Like reading the ‘Schland for free?
For those who can see the forest from the trees, these are unfortunate times. German Officialdom has now happily made it easier to deport certain people faster. At the same time, Officialdom’s upstanding members are recoiling in horror at the revelation of well-connected German nationalists meeting privately to draw up a “master plan” to — you guessed it — deport certain people faster.
Totally unrelated ethnonational endeavors, of course. At least that’s what defenders of the former would claim, preferring to highlight how high-minded they are in contrast to those (neo-)Nazi brutes. The cognitive dissonance required to reveal the overlap in competing deportation desires is sorely lacking. If nothing else, the overriding reason the “center-left” government feels compelled to talk about deportation at all is pressure from a resurgent far-right and its nationalist-conservative bedfellows. Good democrats they are, the parties of the Ampel coalition simply have the good sense to look liberal doing it, while the Adolfchens were trying to pull off a reenactment of the Wannsee Conference.
All the while the Bundestag has also made naturalization easier with “modern” rules, such as dual citizenship, thus finally making Germany about as progressive as Albania. (No shade on Albania intended.) A long overdue step, but it remains an open question who will judge which foreigners are “particularly well integrated” enough to apply for a passport after three years, not five, and with what criteria they will define “integrated.” Just as uncertain is whether the nay-voting Christian Democrats, who complained bitterly about “cheapening” the specialness of German nationality, would repeal the reform should (when) they come to power.
Whatever happens now with letting foreigners in and kicking them out, German history was remarkably absent from public debate over both. The disconnect is easy to explain: In Germany, as long as you pray at the altar of Erinnerungskultur, pretty much anything else is fair game. That’s really how boring the Teutonic Imaginary is. Everything is fine, just don’t literally resemble the Third Reich. Bad ideas are not as bad as reminding Germans of their bad ideas. Do that and risk triggering the only trauma response German Guilt™ has in its toolbox. Eight decades of cosplay do-gooderism will fall on you with the full force of a sinner’s insatiable search for salvation — the penalty for violating the rules of remembrance. They are easy to stick to.
Don’t go full Nazi.
Don’t make Germans feel bad.
Basta.
This is why the “deportation improvement” law sailed through the Bundestag with widespread nodding along, while masses of Germans took to the streets only when they learned about the Weimar wannabes and their fanciful plots. Unlike the legislative process of the former, the latter has little actual bearing on policy. It has great bearing, however, on pathology. News like this forces Germans to awkwardly ask themselves: “Scheiße, are we still Nazis?”
Anything, absolutely anything, but that.
Very little of this is about you, the vulnerable minority; very much of it is about us, the nervous majority with self-inflicted wounds. If it were the other way around, the D-word would be unacceptable politics in any form, targeting any person; a Germany actually humbled by its history would be the most progressive and inclusive country in the world; and those participating in the latest wave of protest theater would know that the banality of Bundestag legalese is just as much a Nazi tactic as the alluring grandeur of furtive meetings in fancy hotels near Potsdam. It’s all just different shades of the same color of bad, bringing us back to the same dark place, albeit via different routes.
Since its establishment about a decade ago, the AfD has made for a convenient dumping ground for the navel-gazing nationalism of more respectable corners of German Officialdom. The mobilization against the far-right now is another iteration of the collective narcissism embedded at the center of Germany’s embarrassing and existentially exhausting, but hardly exhaustive, efforts at being “good.” Showing up to church and lecturing others about repeating the prayers are more important than knowing why you’re there and what you’re praying for. That is, an exercise in box-checking: Many of the causes and consequences of German history stay stubbornly with us, but to the extent there is analysis of them, the conclusion is often wrong. Hate is ugly, but hardly the root of the Final Solution; it was more Germany’s obedient penchant for social pedantry.
Not only blind to, but embracing of that kind of unwavering categorical thinking is what brings us clueless expressions of solidarity, like the German grocery giant, Edeka, reposting its 2017 spot reminding Herr und Frau Jedermann that they would starve without the “diversity” of non-German products. In Germany, you are either German or you are foreign. Never the twain shall meet — precisely what folks like the AfD also prefer.
Applause, applause.
No amount of anti-AfD protest will change that outlook, rooted firmly in mainstream German society, which makes the demonstrations largely one of vanity — insufferable to watch and difficult to take seriously. That fact, though, won’t get in the way of domestic and international headlines happily heaping praise on them for making a “strong statement” against social division. In an era of virtue-signaling culture wars, it seems the bar is low enough to get credit for simply expressing the basic decency of not being a Nazi anymore.
While “all of Berlin hates the AfD,” it is largely quiet on the CDU, which got voted to run the city-state capital in a never-gets-old Grand Coalition with a strangely conservative SPD. So far their ideas have included “law-and-order” tactics against highly visible minorities; widespread bans of peaceful and otherwise legal demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza; and tying arts-and-culture funding to the troubling, IHRA definition of anti-Semitism — a McCarthyist move that got nixed only after state leaders acknowledged that maybe it wasn’t legal to do so.
