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Home , Armin Mohler, Roman Reusch

Number 150 • July / August 2017

Editor Jacob Heilbrunn

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By Thomas Meaney

n Stuttgart I was awoken by a large to cut path through bushes. What poor rab- man outside my hotel window wear- bits!” was the comment of the Ta g e s z e i t u n g. ing a niqab. “I am the protest for the “At least the bushes were German bushes.” AfD / and that is totally ok!” went the As a right-wing party that is likely to Ihoarse refrain. It was the annual convention gain seats in the in this Septem- for the Alternative für Deutschland, Ger- ber’s federal election, the AfD is more than many’s no longer fledgling far-right party. a novelty in postwar German politics. In More than four thousand of the faithful a country dominated by ’s had converged in Stuttgart to make it the Christian Democratic Union (cdu), how- largest rally of its kind in Germany since ever, there are only so many inroads it can the war. (Unlike other German political par- make before its more viable platforms are ties, which send delegates to conventions, cannibalized by the cdu. Ever since Merkel the AfD leadership, true to its populist was caught unawares on her right flank, she credo, had invited all members to attend.) has been speaking AfD talking points— For AfDers passing by, the niqab man from from the proposed burqa ban to the swifter Pforzheim was a Charlie Hebdo caricature banishment of undesirable refugees—and come alive: a bit of a chore for the media- thus far has gamely contained the threat. relations department, perhaps, but neverthe- Merkel benefits, too, from previous practice less a rude emblem of the cause. As I walked down the slalom course to the chancellor- across the Stuttgart Messe from my hotel to ship, which requires a hard-right turn on the convention hall draped in the party’s sky- bended knee for her sister party’s constitu- blue banners, the AfDers came under fire ents in Bavaria—where she tightly smiles from young Greens and Antifascist protesters alongside its local chieftain, Horst See- stationed in the adjacent parking lot, lobbing hofer, a man who has publicly accused her cake and packets of excrement over the secu- of conducting a “reign of injustice.” Then rity perimeter. “Blue is the new Brown!” they comes a soft slide to the center for the rest shouted. “Voting AfD is so 1933!” An Aus- of the year in order to blur the miniscule trian venture capitalist directed me toward differences between her party and the Social some cover, as we followed the AfD leaders Democrats. What makes the AfD upstarts through a thick row of bushes up an em- irritating for Merkel is that they make this bankment into the main hall. “AfD forced blurring maneuver more difficult. Inside the vast, hangar-like space of the Thomas Meaney is the fellow in residence at Stuttgart Messe, the AfDers were already the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. He has reported tipsy with the feeling of making history. The from Germany for the London Review of Books, the Alternative für Deutschland is a party of Guardian and the New Yorker. elbow patches and ascots, but also one of

