Germany is changing: A conservative view on a left, neoliberal, increasingly unintellectual and generally declining country.
Let me get this out of the way. I am half German, half English, and I have lived in Germany for most of my life. I love this country. We have some beautiful and varied nature, which for the most part is accessible to everyone, including rolling green hills, quiet lakes and valleys, historic vineyards, large woods, two long coastlines in the North, and the Alp mountains in the South. And we have pretty villages and bustling cities, even if many of the latter were destroyed in two world wars, and only partly rebuilt in the old way afterwards.
What I write about my country therefore stems from a certain authority, but nonetheless, some Germans would probably disagree with me. However, I believe that far more would agree with me, than both German media and the view of foreign media, too often a distilled version of the former, would make you believe.
Germany has changed a lot over the last decades, and even more so since the beginning of the so called immigration crisis of 2015. In many ways, the same can easily be said about many other Western European countries, and it probably would not be wrong to tie this to a general decline of the West since the beginning of the twentieth century, about much has been written.
I therefore want to limit this text to a short overview of contemporary Germany, and about some typical misconceptions I have repeatedly heard, read and seen in English language media. When politicians or journalists in other countries want to drive home a point about how their own government is doing it wrong, I sometimes hear ‘but the Germans do it better’.
But mostly, in fact, they do not. It is only that a very uniform, both neoliberal and left leaning group of mainstream journalists in Germany paints an idealised picture of how they perceive, or want, the world to be. This view is then picked up by journalists in other countries, perhaps via the few German colleagues they know, or with the help of automatic translation, and is usefully cemented as ‘the way things are done in Germany’. As I mentioned, they often are not.
One big, repeated misconception is: Much in Germany is orderly, on time and organised, thereby profiting everyone. It used to be, in many cases. But these days, not so much. Trains are very often delayed, and the German saying ‘punctual like the railway’ is no more. Many roads and bridges are in need of repair, leading to huge traffic jams across much of the country. Numerous school buildings and university campuses are in a state of decay. A complacent kind of dysfunctionality pervades most tax supported services in the country, be it on a city, county or federal scale. There is no open corruption, but everything has become more about ensuring personal income and short-term advantage, and less about common values that once at least in part guided the country.
Several main factors are at play here:
Mismanagement and short-sightedness. In the decades following the Second World War, most German infrastructure was rebuilt, often from scratch. The country prospered. There was no real pension fund, only money redistributed into the system, and the promise of a pension to be paid by future generations. Salaries big enough to support three or four children were suddenly being earned by two people in a family with one or two kids. Those earners are now pensioners in large houses, and are often being generously paid for by the generation of those working these days, who often just manage to make ends meet in their little rented flats. The percentage of house ownership in Germany is one of the lowest in Europe, as is median income and the balance of bank accounts compared to most of Western Europe. In short, many Germans are quite poor in comparison to other countries with similarly high gross domestic products.
As a consequence, although Germany has among the highest taxes in the world, most of these simply go towards pensions, towards the income of the civil service, to unemployed Germans and foreigners, as well as to paying interest on an enormous, rising amount of debt, and otherwise keeping the system barely running with the lowest amount of upkeep possible.
Neoliberalism. Private enterprise is a wonderful thing, but if it simply means getting at tax money, doing things cheaper by paying subcontracted people badly, letting them work under worse conditions, then dressing it up with corporate identity, while still making an additional healthy profit on top, and finally calling that a public-private-partnership — it is just deception, really. A lot of what the civil service used to control, including much of the infrastructure, has been handed over to private companies, with the remaining influence hollowed out by a loss of competence, often in exchange for political correctness.
More than half a century of social welfare state. It always works for a time, but with everyone being taken along for the ride, a distortion of the driving forces in society has taken place. After the horrors of Nazi Germany and on a wave of postmodernism, any kind of distinguishing between good and bad, nice and ugly, complex and not-so-complex was abolished in favour of egalisation. That, however, is not what forms any kind of competing system, be it in the plant, animal or human kingdom. What it, however, encourages among humans, is a kind of pseudo-left ideology, where getting more for doing less is dressed up as fairness.
The Germans. There is a subservient, opportunistic, fearful, sometimes brutal and often humourless streak running through the German character, and it can perhaps be explained historically. Around the time of the reformation, there was an uprising of peasants, basically calling for less exploitation and more participation. They were slaughtered without forgiveness by their rulers. It seems that this, among other events, has worked itself into the cultural and genetic fabric of the German people. Later, as a further development of feudal rule, the Prussians promoted the influence of civil servants faithful to the system. Many authors, over the centuries, have commented on the typical German characteristics, perhaps most well know among them being Heinrich Mann’s ‘Der Untertan’, i.e. ‘The Subservient’, so far translated as ‘Man of Straw’, ‘The Patrioteer’, or ‘The Loyal Subject’.
At the best of times, the German traits encourage working together for the greater good. At the worst of times, they encourage the same for the greater bad. One could theorise about the causes for the Second World War forever, and about the treaty of Versailles, but in the end, the Germans started it. After the war, Eastern Germany was under the control of Soviet Russia, and they sure were the poster boy for spying on and denouncing others, the perfect socialists. While Hungary and Czechoslovakia somehow preserved their melancholy souls, some Germans came into their own once again.
And these days, far-left, basically neo-fascist groupings of a conviction greater than their intellect once more do the dirty job for those in power, by spreading intimidation against those questioning them. Of course, it is again for the greater good, and they once more feel firmly on the right side of history. Some of those part of this new kind of power, did, in fact, as young people enjoy similar roles in socialist Eastern Germany, before the fall of the iron curtain.
