here to the CDU and FDP, there is plenty left over for the cuddlier-seeming Greens and Social Democrats.
Of course you could argue — and I like to, if only to irk my North American acquaintances — that for as long as there’s a foreign monarch on its money and that foreign monarch presides over its politics by way of a governor general, Canada does not, in fact, exist. So, maybe bad example?
And may be nearing an end of, which is one meaning behind Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s “Zeitenwende” that may make him a little queasy to consider.
Of course, the Soviets tried this, too, but they didn’t have the economic productivity (that is, wealth generation) to back it up.
Germany is, of course, not alone in blood-based notions of citizenship, and refusing dual citizenship, but it is a decidedly un-modern policy view, especially for a country as big and globally connected as Germany, which likes to show off how high-minded it is. Seeing that a passport is the property of another government, not its holder, I would be keen to see a court case arguing that revoking a foreign citizenship is illegal. You know, just for fun.
None of this even gets into the domestic migration issue between former East and West Germany, which is another source of resentment and disadvantage.
And, at least for the center-left parties pushing for reform, politically expedient. They likely have the most to gain by adding new Germans to the electoral roll.
Fun fact: His office is conveniently located across from a set of toilets in the Bundestag.
Yes, the CDU lost. But only by a hair.