They will never learn
I recently read an article on the historical German right which felt so convincing to me that I archived it. The author, Gustav Seibt, argued that the German traditional right suffered from two historically disastrous flaws: an ambiguous attitude towards the legality of the state and a lack of honesty towards the public.
He went on to say that There is a direct line from Bismarck's putsch plans (the founder of the German Reich seriously believed he could put his creation back in the box again), through the personal rule of Kaiser William II, Hindenburg’s emergency powers, Von Papen's cabinet of experts and Adenauer's Spiegel affair to the Christian Democratic Union's slush funds, Kohl's "word of honour" and most recently Kanther's dreadful attempts to justify his party's Swiss bank accounts through a supposed crisis in the struggle against the left. This is the significant point: Legality is for others, because we are the real lords of the realm; we know when extraordinary circumstances justify us to set up a putsch plan, a state of emergency or a slush fund. In other words, far from being conservative in the sense of respecting the laws and upholding the social structure, the German conservative elite has an attitude that justifies the violation of laws and the breaking of codes of honour.
And this disdain for legality - well concealed behind statesmanlike rhetoric - corresponds directly with a second vice: not telling the public the truth. The economic side of (1989-1990) reunification provides one example here, one whose consequences Germany will be dealing with for the foreseeable future. Expanding the West German welfare state to 17 million additional beneficiaries was at least a highly risky venture, the exchange rate between the East and West German currencies did not correspond to the facts, and the hopes for a self-propagating upturn ("blooming landscapes") were castles in the air - and none of that was exactly unpredictable in 1990. And yet the Chancellor of the time, Kohl, avoided any talk of sacrifices and insured everyone that seventeen million members of a collapsed economy could be absorbed into the German state without any particular consequence, that, indeed, that part of Germany which had been distinguished even before WWII for poverty and backwardness would immediately and naturally rise to the level of Bavaria and Westphalia. He was lying, and he must have known it, just as he lied later when he was found to process huge amounts of slush funds and called on his "honour" to make his patent lies a bit more believable.
[A]t the time (of Unification) there were many calls for a patriotically grounded willingness to make sacrifices - which would certainly have been a plausible option in the exceptional situation of reunification. But the right cynically and short-sightedly refused to admit in public that a problem even existed, and marched the German economy into its current swampy state, which is the result of the continuous failure of most of the East to take off, and of the huge drain this puts on what could be a strong Western economy. That is what was behind Kohl's generous post-reunification course: mistrust of the citizens, which is hardly distinguishable from disdain. The disdain of the law practised since Bismarck and this arrogance towards the citizens, who apparently have to be guarded from the plain truth, demonstrates the continuing unbourgeois character of German conservatism: still half feudal, half petty-bourgeois, but definitely not urbane.
Steibt's reading of very recent German history is important because as far as I am concerned it resonates with much older events. What Seibt calls the German right is not Nazism or any group that can in any way be connected with that movement; for Nazism was largely a revolutionary movement out of what might be called the lumpen-petty-bourgeoisie, whose attitude to the traditional powers in Germany was uncompromisingly hostile and destructive. The rise of the Nazi party had this to do with the traditional conservatives: that, like other popular-nationalist or nationalist-socialist movements in Europe, it was fostered by the instruments of the reactionary right in order to break what was then the huge and largely united front of the Socialist/Anarchist working class. The right wanted a Socialist movement of their own, but one which they could control for their own interest; and when the former red revolutionary Mussolini turned against his former comrades in Italy over the need to fight (ironically enough) German aggression, they had the first functioning instrument of their reaction.
Events in Italy ought to have warned the other European reactionaries of what the invention of a nationalist-socialist was likely to cause: Mussolini, instead of becoming the docile instrument of the landowners, took their money, built a party army, financed a coup d'etat, and gained absolute power. But these men were not very good at accepting that they were wrong in anything; and so, even in 1932, the German traditional right was still busy manoeuvering in favour of the revolutionary Nazis, which would destroy them. Even in Britain, the Daily Mail actively campaigned for a British Fascist movement, in the service of its obsessional, tribal hatred of the Labour Party. Nazism was certainly created and originally controlled by the German Army, and its ideological bases were taken from the anti-Jewish scare of 1919, deliberately directed and controlled by shadowy conservative interests - only one of the real leaders, the sinister Count von Reventlow, is known to me by name - to generate just such a popular movement. Twenty years later, Count von Reventlow, who had by then become a Nazi himself, candidly admitted that he did not believe a word of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a prime instrument in the "Jewish scare" which he had helped engineer.
