Patrick Lawrence: Wanderers & Seekers — Germany in Crisis

In this fourth and final part of his series on Germany, the author writes of the end of an era in the country and a renewed search for its identity.

By Patrick Lawrence
in Dresden, Germany
ScheerPost

This is the fourth in a series of four articles on Germany. Read the first, second and third here.

Friedrich Merz was formally named Germany’s chancellor today. It was a significant event and a non-event all at once. The war-mongering Merz will lead the Federal Republic down a path that we — joining what seems a majority of German voters — must all oppose. 

[Merz shockingly failed to win the Bundestag’s backing as chancellor in the first round of voting on Tuesday, the first time that has happened in post-war German history. He fell short by six votes in the first round. He was confirmed as chancellor in the second round with 325 votes.]

Merz, pouncing immediately after the much-watched elections in February, has already made the nation’s future direction clear. The date we need to think about is not May 6. It is March  18, when a vote in the Bundestag confirmed what was by then bitterly evident: Germany’s postwar democracy is failing; a sequestered elite in Berlin now proposes to set the nation’s course irrespective of voters’ preferences.  

March 18, a Tuesday, was the day the German parliament removed a constitutional limit on government debt. This marked more, far more, than an adjustment in Germany’s famously austere fiscal regime. It was the day lawmakers approved, in effect if not on paper, new defense [and infrastructure] spending of €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion) [over the next decade].

This was the day the Federal Republic voted to remilitarize. It was the day those purporting to lead Germany decisively repudiated a political tradition worth defending and determined to return to another tradition — one the nation seems, regrettably, never able to leave entirely behind.

The particulars of the 512 to 206 vote are plain enough. The law on federal borrowing, in place since the 2008 financial crisis, is very strict: It limits debt to 0.35 percent of GDP — roughly a 1oth of what the European Union allows members.

But Berlin has been restive within this limit for years. It was an internecine fight over the “debt brake,” as it is called, that caused the collapse last autumn of the none-too-sturdy coalition led by the wayward Olaf Scholz. The Bundestag vote removes the brake on public borrowing allocated to military spending above 1 percent of GDP. As is widely acknowledged, this formula implies that expenditures could exceed the €1 trillion commonly cited. 

While the Germans have been near to neurotic about official debt since the hyperinflation of the Weimar days a century ago, the Bundestag has voted Germany past this paranoia in favor of another one.

The nation’s neoliberal “centrists” — who now declare themselves very other than the center of anything — have just told Germans, Europeans, and the rest of the world that Germany will now drop the Social Democratic standard the nation has long held high, in the service of a wartime economy with its very own military-industrial complex. 

It is well to understand this as a political disaster whose import extends far beyond the Federal Republic. Indeed, it appears to mark the end of an era across the West. And it is a blow to anyone entertaining hope that we might achieve an orderly world beyond the rules-based disorder that now blights humanity.  

The authors of this transformation are those parties that have negotiated a new coalition in the weeks since the Bundestag vote: Merz’s Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, the CDU’s traditional partner, will enter into an odd-but-not-so-odd alliance with the Social Democrats, the SPD. The Grünen also voted for expanded military spending, but the Greens, along with the SPD, were roundly discredited in the elections of Feb. 23 and will not serve in the new government. I have met not a single German who will miss them.

All of these parties carry on incessantly about the authoritarianism of their opponents — this as they join to inflict an era of centrist authoritarianism on Germany’s 83 million people. They are more or less hostile to prevailing concerns among voters — the questions that moved the percentages in favor of the opposition in the elections.

These include the Scholz government’s calamitous management of the economy, a too-liberal immigration policy (which has hit the former East German states hardest), Berlin’s undue deference to Brussels technocrats, Germany’s participation in America’s proxy war in Ukraine and, not least, the severe breach in Germany’s relations with the Russian Federation.    

