Putin, the violent anarchist

Germany is obsessed with the violent riots against the G8 summit. They are being driven by a subgroup of the left-wing protest movements known in Germany as the "Autonome" (and popularly called the "black bloc").

Now, the word "autonom" of course also means autonomous - and as an adjective is sometimes used to designate protectionist or autarchic policies. Never, though, is a protectionist called an "Autonome".

Never, that is, other than in a current lapsus on the Spiegel website. Where it says, in large letters - and next to a rather funky photo of Putin in a black suit and black sunglasses: "Putin, der Autonome".

An elaborate pun? Comedy-value to be had out of imagining the cold Putin as he throws stones full of emotion against Western capitalism? The choice of colour in the Putin photo a subtle allusion to the "Black Bloc"?

More realistically: a linguistic error, and bad copy-editing. But perhaps the beginning of a new linguistic trend, the transformation of a word. Exciting stuff. Better, at least, than the 100th discussion round on German TV about whether the violence was caused by the "Black Bloc" or police provocation.

(See also my analysis of Parisian anarchists a few weeks ago - my friend Thierry, by the way, rightly pointed out that I should have distinguished more clearly between the extreme left-wing and anarchists in that post)

Honouring Dead Soldiers

Soldiers and death have long been a controversial topic in Germany – not just because of the Nazi past. In the German peace movement, for example, a slogan – borrowed from Kurt Tucholsky – is very popular: “Soldiers are Murderers.” A few years ago, the German Constitutional Court ruled that this slogan did not constitute slander, and therefore was a legitimate use of freedom of expression, so long as it wasn't used to describe any particular soldier. A fair enough legal cop-out to resolve the problem.

But now the topic soldiers and death is re-emerging again in a very different way, which, alas, will not be resolved by a clever judge. In the “Bonn Republic” it was taboo to use the German army for military missions abroad. But since 1994, German soldiers have been participating in foreign missions once again – and over the last thirteen years 69 have died in combat, including some who were killed a few days ago in a suicide attack in Afghanistan. It has become increasingly apparent that their comrades and families wish that there was a central monument at which they could remember the dead. This is understandable.

It is also important for a democracy not to turn its eyes away when citizens have died on a mission which the people – represented by Parliament – has sent them on. After all, unnecessary wars can best be avoided when all voters are well-aware of the faces and stories of the nation's own victims. This insight has inspired Immanuel Kant's stipulation in Perpetual Peace that a nation should not have a standing army, so that all citizens must fear that any victims of a war they embark upon might be friend or even family. Not to credit Bush with Kant's analytical gifts, this is also the very reason why the US President wouldn't allow the coffins of American soldiers to be photographed...

At the same time, though, the opposite danger also exists. The pictures of glorifying or simply tasteless war monuments in Germany express this more eloquently than words. All too easily, war monuments can either speak too positively of war, in an attempt to justify the immense suffering (I expressly avoid the word “sacrifice”, though suffering is perhaps also euphemistic) it imposes on victims. Or they speak of the dead, often in their teens when they were slain in the battlefield, as though they had willingly laid down their life in pursuit of a noble ideal. Whilst the former phenomenon is particularly true of 19th century and Nazi-time German monuments, the latter holds for many 20th century designs too – I have, for example, often observed it on English World War I memorials.

It is imperative that we are more honest with ourselves, even when talking about soldiers who died on missions we wholly approve of. Even when soldiers were indeed pursuing a noble ideal, and even when they did make a conscious decision to risk their life, it is too easy too elevate them into a moral sainthood which only serves to mask the fact that we all, as citizens of a democracy, sent them to their death. So please no more talk of teenagers valliantly and willingly laying down their life – whether it be for the most noble cause or the basest nationalism.

Assuming that a new German war memorial will soon be built, the real question therefore is what the inscription should be. I've already noted two possible dangers, which should at all cost be avoided – even if, in the extreme case, the cost is not building the monument.

Let me finish with a suggestion from Munich. On the Leopoldstrasse, a central, representative 19th century boulevard, a rather martial triumph arc has stood for one and a half centuries. Its original inscription: “To the victories of the Bavarian Army”. After it was destroyed in World War II, the monument was rebuilt, with its original inscription on one side. But on the other side, it now reads, in plain latters and sober, evocative language:

“Dem Sieg geweiht. Vom Krieg zerstört. Dem Frieden mahnend”

“Dedicated to Victory. Destroyed by War. Calling to Peace”

Right-Wing Extremist Crime on Rise in Germany

Sorry for the recent string of German-related entries on this blog. Back in France tonight, and then there'll be more entries about France and other countries.

