The German nation is undergoing something of an identity crisis, which Rammstein’s Deutschland deftly and beautifully explores, and which seems only to have become more acute in the twenty-odd years since the Die Prinzen song of the same name was published. In some ways, an identity crisis is kind of the natural state of Germany— it is after all not so much a country as it is an argument, having first cobbled itself together from a fair number of somewhat-disparate parts who liked little more than making war upon each other for not very good reasons.
The heat of this national argument has varied, with some long periods of relative quiescence interrupted by bursts of furious discussion, capped off occasionally by an ephemeral answer. I have already analysed the Second World War as a sort of Western civil war, with Germans striving to redefine the political and economic order that had been imposed by Britain and the United States. This was the most recent example of Germans acting in concert, when their perpetual national argument settled provisionally upon National Socialism as the animating national principle.
After the absolute catastrophe which resulted from that collective decision, the Western Allies colluded with the Soviet Union to shear Germany of a decent hunk of territory and divide what remained into two competing state structures. The creation of the western Federal Republic of Germany and the eastern German Democratic Republic was something of an external reimposition of the national argument on the Germans to help ensure they would never again settle their differences.
The contours of this argument were largely subsumed into the broader civilisational questions of the Cold War — Communism versus capitalism, liberal representative democracy versus one-party authoritarianism — but the argument retained a particularly German character. In particular, both German republics claimed to speak for the whole of the German nation, and each accused the other of a gross failure to expunge the vestiges of National Socialism from their institutions and broader societies.
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Eastern Bloc collapsed, quite a few policymakers in Europe worried about the two Germanies reconciling; the concern was that the Germans would once more settle their national argument by deciding to invade their neighbours and impose their will by military force.1
This reticence proved unfounded, however — rather than settle upon any kind of answer to the national argument, Germany seems to have taken arguing itself as its national reason for being. Though it is not really so much arguing as it is berating, bemoaning, whingeing, fault-finding, endless criticising. The German verb that best sums up this activity is meckern, which has long been an essential part of the German character, but which Germans have lately elevated into a national pathology. Indeed, Die Prinzen’s Deutschland provides an excellent example of this sort of nitpicking criticism that has, in the years since, only become more prominent in the German psyche.
The national argument, the perpetual German identity crisis, slowly evolved from which German state had the right to represent the German nation to whether there even is such a thing as a German nation or whether there should be a German state at all. To state it plainly, it is an open question whether or not the people of Germany will, in the coming decades, collectively allow the state of Germany to remain a cohesive nation-state.
There are three major contours to this argument, which I will briefly sketch out below, though each deserves a thorough treatment. While they won’t be part of a new series, I intend to expand on each of these themes in standalone essays as and when I find the time and inspiration.
The first turn of the national argument is the continuing East-West divide in German society, which shows a remarkable durability even amongst the children of Germans who were themselves too young to consciously remember the Berlin Wall. One of the most shocking things I have encountered in my time here is the casual bigotry many West Germans still evince for the part of their country they sometimes still call Dunkeldeutschland.2
It is not uncommon in certain circles to hear the entire region dismissed as a hotbed of Nazism, a place having more in common with Poland or Hungary than North-Rhine Westphalia or Lower Saxony; a burden best ignored and possibly one day to be rid of. This is not (yet?) a serious political position, but it is a common casual attitude, especially among left-wing city-dwellers.
There are some deeply misguided Germans who hope to preserve and revive the National Socialist project — people who not only question but vehemently reject Germany’s cosmopolitanism, the recent dramatic increases in its ethnic diversity, even its very membership in the Western liberal order. Some of these people gather into colonies of their own, especially (though not exclusively) in the east of the country, where cheap land and an acute sense of betrayal from the Wiedervereinigung has made the population slightly more tolerant of right-wing nationalists than elsewhere. These colonies are often insular and attempt to revive traditional German and even ancient Germanic customs in their everyday lives, resembling nothing so much as reactionary religious cults in North America, and they cause no end of grief for the villages they choose to invade.
One gets the impression, when talking to the aforementioned young and progressive West Germans, that they think they are enlightened adults who consider East Germans to be either incompetent or even malicious children, too stupid or too complicit to extirpate the National Socialist cosplayers in their midst.
