ALICE WEIDEL
It’s the Kultur, Stupid
by Melanie Amann
Munich: Droemer, 317 pp.
by Rolf Peter Sieferle
Steigra: Antaios, 104 pp.
“The reason we are inundated by culturally alien [kulturfremden]
peoples such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma etc. is the systematic
destruction of civil society as a possible counterweight to the
enemies-of-the-constitution by whom we are ruled. These pigs are nothing
other than puppets of the victor powers of the Second World War….” Thus
begins a 2013 personal e-mail from Alice Weidel, who in this autumn’s
pivotal German election was one of two designated “leading candidates”
of the Alternative für Deutschland (hereafter AfD or the Alternative).
The chief “pig” and “puppet” was, of course, Angela Merkel. Despite the
publication of this leaked e-mail two weeks before election day, adding
to other widely publicized evidence of AfD leaders’ xenophobic,
right-wing nationalist views, one in eight German voters gave the
Alternative their support. It is now the second-largest opposition party
in the Bundestag, with ninety-two MPs.
Xenophobic
right-wing nationalism—in Germany of all places? The very fact that
observers express surprise indicates how much Germany has changed since
1945. These days, we expect more of Germany than of ourselves. For, seen
from one point of view, this is just Germany partaking in the populist
normality of our time, as manifested in the Brexit vote in Britain,
Marine le Pen’s Front National in France, Geert Wilders’s blond
beastliness in the Netherlands, the right-wing nationalist-populist
government in Poland, and Trumpery in the US.
Like
all contemporary populisms, the German version exhibits both generic
and specific features. In common with other populisms, it denounces the
current elites (Alteliten in AfD-speak) and established parties (Altparteien) while speaking in the name of the Volk,
a word that, with its double meaning of people and ethno-culturally
defined nation, actually best captures what Trump and Le Pen mean when
they say “the people.” In Angst für Deutschland, her vividly reported book about the party, Melanie Amann, a journalist at the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, notes how some of its activists have appropriated the slogan of the East German protests against Communist rule in 1989: Wir sind das Volk—We are the people. Like other populists, Germany’s attack the mainstream media (Lügenpresse,
the “lying press”) while making effective use of social media. On the
eve of the election, the Alternative had some 362,000 Facebook
followers, compared with the Social Democrats’ 169,000 and just 154,000
for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Its
criticism of globalization is familiar, as is its angry and
self-congratulatory denunciation of political correctness. Typical of
all European populisms is a negative attitude toward the EU in general
and the euro in particular. The Alternative started life in 2013 as an
anti-euro party. Although overall German support for the EU is still
very strong, a poll conducted for the Bertelsmann foundation in the
summer of 2017 found that 50 percent of those respondents who identified
themselves as on the “right” (carefully distinguished from the
“center-right”) would vote for Germany to leave the EU, if Germans were
offered a Brexit-style in-or-out referendum. This is a remarkable
finding. Unlike Brexit, Germexit would be the end of the European Union.
Tiresomely
familiar to any observer of Trump, Brexit, or Wilders is the demagogic
appeal to emotions while playing fast and loose with facts. In Amann’s
account, the predominant emotion here is Angst. Her book cover picks out the AfD’s initials in her title, Angst für Deutschland. She quotes the Angstindex of
an insurance company reporting in mid-2016 that “never before have
‘fears grown so drastically within one year’”—the leading fears now
being terrorist attacks, political extremism, and “tensions resulting
from the arrival of foreigners.”
The
dramatic influx of nearly 1.2 million refugees in 2015–2016 is the
single most direct cause of the Alternative’s electoral success. Its
leaders denounce Merkel for opening Germany’s frontiers in September
2015 to the massed refugees then being made thoroughly unwelcome in
Viktor Orbán’s xenophobic populist Hungary. Following last year’s
Islamist terror attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, in which twelve
were killed, one AfD leader tweeted: “these are Merkel’s dead.”
