Long-time reader and friend-of-the-blog Jim Brown asked me to respond to his thesis of German “political ennui,” which he aired in the comments to my last post on the self-immolation of the CDU:
What interests me most is how collective German guilt may have been transmitted across generations, and what that inheritance costs. … [T]he doctrine of collective guilt, which functions much like original sin, is corrosive precisely because it assigns a debt no one can discharge.
My hypothesis is that this produces a kind of political ennui — a diminished civic confidence that leaves the field open to a succession of midwits like Merkel and Merz.
All nations have their foundational myths. These are stories that explain where the people of those nations come from, who they are and above all why they belong together. As the official successor to the German Reich in its final twelve-year flameout, the Federal Republic has cultivated a foundational myth based upon total repudiation of the National Socialist past, acceptance of collective and generationally transmitted guilt for the Holocaust and a near-religious devotion to Our Democracy as promulgated in the Basic Law of 1949.
You could say that the anti-nationalist Federal Republic is the final (and only lasting) answer anyone has given to the vexing twentieth-century question of how to deal with a unified Germany. To some degree we regret our own national existence and we have ceded a good part of our sovereignty to the European Union. In return for this self-effacement we are tolerated as Europe’s dominant industrial power.
The Guilt Cult naturally has its drawbacks. Most obnoxiously, it places a small cast of officially deplored villains at the centre of all the most important stories we tell about ourselves. And as the years between 1933 and 1945 slip ever further into the past, the Guilt Cult rooted in these years becomes an ever more powerful fixation, seemingly to allay the anxiety that one day without anybody noticing Hitler and company might just vanish into the fog of history. In 1989, Botho Strauß wrote of Hitler as “the tragedy of my late birth, the black sun around which all the planetary values of this Republic orbit.” He said that “In my modern life, the past extorts everything from within and without” and that “there is no writing and no thinking that is spared from it.”1 That was 37 years ago, when the discourse was far less pathological than it is now. I can’t imagine how Strauß would characterise the Guilt Cult in Germany today.
All of that said, I would hesitate to trace Germany’s political ennui to the Guilt Cult in itself. Many of our neighbours have succumbed to similar political trajectories despite having altogether more positive founding myths. Also too, just a few decades ago Germany was a fairly optimistic place. The true drivers of depressed feeling in the Federal Republic feel overwhelmingly economic: high interest rates, expensive energy, deindustrialisation, wage compression, insanely high taxes, dysfunctional public services and crumbling infrastructure. Behind these problems lie some genuinely terrible causes, foremost among them our demographic decline. Germans are getting older and they are having too few children. In the open-air nursing home that Germany increasingly resembles, pensions and healthcare become overwhelming political obsessions; the appearance of a novel influenza-like-illness is enough to occasion a years-long panic; nobody wants to think very hard about the future.
Foundational myths are a kind of scaffolding upon which you can festoon any number of personal perspectives. It’s easy to feel badly about Germany’s past, but there are other possibilities. Our responsibility for the great crimes of National Socialism has become the foundation of German ethnic identification, and for no few it is perversely intertwined with a kind of inverted national pride. You see this whenever our politicians or pundits venture to lecture Americans about their politics. They are fond of insisting that our historical experience has uniquely positioned us to detect and denounce fascism wherever it emerges, despite the fact that nobody any longer has any living memory or personal experience of Nazism. The Guilt Cult thus becomes a locus of moral authority and an occasion for tiresome preening.
I’ve written before about the deep contradictions of our present ideological situation. Ideally, progressive Germans would like nothing more than to vanish into a vaguer, general Europeanness, finally driving a stake through the heart of their own hated nationalism. Yet such escape is unthinkable, because fleeing Germanness would amount to abandoning their greatest duty, which is to carry responsibility for the Holocaust and prevent the recurrence of fascism. Efforts to reconstruct Germany as a proposition nation and deconstruct German identity as yet another purportedly fake genre of ‘whiteness’ break apart on the rocks of these mythical obligations. Can immigrants to the Federal Republic really and truly become ‘German,’ in the same way many believe that immigrants to the United States can become American? That would seem to entail opting into the entire programme of national regret and Holocaust guilt – a strange proposition, and also (you would think) a deeply unattractive one.
The most important thing to remember about the Guilt Cult, is that Germans impose it upon themselves. They are not victims in this. Our leaders cultivate this mythology because they think it furthers our European integration and because it is a powerful cudgel to wield against real and notional opponents on “the right.” Ordinary Germans participate in the Guilt Cult because they find it personally meaningful and because it constitutes an important part of their national identity. The Guilt Cult may be a demoralising force, but I would locate the bulk of its malign influence elsewhere. It keeps cultural attention fixated on a set of political evils that every year grow more anachronistic and have ever less to do with our present world, while distracting everyone from a growing body of increasingly urgent problems. National Socialism is not coming back to Germany, because National Socialism is in the past and the past does not recur. The real threats to our political system are posed by the hostile migrants we’ve welcomed into our country and by an array of foolish anti-industrial policies that will destroy our economy us if they’re not unwound very soon.
Botho Strauß, in the 1989 Spiegel special issue on “100 Jahre Hitler,” p. 102.
Many new arrivals follow the Muslim books and theory. No problem for them in assuming the history of the Reich. They just don’t see it as guilt.
Everything has to be reduced to some faux moral imperative or outrage because it ensures first order thinking.
Hence the state of affairs in the west.