52 The National Interest Teutonic Tremors leather bodysuits and high-and-tight hair- for the microphones to make changes and cuts. Milling about the breakfast tables were offer amendments. “Burqas and hijabs do men in Trachten jackets, surgically sculpted not belong in Germany,” read one clause. women, a Trappist monk, a child on an elec- “But,” said a plaintive man in plaid, “we tronic scooter, and a man in a green uni- cannot just ban all headgear—handkerchiefs form modeled on the one his ancestor wore on women’s heads is the traditional German in Blücher’s army at Waterloo (“Napoleon style—our grandmothers wore those!” “We was the beginning of this eu shit”). The at- need to make it specific: only burqas and mosphere was warm and burgherly, with a niqabs should be banned—we need to be slightly forced sense of camaraderie. Conspir- precise in our language.” Germany’s status acy theories were politely passed around as if as a country of immigrants was roundly re- they were snaps of newborn children. There jected. “We should be a land of skilled im- was the reaffirming presence of right-wing migrants,” shouted one man. Mild applause. neighbors, brothers and sisters from Aus- “We should be a land of no immigration tria and Switzerland and German-speaking except special immigration that we want,” enclaves beyond. In a corner of the room said another man. Raucous foot-thumping. I saw Václav Klaus standing alone, testing Already a few hours in, the appetite for de- the coffee. Fed up with the staid rituals of bate was quelled. The AfDers waited for Germany’s Altparteien, “the old parties,” the their pet issues to come on the screen, which AfDers were preparing themselves for un- made them brush other people’s pet issues known territory: an open-floor debate over away from the microphone as soon as pos- issues, and with it, the prospect of the sort sible. We were moving at a brisk, auction- of political exhilaration the rest of Germany style pace. In the controversial categories, the regards in bad taste. A YouTube video AfDers more radical proposals rose to the surface as like to circulate shows Merkel pulling the if obeying some hidden political law. There German flag out of the hands of one of her was disagreement over the merits of market colleagues at a Christian Democrat rally, dis- reforms, the nato alliance and the public posing it out of view of the camera and giv- funding of German theater, but one clause ing him a reproaching shake of the head. In garnered no dissenters; it was the tie that Stuttgart, the German national flag and the bound: “Islam does not belong in Germany.” AfD flag were everywhere, rivaled only by the awkward presence of placards for Turkish hough it is hardly a difficult feat, Airlines, the refugee carrier of choice. leadership of the Alternative für The convention was not merely intend- T Deutschland has more eye-catching ed to channel grievances and rage. It was creatures than the rest of the German po- also meant to prove to the German press litical establishment combined. There is the that the AfD was not a flash phenomenon, gamine party cochair, , and her but a professional, fully functioning politi- husband, Marcus Pretzell, the AfD cohead cal party. To that purpose, the AfD lead- of North-Rhine Westphalia, who were once ers onstage lapsed into reflexive procedural treated as enterprising transgressors by the frenzy—Vereinsmeierei—about how to con- German tabloids. But now, in their effort to duct the voting: voting about whether to turn the party in a more “realistic” direction vote with electronic devices or a show of to woo “moderate” voters, they have been hands. A 1,250-page party program had beaten back by a portion of the party that been circulated. Clauses appeared on a giant wants the AfD to be a “fundamental opposi- blue screen, and AfDers queued in two lines tion” party that does not seek to soften its

Teutonic Tremors July/August 2017 53 tone in order to make alliances, but rather Oldenberg who clings to her aristocratic to force other parties to toe its hard line. roots and wears riding outfits at her pub- Petry likes to quote Kant, cites the studies lic appearances, she is the party’s talk-show of the Oxford economist Paul Collier and warrior. The AfD’s resident Islam expert is claims to have developed her views on Islam Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a small man in from deep teenage reading of V. S. Nai- his thirties, who was born in Romania and paul. Pretzell has called for more Germans who has published peer-reviewed articles in to own firearms—which confuses almost American journals on Koranic jurisprudence. everyone—and is an expert at worrying the The house philosopher is , an elderly about the eu’s plans to abolish paper assistant professor of aesthetics at the Uni- money. Then there is , versity of Karlsruhe, who was born in Italy the face of the “fundamental” opposition (“South Tyrol” on his curriculum vitae) and camp. He is a disgruntled cdu exile, prone became a German citizen five years ago. to regular Trumpian outbursts, who holds a Finally, there is Björn Höcke. A former personal vendetta against Merkel for crush- history and gym teacher, he is the AfD’s ing his rebel cdu faction that secretly plot- steely-eyed Robespierre, whose yearning ted against her. Together with the fresher to normalize Germany’s Nazi past makes face of , a former Goldman the more practical AfDers perpetually try Sachs foot soldier in China, who is the AfD’s to purge him from their ranks. As Höcke latest sop to its pro-business constituents, entered the hall late on the first day of the Gauland is the candidate for the AfD’s bid convention in Stuttgart, he was loudly to enter the Bundestag in the general elec- cheered by his faction. An avowed anti- tion in September. Holding up the party’s Atlanticist who claims “our once respected base is , an AfD repre- army has deteriorated into a de-gendered sentative to the eu, whose grandfather, Lutz and multi-culturalized response force in the Krosigk, was the short-lived Nazi chancel- service of the usa,” Höcke worries openly lor after Hitler. A duchess of the House of about the dilution of the ethnic German

Image: Frauke Petry.