As far as their counterparts at the national level go, they’re rather upset that protests are “generalizing” about people with right-wing views. A wise perspective, suggesting that even a broken clock can take a principled stand two or so times a day. Labeling everyone on the right a “Nazi” is indeed both inaccurate and dangerous — about as much as branding as a Hamas sympathizer anyone who thinks killing 26,000 people in a few months is a bit much; or looking to deport, deny entry to, or revoke citizenship from the masses of allegedly anti-Semitic criminals from the Middle East; or confusing Fridays for Future for “left-wing radicals.”
When climate activists with meager demands and nonviolent means are your extremists, it becomes laughable to speak of your mainstream as “centrist” and questionable if your conservative party still deserves to belong to the broad political definition of “liberal.” Until Germans, en masse, protest that, claims of knowing their history are specious at best. The AfD is not a “Nazi party,” you don’t need to be a “Nazi” to ruin society, and in any case the Nazis did not beget the Nazis. That’s not how political history works.
The misunderstanding is zero-sum. One side has to be the “not-Nazis” so the other side can be the “Nazis.” That being Germany’s N-word, it is automatically verboten. Labeling the AfD as such gives the party way more credit and power than it deserves, but it allows the other side to push ahead with the only idea they seem to have without feeling bad about its own reactionary and illiberal implications: just ban them — an authoritarian response to a pseudo-fascist appeal, sure to further alienate the solid chunk of voters unafraid to tell pollsters that democracy as currently defined isn’t doing it for them anymore.
The urge to ban a political party is about as dimwitted as the insistence on bombing an ideology out of existence. What you can’t kill will only make it stronger.
The truth is, as it always is, so much more complicated. German Officialdom has been cheerleading exactly such a bombing campaign, carried out by a foreign government that is itself so right wing it makes some elements of the AfD appear moderate. That government, in turn, cheerleads the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, for whom undermining German interests and European liberalism is a beloved sport. One way he does that is by aligning with the white supremacy of America First, which German Officialdom fears, loathes, and condescends to.
At risk of exaggerating Germany’s importance in the world, it is playing its part in bringing Donald Trump back to power — and the anti-NATO, anti-EU, anti-Ukraine positions that are the antithesis of German consensus. The missionary zeal German political and cultural elites bring to their campaign to stamp out alleged Jew hating — conveniently rebranded as an imported phenomenon to help make xenophobia respectable — serves as easy fodder for MAGA talking points.
Before he knelt to Trump 2.0, Gov. Ron DeSantis called out the canary across the Atlantic:
“Look at what’s happened in Europe. You have more antisemitism in Germany than at any time since Adolf Hitler. Why? Because they imported mass numbers of people who reject their culture. Europe is committing suicide with the mass migration, and it’s illegal and legal.”
Don’t come crying in November stunned that the Orange Man won and fearing the end of the “international rules-based order.” Accountability sucks, I know.
Without a doubt many of the Germans protesting the AfD fail to see any of this complex flowchart or smell the scent of old-school antisemitism, barely masked by the more dominant stench of Islamophobia, that runs through it. They may have no clue how to pronounce “Chanukah” correctly, but that won’t stop them from explaining to others, including Jews, what and how terrible antisemitism is.
Germany is not alone in this sort of dangerous reductionism, of course. President Joe Biden didn’t hesitate to repeat the lie that “without Israel as a freestanding state, not a Jew in the world is safe.” Whether this is a conscious position of his or one of the afterthoughts he is famous for, it was impressive of Biden to simultaneously foment antisemitism (because conflating Jews and Israel is antisemitic, and anti-Zionism has a prominent place in the history of Jewish discourse) and undermine the American Exceptionalism he holds dear (because what is America if not a place where anyone can become anything regardless of background or circumstances?).
Germany also finds itself at home among the community of rule-making (and breaking) nations that, willfully or not, are in deep denial about centrism not as the antidote, but the gateway drug to nationalism. You do not have to go back as far as Weimar’s (conservative) liberals to understand the connection. If Euro-Atlantic countries were biblical genealogy, their lineage might start sounding like the book of Bereshit.
And David Cameron begot Brexit; and Donald Tusk begot PiS; and Mario Draghi begot Fratelli d’Italia; and Mark Rutte begot Geert Wilders; and Barack Obama begot Donald Trump …
Granted, that is an oversimplification of the causation-correlation dynamic, but establishes a solid enough trend. The way things are looking, it is one that may continue in France and Germany, respectively, under Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, and at the EU level come parliamentary elections in June.
Worrying all around, but especially so in Germany with its stubborn streak of authoritarianism and allergy to difference that go deeper than just politics. The country’s post-war liberal facade did not evolve from within, but was forcibly imposed from without. It risks falling away, especially as those who did the imposing confront nationalist impulses of their own.