And yet the lands of the former East Germany — and indeed areas that are now parts of Russia and Poland — were home to some of the most pivotal figures and moments of German history, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Immanuel Kant, from Wartburg (where Martin Luther laid the foundations for a common German language by translating the New Testament into a language most Germans could understand) to Wittenberg (where Luther supposedly nailed his 95 Theses to the church door, sparking the Reformation and millions of deaths in continental Europe) to Weimar (where Germany’s first democratic constitution was written and signed).3
These places and figures are the common heritage of all Germans, and indeed of everyone in the West, if not the whole of the world. And yet a non-negligible chunk of contemporary German society would see neither loss nor sacrifice in surrendering these regions with their attendant relics and potential for the future. This is a deeply sad state of affairs, and quite detrimental to the continuing existence of the state.
The second turn of the national argument evokes the spectre of Nazism more generally, as it regards Germany’s rapidly-changing ethnic and religious composition. Indeed, many Germans — especially young or progressive Germans — have developed strong conversational taboos around the topic of Germans as a distinct ethnic group, or of the German nation as the source of sovereignty for the German state.
For these Germans it is deeply suspicious to even speak of a German nation at all, or of Germans within the country of Germany as constituting an ethnic group distinct from the recognised national minorities that have lived here for centuries, or of the consequences of introducing millions of non-Germans into the country over the past couple of generations4.
The fact that Germany has permanently settled nearly one and a half million refugees from the Middle East within the last decade is a particular point of contention; those who express any concerns about this are often accused of “instrumentalising” their concerns as a sort of Trojan horse for National Socialism, while the concerns themselves are studiously ignored.
Perhaps ironically, even those who support the policy tend only to use it as a cudgel against its opponents in this way; to speak positively about the policy and the sacrifices it has taken and continues to take in order to enact would be too close to expressing pride in their country for having done something worthwhile, and a German expressing pride in Germany is a very questionable person indeed.
The third major turn of the German national argument has to do with the very language that Germans speak, which naturally and inevitably has deep implications for the future development of German identity. There are two phenomena occurring in the German language at the moment, and quite rapidly, one of which has a conscious political valence and the other an unconscious cultural one.
The first phenomenon is an attempt by left-wing intellectuals and activists to reform the gendered aspects of German grammar, which has also become deeply linked with the new gender theology that has taken over all of the intellectual territory that the gay-rights movement won in the last few decades, though the linguistic and sociological gender reforms remain somewhat superficially distinct. This ongoing attempt to reform the language has near-universal support from most media, government, scholarly, and economic institutions, though a supermajority of the adult population regards it with skepticism, and a significant proportion are actively hostile to these measures. It remains to be seen whether the proposed innovations will become permanent, though it would not be surprising.
The second phenomenon is the ever-accelerating adoption of English terms in favour of perfectly-serviceable German equivalents in everyday speech.5 Most Germans are aware of this phenomenon, and for the last few decades it has been viewed mostly affectionately, though that is very likely to change in the next generation or so as exponentially more English words and phrases come into usage at the expense of existing German syntax. The situation already resembles a proto-creolisation — or at the very least a hybridisation — of German with English; it is possible that the grandchildren of today’s Germans will speak a language as incomprehensible to their grandparents as Shakespeare is to most English speakers.
So the perennial national argument is alive and well in Germany. As this argument continues to evolve, it is far from inconceivable that the state might be split into two or more parts, along various historical axes — the East-West divide being only the most recent and pregnant — allowing Germany’s various regional identities to flower into related but independent nations of their own; this is unlikely, to be sure, but hardly out of the question. Switzerland and Austria are perfectly serviceable examples of small, independent states with predominantly German-speaking populations whose national identities are distinct both from Germany and from one another, and who could serve as a template for potential successor states of the Federal Republic of Germany.
It is also conceivable that the German state remains coherent, but that the German nation as such disappears — that German becomes a default identifier for an inhabitant of Germany otherwise unbound to any particular ethnic or linguistic group (and who need not even speak a word of the German language), similar to how the un-hyphenated American serves as a neutral base descriptor for legally-recognised inhabitants of the United States. This is far more likely, with many of the predicate social developments either already in full-swing or eminently foreseeable within our lifetimes.
