On the Arrogance of Modern-Day Germany: Brief Thoughts

Or, you can’t have your Mein Kampf and read it, too.

Since 1949, Germany has been quite successful in maintaining — in most folks’ minds — a highly specious image of tolerance, political stability, and sophistication. They’ve done this largely by resting on their 1,000 year old cultural laurels, trotting out the works of Albrecht Durer and Guenter Grass, and chewing our ears off about Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Kleist, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Heinrich Boll among the newer generations of Germans. They may be all dead and gone but Germany still gets by, shielding its modern-day mediocrity under centuries of its own cultural detritus–their scribbled parchments, crackled canvases and crumbling Hapsburg palaces.

Anybody who has lived in any major German city for any appreciative length of time–say, four to five years, at least–-should know otherwise. Is Germany like the United States of America, disaster-wise? No…not yet, anyway. That might be a few years off. “And I thought the Germans were classless pieces of shit,” snarled one of the Italian mobsters in The Sopranos, after watching the boorish antics of their American counterpart.

Germany is not a land free of downright stupidity, crass vulgarity and stultifying middlebrow kitsch. Actually Germany just might very well be the European…