All the Stops Before Derailment

How did we reach the threshold of disaster? Let's travel along a timeline of seven historical waypoints that have disrupted our lives and continue to lead us towards the coming mega-crisis.

In the late summer of 2022 I wrote here (in German) about my country's not hopeless, but hope-free situation and the adequate way of living with it as someone who happens to be a German citizen. What I couldn't fit into the–admittedly–very long text was the question of how this point was reached historically. What milestones lie behind us that would at least allow us to see in retrospect where our “forerunners” took a wrong turn or did not even ask for directions in the unfounded hope that higher powers would decide to the best of the whole?

For someone like me, an (economic) historian and economist who studied before the turn of the millennium, this is something that inherently concerns me. That is why this essay will deal with the roadblocks on the long journey to freedom from hope. Don't the very people who brought us here constantly mumble the mantra that we have to learn from history? So let’s learn–even if it may be too late for that.

In my lifetime, which began in 1966, six so-called disruptions have already taken place: dates on which something quite drastically new, radical and, unfortunately for us, increasingly destructive began politically and socially. I will go through them in order below. The seventh and perhaps most shocking for our country, the basic supply and stability crisis, is only just beginning.

Seven shocks, at least six points of no return. And, as it cannot be otherwise in history: They are all connected to each other, even if by several corners. No, of course not as a big, centrally controlled world conspiracy. To try and be sarcastic: Bill Gates is to blame for a lot of things, but not even he is rich enough to be guilty of everything. Rather, everything is a consequence of opportunistic decisions that disregard the established social structure on a globalist playing field that has gradually been hijacked by a wide variety of figures and groups for their radical purposes.

An alarming realization: the increasingly violent tremors have recently followed each other in close succession, which clearly points to a classic chain of escalation, a gradual crescendo into catastrophe. This is because more and more debris from the last time is standing in the way of a saving reaction, while the pressure of time and of mounting problems is increasing.

So I travel along the waypoints once again and collect the historical damage reports in order to evaluate them in total at the end of the mapped out route. My completely subjective reference point on this acceleration path is the date of my birth on May 1, 1966. It stands, however, for the experience of a generation that grew up in the relative social security and political naivety of the old Federal Republic.

Waypoint #1
Date: Oct 3, 1990
German reunification
Time since reference point: 24 years, 5 months
Damage report: legacy, identity crisis, obsolescence

Once upon a time there was the Shire. Its capital was Bonn on the Rhine. In retrospect, the 1980s, which had just ended, will probably go down in the history books as the most fragrant of all social flower meadows, at least in West Germany between the wars. For us (younger) Westerners, the crumbling and crashing in the East, and finally the cracks in the concrete of the Wall, were more like a well-staged telenovela - spiced up with a dash of revolutionary pathos. And the grand finale called “Unity” was a festival of patronizing sentimentality. What got lost in all the funfair hype was the explosive geopolitical dimension of reunification.

Since 1949, geopolitics–the representation of strategic interests around the globe–had been abandoned by the Federal Republic of Germany, which was largely foreign-dominated in military and diplomatic terms, and bequeathed to its hegemon, the USA. Its NATO partners, including the two nuclear powers France and, first and foremost, the Anglo-Saxon US proconsul, Great Britain, lent weight to the hegemon’s interests. But in the end, the three former Western Allies and even Gorbachev's Soviet Union all agreed on the German question: nothing less than the self-dissolution of Germany was called for as the price for reunification at the “2+4 negotiations”.

What seems an absurd strategy, unification and dissolution, made sense as a two-stage plan: the new nation should first be allowed to bathe in the deceptive glow of its togetherness for a while. But after this grace period, it should then diffuse in a final European concrescence (as well as in NATO militarily) and disappear without a trace. The hastily decided path to “irreversible political union” of the former EEC towards the EU and the introduction of the euro in Maastricht in 1992 bears witness to this. A unified Germany with planned obsolescence.

The victorious Western powers of the Second World War were too worried that they might otherwise once again be faced with an independent antithesis on the Old Continent. Above all, after the end of the duopoly of two world power blocs, they feared closer economic and cultural ties between the industrial giant (West) Germany and Russia, the resource-rich core state of the former USSR. It was the old American nightmare. Since the end of the First World War, and then again after 1990, the Washington-London axis in particular has been working against this nightmare with all its might. The Russian war in Ukraine today offers it paradisiacal opportunities to reach this goal.