When one takes in the full weight of Rammstein’s Deutschland, it is not so difficult to understand how such an eventuality might come to pass. In the film, Germania is shown through a kaleidoscope’s worth of aspects, most of them either orthogonal to modern Western morality or directly opposed to it, with precious little worthy of emulation. She is variously depicted at the heights of glory or the depths of villainy; by turns indifferent to and animated by the suffering given and received by those who owe their tongues to her. She is among other things a bloodthirsty force of nature; a victim of the bottomless hunger of corrupt medieval theology; an integral part of the National Socialist project; a feudal warlord; a frantic conductor of a march into the modernity of the 1900’s; a hostage to the ideologies that took root in her soil; a diva trapped within the luxuries of the early 2000’s; and, ultimately, a mother mortally wounded during the act of giving birth.
But, as exhaustive a tour through German history as the film is, it omits a crucial part of that history — indeed, the very period during which Germania was conjured into being by the artists and poets of the Romantic Movement. This movement arose in contradistinction to the Enlightenment, and in particular to the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the reorganisation of its polities into French client states, and it provided the first serious intellectual arena within which the foundation of a singular German nation-state was argued.
Romanticism became one of the most influential intellectual and artistic movements of Europe, and one of the most consequential for the world.6 In those days, Germany itself was as poetic an idea as Germania, an ethereal solution to the very corporeal problems of feudal ossification and French domination that then plagued the German-speaking heart of Europe. As diligent as Rammstein are in recording Germany’s most important historical currents, and as important as Romanticism was for Germany, the failure to showcase this period7 cannot but have been a deliberate choice.
It is quite likely that, without Romanticism and its discourse with the Enlightenment, there would never have been a single country called Germany. Fascism may well have remained a species of Latin dictatorship, terrible for its own citizens, certainly, but hardly a threat to the Western democratic order. In short, without Romanticism, we may well have avoided National Socialism — with all its attendant horrors and miseries — entirely.
For all that, much like in Rammstein’s song, there are few traces of Romanticism visible in everyday life today in Germany, unless you happen to live where a particular Romantic figure is remembered…and even then, you usually have to know what you are looking for to appreciate them. By contrast, this country has tens of thousands of villages and small towns that first appeared in the Middle Ages, many with palaces and castles in various states of repair; its great cities are filled with countless reminders of its recent crimes, from concentration camps repurposed into museums to placards on buildings and street signs to informative sidewalk stones that tell of the last places Holocaust victims lived by their own designs, in amongst the skyscrapers and the occasional ancient Roman bath that remains here.
The castles are beautiful, the museums splendid, and the memorials arresting, but they sum up to quite the albatross around the nation’s collective neck. It is an albatross that the Germans deliberately continue to wear, which seems only to grow more burdensome as the years pass and each new generation comes to reckon with the terrible things their ancestors were party to.
The German education system — unlike that of pretty much every other country until the very recent domination of Critical Theory in Anglosphere school bureaucracies — addresses the horrific evils of its recent past head-on, stressing the criminal nature of the National Socialist regime and how it bastardised and retarded Germany’s development into a modern Western democratic state; historical works that the Nazis appropriated, such as the Nibelungenlied, are often framed as having been misused by National Socialist propagandists to fascist ends. German politicians even occasionally credit America with having freed the Germans from the Nazis and for establishing a robust democracy in Germany, a task at which the Germans themselves were incapable.
In this we see Germans attempting to strike a delicate balance8, fully owning up to the madness of National Socialism which they unleashed upon the world while attempting to deny that ideology’s claims to dominion over the German soul; admitting that National Socialism came to dominate German society while attempting to deny the premise that the purest manifestation of the German character and the inevitable fulfillment of the German people’s destiny was expressed by National Socialism — in other words, that National Socialism was a false answer to Germany’s national argument, an answer which Germany may never repeat.
This collective decision was far from inevitable, and Germans deserve some manner of recognition for having made it. And yet, if one pays attention to Germans’ relationship with Germany, one gets the sense that, at some point, the Germans overbalanced. The suspicion arises that many Germans, on some level, cannot help but believe the Nazis’ claims to their history and national identity — and that they are deeply ashamed of this in a way few of them are able to directly articulate.
Norm McDonald once joked that Germany should, perhaps, not have been allowed to remain as a country after its two concerted attempts to topple the Western liberal order by force of arms. And though the country of Germany was allowed to unite once the Cold War ended, it is not so clear that the German people will ever really unite once more — if das Volk will ever again be anything more than the Romantic myth that the National Socialists used to murder fifty million people.