The ‘Russian Threat’

Russophobia has been evident for years among Berlin’s governing elites — if not in the business class and elsewhere. This, too, now takes a turn in the most wrong  direction. There is only one argument, too obvious to name, for rearming a nation that has famously restricted its military profile for the past eight decades.

Merz rushed through the March 18 vote with uninhibited crudity — evidently to preclude substantive debate.  He will now lead a government of compulsively anti–Russian ideologues who will tilt Germany disturbingly in the direction of the aggressions of the two world wars and the divisive hawkery of the Cold War decades. 

This is now on paper. After weeks of negotiation, the conservative CDU and the nominally-but-no-longer Social-Democratic Party, the SPD, made public their coalition agreement on April 9. Here is an extract from the section headed “Foreign and defense policy”:

“Our security is under greater threat today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The greatest and most direct threat comes from Russia, which is now in its fourth year of waging a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine in violation of international law and is continuing to arm itself on a massive scale. Vladimir Putin’s quest for power is directed against the rules-based international order….

We will create all the conditions necessary for the Bundeswehr to be able to fully perform the task of national and alliance defense. Our aim is for the Bundeswehr to make a key contribution to NATO’s deterrence and defense capability and to become a role model among our allies….

We will provide Ukraine with comprehensive support so that it can effectively defend itself against the Russian aggressor and assert itself in negotiations….”

There is some code in this passage, easily enough legible. The new coalition is preparing the German public, along with the rest of the world, for the deployment of German troops abroad for the first time since World War II.

As noted in the first piece in this series, the Bundeswehr began moving an armored brigade into Lithuania on April 1, a week before the coalition disclosed the terms of its accord.  This is the front end of the new German military posture: There is likely to be much more of this to come. 

There is also the notion of Germany as a role model for the rest of Europe. This comes straight from Merz’s side of the coalition, in my read, given his ambition to carry not only Germany’s banner but also the Continent’s.

There is, indeed, a power vacuum in Europe, made more evident since the Trump administration signaled its lapsing interest in the security umbrella under which the United States has long allowed Europeans to shelter. Merz and his new political partners are right about this.

But how hopelessly unimaginative do Germany’s neoliberal elites prove as they propose a new purpose for the Federal Republic and those they wish to follow it. What is this other than old wine in old bottles? 

In my read, those purporting to lead Germany have so thoroughly and for so long suffused public space with the tropes of Cold War paranoia that they can no longer change direction without discrediting themselves. They have, as the saying goes, no reverse gear. Or to reference the observation of a friend I quoted in the previous piece in this series, the entrenched German leadership has been speaking the language of the victor so long it knows no other — this even as the victor grows tired of speaking it. 

German voters are equally weary of hearing it, if the elections and various polls conducted since can be taken as any guide. But Merz and his people show little interest in the electorate’s preferences. The running theme among them is that Germany and the rest of Europe should be prepared to wage war against Russia within five years.

You hear this regularly now. Johann Wadephul, an arch-conservative Bundestag member who is expected to serve as Merz’s foreign minister, has a telling explanation for the German public’s resistance to any such prospect. They are “repressing” the reality of the Russian threat, he said at a think tank conference a few days before the new coalition issued its accord last month. They are “in denial.”

Wadephul spoke after errant members of the CDU and the Social Democrats dared to suggest publicly that the Federal Republic should, after all, consider resuming trade relations with Russia, so reviving the energy contracts severed as part of the U.S.–imposed sanctions regime against the Russian Federation.

“The most acute threat to us — to our lives, to the legal system, but also to the physical lives of all people in Europe — is now Russia,” Wadephul told his apparently sympathetic audience. “They do not want to accept it.”       

As political argument, this is as lame as I have seen in many years. 

Moscow Paying Attention 

Russians have paid close attention to these choppy political waters since the recent Bundestag vote, to state what will surely be obvious. And no one has made Moscow’s distress plainer than Maria Zakharova, the articulate, ever-incisive spokesperson at the Foreign Ministry.