Besides
the refugee influx, there are other features peculiar to German
populism. For eight of the last twelve years, Germany has been governed
by a so-called Grand Coalition of Christian Democrats—Merkel’s CDU in a
loveless parliamentary marriage with the more conservative Bavarian
Christian Social Union (CSU)—and Social Democrats. This has impelled
disgruntled voters toward the smaller parties and the extremes. The
effect has been reinforced by Merkel’s woolly centrist version of
Margaret Thatcher’s TINA (There Is No Alternative), perfectly captured
in the German word alternativlos (without alternatives). It’s no accident that this protest party is called the Alternative.
The
Alternative scores best in what we still loosely call East Germany,
that is, the territory of the former German Democratic Republic. There
is a striking inverse correlation between the number of immigrants (or
people of migrant origin) in an area and the populist vote: East Germany
has the fewest immigrants and the most AfD voters. As one participant
in a demonstration organized by the far right, xenophobic movement
Pegida (the initials stand for Patriotic Europeans Against the
Islamization of the West) told a reporter: “In Saxony today there are
hardly any immigrants, but there is a danger of the Islamization of
Germany in fifty or a hundred years.” An urgent matter, then.
It
would require a longer essay to explore the collective psychology of
this East German vote, but its ingredients certainly include the
poisonous legacy of a society behind the Berlin Wall that was anything
but open and multicultural. There is also a resentful feeling among East
Germans that they have been treated as second-class citizens in united
Germany: not given enough attention, not paid due respect. When a street
protest in a small town in Saxony was totally ignored by the visiting
Chancellor Merkel, a protester complained, “She doesn’t look at us even
with her ass!” One can imagine a Trump voter saying something similar
about Hillary Clinton. In explaining the populist vote in many
countries, the inequality of attention is at least as important as
economic inequality.
And
then, to add insult to injury, these bloody foreigners—Muslims to
boot!—are welcomed in Germany with open arms and “get everything for
nothing.” As in other European welfare states, the knowledge that
“everything” includes generous welfare provisions only sharpens the
resentment.
Unlike
in Britain and America, economic factors play only a small part here.
It’s not just that Germany as a whole is doing well economically. In a
2016 poll, four out of five AfD voters described their personal economic
situation as “good” or “very good.” This is not a party of the
economically “left behind.” It gathers the discontented from every walk
of life, but those who predominate in its ranks are educated,
middle-class men. A leading CDU politician told me that the angry
protest letters he gets from defectors to the Alternative will typically
be from a doctor, businessman, lawyer, or professor. This strong
presence of the educated upper middle class distinguishes German
populism from many other populisms.
Among
the leaders of the party, they are visibly represented by its other
designated “leading candidate,” Alexander Gauland, a
seventy-six-year-old former CDU functionary who almost invariably wears a
check-patterned tweedy jacket and dark green tie. He is one of those
elderly conservative gents who look so English that you know they must
be German. Then there is Beatrix von Storch, a shrill and tiresome minor
aristocrat with neoliberal, Hayekian intellectual pretensions. (Her
maternal grandfather was Hitler’s finance minister—but we are not
responsible for our grandfathers.) As for Alice Weidel: this former
Goldman Sachs and Allianz asset manager, white, blonde, always neatly
turned out in business attire, lives just across the border in
Switzerland, in a same-sex relationship with a Swiss filmmaker of
Sinhalese heritage and two adopted sons. These are not the German
equivalent of the American rust belt manual worker, or of what is known
in England, with liberal condescension, as “white van man.” (The van is
white as well as the man.)
“It’s the economy, stupid” simply does not apply to Germany’s populist voters. Rather, it’s the Kultur. (I say Kultur, rather
than simply culture, because the German word implies both culture and
ethno-cultural identity, and has traditionally been counterposed to
liberal, cosmopolitan Zivilisation.) In a poll shown on German
television on election night, 95 percent of AfD voters said they were
very worried that “we are experiencing a loss of German culture and
language,” 94 percent that “our life in Germany will change too much,”
and 92 percent that “the influence of Islam in Germany will become too
strong.” Feeding this politics of cultural despair—to recall a famous
phrase of the historian Fritz Stern—is a milieu of writers, media, and
books whose arguments and vocabulary connect back to themes of an
earlier German right-wing culture in the first half of the twentieth
century. This is a new German right with distinct echoes of the old.