The UK and US mostly leaving Germany after the end of the cold war. Post-war Western Germany was basically overseen by the English and the Americans, which mostly was a good thing. An Englishman tried to introduce BBC-style journalism in Germany’s de-facto public broadcaster, and returned home some years later with a feeling of failure, remarking that once again political people were in every controlling seat.
Mistaking party political rule for democracy. Sure, Germans get to vote once every few years, but that is it. There basically are almost no referenda on issues big or small, unlike for example in Switzerland.
The political media class. Mix welfare state with postmodernism, well paid jobs in the pseudo-independent state broadcasters with political agenda, and you get a ruling class that dominates what people should think and not think. It is not about democracy or freedom of opinion, but about power and control.
The EU and the Euro. Praised as the ultimate solution to never fighting an inner-European war again, the EU and the Euro in reality mostly profit global companies, who can move money and goods tax-free and tax-incentivised over EU-borders, to produce where it is cheapest and to sell where it makes the most profit. That this would lead to lower salaries for those in the richer countries and the loss of selective devaluation for the poorer countries, was foreseeable, but seemed to interest few until the European Central Bank and global capital had taken over for good.
Since then, first the lowering and then complete abolishment of interest on the Euro has led to a constant devaluation of savings, euphemistically called ‘quantitative easing’, making anyone with money on the bank, and not invested in real estate, poorer by the day. And, although specifically excluded at the introduction of the Euro, Germany is now de facto liable for the huge debts of all other countries in the Euro-zone, like Italy, Greece, Spain and France.
A loss of homogeneity. With people less identifying with their neighbours, they become more tribal, and less communal. Britain, Sweden and France, all welfare state countries with heavy non-European immigration like Germany, seem to have the same problem, especially in the cities.
A diminishing middle-class. With the holocaust and the exodus of some of its most brilliant minds, and an intellectual distortion of an overarching welfare state in the decades since, as well as due to an influx of disproportionately lowly educated foreigners, Germany has become even more ‘working’ class and petite bourgeoisie than it ever was. It shows in small minded materialism, weaning intellectualism and run down city centres pulsating with subwoofers and purposefully loud cars, and never more than today.
Angela Merkel. Often admiringly heralded as the ‘strong woman of Europe’, Merkel, in her 16 year period as German leader, changed the political alignment and atmosphere of the country more than most foreigners, and most Germans too young to remember a time before her, realise. Merkel’s father, a protestant theologian and devout socialist, moved the young family from free Western Germany to the Soviet ruled and euphemistically named ‘German Democratic Republic’ one day before her birth. Merkel thus grew up in communist socialisation and later was part of the socialist ‘Free German Youth’. She studied and acquired a PhD in physics, which later enabled spin-doctors and well-meaning media to positively frame her as ‘a pastor’s daughter and physicist’, e.g. ‘someone with heart and brain’. Soon after the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall, Merkel became politically active, and through party-merging joined the then still conservative CDU, where she quickly ascended within its power structures. After being a protégée of chancellor Kohl, she later was part of his fall. Having, for many slightly surprisingly, become German chancellor herself, she soon got rid of any political competitors threatening her absolute power, which increasingly led to a hollowed out top party circle of yea-sayers clinging to their posts.
During the time of her chancellorship, Merkel, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, decided on switching off all German nuclear power plants by 2022, without considering the supply gap having to be filled by importing energy, also often of atomic origin, from neighbouring countries. In 2008, after deliberating with some high-up bankers, she initiated a massive tax-paid bailout of most German banks. In 2010, another massive bailout, this time of Greek debts, was agreed, basically again funnelling dozens of billions of Euro to banks. In many of her actions, Merkel tried to sideline German parliament as much as possible, cultivating the word ‘alternativlos’, thus ‘without alternative’, as the maxim for many of her decisions. As such, the EU-parliament with no ability of its own to initiate lawmaking, seems closer to her way of thinking than the German system installed by the Western powers after the war.
In 2015, Merkel was largely responsible for the opening of German borders for refugees claiming to be Syrian. As a consequence, many millions of non-EU foreigners swept into the EU, claiming asylum and benefits. Although the majority of claims has been rejected, very few of these people ever left Germany or the rest of the EU. The Brexit vote of the UK to split from the EU can very much be seen as the direct consequence of Merkel’s actions. In the slipstream of a general ‘all immigration critics are racists’ atmosphere pervading German politics and its state-aligned public media, non-governmental organisations with avid pro-migration and anti-free-speech-agendas have begun to flourish in Germany, often directly or indirectly supported by the taxpayer. At the end of Merkel’s reign, her party, the Christian Democratic Union, is but a shadow of its former self, and Germany a country so high in debts that it will never be able to pay these back, but nevertheless will be forced to at least partly privatise the remaining infrastructure, like motorways, universities and schools.
Suppression of free speech. Those suppressing free speech will of course hotly contend this, citing that everyone is free to voice their opinion. The fact that this opinion can in any non-left case almost not be articulated in mainstream media, will quickly be branded as ‘hate speech’ and could possibly lead to serious job consequences or visits from so called anti-fascists, who are often indirectly financed by the tax-payer, is conveniently swept under the carpet.
A green climate agenda to rule them all. If anyone wants to save world climate, it is Germany, a country highly dependant on the energy intensive production and export of cars and machines, and well on the way to scrap its functioning energy production to reduce its worldwide carbon dioxide contribution of two percent while already having among the highest energy prices in the world. The plastering over of great parts of cultural landscapes, until now unchanged for millennia, with wind turbines that at their top flash in red unison at night, is just a small side effect of this.
And who needs democracy, individualism and free thinking, when the world is about to end in a decade or two? As the majority of children, teenagers and students seem to believe this, after having it spoon-fed by the media for several years, everything is firmly set for a new kind of totalitarianism.
This time, to save the world, of course. The Germans just wouldn’t go below that.