I quote at length her statement, delivered two days after the Bundestag vote, for the weight of history she brings to this momentous shift in Berlin’s geopolitical thinking:

“March 18, 2025, marks a significant date…. To put it plainly, this decision signifies the country’s transition onto a path of accelerated militarisation.

Does this not evoke a sense of déjà vu?…. The haste and unprincipled manner in which this decision was adopted serve as a vivid testament to the reckless anti–Russian course pursued by ruling circles in the Federal Republic of Germany.

There is another reason. The absence of resources — the resource base that existed until Berlin ceased using Russian energy resources under U.S. orders — denies Germans the capacity to develop at the pace they anticipated and upon which their economy was structured. The internal economic collapse leaves them no alternative but to revert to a historically tested approach….

They appear, however, to have forgotten the consequences: the absolute collapse of the nation. This has occurred repeatedly. Yet, evidently, their rewriting of history is taking its toll. They have forgotten it.

How can one not recall the well-known thesis regarding the ingrained desire for historical revanchism within the genetic makeup of German political elites? Alas, such tendencies, once every century, override common sense and even the instinct of self-preservation. Is this not so?”

I have to say straightaway that Zakharova is carelessly wrong to assign this new turn to Germany’s genetic makeup. She makes what is known as a national character argument: The Germans are doing this because they are German and this is what Germans do. There is no circumstance under which this insidious line of reasoning is defensible. I am surprised Zakharova does not know better. 

But she is right as rain in her analysis of the strategy Merz and his partners in another unpopular coalition are deploying in defense of their hold on power. As many German economists will tell you, there is no reconciling Russophobia and the sanctions regime that accompanies it with any kind of economic recovery.

A new military-industrial complex — the dismantling of the social welfare apparatus and the accumulation of national debt its collateral consequences — is in this dimension a cynical attempt to revive GDP growth without resorting to its traditional sources.      

Curiously enough, Zakharova also echoes an honorable tradition in postwar German historiography, the leading exponent of which was a leftist scholar named Hans–Ulrich Wehler (1931–2014). Wehler held that Germany tends to turn repeatedly to aggression abroad in response to various sorts of domestic turmoil — class struggle and the disruptions of industrialization prior to World War I, the chaos of the Weimar years.

Now, amid a mounting animus toward Berlin’s entrenched neoliberals, the nation appears again to follow the pattern Wehler identified. 

He identified a phenomenon he called “social imperialism,” an imperialism turned inward that governing elites use to control political, social and economic antagonisms. In this connection, German friends remind me of Kaiser Wilhelm’s most famous pronouncement, delivered in 1914 to reconcile animosities between Social Democrats and the Reich’s loyalists: “I no longer know any parties. I know only Germans.” 

There is no talking of “only Germans” now. The election results made this plain in statistics. The parties that advanced most impressively were those in opposition to the so-called centrists: Alternative für Deutschland doubled its share of the vote, to 21 percent, immediately making it the No. 2 party in the Bundestag. Die Linke, The Left, and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, BSW, also grew, although their numbers are smaller. These gains were yet more marked in the former East Germany. 

Here is Karl–Jürgen Müller, a historian by training and a close student of the polls, in Current Concerns, a twice-monthly journal published simultaneously in German as Zeit–Fragen and in French as Horizons et débats:

“Voter turnout was higher than it had been for almost 40 years: 82.5 per cent. More ‘dissatisfied’ citizens voted. But it can also be put another way: More and more citizens not only want a different policy, they are also expressing this — this time with their vote…. Or: Many young voters aged 18–24 voted for Die Linke or the AfD: 25 per cent for Die Linke and 22 per cent for the AfD. Together, that is almost half of all young voters….

These three [opposition] parties, often marginalised by the majority of West German power elites and media, together achieved an absolute majority of votes in East Germany: 54.7 per cent.”