This example of cold-hearted manipulation of the masses, with Reventolw's cynical admission that he had never believed a word of the fables he used to affect them, shows what Seibt means when he says that the German conservatives have no respect for the public. Certainly, at the time, they were facing a deadly crisis: they had led the country into a disastrous war, lost it through their diplomatic incompetence (which had pushed neutral states such as the US, which had no issue with Germany, into the arms of ancient enemies such as Britain, and brought together implacable enemies such as Britain and Russia), and paid an obscene tribute of blood in so doing. If there ever was a ruling class ripe to be removed, the German conservatives were it; and, within sight beyond the Vistula (http://www.livejournal.com/users/bufo_viridis/7719.html) raged and swelled a new power that looked ready to remove it. Even so, there is nothing different in their manipulation of public opinion except the desperate intensity with which it was carried out at this dangerous time - which died down as soon as the hated Poles had stopped the Communist menace in its tracks.
Nazism made devastating inroads into the upper classes, murdering their leaders, killing their children in wartime, removing them from power and replacing them with its own creatures. (Sometimes with odd results: the Swabian bourgeois Rommel, who would never have risen to three-star General, let alone Field-Marshal, in the old Prussian system, became a convinced opponent of Hitler, to whom he owed his career, and would have been the figurehead of the government the coup leaders of July 1944 intended to set up.) The catastrophe of 1945 removed half of the Prussian heartland from Germany for ever, and placed the other half under a Russian quisling regime. In the writings of many historically informed Westerners of the time, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, there is something like a sigh of relief: thank God, whatever else may happen, we will never have to deal with Prussia again. That relief went well beyond Nazism: since long before the First World War, Prussia had been an untameable, unteachable disruptive element in the concert of European powers, threatening, insulting, occasionally attacking, and always creating an atmosphere of uncertainty.
Well, they were wrong. For what Seibt describes is simply, to use the most famous Prussian quote of them all, the prosecution of Bismarck by other means. In a century and a half, the German ruling classes have not learned to trust the common man, to play the game by the rules, or not to have a proprietary attitude to the country.
I write this because I have just read a singularly unpleasant display of the mentality, written in English and for an American audience by one Ulf Gartzke, head of the US branch of a think-tank affiliated to the Bavarian CSU. The quality of his writing is a subtle but deep nastiness, compounded of arrogance, contempt for argument, contempt for opponents, and lack of intelligence. He trots out the old nostrums for European reforms as if they were acquired truths that nobody had to defend or describe. But his worst offence in my eyes is the use of the American expression "regime change" to describe the possible electoral defeat of Chancellor Schroeder. Granted, Schroeder is an incompetent, and his anti-Americanism is so shop-worn as to be a joke. But to call his democratically elected government a "regime", a term used in English only for undemocratic governments, and to speak of its replacement in a democratic election as "regime change", a term used for the defeat of an enemy in wartime, is nothing short of disgusting. That it may have been meant as a joke is denied by the whole tenor of Gartzke's article, which could be used as a topical example by anyone who wanted to prove that the ethnic cliche about humourless Germans is true.
No, he was making an association of ideas. And what it proves is that in his mind, there is no fundamental difference between the expulsion of a tyrant by brute force and the defeat of a democratic government in democratic elections. Not, at least, so long as the democratic government in question is an opponent of Mr.Gatzke and his party.
Mr.Schroeder will probably lose, and certainly deserves to lose. He has proven incapable of governing Germany well, and has sunk into hypocritical anti-Americanism to give himself any ideological justification at all - thus sabotaging the work of his own Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who needed the implicit threat of American action to negotiate with the obdurate and dangerous Iranians, who have punctually paid attention at the language coming from Berlin and decided to treat Mr.Fischer with contempt. But I do not like the thought that the party that will replace him has such minds in its policy-making think tanks. I do not like to think that its leadership is still polluted the arrogance and dishonesty of old. One way or another, contempt for the intelligence of the people is a bad foundation on which to build a government.
