The revival of German nationalism

Dear Reader,

A crumbling old cookery book fell into my hands recently. Its cover is attached by a thread, and its pages have turned brittle and brown.

Titled “Der Weg zum Herzen des Mannes,” it is full of wholesome recipes meant to help an inexperienced young housewife keep her husband happy.

Inside, I found a loose leaf of paper addressed to a Frau Geiger. It was a recipe for raspberry buns. And it was signed with the words “mit deutschem Gruß, Heil Hitler!”

It was a startling reminder that the enthralment with Nazism seeped into intimate aspects of everyday life - politics was even woven into a dessert recipe.

But, on closer inspection, the recipe took on an even darker turn.

There are other hand-written notes in the book and they all contain blots and smudges - the unmistakable marks of a fountain pen. But this one, dry and scrawled, was quite obviously written with a ballpoint pen.

Here’s the curious thing: there were no ballpoint pens in Nazi Germany. The biro's inventor, László Bíró, was a Hungarian Jew who fled Europe during the War. His pens only went on sale in Germany in 1950.

Is this recipe a tantalizing window into a nationalist mindset that lived a quiet afterlife once fascism had been defeated?

Perhaps there was some precursor to the biro that I’m not aware of (correct me if I'm wrong). Perhaps though, the masses didn't see the end of the war as a form of liberation, but remained loyal to the views they'd held so fervently beforehand.

The furious debate that took place in the late 1940s over the so-called Westbindung would certainly suggest as much.

Looking back from today, we tend to think that Konrad Adenauer’s decision to tie West Germany to the liberal democracies of the West was widely embraced.

The truth is more complex.

When Adenauer, Germany’s first post-war chancellor, decided to accept foreign control of the coal and steel industries in the Ruhr as the price of gaining membership of west European institutions, he was accused of treachery.

A Catholic from Cologne, Adenauer of the CDU prioritised democracy and free markets over reunification with Germans in the east. For him, making concessions on the Ruhr was the first step to creating economic and defence pacts that would safeguard West Germany against Soviet invasion.

On the opposition benches, Kurt Schumacher had a very different opinion. Born in modern day Poland, he saw regaining lost German land as the priority.

Adenauer was “giving away German soil and turning the injustice inflicted on the German people into his own policy," Schumacher thundered, adding that his party would "fight for every square metre" of German land that had been taken by the Allies.

During a debate on the Ruhr Authority, Schumacher caused scandal by shouting out that Adenauer was the “Chancellor of the Allies!” - a charge that he was little more than a puppet.

Schumacher, you will note, was not from the far-Right. He was a Social Democrat and had spent a decade in Nazi concentration camps. He believed that Germany should be an independent, neutral power that didn't allow itself to be "exploited" by foreign actors.

The German public were divided on the issue. In the federal election of 1949, Adenauer's CDU just beat Schumacher's SPD, by 31 percent to 29 percent.

Three years later, when Adenauer signed the Deutschlandvertrag, a treaty that gave West Germany its sovereignty back but reserved certain powers for the allies, Schumacher retorted that “whoever supports this treaty is no longer a German.”

When Stalin proposed the establishment of a unified, non-aligned Germany, Adenauer suspected a propaganda manoeuvre aimed at subverting negotiations on the Deutschlandvertrag. But the SPD took Stalin's offer seriously and accused Adenauer of a “historic guilt” for ignoring it.

In the end, Schumacher lost the public debate. West Germans rewarded Adenauer’s Westbindung with victory in national elections throughout the 1950s. By the end of the decade, West Germany was a member of NATO and had its own armed forces again.

The SPD eventually also changed course. In 1960, eight years after Schumacher died, they explicitly endorsed NATO.

That was that. In the decades that followed there were occasional battles over the stationing of American weapons on German soil, but there was no serious discussion of where the country fundamentally belonged.

In recent years though German nationalism has reared its head again, both on the right and on the left.

Ahead of state elections in Saxony and Thuringia in September, insurgent politicians heavily deployed nationalist rhetoric to try to stoke grievances about an alleged subjugation of the German people.

Sahra Wagenknecht, the left-wing provocateur who set up her own party (the BSW) at the beginning of the year, labelled Olaf Scholz a “vassal chancellor” over his decision to place US ballistic missiles on German soil. By doing so, he was increasing the chances of war and making the German public "a target," she claimed.

Wagenknecht is a staunch critic of NATO who thinks that German security would best be served by being non-aligned. In June, when Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin set out his conditions for a ceasefire, including a complete Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas, Wagenknecht urged the chancellery to take them seriously.

Over on the right, AfD man Björn Höcke told supporters at a rally in August that the CDU “has never been a German party” but is in fact a “transatlantic vassal party.” 

Like Wagenknecht, the AfD thinks Germany would be best served by being a "mediator" at the crux of east and west. Berlin should take on a “special bridging role to the Russian-Asian region,” they state.

These attacks on the foundations of German foreign policy have forced mainstream politicians to start talking about the Westbindung again over 60 years after the matter was settled.

In a speech in Brussels this month, Scholz said: “The AfD and the BSW see integration into NATO and the European Union as problems for Germany’s future. But I say that that is wrong. Their ideas are the threat to our security... It is our American friends and our partners who stand for peace, security and freedom.”

But nationalism is clearly winning votes. The AfD and BSW achieved a combined 40 percent in all three state elections this autumn.

Particularly painful for the mainstream is the question of whether to form state coalitions with Wagenknecht in the east, where she is insisting that the SPD and CDU cede to her opposition to the stationing of US ballistic missiles on German soil.

While the SPD have shown flexibility, many in the CDU see such a concession as a betrayal of their dearest values.

Roderich Kiesewetter, CDU foreign affairs spokesman, has said that his party should refuse to work with Wagenknecht. She is “helping Putin in his attempts to dismantle Germany's Westbindung,” he argues.

Just how seriously should we take this nationalist revival?

Both Wagenknecht and Höcke are talented populists with a fine ear for the things Germans think but are afraid to say. To close a circle: they have a good idea of how housewives are signing off the recipes that they slip into their friends' cookery books.

At the same time, polling suggests that a steady majority of Germans see non-alignment as a con that would simply expose both eastern Europe and, eventually, Germany itself to the Kremlin's machinations. 

Close to 80 percent of Germans see NATO as a force for good, a recent poll by the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung found. That is considerably more than the 55 percent of Americans who responded positively to the same question. Support for the EU is similarly strong.

These numbers could shift, though. For the Westbindung to remain attractive, Germany will need to emerge from its economic malaise and Putin's invading armies will need to be defeated. Neither of those things seem certain.

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