But even the left-liberal West German bourgeoisie was committed to the course of its own diffusion after the Nazi guilt trauma and decades of subsequent Americanization. With the people and the country, the proverbial Nazi corpse in the family cellar would finally dissolve into nothing, was the secret hope. Under these circumstances, the unification of Germany could only be the birth of a short-lived pseudo-giant. Admittedly, the illusory giant did develop a surprisingly real economic power for a few decades. But from a competitive point of view, the illusion that the country formed from two vassal states would be allowed to develop a perceptible political pulse was all the more unrealistic from the outset. It never got this chance.

The concept of “nation” itself, which today could have been the last bastion against the global feudalism of the oligarchs, was given an expiration date from the outset. And the country, which was not supposed to remain one, remained without an identity, without an inner cohesion. I suppose that politicians who have to lead such a hybrid entity simply cannot be expected to manage a thoroughbred crisis.

Waypoint #2
Date: Sep 11, 2001
Airplane attack by Islamist terrorists on the USA
Time since previous waypoint: 10 years, 11 months
Damage report: 2,996 fatalities, several skyscrapers, the principle of the rule of law

On that day, we all realized that even in 2024 we would still know where we were back then and what went through our minds when we saw the images. These images were intended to make even the most stupid of us understand that a historical caesura had just been set before our very eyes and that we would henceforth distinguish between “before” and “after” 9/11. Just the why was not immediately clear and only took shape over the following years. Because this day would tempt the USA, as the most massively armed of all democracies, to drop its constitutional mask and take up the fight against individual freedom under the trademark of the “war on terror”. For the Americans, anyone who could not prove the opposite was henceforth a terrorist. They knew, however, that by establishing this rule they would sink to the level of their most primitive enemies, and accepted it.

This is where it all began, and it is only now that we have a fully developed high-tech hunt for individual “public enemies”. But 9/11 started it: the CIA's Black Sites, torture chambers that are not marked on any map; waterboarding, the “enhanced interrogation methods” legitimized by leading US lawyers and psychologists; Guantanamo, the model concentration camp of every future rogue state; the satellite reconnaissance and Navy SEALS teams as executive bodies in the lawless space of US global warfare; the drone strikes against Afghan wedding parties, unpopular Iranian military chiefs and Arab terrorist leaders, which were also eagerly approved by the angel of peace Obama. And the iconic image of Abu Ghraib: the hooded man balancing precariously on the box with the electric cables at his fingertips.

In September 2001, it would be another six years before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and ushered in the age of voluntary digital mass disclosure. Streams that converged afterwards: secret services in a bloodlust of hunting down villains, the greedy corporate conglomerate “Big Data” and the church of virtual self-exposure. Data is given, data is taken. Data first, then freedom, then lives. Only the name of the “war on terror” changes as appropriate, as do the names of the target groups and their individual members. Soon enough, the justifications would emerge to unify all of this into a seamless control network based on the tracking of ubiquitous “smart” phones. Steve Jobs, at lieast, didn’t live to witness how the social points for good behavior began to light up on the iPhone clones in China. Or would he have sensed a new business opportunity?

Since 2001, all the erosion of the Western-style liberal constitutional state, the turning of elected “democrats” to the surveillance and punishment practices of totalitarian systems, has been under a logo with two airplanes flying into two towers in the space of a few minutes. But the image that stuck in my mind above all others about 9/11 came on 9/12, the next day. Somewhere in America, a John Doe was driving his bulldozer through the streets with the word REVENGE written across half the width of the road on the frontal blade. Since that day, we have been living in his world, in which vengance outweighs justice. And this commander will lead us into his war if necessary.

Waypoint #3
Date: Dec 12, 2008
US central bank cuts key interest rate to zero
Time since previous waypoint: 7 years, 3 months
Damage report: Failure of vital market mechanisms, political economy

The period between the start of the US real estate crisis in 2007 and the multiple banking, Greek and euro rescue packages up to 2015 saw countless interlinked disasters in the global financial system. It is difficult to single out a specific event, but the Federal Reserve's zeroing of a key US interest rate in December 2008 was probably the most symbolic. The European Central Bank later followed suit and even imposed negative interest rates in the eurozone for a while. This was the first time that interest rates, the most vital capitalist market signal and steering tool, were reduced to absurdity. The creeping expropriation of hundreds of millions of small savers through the silent erosion of their savings by means of inflation was a striking milestone. And the tombstone of the market economy.