Just to note here that according to the Verfassungschutzbericht 2006 (a yearly report by the German federal agency responsible for the protection of the constitution), which was presented by Germany's Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble a few hours ago, right-wing extremist crime has risen 18.1% in 2006, as compared to 2005. This means that a staggering 18.100 right-wing extremist crimes were committed in Germany last year.

German TV dementia

Currently in Munich, I was watching German TV yesterday night for the first time in a long, long while. They served me up a rather entertaining half-documentary, half-movie about the first German experiences of serious terrorism.

Two moments of dementia, however, were striking and amusing. A Lufthansa plane had been hijacked, and has found its rocky way to Mogadishu. German special forces - the infamously incompetent GSG9 - are flown in to liberate the hostages. When they arrive, the Somali authorities are training to storm the plane themselves.

The German commander makes fun of them: "I asked them whether they had ever stormed a plane before. I had to explain to them that it isn't so easy, that people could die. But the Somali commander looked all-excited: 'we don't have any experience of how to do this, but we've been practising since this morning', he told me. Naturally, it would have ended in a catastrophe had we left the affair to the Somalis".

Quite. Just as it did end in a catastrophe when in Munich, a couple of years before, the same GSG9 decided to refuse a request by the vastly more experienced Israeli forces to allow them to mastermind the operation. Instead, the GSG9 took things into their Germanic hands, and stormed the plane full of Israeli Olympic athletes hijacked by Palastinians. All hostages died. A few years ago, Germany was even convicted to pay some damages to relatives of the victims for its insufficient handling of the situation. So the experience the German in the documentary seemed so proud of stems primarily from that catastrophe...

Second, there was a comic moment when Helmut Schmidt, who was Germany's Chancellor at the time of the successful Mogadishu operation, was recalling how useful it was that nearly all politicians in charge at the time had been Wehrmacht officiers not that he proncounced the word "Wehrmacht", makign reference merely to their position as Unterleutnant. "The hijackers didn't know what cattle of fish they were dealing with - they had certainly made a huge miscalulation" he said, commenting on his military experience. Well, yes. But Schmidt's point didn't exactly help to diissipate the terrorists' - no doubt ridiculous - claim, oft-repeated in the movie-elements of the show, that the German government were all fascists anyway...

Not making any serious points with this, but amusing, I think, these instances of German TV dementia certainly are.

Red-Green Comeback in Germany

At today's elections in Germany's smallest state, Bremen, the governing grand coalition has suffered marked losses, whilst the Green Party has increased its share of the vote to over 16%. It is likely that Bremen's Social Democrats will choose to govern in a coalition with the Green party henceforth - even though a grand coalition would continue to have a large majority and a red-green coalition would have been possible even in the last Parliament.

For those, admittedly not many, who are nostalgic for the seven years in which Gerhard Schroeder was Germany's Chancellor this is important news: the red-green model had become completely wiped out in Germany, not only on the national but also on the state level.

A little bit of hope, however, is also restored to others, who perhaps were never entirely enthusiastic about the Schroeder government, and yet hope that Germany's political future lies with its moderate left of centre forces. For socially liberal social democrats the Green Party is the natural coalition partner because it provides a corrective for socially authoritarian and populist forces on the left, such as those trumpeted by Oskar Lafontaine in Germany, some Old Labourites and, in part, Royal in France.

It was with the Red-Green coalition of 1998 that the social changes initiated by the 1968 generation found visible representation in the country's political leadership. These accomplishments have now, by and large, penetrated into the political consensus. But many battles for social advances remain to be fought. These need a political home, which for progressive left-wingers in Germany is likely to remain, to a great part, somewhere between the Social Democratic and the Green Party.

For this reason, today's election result in the tiny state of Bremen is important, even though it is a very long road indeed to the next Red-Green coalition on the national level - and, alas, possibly an even longer road to a national Red-Green coalition that can live up to the hopes initially invested in the 1998 Schroeder government.

Ghosts of the Past

The Filbinger affair, and Germany’s search for ’normality’.

In 1978, Hans Filbinger was forced to resign as premier of Germany's South-Western region, Baden-Württemberg, when the Nazi bureaucracy's meticulous filing cabinets proved beyond all doubt that as a prosecutor in World War II he had asked for a teenage army deserters to be put to death.

But guilt, apparently, lies in the eye of the beholder. Filbinger never admitted that his actions during the Nazi regime had been wrong. Instead, he opined: “What was just then, can't be unjust now”.

Until he died on April 1st of this year, Filbinger remained an honorary president of the Christian Democratic Party – to which Chancellor Angela Merkel also belongs. At party conferences, he continued to be given a place of honor. Nevertheless, most of the country's establishment had distanced itself from him. The Filbinger affair remained in the national conscience as a watershed event, which stood for an uneasy yet earnest confrontation with Germany's Nazi past.