Amann
shows how a publisher and ideological activist of the new right, Götz
Kubitschek, played a significant behind-the-scenes part in the
development of the party. She quotes a blog post from the very first
weeks of the then primarily anti-euro party’s existence, in which
Kubitschek describes hostility to the euro as “the door-opener theme”
after which “our themes (identity, resistance, gender-, party- and
ideology-criticism) will come rumbling through, so long as we quickly
and consistently put our foot in the door.” And so it came to
pass—thanks to the refugee crisis. Kubitschek was instrumental in
promoting the party career of an East German history teacher called
Björn Höcke, whose plangent rhetoric of cultural pessimism and völkisch nationalism
would have been entirely at home in the 1920s—except that now the
scapegoats are Muslims rather than Jews. Höcke told a gathering of the
Alternative’s youth wing that, because of Germany’s low birthrate and
mass immigration, “for the first time in a thousand years the question
is posed of Finis Germaniae [the end of Germany].”
Interestingly,
Amann begins the party’s story not with the euro or the refugee crisis,
but with a magazine interview given in 2009 by Thilo Sarrazin, then a
director of the Bundesbank, and his subsequent book, Germany Abolishes Itself. As I noted in these pages at the time, bien
pensant German opinion leaders first ignored and then deplored his
sub-Spenglerian tract about the forthcoming Islamic swamping of
Germany—but it sold 1.2 million copies in less than nine months.1 In
his cellar, Sarrazin keeps folders stuffed with thousands of letters of
support: “I would like to express my unconditional respect for your
unvarnished remarks about the Turks.” “When shall we at last kick out
those who neither speak German nor want to, but only hold out their
hands?” And “it’s terrible that one can no longer tell the truth in
Germany!”
Seven
years later, in the run-up to this fall’s election, controversy erupted
around another angry and angst-ridden book. Like the Sarrazin affair,
this latest storm is interesting not just for the ideas expressed by the
author, but also for how democratic Germany responds to hateful echoes
of its pre-1945 past.
A
strange thing happened on the afternoon of July 20, 2017, the
seventy-third anniversary of the German resistance’s attempt to
assassinate Adolf Hitler. If you looked up the Spiegel nonfiction best-seller list on Amazon there was a hole in sixth place, between Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature in fifth place and Penguin Bloom: The Little Bird That Saved Our Family at number seven. Subsequently, Penguin Bloom was
silently lifted up to sixth place, number eight became number seven,
and so on. The previous number-six best seller, a book called Finis Germania by Rolf Peter Sieferle, had simply disappeared.
What was going on? Had there been an embarrassing mistake in tabulating the bookshop sales that form the basis of the Spiegel best-seller list? Not at all. Finis Germania (a weirdly ungrammatical version of Finis Germaniae) was selling away. But the top editors of Der Spiegel had decided that such a nasty piece of work should not appear on their list. They
were embarrassed that it had shot to prominence because one of their
own journalists, Johannes Saltzwedel, had earlier placed it on a widely
noticed list of recommended books carried by North German Radio and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading liberal daily. The controversy around that list seemed to have led people to buy Finis Germania in larger numbers.
Sieferle’s book was, explained Spiegel deputy editor Susanne Beyer, “right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic, and historically revisionist,” and since the news magazine sees
itself as a “medium of Enlightenment,” and the best-seller listing
might be mistaken for a recommendation, they had removed it. So Finis Germania was consigned to an Orwellian memory hole, made an unbook. It was not a best seller. It had never been a best seller. Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf—for what may not be, cannot be—as the poet Christian Morgenstern once put it.
