If Germany were a movie, it would have to be by Christopher Guest. A story about a small town, unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight, for which its provincial and seemingly benign residents are so unprepared they vastly overestimate their competencies, confusing local pride for actual importance.
It’s in that discrepancy that hilarity ensues and, true to Guest’s mockumentary aesthetic, it feels almost real. Just like Germany.
Unfortunately, Germany is not a Christopher Guest film so that discrepancy falls flat. Instead of laughs you are left only with cringe — plus the sneaking suspicion that you are the punchline.
Do not despair, however! Contrary to cliché, Germans are actually quite funny. You might not have noticed because the humor is about as dry as a Chia Pet you forgot to soak. But give it enough benefit of the doubt and suspension of disbelief, and it’s there. Sometimes you get lucky and come across a few laughs while thumbing through the daily paper.
Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter Jan Heidtmann was clearly on his game last weekend when he covered yet another episode of Deutschland Gegen Geschichteerinnerungsdissonanz protests against the far-right, in which a couple hundred thousand people (est.) showed up at the Reichstag in Berlin and, among other things, held hands in a human chain around the building.
Granted, German media set a low bar that SZ itself doesn’t always clear, but the Munich-based national daily is solid enough. The story here appealed to me in particular because it asks the question I have been asking since these protests kicked off several weeks ago: What are they actually about?
Fortunately, Mark knows and was present to share his wisdom with the SZ. Mark has shown up to this and other demonstrations “because of the AfD, because of the Nazis.”
Now, actual Nazis are all dead or very soon will be, but why quibble over a technicality? Mark gets it. When Mark says “Nazis,” he’s doesn’t just mean the literal far-right, but also “Friedrich Merz and the FDP — this whole trend that blames foreigners for everything.”
Well done, Mark. Looks like someone has been brushing up on his history — and is also keeping tabs on what’s been going on. Merz’s CDU is like the far-right lite edition — a gateway drug to even worse ideas, if you will. Yet the party tops the polls, ahead of only the AfD itself. They and their Christian brethren who dominate Bavaria think the best way to counter AfD popularity is by using its playbook. The CSU even made up their very own Keystone border force to roam Bavaria looking for baddies coming in from Austria and, even worse, Czechia.
Then you have the government coalition, which came to power "daring more progress” but is looking about as national-conservative as the opposition. One speaker at the protest, according to the SZ, called Olaf Scholz the “deportation chancellor.” A bit dramatic, but not a huge exaggeration. The government’s smallest party, the FDP, is a surprising heir to Nazi ideology regarding the individual in society and paves its own anti-government path towards far-right sentiment. When the AfD started out, primarily as a eurosceptic party, it drew a fair amount of support from fluid Free Democrats.
The FDP may cease to exist if it falls under 5% in the next election, a distinct possibility, yet it still manages to overpower its bigger partners, the Social Democrats and Greens, on everything from climate action to fiscal policy. Ostensibly apolitical economists are pleading to loosen up on the debt brake, but that matters little at the Church of Scrooge.
So we get all the miserly and parochial bugs of national-conservatism without any of the features. Say what you want about the tenets of Poland’s PiS, but at least it spent lavishly while in power, especially on families and children. That’s the whole, bread-and-circus point of populism, which Germany seems to have missed. Parental leave tops out at €1,800/month, to take just one example, and hundreds of thousands of kids struggle to get into preschool due to lack of space. The country’s GDP, in absolute terms, makes Germany the third or fourth largest economy in the world, but per capita it drops to 18th.
Punching below its weight domestically and increasingly out of its depth internationally: welcome in Germany. Asked by a reporter late last month what the difference is between the Palestinian and Israeli versions of the phrase, “from the river to the sea,” and the best its ministry spokespeople could come up with is that, well, we say it’s different and that’s why we’ve banned the former, but not the latter.
No matter that the banned version is almost always an expression of equal rights, while the other one can only really express a far-right desire to quash them. Either way, Germany is banning words. If only the Nazis had called themselves the Nickumpoop Party because that would make the word-police authoritarianism that much sillier.
If you speak German, this exchange is really worth watching:
We should be more like Mark. Unfortunately, as the SZ reporting goes on to suggest, Mark may be an outlier. Only in the Teutonic Imaginary can you stage a massive protest against xenophobia and ethnonationalism during which the police ban Palestinian flags. See, I told you Germans were funny!
Never again is now. Or something. If some reports are true, more than a handful of those who showed up to hate the AfD for hating outside groups were fine with hating outside groups — including Jews. So I guess that answers the SZ’s earlier question to its readers, “How does the word ‘Jew’ make you feel?” That’s of course all that really matters in Germany.
Poor Mark. It must be very lonely on that “firewall.”