But in this increasingly bizarre economic world view, the monster called inflation was also considered defeated. After all, that was precisely the argument for interest rates of zero: to shy away the much nastier deflation. In the economies of the West, which had shrunk to depression levels after the bubble baths of real estate and junk bond excesses, central banks were now incessantly injecting money into the arteries of “the markets” in order to coax signs of life out of them again. What, still no pulse? Another hundred billion units! Too much cheap money before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was cured with even more free money after Lehman. In this parallel universe without fear of inflation and with (sub)zero interest rates, we the small scale savers were left exclusively with the capital market casino to place our money–involuntarily and against our better judgment. We were turned into traders, dealers and junkies at the same time–always on the needle of prices and indices, and increasingly detached from real value creation. The avalanche of fiat money rolling across the globe, long since a thousand times the value of all physical things on earth, was finally freed from the shackles of the physical economy and developed a virtual life of its own as a value in and of itself, as an end in itself.

With this ghostly setting, the latest stage of late capitalism was born in 2008. It no longer has anything to do with exchange value, nor with measure and purpose. The formula goes, financial capital yes please, market economy no thanks. And so it went on to the last hysterical rounds–in a Western economic hemisphere that learned to listen to political signals instead of sober demand data: to indicators with dazzling new names such as diversity, compliance, anti-colonialism, climate neutrality, emissions certificates, and sustainability. This was the globalized ideology of “wokeness”, originally forged in American neoliberal and neo-marxist circles: the claim of a hypermoral elite to impose its ideological objectives on Western societies and their economies as it sees fit. The coercive means used by these new moral economists against freedom-oriented dissenters ranged from shaming, public demonization, boycotts, advertising and credit bans to the total destruction of economic livelihoods. With the help of social media platforms controlled from the USA and a compliant and corrupt media, the divisive poison of wokeness has long since been spread to Germany's social and political control centers.

Here, it is eagerly absorbed by those who benefit most from the controlled capital flows of a politicized economy without competitive market mechanisms: Industrialists and their apparatchiks who, due to unattractive products and a lack of innovation, shy away from nothing more than selection through the principle of supply and demand. The “common market” of an EU that has been transformed into a gigantic steering and redistribution machine down to the finest ramifications of economic life–largely shaped and controlled by green ideologues–suits them just fine. However, those in their church who are prepared to use the right buzzwords at all times and renounce the wisdom of the markets are rewarded with political and religious letters of indulgence for their notoriously guilty conscience as resource destroyers. What's more, they can look forward to access to the subsidies and loan tranches of a European Green Deal. All of this was only made possible by a form of “guided capitalism” in which interest no longer played a role as a guarantor of stability and limitation. This was a milestone in the removal of taboos and boundaries. The only thing that was relegated to ever narrower limits was reason.

But there were to be three more shocks of at least the same caliber, to which the political response, especially in Germany, was either negligently naive or even deliberately destructive. The scope of these reactions, much closer in time and in closer succession, contributed all the more to the country's current state of emergency. I will look at these last three events in chronological order before drawing some conclusions from the analysis of all the historical milestones mentioned.

Waypoint #4
Date: Mar 11, 2011
Fukushima
Time since previous waypoint: 2 years, 6 months
Damage report: 20,000 fatalities (from tsunami, not radioactivity), German “energy U-turn”

After the September 11 attacks, these were probably the most disturbing images to reach us in the early 21st century: a tidal wave triggered by a seaquake, on which burning houses, ships and cars drifted over square kilometers inland, taking everything with them, rolling everything down. The tsunami also hit the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima-Daiichi, located directly on the Pacific Ocean. In the three days following the quake, between March 12 and 14, 2011, meltdowns and explosions occurred and radiation leaked out. Over 160,000 people had to be evacuated. Around 2,000 deaths are indirectly linked to the nuclear power plant accident. However, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, only one person died as a result of exposure to radiation.

While the Japanese reacted with admirable stoicism and pragmatic efficiancy to rebuild the infrastructure and secure the destroyed nuclear power plant, the disaster immediately triggered another one in Berlin, 8,750 kilometers away: the German “Energiewende” (energy U-turn). Just one day later, Chancellor Angela Merkel canceled the extension of the operating life of Germany’s nuclear power plants, which had just been negotiated with the energy industry and was expressly intended to reduce CO2 emissions. Of the 19 German nuclear power plant units still in operation at the time, some of them brand new and most of them ultra-modern, all 19 have been shut down to date and some have already been “dismantled”.