Predictably,
the effect was the opposite of that intended. There was another storm
of controversy around this bizarre decision, and even more people bought
the book. The publisher was laughing all the way to the bank—and to
this autumn’s Frankfurt book fair, where he invited the AfD
pocket-Spengler Björn Höcke to speak at the Antaios publishing house
stand, thus generating another round of indignation, protest, and even
more publicity. The publisher was none other than that new-right
string-puller Götz Kubitschek, who, from his base in a village in the
East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, had played a significant part in the
party’s völkisch turn. To cap it all, the book has a postscript
by a friend of Sieferle’s that describes the refugee crisis of 2015 as
“internationally long since planned, and…triggered by the German
Chancellor in the manner of a putsch.”
So
the whole new-right packaging of Sieferle’s text stinks to high heaven.
But why is the postscript written by a friend rather than the author?
Because in the autumn of 2016 Sieferle committed suicide, hanging
himself in the attic of his Heidelberg villa. He never sent Finis Germania to
a publisher. That was done by his wife and friends, who found it on his
computer, along with another book-length text, now published as Das Migrationsproblem: Über die Unvereinbarkeit von Sozialstaat und Masseneinwanderung (The Migration Problem: On the Incompatibility of the Welfare State and Mass Immigration). They
interpreted the fact that Sieferle had carefully tidied up the
electronic files as meaning he intended these texts for publication. But
who knows? Perhaps he did not know himself.
The
story of Rolf Peter Sieferle is a sad one. Generationally a ’68er, and
briefly part of the 1968 student protest movement, he was a highly
cultured loner and academic oddball, with a fine, provocative turn of
phrase. He made a modest reputation with a book called Der unterirdische Wald (The Underground Forest), published
in 1982, which described the modern world’s plundering of millennia of
carbon deposits to make coal and oil. Its title rather brilliantly
blended the then-new West German Green concerns and the age-old German
cultural fascination with the forest, the Wald. In 1994 he produced Epochenwechsel: Die Deutschen an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert (Turn of the Epochs: The Germans on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century). This already anticipated some of the themes of Finis Germania,
including a provocative critique of the way in which Germany’s
treatment of its Nazi past supposedly puts the subject beyond rational
debate.
A year later came Die Konservative Revolution (The Conservative Revolution), an
argument built around biographical sketches of five right-wing German
thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, including Oswald
Spengler and Ernst Jünger. While Sieferle’s work at this time was still
written in an academic style (and contemporary German academic style is
no laughing matter), one senses his aesthetic fascination with his
subjects’ stormy, sweeping, no-holds-barred manner of writing—one he
would make his own in Finis Germania twenty years later.
All these books were published by respectable publishers, to mixed reviews. It is said that Sieferle was deeply hurt because Epochenwechsel was
not received as the major work he believed it to be. Rather late in
life he became a full professor, but he was rarely seen at conferences
and never part of the academic mainstream. By 2015, his cultural
pessimism seems to have deepened into a kind of existential despair,
exacerbated by serious health problems—reportedly he was suffering from
cancer and losing his sight.
After the controversy erupted this year, some of his friends retrospectively told a writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
that in the last years of his life Sieferle had become isolated and
embittered. But his widow wrote an angry letter to the FAZ , rejecting this tendentially apologetic (“he was a sick man”) explanation and insisting that already in the 1990s, in Epochenwechsel,
he had taken a “national conservative position.” It seems plausible
that both biographical strands, the ideological and the personal,
combined to give Finis Germania its bitter and biting tone.
This
is the background against which we must read Sieferle’s book, a mere
one hundred small-format pages of loosely connected short essays. In
sound, they echo Friedrich Nietzsche, and in fury, Ernst Jünger, who is
the ostensible subject of one section. Several passages are beyond
parody, like a Monty Python version of an early-twentieth-century
cultural pessimist walking the streets of twenty-first-century Germany.
There are “tragic” nations, he informs us, such as the Russians, Jews,
and Germans, and “untragic” ones, above all the Anglo-Saxons. I must
confess to laughing out loud at his lament about “the sensually
perceptible presence of nihilistic relativity in every pedestrian zone.”
