Much is happening in Germany these days. There is a general election on Sunday, February 23. There was an interesting vote in the Bundestag last week where the AfD voted with the Christian Democrats.
Last evening on the Caren Miosga programme on the ARD station the leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel was interviewed. Also on the programme was a representative from German industry and a political commentator.
It was a fascinating hour-long programme. Weidel is a sophisticated European version of Trump.
At one stage Miosga played a clip of a rally where Weidel roared that the AfD would tear down every wind turbine in Germany. When challenged on the issue she said she did not mean it literally and it was words spoken in the poetry of an election.
Weidel is in favour of returning to the German Mark, is critical of the EU and wants Germany to return to being a sovereign state. She wants a return to nuclear energy.
While it was in a different format to the Trump Harris debate there were aspects to it that reminded on of that debate. Weidel had many one liners easy to remember.
She believes it’s time for Germans to stop looking to its past, instead to look to the future. It’s time for Germany to stop feeling guilty.
The ghost of Hitler’s Germany hovers over the heads
of the AfD.
On one occasion Caren Miosga asked Alice Weidel why she was moving her eyes as if she were sneering.
It was a programme where one could place much emphasis on body language. And Weidel, right through the programme, cleverly used the cameras to her best advantage.
It would have been impossible for Sunday evening’s programme to have been aired on German television 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. It would have been beyond taboo.
An interesting moment in the run-up to the election and no doubt the commentators will have much to say about it in the coming days.
Hitler and Goebbels used the media to the very best of their advantage. No one was better than they at using the then new medium.
1 comment:
"It's time for Germany to stop feeling guilty".
It's a popular argument from the extreme right in Germany. The concept of inherited guilt is a good straw horse argument; It puts forward a false premise, demolishes it, and then claims that the demolition proves its case.
The Christian concept of Original Sin notwithstanding, there is no such thing as "inherited guilt". What there is, is a collective responsibility for Germans - and for the Federal Republic of Germany, as the legal successor state of the Nazi one - to remember the lessons of that appalling period of German history, and to bear witness to it so that those lessons will not be forgotten.
One way of looking at the history of Germany since the war is to see it as the long and difficult journey to understand and express the consequences of this responsibility. Part of this process involved a decided refutation of any concept of "blood guilt", given the presence of such ideas in the foul mess of the origins of antisemitism.
The ideas of "inherited" or "blood" guilt are illogical and absolutely toxic. Are my children (half-German and half-Irish) only half as guilty as their contemporaries? Or is one "drop" of German blood enough to damn them completely to guilt?
It is horribly fascinating to see how the AfD is able to paradoxically use the racist concept of "blood" to relativise the whole question of remembering the lessons of the Holocaust. Combining the idea of German "Volk" and German Nation, and commingling it with a simplistic view of history extending over millenia, the AfD politician, Alexander Gauland, described the history of the Nazi period as a "bird dropping" [Vogelschiss] in the whole sweep of history. Commingled with this relativism is the usual right wing argument that Germany has more than adequately accepted its guilt and done sufficient atonement for it. And so, absolution is self-declared.
Except that present-day Germany is not "guilty" of the Nazi abomination. It needs no absolution. But the responsibility to remember, to bear witness, remains. Is that an ongoing cultural "burden"? Some may see it that way. But I see the ongoing challenge to bear witness to the terrible lessons of the past as a marvelously creative opportunity for German culture. Often imperfect, frequently with a large serving of hypocrisy as a side dish. But over the decades, always moving forward. When you visit the Holocaust Memorial in front of the Bundestag in Berlin, you get a real sense of what this German responsibility means. Yes, the burden can sometimes feel heavy, but there is also profound honour to be found in taking it up.
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