At the same time, Merkel had already been presiding over the gradual but total phase-out of the German hard coal industry for six years, always in close consultation with all relevant parties. She was able to announce completion at the end of 2018. The last shafts of the last mines are currently being backfilled with concrete after all the mining equipment has been recovered from the depths. The reserves stored underground that would last for 300 years will therefore be inaccessible forever. Of course, the German economy will need hard coal for years to come, but it is now being imported from countries such as Colombia, where it is extracted under far more dangerous and environmentally damaging conditions. The phase-out of lignite in Germany has also come a long way, with extremist protesters and activists relentlessly driving Merkel’s successor Olaf Scholz on. The dismantling of coal-fired power plants is equally in full swing and coal-fired power generation is to be terminated by 2038 at the latest.

Once in the throes of abolition, Merkel also decided to put an end to the fuel-burning car engine and committed the German automotive industry to only build electric vehicles powered by green electricity in the medium term. Even after a decade of Energiewende, we still don't know how to store this type of electricity (which still accounts for less than a fifth of the total energy required in Germany) for times when there is too little wind or sunshine, or even how to transport it to distant parts of the country. Or when the necessary charging infrastructure for e-mobility could sufficiently cover the whole of Germany. Or why a car with highly toxic heavy metal batteries should be more environmentally friendly than a modern combustion engine vehicle.

None of this seemed to matter for an industrial society that had simply thrown away a well-established mix of energy sources after Fukushima. After all, there was Mr Putin, with whom not only Merkel had excellent connections (GDR-tested: she spoke Russian at meetings, he as an ex-spy chief is fluent in German), but also her SPD predecessor in office. Gerhard Schröder, the Gazprom lobbyist, did his bit for the joint mega-project, the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. The fact that this device for guaranteeing the energy “base load” would lead us into a fatal dependency on the Moscow regime of philanthropists was not a thorn in anyone's side here. Well, almost anyone’s, for it enraged a foreign power. Which is why American extraterrestrial agents simply blew up the remaining “fossil” energy supply for a country of 85 million inhabitants–without the German foreign minister even finding it worth commenting on. So what, we'll just buy the expensive fracking dirt from Biden's buddies in the USA. That is, in around ten years' time, once we have beautified our coastal nature reserves with the necessary terminals, hubs, and pipelines.

In February of 2023 the renowned former New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh presented detailed research according to which the Nord Stream sabotage was carried out on the direct orders of US President Biden by special forces of the US Navy. The embarrassed silence in German government circles couldn’t have been louder. Recently, another theory has gained traction: Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now supposed to be the supervillain mastermind of the blowing-up. Which is somewhat ironic, given that Germany spends gazillions of euros to finance his war against Putin and to acommodate millions of Ukrainian refugees.

But regardless of the whodunnit, one little thing seems irreversible: the nuclear age, this high plateau in the history of human civilization, is now the past in Germany. Meanwhile, the EU recommends nuclear energy as climate-friendly and new nuclear power plants are being built around the world. In China, for example, they are even constructing early precursors of economically viable fusion reactors that could bring eternal prosperity to their society. But this is undoubtedly another No-Go in the worldview of crazy German climate ideologues who, applauded by their like-minded comrades in the media, are guilty of the most naive and irresponsible energy policy strategy of all time and of all nations.

Waypoint #5
Date: Sep 5, 2015
Merkel's opening of the border
Time since previous waypoint: 4 years, 6 months
Damage report: overloading of social systems, parallel societies, smuggling of migrants

The unconditional opening of the border by the German Chancellor on September 5, 2015, the carte blanche for Syrian refugees and those who claimed to be, was only a few days old. Unchecked and unregistered, thousands upon thousands of predominantly young, able-bodied men from a culture far removed from democracy and devastated by war were streaming into the country every day by train or other means. Deutschlandfunk radio interviewed a volunteer who was distributing water bottles and provisions to the new arrivals at Hamburg Central Station. When asked about his motives, he replied: “I hope they will help us to become better people.” BILD had headlined: “The whole world is celebrating us Germans.”