But last week, at Filbinger's funeral, his successor Günter Öttinger, ignoring plain historical fact, claimed: “Hans Filbinger never was a National Socialist. On the contrary, he was an opponent of the Nazi regime.” In case any doubt remained about the revisionist intentions of the speech, Öttinger hammered the message home even more brutally: “Filbinger did not hand down any judgements which caused anyone to lose their life.”

This was not just a momentary rhetorical lapse. Nor does Öttinger merely have a peculiar conception of what an opponent of Nazism is – it would have to be very peculiar for a member of the SA and the NSDAP, a judge who in one instance continued to apply Nazi law even after German capitulation, to qualify. No: Öttinger's office freely admitted that the speech was carefully crafted, and had been discussed in detail.

This leaves only two possibilities. Either the speech was a deliberate political ploy to appeal to the party's far-right. Or Öttinger, who belongs to the first generation of German leaders to be born after World War II, no longer sees the need for truth or tact in dealing with the past. In the first case, the renewed Filbinger affair, which has been monopolising German front pages for the past week, would be a shocking instance of ill-judged populism, but of limited importance. In the second case, it would stand for a wider trend in German society, with potentially far-reaching implications.

Unfortunately, the latter interpretation is the more plausible one.

An earlier generation of obstinate revisionists was primarily concerned with white-washing the post-war German elite – many of whom, in their youth, had been all too willing to participate in the Nazi frenzy, just like Filbinger. But by now, those implicated in Nazi crimes have either died, or retired from public life. For the likes of Öttinger, then, the trivialization of the historical guilt of Filbinger and others is no end in itself. Rather, it is a necessary means to a more ambitious goal: to allow Germany once again to be unthinkingly nationalist.

This would not pose much of a problem if Germans actually were capable of expressing straightforward patriotism without much reflection. But in reality, a sense of "normal nationalism", though much talked about and even more ardently desired in recent years, remains elusive. In reality, Germany's new-found nationalism, for many, is predicated on drawing a categorical “Schlusstrich”, or concluding line, under the country's self-critical preoccupation with its past.

The problem is that for a nation in search of normality – which other country, by the way, desires first of all to be normal? – normality will forever be elusive. As long as Germans keep telling each other in all-too-audible stage whispers not to talk about the past, nationalism and historical honesty will continue to prove incompatible.

The desire to block all things relating to Germany's not-so-normal past out of view also makes impossible a real battle against the resurgent far-right. Neo-Nazis are gaining an ever firmer grip on community life in certain areas of the country; at the last state elections, which were held in the Northeastern region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 18 % of voters aged 18 to 24 voted for the Neo-Nazi party NPD; and according to recently released records, xenophobic as well as anti-Semitic crimes have reached new record heights last year.

It's true that the way to fight these developments does not consist in over-dramatizing them as though a Fourth Reich was just around the corner – it is not. But democrats must worry and react when the extreme right-wing is gathering such momentum. The need to pretend that everything is normal can hardly be helpful in this respect. On the contrary, it encourages wilful ignorance, as expressed by Germany's Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble – a political ally of Öttinger – when he insisted that the racist murder of a black German engineer was no big deal: “After all, crimes are committed every day against Germans with blond hair and blue eyes”.

It thus seems that, despite decades of similar controversies, every generation of German elites has to learn anew to reconcile their patriotism with seriousness about the past and vigilance in the present.

Up until now, those politicians who loved their country yet managed to express sincere regret about the Nazi past have usually carried the day. Unforgotten, for example, are the breathtaking pictures of former Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling in front of the monument for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in December 1970. At first, a majority of Germans loathed him for it – but over time, especially after Brandt received the Nobel Peace Prize, most came to agree that the gesture had been appropriate.

It is difficult to imagine Angela Merkel accomplishing such a historic gesture. Her style is too discreet and rational for symbolism of this kind. But she did what the last Christian Democratic Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, most probably would have failed to do – publicly reprimand Öttinger.

Merkel's frank words did not exactly help to solidify her standing within her own party which, by and large, had cheered Öttinger's remarks from the sidelines. Indeed, some senior politicians declared that Merkel's protest, not Öttinger's original remarks, were the real scandal. But her intervention did force him to publish an apology of sorts, if only after days of obstinate wavering.

Let's hope that most Germans, undeniably keen for their country to express patriotism more prominently, will turn to Brandt's courage or Merkel's sober honesty, not Filbinger's and Öttinger's distorting idyll of 'normality', for a source of inspiration. If – and it is a considerable if – the renewed debate about Filbinger has helped Germany make that choice, some good might, after all, have come from it.