Nietzsche prowls amid the weekend shoppers of Heidelberg.
Then
there are the sections about contemporary Germany’s attitude toward its
Nazi past, which account for most of the controversy. Here Sieferle
takes to an extreme his argument in Epochenwechsel that Germany
has frozen its Nazi past, and Auschwitz, into a kind of absolute
negative myth, marked by ritualized, increasingly empty expressions of Betroffenheit (only
weakly translatable as a sense of intense personal dismay), and thereby
separated from everything else in contemporary German life. “National
Socialism, more precisely Auschwitz, has become the last myth of a
thoroughly rationalized world,” he writes, in one of many deliberately
provocative formulations. “A myth is a truth that is beyond discussion.”
This puts the Jews beyond criticism, and turns the German, or at least
the “eternal Nazi,” into “the secularized devil of an enlightened
present.” (AfD ideologues more crudely call this the Schuldkult, the guilt cult.)
Sieferle
writes with a kind of wild determination to say exactly what he thinks,
however publicly unacceptable (and remember, we don’t definitely know
that he intended this for publication). He argues that Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the
familiar West German term for “overcoming” a difficult past—has become a
kind of state religion, in which the Germans are forever the negative
chosen people and the Jews the positive chosen people. “The first
commandment reads: thou shalt have no other holocaust besides me.” And
again: “Adam Hitler is not transcended by any Jesus; and such a
Jesus”—one involuntarily wonders: Does he mean himself?—“would surely be
rapidly crucified. The guilt remains total, is compensated by no divine
mercy.” This is hysterical stuff.
Sieferle
reaches far too often for Nietzsche-like profundity and usually misses
the mark, tripping over his own rhetorical shoelaces into a puddle of
absurdity. But occasionally, when he pulls together his life’s work on
modernity, ecology, and German history, a genuinely thought-provoking
formulation emerges. Referring to the “project of the modern,” he writes
that “the history of the projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth
century is, then, one of a total failure, which became apparent in the
twentieth century: morally, from World War to Auschwitz, technologically
and economically, in the environmental crisis of the end of the
century.” (Not, I think, the remark of an Auschwitz denier or routine
anti-Semite.) And again: “The twentieth century can be seen as a period
of vast profligacy…profligate with everything: with natural resources,
but also with people, with ideas, with cultural reserves.”
Finis Germania raises
in helpfully sharp form the question of how one should respond to such
ideas, in a country where one in eight voters just chose a right-wing
populist party, motivated mainly by concerns about culture and identity.
Der Spiegel’s extraordinary
vaporizing of Sieferle’s book from its best-seller list is an extreme
example of an approach characteristic of contemporary Germany. If you go
beyond a certain point in expressing what may be seen as right-wing
extremist or anti-Semitic views, you are banished from all respectable
society, branded with a scarlet, or rather a brown, letter. Nazi
insignia, Holocaust denial, and hate speech are banned by law (as
Facebook is finding to its cost), but there is also this broader social,
cultural, and political enforcement of the taboo.
Now
many would argue that this has contributed significantly to the
civilized, centrist quality of German politics and public debate—and
they have a point. I find that many young Germans support this approach
wholeheartedly. And would the rest of the world have been happier if
Germany did not have this taboo on any hint of a revival of the worst
that modern humanity has produced?
Yet this whole approach comes with a price, and the electoral success of the AfD shows that the price is going up. Sieferle’s Finis Germania is
a late, slight product of a sad, disordered, but undoubtedly fine mind.
Simply to say “right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic, historically
revisionist—therefore get thee behind me Satan and off the best-seller
list you come” is a woefully inadequate response. Indeed, subjecting
Sieferle to the taboo treatment actually supports his contention that
this really is a taboo—that is, something put beyond the realm of
rational debate.
For
right-wing ideologues, such bans are wonderful free publicity, enabling
them to pose as martyrs for free speech. Kubitschek, the publisher,
gloated that the row at the Frankfurt book fair was “heathen fun.”
