Germany needs new heroes
Dear Reader,
On the hunt for a biography of former chancellor Willy Brandt, I dropped into a small bookshop near my house last week.
When I told the owner what I was after, he launched into an excited eulogy to the former chancellor.
As luck would have it, I had walked into a store owned by Brandt’s number one fan.
He told me that Brandt’s Ostpolitik, his policy of reconciliation with the countries of eastern Europe, was the single greatest act by a German leader in the post-war era.
But then he sighed and added that German attitudes to Russia today show that young people no longer see the need to make sacrifices for their country.
“In Poland, the UK, or America, people would be prepared to defend their country, but this is alien to young Germans,” he said.
It was an interesting observation - and not a totally unfounded one.
Polling released last year found that only five percent of Germans would volunteer to fight in the event of an invasion, while a quarter would leave the country.
What can explain this apparent ambivalence among Germans to their own homeland? I think there is something to the idea that, as a nation state, Germany is too much state and too little nation.
The state - i.e. the institutional machinery - is robust. It is in a constant nervous process of trying to tend to citizens’ every need. The nation - that nebulous idea that glues people together - is weak… and getting weaker.
What Germany means - some grand narrative that gives a deeper meaning to people’s lives - seems to be lacking.
Modern Germany is a “myth free zone,” observed political scientist Herfried Münkler back in 2009.
"We have no storming of the Bastille followed by a glorious revolution like the French; no war of independence to enforce political values like the Americans; no memory of a glorious imperial past like the English," Münkler wrote in his book, The Germans and their Myths.
This wasn’t always the case. German nationhood used to be soaked in myths and legends that sought to instill a shared sense of belonging.
Hermann, the warrior chieftain who defeated the Romans at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, was turned into a father of the German nation in the 19th century. In the 1870s, a 50-metre tall statue of Hermann wielding a sword was erected near the site of that battle.
On the banks of the Danube, the temple of Walhalla is a hall of fame for the defining personalities of German history. Built by King Ludwig I of Bavaria in the 1830s, the temple contains over a hundred marble busts of figures from 2,000 years of history.
19th century nationalists were obsessed with weaving a national narrative out of legends from the past. Most famously, Richard Wagner turned the pre-Christian Nibelungen sagas into his epic Ring Cycle.
As we all know, this obsession had its dark side.
The National Socialists took these narratives and twisted them to fit their racist ideology. Hitler and Hermann were portrayed as protectors of a pure German race. The Nazi dictator used Walhalla as the backdrop for his propaganda and worshipped Wagner.
Mystical national narratives were tainted forever.
Even the once-popular names that evoke Germanic myth - Brunhilde, Siegfried or Gertrud - are now as good as extinct. (My valiant attempts to bring them back into existence have so far been met with a clear veto from my partner!).
As obvious as the reasons for rejecting national myth are, their absence has a price, argues political scientist Münkler: Grand narratives “generate confidence and courage, and allow for political reform, while a lack of myths goes hand in hand with structural conservatism.”
The claim that Germany is timid and structurally conservative seems more true now than ever. This risk aversion can be seen in everything from an exaggerated fear of nuclear energy, to a timid and predictable film scene, to the lifeless architecture of post-reunification Berlin.
A weak sense of national identity has other downsides: it increases the anxiety that Germany will be overwhelmed by foreign cultures that are brought in via large-scale immigration. Neo-Nazis prey on this fear via their conspiracy theories about a “great replacement.”
And yet, the need for new narratives is still unrecognised in the political mainstream.
Parties on the Left remain allergic to words like nationalism and patriotism.
The conservative CDU at least appear to have noticed that something is missing. In their most recent party programme they note that: “The more diverse and pluralistic a society is, the more it needs a unifying bond that connects those who live in one and the same country.”
But their proposal of a state-enforced Leitkultur, the primary aim of which is to teach immigrants about acceptable German behavior, is wholly insufficient for the task of bonding a country together through shared stories.
When asked to pin down exactly what this Leitkultur is, CDU politicians often end up spluttering generalities about “tolerance” or banalities like “eating bratwurst.”
On the lookout for new myths Germany could do worse than take a leaf out of the book of American culture, where the story of immigrants struggling against the odds never seems to lose its power.
Recently, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin tried to fuse ancient German myth with the modern immigrant myth in his own adaption of the legend of Rhinegold that Wagner used for the first opera in his Ring Cycle.
Akin’s Rhinegold tells the real-life story of rapper Xatar, a child of Kurdish refugees, who grows up on the banks of the Rhine before slipping into a life of crime and robbing a stash of gold - just as the power-hungry dwarf Alberich does in the original.
The Walhalla temple presents another chance to build upon 19th century myth-making to reinvigorate German nationhood. Every five years a new bust is accepted into the pantheon - but mostly these still honour Germans from a long-vanished past.
Walhalla was built before the establishment of the German state when there was no agreed idea of what it meant to be German. That led King Ludwig I to define Germans as those who “speak the German tongue”. What better starting point for a 21st century nation at least as diverse as that of the 19th century, whose defining quality is still a shared language?
Many in the UK of varying political persuasions would rightly query what and who they might be called to 'defend.' Too much Nationalism and too little community nationhood in the UK has created an ambivalence to the old order of sacrifice for the Country and not just in the younger generation. On a lighter note my son has the old fashioned German name Emil and the dog is called Otto! What goes round comes round . . . . . . .
Defining Germans as those who speak the German tongue was of course the Nazi's pretext for the invasion of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the annexation of Austria and the restructuring of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact, so it could be argued that they also defiled even that most basic story of national identity.