Because the National Socialists were wrong about what unites a people, and what differentiates it from other peoples. It is neither blood nor soil that binds and divides us, but rather ideas; what carries cultural information is not genes, but memes. That is to say, a culture and a language are transmitted from mouth to ear, from person to person and generation to generation. If enough individuals decide they no longer wish to be a people any longer — if they cannot reconcile the reality of nationhood with their own sense of justice or the echoes of trauma that nationhood has brought upon them — then, though the individuals remain, that people and that nation might well disappear.
Aside from their many crimes against humanity, the National Socialists did grievous injury to the very nation and the people in whose name they committed all those other crimes. By allowing themselves to succumb to the National Socialist project, the Germans of that generation betrayed themselves and their descendants. This sense of betrayal, this self-inflicted wound in the German psyche, is one that Germans may never be able to forgive; their ancestors’ mistakes in taking nationalism to its most extreme logical conclusion may yet be the end of the very nation that tried so disastrously to assert itself.
And while that might not count as the greatest of crimes the National Socialists committed or abetted, it would be a damned shame, all the same.
Here is a short video that succinctly explains the reticence by some European powers to see Germany reunite. The money quote, allegedly from the then-Prime Minister of Italy, is “I love Germany so much, I prefer to see two of them”.
This term literally translates to “dark Germany”, referring to the Germany behind the Iron Curtain, veiled in shadow. It is generally taken as an offensive term when said by a West German.
There are many other historic places in East Germany that don’t start with W as well, such as Dresden, Rostock, Jena, Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, Magdeburg, Merseburg, and the island of Rügen. But just the ones that start with W seem impressive enough.
The Federal Office of Migrants and Refugees estimates that 26% of Germany’s current population have “a migrant background”, meaning they are either direct immigrants or the children of immigrants. For reference, this is just about the same percentage as the comparable population within the United States. That is a dramatic change from the year 1900, or even from the year 2000 — about two-thirds of those with a migrant background are direct immigrants.
Interestingly, though Germany refused to participate in America’s Middle Eastern adventures (except for a very small role in the occupation of Afghanistan, a duty to which Germany considered itself bound as a member of NATO), it has taken by far the lion’s share of refugees resulting from these conflicts and from the resultant Arab Spring. For example, of the 1.2 million Syrians who’ve come to Europe since 2014, at least 800,000 of them have settled in Germany. There is an essay in exploring the relationship Germany has with the United States, but that is an essay for another time.
The umbrella term for using English syntax within the German lexicon is Denglisch, from combining Deutsch and Englisch. It is actually a multilayered phenomenon, and most Germans associate it only with reappropriating English terms for novel purposes in German — e.g., a Handy is a mobile phone, an Oldtimer is a classic car, among many other examples. But there is another side to Denglisch that has begun to assert itself, where perfectly serviceable German words and phrases are being replaced by English equivalents — often without even a shaded difference in meaning to justify their usage over native syntax. I intend to write much more about this phenomenon in due time, but it is quite interesting to observe, and a bit alarming, for all that.
Recapitulating the full sweep of Romantic history is beyond the scope of this series of reviews, but here is an excellent video about the subject, which I highly recommend for more general context. The presenter gives a compelling dissection of Romantic-era Germany and its influence not only on the Germany of today, but also on the Western conception of a well-considered life, with many of the positives and negatives that implies.
Except arguably as an oblique reference in the very lyric Deutschland über Allen and in the few scant shots where Germania is dressed as a fairy-tale queen, though these shots never quite cohere into anything like the other, much more legible scenes of the film.
A prominent example of this can be seen in and around the Reichstag building. The word Reich means realm or commonwealth, and was integral to the name of the German state from the date of its founding until the unconditional surrender of the National Socialist government at the end of the Second World War. The Reichstag was the common government assembly throughout this period, though it had various amounts of power and democratic legitimacy, with none of either by the time the war was in full swing.
These days, the assembly itself is called the Bundestag, while the building retains the name Reichstag out of that same attempted balance-striking. Nevertheless, all the street signs and pamphlets are very clear that the Reichstag is the name of the building where the Bundestag meets, just to make sure nobody is ever confused.
Furthermore, the front of the building is inscribed with the words DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE, which means “to the German people”. Because the Nazis were so obsessed with the German people, the very utterance of das Volk is regarded as highly problematic; it is politically correct to instead refer to die deutsche Bevölkerung (the German population), which encompasses everyone who lives in the country regardless of their ethnic background. As such, the inside building takes great pains to put the engraving into the initial context within which it was inscribed.