For
the rank-and-file, it is yet more evidence that the liberal elites have
so little time and respect for them that they “won’t look at us even
with their asses.” Worse still: they won’t even let ordinary people say
what they think. In a poll conducted in spring 2016 for the Freedom
Index of the John Stuart Mill Institute in Heidelberg, only 57 percent
of respondents said they felt that “one can freely express one’s
political opinion in Germany today.”2
It’s
therefore encouraging to see a growing number of German intellectuals
advocating John Stuart Mill’s own response. Take on these arguments in
free and open debate. Subject them to vigorous and rigorous scrutiny.
Separate the wheat from the chaff. For as Mill famously argued, even a
false argument can contain a sliver of truth, and the good sword of
truth can only be kept sharp if constantly tested in open combat with
falsehood. Otherwise the received opinion, even if it is correct, will
only be held “in the manner of a prejudice.”
Sieferle’s
two posthumously published texts, taken in the context of his life’s
work, are eminently susceptible to the Mill treatment. While dismissing
the hysterical, crypto-Nietzschean hyperbole of his last treatment of
the “state religion” of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, we may yet
take from it a useful challenge. More than seventy years after the end
of World War II, how does one prevent German leaders’ statements about
the Nazi past from being reduced to empty ritual? How does one truly
bring home those horrors to a generation of Germans who have known
nothing of the kind? If the first commandment is not Sieferle’s bitterly
sarcastic “thou shalt have no other holocaust besides me,” then what is
it? If the answer is, as I believe it should be, “thou shalt do
everything thou canst to prevent any new crimes against humanity,” then
what follows from that? It was on precisely these grounds that the then
foreign minister Joschka Fischer eloquently made the case for German
military participation in the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, when
faced with a possible Serbian genocide. And if you can’t prevent the
crime against humanity, then don’t you at least have a special
responsibility to take in some of its victims? Refugees from Syria in
2015, for example.
Engaging
in the battle of ideas is, of course, only one part of the
indispensable fight against the new right and xenophobic nationalist
populism. A lot will depend on the overall performance of the expected
new “Jamaica” coalition government—so-called for the colors of the four
disparate parties (black for CDU and CSU, yellow for Free Democrats, and
green for Green) that will each make one leg of this improbable
pantomime horse. Any more terrorist attacks perpetrated by violent
Islamists will stoke the angst about immigration and Islam. Showing
that immigration is now actually under control will be crucial. As
important will be the success or failure of Germany’s attempts to
integrate into schools, civic life, and the workplace the more than one
million immigrants who have arrived in the last couple of years. Can
they become what the scholars Herfried and Marina Münkler call “The New
Germans”?3
The
politics are such that the CSU certainly, and the CDU sooner or later,
will move to the right on issues of immigration and identity, to try to
win back the populist vote—as center-right leaders have done in
neighboring Austria and the Netherlands. Even the centrist Merkel’s
interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, wrote earlier this year in the
mass circulation Bild-Zeitung that “we are not Burqa”—a ludicrous
sentence that may be translated as “give us your votes rather than
defecting to the Alternative.” But precisely if you are moving to the
right, while at the same time trying to integrate all those mainly
Muslim immigrants, it becomes all the more important to fight the battle
of ideas and draw a bright line between positive civic patriotism and
xenophobic, new-right nationalism.
Here is the cultural struggle for Germany’s future.
2. 2. This
figure comes from an opinion poll by the highly respected Allensbach
Institute. It should be noted that the alternative offered was “Is it
better to be cautious?”—to which 28 percent agreed, the rest answering
“with reservations” or “undecided.” Quoted in Freiheitsindex Deutschland 2016 des John Stuart Mill Instituts für Freiheitsforschung, edited by Ulrike Ackermann (Frankfurt: Humanities Online, 2016). ↩
3. 3. Herfried and Marina Münkler, Die neuen Deutschen: Ein Land vor seiner Zukunft (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2016). ↩