Reflecting the now-chronic volatility of German politics, the nation has effectively continued to vote since the February elections. Merz and his Christian Democrats have steadily lost support even before he is named chancellor. And a series of polls conducted in early April show that AfD now ranks as Germany’s No. 1 political party.

Historic Shift

This marks an historic shift in power away from the nation’s traditional parties. Many analysts say it reflects widespread disapproval among voters as they watched the CDU negotiate yet another going-nowhere coalition with the Social Democrats.

To one or another degree, Germans are stunned by the AfD’s rise to the top. But let us be clear as to why. The thought that the now-undeniable prominence of a rightist party signals some kind of Nazi revival in Germany is beyond preposterous. You can read all about this in The New York Times and other Western media, but you cannot find it while walking around in Germany. 

AfD was founded a dozen years ago by Euroskeptics opposed to the anti-democratic intrusions of Brussels technocrats and to a runaway influx of immigrants. It is “nationalist” insofar as it favors German sovereignty and “pro–Russian” insofar as it considers the breach of interdependent relations with the Russian Federation ruinous.

As the party gained adherents it attracted various far-right elements — this cannot be disputed — but these are best understood as the fringe of a once-fringe party. No, Germans are startled by AfD’s arrival as their leading political party because it suggests the major parties’ long grip on power is slipping or has, indeed, just slipped.

And they are stunned twice over as the centrist parties block it from the government by way of an openly undemocratic “firewall” that is likely to remain in place regardless of AfD’s standing with the public. 

Germany’s domestic intelligence service indicated Friday, May 2, that it is considering steps officially to classify AfD as “extremist” and so outlaw it entirely. Let’s take just a sec to get this straight. German citizens are to be protected from a party that enjoys more support among them than any other? How ridiculous is the Merz clique going to get? The neoliberal authoritarians who control Berlin are now down to erecting barricades to keep out the hordes commonly known as voters.               

Germans are once again a nation divided, to put the point too mildly. There is no mistaking this when you are among them. As so often over the past two centuries, they share few things but for an uncertainty as to their identity. In Gordon Craig’s terms, the terms he derived from Ferdinand Freiligrath, the poet of the 1840s democracy movement, the nation once again finds itself Hamlet.

The ruling elite’s authoritarianism and Russophobia meet an evident impulse to reconstruct bottom-up forms of democracy and to resign the Federal Republic from the East–West animosities of the past — and the arriving present, alas. The lost man of Europe is still lost. 

Maria Zakharova, in her comment on the Bundestag vote, said something that caught my eye for its insight into what is happening on the ground in Germany, away from the cameras and the mainstream media’s attention. “German citizens,” she observed, “still have an opportunity to question their own authorities: What have they conceived, and into what adventurism are they attempting to drag the European Continent?”

I do not know how Zakharova comes by her certainty on this question, given her daily duties at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. But it is precisely what I found as I traveled among Germans — in the West, yes, but emphatically in the old German Democratic Republic. There remains an opportunity, and many Germans are looking for it. 

The Once Firebombed City

Dresden sits hard by the Elbe. It was on the river’s opposite banks on Apr. 25, 1945, that Allied and Red Army soldiers stared at one another, eventually crossing it in one of the great encounters of World War II’s concluding days. My excitement on seeing the Elbe for the first time, during my recent reporting travels,  will always remain with me.

The stone buildings that survived the infamous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 are charred black, giving the city the look of an eternal memorial to the 25,000 lives lost over those two dreadful nights. One of these is a church called Frauenkirche, a splendidly proportioned Baroque specimen that was burned badly. Reconstructed in the 1990s, it is now crowded with tourists daily. 

As I stood in line to enter the church one bright, blustery day, there was a man off to the right selling the usual cellophane-wrapped prints one sees at tourist sites the Western world over. My companion pointed to one that, with no picturesque image, was simply some lines inscribed in Fraktur, the old German script. 