And now Katrin Göring-Eckardt, at the time leader of the Green Party in the Bundestag, formulated a question in ARD TV’s live morning magazine that turned into a categorical imperative while she was still speaking: “Are we a country that is open to migrants, that attracts people who we urgently need, not just skilled workers, but because we also need people here who are at home in our social systems and also feel at home there.”

In retrospect, these few confused days and quotes already hold the key to understanding–as far as this is rationally possible–the further development of German migration policy since 2015. Psychologically, the fixation of several post-war generations on a learned guilt complex flares up: free entry for all as imagined atonement for collective German sins; at the same time, the perceived grandiosity of the atoners, who see themselves “celebrated” by the whole world, becomes apparent. The inextricable confusion between “temporary asylum” due to flight from war or persecution and “immigration”, i.e. permanent settlement in the host society and even naturalization, is already evident.

In the logic of #wirhabenplatz (“we have free space”), the distinction between asylum seekers, those temporarily entitled to shelter, tolerated persons, those obliged to leave the country, permanent immigrants and family reunifiers, is hardly made any more. This results in a self-legitimizing migrant status: anyone who defines themselves as “seeking refuge” from whatever adversity is allowed to cross our borders. Those who have crossed are allowed to stay. This has been the system since 2015, and it was fully intentional. Because a little later, during the coronavirus crisis, it became clear that the fatalistic Laissez-faire-Merkel (“So what, now they're here”) could mutate overnight into the energetic guardian of an iron border regime. The permeability all depended on the context and the target group.

However, the political figure of Göring-Eckardt also shows that the advocates of an open-access society are not only alien to any macro-economic considerations, thus “being at home in our social systems” is offered as something positive. No, the question of the financial ability of the host society to cope with mass migration amounts to heresy: who is going to discuss money when it comes to the fates of refugees? The counter-question of who would not discuss money or demand reason when it comes to the fate of the host society would be simply inhumane for those who think this way.

In the case of Göring-Eckardt, who has held the highes offices a layperson can obtain in the German Protestant Church, there is also the moral-theological joy of virtue-signalling. When the current Vice-President of the Bundestag spoke her famous credo “Germany will change radically, and I'm looking forward to it” in front of a green wall in November 2015, a small rhetorical addendum was usually not quoted: “It will probably also become more religious.”

And she was absolutely right. Well over two million predominantly Muslim immigrants since 2015, quite a few of them from fundamentalist to fanatical sects, stand for this. Conversely, hundreds of thousands in the host society have since quit their Protestant and Catholic congregations, but migration has led to a renaissance of religion. The only problem is that a society divided into “communities”, tribes, clans and cliques without a common language and shared values can now hardly agree on the consensus that is the bottom to fall back on in times of need.

Waypoint #6
Date: Mar 22, 2020
First nationwide Covid-19 lockdown
Time since previous waypoint: 4 years, 7 months
Damage report: rampant sociopathy, unleashed executive power, dismantling of fundamental rights

If there is any new, halfway original insight into the Covid-19 complex, then perhaps this is it: the mother of all measures, the announcement of the first German lockdown by the Federal Chancellor Merkel on March 22, 2020, had to turn into a cascade of lies and half-truths and misinterpretations and feigned lack of alternatives in no time at all. From the outset, the precarious danger of slipping and the constant threat of this scree slope descending in an avalanche of exposed falsehoods created the fatal momentum of ever more manipulation to support the official narrative that we are still suffering from today. The dramatic imbalance between the official fear narrative and reliable facts created the pressure to bend and conceal key statistics, to prevent the traceability of causal chains and responsibilities, to push through media language regulations and bans, to drown out uncomfortable questions.

Virtually nothing was proven or stood up to scrutiny. Not the origin of the virus from a weekly market. Not the nationwide overloading of intensive care units. Not the medical usefulness of the PCR test. Not the usefulness of masks as they are otherwise used in the construction industry. Not the need to vaccinate children and young people. Not the official accounting methods, according to which hundreds of thousands died of Covid, instead of with the Coronavirus. Not the safety of the new mRNA vaccines pushed onto the market without the usual testing. Not the assertion that vaccinated people are safe from disease or will not transmit the virus to others. And especially not the idea that a society can remain healthy if it only consistently stops treating each other as human beings and supporting each other physically and directly as human beings in severe suffering.

Almost every leading role in this horror show of an unleashed executive was filled by people who were either not up to the responsibility of their positions or abused them for personal gain. Truly terrifying sociopaths appeared and still appear before the cameras, whose psychological need for treatment is only surpassed by their resistance to therapy. And they, of all people, are allowed to wear titles that nobilitate them as practitioners and servants of the healthcare system. To question the legitimacy of these titles alone was enough for some of them to get into serious trouble.