He went on to say that There is a direct line from Bismarck's putsch plans (the founder of the German Reich seriously believed he could put his creation back in the box again), through the personal rule of Kaiser William II, Hindenburg’s emergency powers, Von Papen's cabinet of experts and Adenauer's Spiegel affair to the Christian Democratic Union's slush funds, Kohl's "word of honour" and most recently Kanther's dreadful attempts to justify his party's Swiss bank accounts through a supposed crisis in the struggle against the left. This is the significant point: Legality is for others, because we are the real lords of the realm; we know when extraordinary circumstances justify us to set up a putsch plan, a state of emergency or a slush fund. In other words, far from being conservative in the sense of respecting the laws and upholding the social structure, the German conservative elite has an attitude that justifies the violation of laws and the breaking of codes of honour.
And this disdain for legality - well concealed behind statesmanlike rhetoric - corresponds directly with a second vice: not telling the public the truth. The economic side of (1989-1990) reunification provides one example here, one whose consequences Germany will be dealing with for the foreseeable future. Expanding the West German welfare state to 17 million additional beneficiaries was at least a highly risky venture, the exchange rate between the East and West German currencies did not correspond to the facts, and the hopes for a self-propagating upturn ("blooming landscapes") were castles in the air - and none of that was exactly unpredictable in 1990. And yet the Chancellor of the time, Kohl, avoided any talk of sacrifices and insured everyone that seventeen million members of a collapsed economy could be absorbed into the German state without any particular consequence, that, indeed, that part of Germany which had been distinguished even before WWII for poverty and backwardness would immediately and naturally rise to the level of Bavaria and Westphalia. He was lying, and he must have known it, just as he lied later when he was found to process huge amounts of slush funds and called on his "honour" to make his patent lies a bit more believable.
[A]t the time (of Unification) there were many calls for a patriotically grounded willingness to make sacrifices - which would certainly have been a plausible option in the exceptional situation of reunification. But the right cynically and short-sightedly refused to admit in public that a problem even existed, and marched the German economy into its current swampy state, which is the result of the continuous failure of most of the East to take off, and of the huge drain this puts on what could be a strong Western economy. That is what was behind Kohl's generous post-reunification course: mistrust of the citizens, which is hardly distinguishable from disdain. The disdain of the law practised since Bismarck and this arrogance towards the citizens, who apparently have to be guarded from the plain truth, demonstrates the continuing unbourgeois character of German conservatism: still half feudal, half petty-bourgeois, but definitely not urbane.
Steibt's reading of very recent German history is important because as far as I am concerned it resonates with much older events. What Seibt calls the German right is not Nazism or any group that can in any way be connected with that movement; for Nazism was largely a revolutionary movement out of what might be called the lumpen-petty-bourgeoisie, whose attitude to the traditional powers in Germany was uncompromisingly hostile and destructive. The rise of the Nazi party had this to do with the traditional conservatives: that, like other popular-nationalist or nationalist-socialist movements in Europe, it was fostered by the instruments of the reactionary right in order to break what was then the huge and largely united front of the Socialist/Anarchist working class. The right wanted a Socialist movement of their own, but one which they could control for their own interest; and when the former red revolutionary Mussolini turned against his former comrades in Italy over the need to fight (ironically enough) German aggression, they had the first functioning instrument of their reaction.
Events in Italy ought to have warned the other European reactionaries of what the invention of a nationalist-socialist was likely to cause: Mussolini, instead of becoming the docile instrument of the landowners, took their money, built a party army, financed a coup d'etat, and gained absolute power. But these men were not very good at accepting that they were wrong in anything; and so, even in 1932, the German traditional right was still busy manoeuvering in favour of the revolutionary Nazis, which would destroy them. Even in Britain, the Daily Mail actively campaigned for a British Fascist movement, in the service of its obsessional, tribal hatred of the Labour Party. Nazism was certainly created and originally controlled by the German Army, and its ideological bases were taken from the anti-Jewish scare of 1919, deliberately directed and controlled by shadowy conservative interests - only one of the real leaders, the sinister Count von Reventlow, is known to me by name - to generate just such a popular movement. Twenty years later, Count von Reventlow, who had by then become a Nazi himself, candidly admitted that he did not believe a word of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a prime instrument in the "Jewish scare" which he had helped engineer.