“You had better let me translate this for you,” my companion said. She wore an amused smile as she spoke. And then her impromptu translation: “It is not enough to have no ideas. You must also be incapable of executing any.”

I instantly burst into a sort of baffled laughter. What supremely ironic sensibility had produced this? How many levels of meaning did I have to plumb? Why was this on offer outside a solemn site that has become a symbol of post–Cold War reconciliation? 

I looked at the man sitting in a folding canvas chair beside his rack of wares. He was somewhere in his 50s or 60s, graying blond hair, toothy smile. He might have been a carpenter or a clerk or a teacher, and, for all I know, he was one or another of these. Our eyes met. And as my amusement tipped into uncontrolled guffaws, he burst into laughter with me. He seemed to think I understood, or he wanted me to understand: It was one or the other.

I bought the hand-lettered sheet, good paper under a beige matte board, for €10. It is a small treasure. 

An ordinary afternoon in a square in central Dresden, the mirthful man and his bins of prints, one artfully lettered piece mixed in with quaint images of townhouses, church spires, cobblestone streets: I have thought often since that day of the scene outside the Frauenkirche. And over time I have come to understand.

This is how the people of the old East Germany address the people of the old West Germany. They speak with irony and disdain — piercing sarcasm and bitter humor an habitual resort. You hear in them what I came to read in the phrases rendered in Fraktur: You hear reproach, you hear refusal, you hear an independent intelligence, you hear truths you do not hear elsewhere.

There are commonly accepted ways to measure the inequalities between the two halves of the reconstituted Federal Republic. Wages are lower in the former German Democratic Republic than in the west, by 25 percent. Unemployment in the east is higher than in the west — by a third.

Good jobs are scarcer in the old GDR, as most of the strong, powerful industries that earned Germany its success — steel, autos, machinery, chemicals, electronics — are in the western half. As those who live in the old GDR will readily explain, most senior positions in the eastern half — in the now-privatized enterprises, the universities, the banks, and so on — are held by Germans from the west. 

In this way “reunification” is not quite the word for what happened on Oct. 3, 1990: Better to say it effectively turned East Germany into a colony of West Germany. Resentment, an obvious consequence, is easily legible in the Feb. 23 results.

In the eastern states the three opposition parties mentioned earlier — AfD, Die Linke, BSW — easily outperformed the mainstream parties as measured against the previous elections. There are some protest voters in the numbers, as many of the German with whom I spoke — not all, I must add — told me.

But protest is not all there is to read into the results. Voters in the old GDR are also more ardent than in the west as they search for a new national direction. 

I come again to questions of identity and consciousness. East Germans were never subjected to those fateful Americanization programs the postwar Federal Republic endured during the Cold War years. There was no unmooring as occurred among West Germans.

This different experience has born profound consequences. East Germans were not, so to say, separated from themselves as West Germans were; their identities were by comparison undisturbed. As those in the eastern states often explain, they developed an abiding distrust of authority during the GDR years.

But a paradox here: It was in their resistance to the East German state that East German people preserved who they were, what it was that made them German.

And it is this distrust and resistance that informs their views and attitudes today toward Berlin and the west of Germany — their disdain, their refusals. More than one easterner told me they view the centrist regime in Berlin as another dictatorship. 

Bautzen

An hour’s drive east of Dresden, across vast flat stretches of what were once collective farms, you come to a town in Saxony called Bautzen. The French commonly speak of la France profonde, “deep France,” literally — the untouched France of the old villages and farms.

Bautzen, it seems useful to say, lies in what we can think of as deep Deutschland. You find in the place and its people another idea of Germany — alive and well enough, precisely the Germany the neoliberal centrists in Berlin appear determined to extinguish. 

Bautzen, with a population of 38,000, has a varied history. It traces its beginning to the early 11th century and is pleased today to display its origins in the Middle Ages. (If you like Medieval towers, this is your place: A dozen of them still mark out the town’s perimeters.)