54 The National Interest Teutonic Tremors population due to the “reproductive strate- what they saw as the creeping normaliza- gies” of Africans. In a country where the tion of the party. Centered around Höcke average birth rate is 1.38 children per fam- and Gauland, with Meuthen as their unas- ily, no one can fault the AfD leadership for suming front man, the ideologues of the not doing its part to perpetuate the German AfD reject any attempt to institutional- Volk. Höcke has four children; the AfD’s ize distance between the AfD and openly other co-chair, Jörg Meuthen, has five; Petry extreme-right and Nazi parties, such as the and Pretzell recently added a ninth child to National Democratic Party (ndp), as well their combined eight, in time for the federal as street movements, such as (Patri- elections in September. otic Europeans Against the Islamicisation Like most political parties, the AfD lead- of the West). Typically, they justify these ership can be roughly divided between op- relations using 1968-style rhetoric, calling portunists and ideologues. Petry and Pret- for openness, plurality, tolerance and devi- zell pride themselves on their entrepreneur- ance. In terms of the economy, Höcke and ial instincts and wish they could run the Gauland’s faction is hostile to free-market party more like a business. Their faction principles, as well as the European Union, of the party grasps the basics of Facebook however much it facilitates Germany’s re- and Twitter, has much of the youth wing gional economic dominance. Höcke calls behind it and is determined to get as many for, in echt Nazi diction, “the organic econ- seats as possible in the Bundestag, with omy.” It is not so much the implosion of the eventual prospect of joining coalitions. the Third Reich that the Erfurters lament, They are neoliberal fellow travelers, admir- but rather the terms imposed upon them ers of Schröder’s political savvy, and were by the Allies. For Höcke, 1945 was not very against Brexit until they were for it (rather different from Versailles: a people forced to touchingly, they first looked up to the To- give up too much for what was essentially a ries as experienced elders in the noble work bogus form of independence brokered and of destroying the eu from within, until overseen by two superpowers. Unlike Petry’s the Tories accidentally ejected themselves faction, the Erfurt faction does not need to from Brussels altogether). Solemnity now dog whistle in public; they just put their replaces laughter when Trump’s name is lips together and blow. mentioned. Petry and Pretzell differ from the opportunists in other alt-right parties, n my second day in Stuttgart, I such as ukip, in the quality of their desper- found the spacious and well- ation. Whereas the several ukip leaders and O stocked pressroom on the second high-level Tory sympathizers could gamble floor of the Messe, where many of the re- on a populist program, assured of comfort- porters were watching the AfD proceedings able lives regardless of the result, for Petry through glass, at a comfortable distance. We and Pretzell politics is an existential affair: were surprised to see that the anti-1968 ap- failure means facing lawsuits (that their po- peals used to gin up the crowd got louder litical office, under German law, currently shouts of affirmation than the anti-Islam protects them against), possible financial jeers. Nevertheless, it was difficult not to ruin and, all too likely, obscurity. notice how Islamophobia was the glue that The ideologues of the AfD are known as bound various factions together and kept the the “Erfurt” faction, ever since they pub- room on the same footing. Islam, as Mary lished a resolution in the Thuringian capi- McCarthy once said of anti-Semitism in tal in March 2015 that sought to undo America, also provides some AfDers with

Teutonic Tremors July/August 2017 55 their only access to intellectual life. There be crushed. “We—whoever we exactly were men all around the room eager to lec- are—we have the newspapers, the schools, ture about the secret network of imams the tv, the cultural institutions,” the Zeit (whose portraits they carried on index cards), writer Bernd Ulrich told me. He continued: or the plot by George Soros to retroactively avenge the Nazis who destroyed his child- It’s not easy for my younger colleagues to un- hood by overwhelming the continent with derstand, but we have been here before in the Muslims. But despite the occasional chuckles 1970s and 80s and we—feminists, gays, liber- at absurdities proposed by the AfDers, there als—we won. Now we’re the “liberal hege- was little sense of how the mainstream Ger- mons” or whatever you want to call us. The man journalists themselves had contributed question is: what does fighting mean today? to the populist phenomenon below, in partic- ular its anti-Muslim elements. In the 2000s, The most curious lapse in the German the mainstream Der Spiegel ran covers that media’s coverage of the AfD concerns the mirror the arguments and iconography of the story of its origins. It is almost universally current far-right popular magazine, Compact. acknowledged, even by the AfD’s own party AfDers can legitimately point to the leadership, that the Alternative für Deutsch- fact that they are being scorned by the land started out as a “professors’ party,” same press that pushed the same clash-of- founded in 2014 by Bernd Lucke, a mild- civilizations mind-set until very recently, mannered economics professor at Hamburg. and still does in mildly more subtle forms. In his own telling, Lucke started the AfD For party members in the East, where there with a group of like-minded academic and are very few Muslim immigrants, many of journalist colleagues who felt betrayed by the earliest and most enduring images of Merkel’s second extension of debt relief to Islam that they carry in their heads came Greece in 2012, and her claim that no “al- from the mainstream German press. Never- ternative” was possible. The AfD initially theless, there is still widespread confidence presented itself as the party of fiscal sanity in German media circles that the AfD can who feared the “structural majority” of debt-