This example of cold-hearted manipulation of the masses, with Reventolw's cynical admission that he had never believed a word of the fables he used to affect them, shows what Seibt means when he says that the German conservatives have no respect for the public. Certainly, at the time, they were facing a deadly crisis: they had led the country into a disastrous war, lost it through their diplomatic incompetence (which had pushed neutral states such as the US, which had no issue with Germany, into the arms of ancient enemies such as Britain, and brought together implacable enemies such as Britain and Russia), and paid an obscene tribute of blood in so doing. If there ever was a ruling class ripe to be removed, the German conservatives were it; and, within sight beyond the Vistula (http://www.livejournal.com/users/bufo_viridis/7719.html) raged and swelled a new power that looked ready to remove it. Even so, there is nothing different in their manipulation of public opinion except the desperate intensity with which it was carried out at this dangerous time - which died down as soon as the hated Poles had stopped the Communist menace in its tracks.
Nazism made devastating inroads into the upper classes, murdering their leaders, killing their children in wartime, removing them from power and replacing them with its own creatures. (Sometimes with odd results: the Swabian bourgeois Rommel, who would never have risen to three-star General, let alone Field-Marshal, in the old Prussian system, became a convinced opponent of Hitler, to whom he owed his career, and would have been the figurehead of the government the coup leaders of July 1944 intended to set up.) The catastrophe of 1945 removed half of the Prussian heartland from Germany for ever, and placed the other half under a Russian quisling regime. In the writings of many historically informed Westerners of the time, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, there is something like a sigh of relief: thank God, whatever else may happen, we will never have to deal with Prussia again. That relief went well beyond Nazism: since long before the First World War, Prussia had been an untameable, unteachable disruptive element in the concert of European powers, threatening, insulting, occasionally attacking, and always creating an atmosphere of uncertainty.
Well, they were wrong. For what Seibt describes is simply, to use the most famous Prussian quote of them all, the prosecution of Bismarck by other means. In a century and a half, the German ruling classes have not learned to trust the common man, to play the game by the rules, or not to have a proprietary attitude to the country.
I write this because I have just read a singularly unpleasant display of the mentality, written in English and for an American audience by one Ulf Gartzke, head of the US branch of a think-tank affiliated to the Bavarian CSU. The quality of his writing is a subtle but deep nastiness, compounded of arrogance, contempt for argument, contempt for opponents, and lack of intelligence. He trots out the old nostrums for European reforms as if they were acquired truths that nobody had to defend or describe. But his worst offence in my eyes is the use of the American expression "regime change" to describe the possible electoral defeat of Chancellor Schroeder. Granted, Schroeder is an incompetent, and his anti-Americanism is so shop-worn as to be a joke. But to call his democratically elected government a "regime", a term used in English only for undemocratic governments, and to speak of its replacement in a democratic election as "regime change", a term used for the defeat of an enemy in wartime, is nothing short of disgusting. That it may have been meant as a joke is denied by the whole tenor of Gartzke's article, which could be used as a topical example by anyone who wanted to prove that the ethnic cliche about humourless Germans is true.
No, he was making an association of ideas. And what it proves is that in his mind, there is no fundamental difference between the expulsion of a tyrant by brute force and the defeat of a democratic government in democratic elections. Not, at least, so long as the democratic government in question is an opponent of Mr.Gatzke and his party.
Mr.Schroeder will probably lose, and certainly deserves to lose. He has proven incapable of governing Germany well, and has sunk into hypocritical anti-Americanism to give himself any ideological justification at all - thus sabotaging the work of his own Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who needed the implicit threat of American action to negotiate with the obdurate and dangerous Iranians, who have punctually paid attention at the language coming from Berlin and decided to treat Mr.Fischer with contempt. But I do not like the thought that the party that will replace him has such minds in its policy-making think tanks. I do not like to think that its leadership is still polluted the arrogance and dishonesty of old. One way or another, contempt for the intelligence of the people is a bad foundation on which to build a government.