The social balance sheet of the coronavirus disaster–a term that is ambiguous in terms of what exactly about the “pandemic” was catastrophic–is more devastating in Germany than in almost any other country. The worst thing is not even the hundreds of billions of euros created out of thin air, which were squandered on contradictory, chaotic, misanthropic and ultimately largely useless measures and which in themselves were enough to ruin state finances in the long term. The worst thing is the relapse into Thomas Hobbes' utterly miserable world of “homo homini lupus”.

We humans, as state-building rational animals, have been officially demoted to being wolves, as in prehistoric times, tearing into every other wolf, denouncing our neighbors, our best friends, even our children, as enemies and bringers of death. The country will not recover from this for many years. But a society of isolated individuals, so weakened in its social coherence, is wounded and ripe for the kill shot that any new attacker from another direction might want to deliver.

Waypoint #7
Date: Feb 24, 2022
Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western “counter measures”
Time since previous waypoint: 1 year, 11 months
Damage report (so far): rampant inflation, energy emergency, war loans

Here we are, if we could still pick ourselves up, out in the open and in the middle of nowhere. Thrown out of our derailed train, slowed down to zero by a wall of self-built concrete blocks. We shake the dust from our hair and torn clothes, examine scratches and bruises, stand in shock before an unfolding panorama of widespread destruction. There’s thunder rumbling in the east. We duly take note of the price hikes that last hit our ancestors a century ago at the beginning of the German hyperinflation in 1923. We read about broken supply chains, are told to stop taking long hot showers and instructed to wear thick sweaters instead of heating our homes. One business after another is closing down. Deep down in the Baltic Sea, North Stream 2 lies dormant. Whether “friend” or foe, this time they are serious about the Morgenthau Plan.

A war is already raging in Europe that we, as a sovereign nation, could have helped prevent by means of diplomacy (and with a valiant effort still could help stop). Instead, our top Green politicians and opinion leaders are almost eager to fulfill non-existent alliance obligations, after the same party once behaved pacifist and thus took its unfortunate rise. As Ukraine now attacks Russian territory, for the first time in 80 years or sowith the help of German offensive weapons, the Green elites are fully on board with that. And as if all this wasn't enough, a bow tie wearing hysteric in Berlin is ranting about new waves of viruses that are causing him great concern and demanding all our defensive capabilities. The majority of ageing and infantilized Germans seems grateful to him for everything.

This man is the personified aftershock of one of the six historical quakes I have described. But he is not the only one who is still disrupting things, as I have tried to show. The epicenter of many of these old and new tremors is not even our increasingly dysfunctional German capital, but rather the USA, whose way of life and death generations in Germany have apparently decided to imitate from the cradle to the grave. As if we had a subscription to suicidal Americanism: zero interest rates, migration, the “pandemic” measures–whatever foolishness was preached there was considered gospel here. And so it is now in the Ukraine war: our transatlanticists, our Joschka Fischers and their political think tanks, our globalized Davos pilgrims under the spell of the largest US corporations, they are all reciting in their own words what Big Brother Washington has pre-formulated in terms of friends and enemies, taboos and to-dos. It is still inconceivable to them that the richest uncle does not necessarily have to be the best friend.

But again, the USA is not to blame for everything that threatens Germany. We here make it infinitely easy for any attacker, from whatever direction, with our German angst, our German naivety, our German inexperience in matters of power and self-assertion. The only constant in our politics since the days of the Kaiser is this: the world (and its climate) is supposed to be rescued by the German character. The feminization of politics has added a specifically female helper syndrome to this. Emotionalism rules instead of realpolitik, and to deal with the consequences billions in aid packages are thrown in afterwards.

We now have the choice of which of the seven biblical plagues we would like to succumb to–or, with an infinite amount of luck, we can cheat our way under the lowest level limbo bar one last time. But the only thing that the Germans would conclude from this hopeless situation in the event of a new general election, perhaps brought forward by a timely collapse of the ruling coalition, would be to vote for the CDU for a change (which then would form a coalition with the Greens). That guy Friedrich Merz, he always wears such nice ties.

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This article is an updated version of a two-part German language essay that was first published in October 2022 in TWASBO Magazine.