The Third Reich operated a concentration camp there, part of the Groß–Rosen network. The Red Army liberated the Bautzen subcamp on Apr. 20, 1945, five days before Soviet troops met the Allies at the Elbe. From 1952 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East German Stasi used the former camp as a notorious prison nicknamed Gelbes Elend, “Yellow Misery,” for the color of its walls. 

During the GDR days the people of Bautzen began what they called “Monday night demonstrations” at Gelbes Elend. At their largest these weekly occasions attracted up to 5,000 people, and they had a standard slogan.

“We are the people” can be fully understood only in its historical context. The GDR advanced itself as “the people’s democracy,” or “the people’s republic.” The words chanted at the protests outside the Stasi prison on Mondays were a pointed reply, the stress in the phrase falling in translation on the first word: “We are the people.”

At the end of my visit to Bautzen, I met for dinner with some of those who led those demonstrations. We gathered at a cavern-like restaurant that had long ago been a monastery. The waiters wore monks’ robes and the menu featured (for better or worse) Medieval dishes. The beer (for the better) was also from an old recipe — a rich red brew served in crude clay steins.

I do not know whether our hosts intended this, but Mönchshof zu Bautzen, as the place was called, was faintly suggestive of their project. This was to rediscover what it means to be authentically German — not in any kind of nativist or reactionary fashion, but as self-preservation, a defense against the neoliberalism Berlin sponsors.

The Monday demonstrations spread widely during the GDR decades and were six-figures large in Dresden, Leipzig, and other cities. They continue now, if on a much smaller scale. And the slogan at all of them is a straight carryover: “We are the people” is still in its way a response to the pretensions of power in Berlin.

Working through an interpreter, I asked those ranged around our table, an assemblage of rough-hewn boards, what their politics were. “AfD? Die Linke? Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW?” The last is a left-populist breakaway from The Left. 

“We take no interest in the political parties, none of them,” one of my hosts said. “We don’t think in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ either. We come together on the basis of facts. We’re trying to build what you would call ‘a people’s movement.’” 

The phrase — how to say this? — did not instill confidence. To an American ear “a people’s movement” suggested I was at a table of dreamers in one of who knows how many towns reunification had served badly. When I mentioned this to Karl–Jürgen Müller, the student of German politics quoted earlier, he replied, “You’re looking at the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the surface there’s a lot more of this.” 

This seemed the case as the evening went on and those assembled told me of the conferences and congresses they organize regularly with other communities. In the back of the notebook I used that evening I find a well-produced accordion brochure announcing a “Kongress Frieden und Dialog,” a Congress for Peace and Dialogue,” in Liebstedt, a Thuringian town near Weimar, 260 kilometers distant. 

I had heard the same frustration with Germany’s traditional party politics many times in the course of my reporting. I do not mean to suggest any kind of imminent nationwide insurgency. What I saw at ground level seemed to me nascent, a suggestion and no more of a possible future.

As we drove back from Bautzen to Dresden I thought of something Dirk Pohlmann, the broadcast journalist and documentarian, had said when we spoke in Potsdam. “We’re sitting atop a tectonic shift,” he told me. “The Greens are done. The Free Democrats [among the other big losers in February] are done. The major parties are weak. People are looking for unities on questions of right and wrong. ‘Left’ and ‘right’ have nothing to do with this.” 

“Maybe” is my view on this question. 

Pohlmann and those I met in Bautzen explained another mystery — the strange “voter migration” evident in the February election results: Social Democrats jumping to AfD, Christian Democrats crossing over to Die Linke and BSW, Die Linke voters going over to AfD.

It seemed indecipherable as analyses of the results first came out — Germany as a kind of madhouse of wanderers. But after my time in Bautzen I twigged: Yes, it is a nation of wanderers, but it is also one of seekers.

“We’re all looking for our country,” Dirk had said. It was too early in my sojourn among Germans, and I hadn’t understood this truest of things then.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

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