Memo to our German friends: soul-searching is necessary, but not sufficient

Germany is going through one of its periodic bouts of soul-searching. More particularly, the conservative Christian Democrats, still smarting from defeat at the polls in September, have embarked on yet another quest to find a leader to fill the shoes of Angela Merkel. The veteran Chancellor is still running the country as a caretaker, while three parties form a “traffic light” coalition of the centre-Left under the Social Democratic leader Olaf Scholz, still serving as Finance Minister in the outgoing administration.

During this interregnum, which has already lasted a month and may go on for many more weeks, there is plenty of time for the German habit of gloomy introspection or grübeln (“brooding”). Mrs Merkel herself set the tone with a weekend interview in which she vented her pessimism about the future, not only of Germany but of Europe. “The world is in anything but a stable condition,” she declared. Divisions between the EU and former Eastern bloc countries had deepened, as “the feeling that there is little national room for manoeuvre creates disappointment”. “At the same time, of course, we also have to say clearly that the rule of law has to apply to us all and is a defining component of Europe’s cohesion. I hope that over and over again people will try to find solutions to this through dialogue,” she added, alluding to her self-appointed task of brokering a deal between Brussels and Warsaw.

The Cassandra of Berlin also warned against a creeping historical amnesia, as the last survivors of the war and the Holocaust pass away: “After the great joy of the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Europe, we have to take care now not to enter a historical phase in which important lessons from history fade away. We have to remind ourselves that the multilateral world order was created as a lesson from the Second World War. There will be ever fewer people left who have lived through that period. In history there is a recurring pattern where people begin to deal recklessly with structures when the generations that created those structures are no longer alive.”

Among others, Mrs Merkel is here taking aim at the British. Like many on the Continent, she blames Brexit for unleashing hardline nationalists in Central Europe. “Some Europeans ask themselves in tough economic times whether their country shouldn’t just think of itself. Perhaps the question is a reasonable one, too, and we have to answer it time and again with well-founded arguments.”

Mrs Merkel cannot forgive David Cameron for allowing the EU referendum — the resort to direct democracy is prohibited by the German constitution — nor Boris Johnson for seizing his opportunity in what Germans regard as an irresponsible example of populism. Yet the dig at national egotism is directed at Germans, too, who tend to grumble that their eastern and southern neighbours are all profiting at their expense.

Certainly, when Mrs Merkel warns about forgetting the lessons of the past, she is really exhorting her compatriots in time-honoured fashion. It was on her watch that a far-Right party emerged in Germany for the first time since 1945 that was sufficiently broadly-based to enter parliament and even form the main opposition to her government over the last four years. The fragmentation of the party system has evoked comparisons with the Weimar Republic, while Germany’s relations with former enemies such as Poland and Russia have seldom been worse. Even as the old Nazis depart, the ghosts of the Nazi era return to haunt the present. For Mrs Merkel’s generation, “more Europe” was the answer to everything. Now the magic has gone.

Paradoxically, it is partly in response to this predicament that in its search for a successor her party seems likely to turn to the Right — and to direct democracy. Instead of a leader chosen by a bureaucratic elite, this time the Christian Democrats will ballot all 400,000 members. Polls suggest that they will elect Friedrich Merz, the wealthy corporate lawyer who has long been Mrs Merkel’s bête noire. At 65, he belongs to the same generation as her, but comes from the West German, free market power base of the party that has never been comfortable with the woman from the former Communist East. Merz would make it his business to win back the voters who have drifted away to support the far-Right AfD (Alternative for Germany). By depicting the new government’s policies as a betrayal of the national interest and security, Merz would polarise politics in a manner not seen since the Cold War era.

It is significant that the most talented politician of the next generation, Jens Spahn, lags far behind Merz in the polls. Despite having successfully managed the response to the pandemic as Health Minister, Spahn is perhaps too associated with the Merkel government to appeal to the disaffected. At 47, he is less trusted by an ageing population than Merz, who is 65. Above all, Spahn is gay — a novelty in German politics. Christian Democrats may no longer be very Christian but they remain reactionary enough to pass up a golden opportunity for a fresh start under a dynamic, younger leader.

It remains to be seen whether Germany’s period of introspection becomes an exercise in retrospection. Looking back is essential, of course, and Angela Merkel is not wrong to read and recommend history books such as Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (on the origins of war in 1914) or Herfried Münkler’s The Thirty Years’ War. Her choices may even inspire a sense of déja vu: in the postwar era more than half a century ago, two of the bestsellers were Fritz Fischer’s Griff Mach der Weltmacht (translated as Germany’s Aims in the First World War) and Golo Mann’s Wallenstein (a study of the Thirty Years’ War). Then, too, Germans worried about their own role as Europe’s largest economy, with a tendency to lurch from one extreme to the other. Also visible, then as now, was the habit (dating back at least to the Thirty Years’ War, which was fought largely on their soil) of seeing Germans as victims rather than masters of their own fate.

Germany, like the rest of Europe, stands at a moment of change when its assumptions are being challenged from all sides. Retreating into a comfort zone of cultural pessimism and political romanticism is not the way to answer Goethe’s question: “What though is your duty? The demands of the day.” It is the task of historians to revise, reinterpret and revisit the past; it is the task of politicians to rebuild the present and reinvent the future.