56 The National Interest Teutonic Tremors ridden countries in the eurozone, a threat goal is not to make xenophobia into policy rendered more real by the arrival of Macron but to make xenophobia more salonfähig— in the Élysée. And yet, in addition to these publicly utterable and acceptable. concerns, the anti-immigrant, antirefugee seeds were there in the party from the begin- t is tempting to compare the AfD to ning. Hans-Olaf Henkel, Lucke’s firmest and -wing “flash” parties that flared highest-profile supporter (he was the former I across the German political landscape in president of the Federation of German In- the 1980s and 90s, and comforting to think dustry) and the personal funder of the initial it will peter out in the same fashion. But the AfD campaign, is a long-time Islamkritik party has several qualities that distinguish and a supporter of Thilo Sarrazin. A former it from its postwar right-wing predecessors. board member of the German Bundesbank, Most critically, it has no former Nazis of Sarrazin published the best-selling 2010 1940s vintage in the leadership, or even in tract, Germany Abolishes Itself, which warned its upper ranks. Also, while the AfD owes of Turkish immigrants’ innate mental de- much of its strength to the former East, it ficiencies and called for safeguarding the is by no means a regional party. It has also German Volk from genetic contamination. appeared at a much more propitious time When Petry and Pretzell wrested control of than its predecessors. The “grand coalition” the party from Lucke and Henkel, it was between the spd and cdu has anesthetized more a change of party habitus than of party the bases of both parties, making them each substance. The danger of the AfD for Ger- at times vulnerable to attack on the right and man politics comes less from the radical-right left flanks. Merkel’s trademark strategy of faction of Höcke and Gauland—who speak adopting popular spd policies as her own has to the already converted—than from the had the effect of moving the cdu to the cen- burgherly imprimatur that Lucke and Hen- ter, leaving it exposed on the right. “Never kel managed to stamp on the party, which allow a democratically legitimate party right has now been expanded by more skillful of the csu,” warned thir- operatives like Petry and Weidel. Their first ty years ago—and with good reason. But

Teutonic Tremors July/August 2017 57 Merkel has since swiftly corrected course, for the pragmatic program of the party, give and adjusted her policies rightward in re- the impression that the AfD is more than sponse to the AfD’s proposals. As long as a mere protest party and that is capable of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan does not reopen the administrative burdens. When I asked Petry gates to refugees before September, and as what her model for the party strategy was, long as there is no major terrorist attack on she pointed to the example of the Greens German soil, the AfD may require more and then corrected herself: “But of course imaginative maneuvers than fearmongering we don’t drag our heels like the Greens, and and cultural resentment if it wants to regain we’ll learn from their mistakes.” its political momentum. The AfD hardly operates in a vacuum. But another unique characteristic of the There is a constellation of smaller far-right AfD speaks to its staying power in German political formations—Die Rechte, Die Frei- politics. The party has actively entered into heit, Der Dritte Weg and the Reichsbürger- the state, in ways unthinkable for far-right- bewegung, to name only a few—that sur- wing parties of the past. AfD members al- round it. There is also a series of amorphous ready occupy minor and major bureau- street movements that have been fueled by cratic and administrative positions across economic grievances, and ignited by anti- the land. The police spokesman for the state refugee sentiments, which feed into the AfD of Thuringia, Ringo Mühlmann, sits on the membership. The most well-known is pe- local AfD Board. The chief public prosecu- gida, founded in 2009 by the petty criminal tor of , Roman Reusch, is an active and house burglar Lutz Bachmann. It was member of the party. These men, invaluable initially aimed against pro-Kurdish demon-

58 The National Interest Teutonic Tremors strations in Dresden. Bachmann was alarmed shrewd ruling that sought to deny the party to find a debate about the Turkish state being any martyrdom that might have come had waged between rival Turkish groups on the they outlawed it. streets of his own city: wasn’t the monopoly The intellectual origins of the AfD’s ideo- of public disturbance supposed to be in Ger- logical wing can be traced back to the tu- man hands? The small marches he organized mult of the 1960s, but it is not found in in downtown Dresden—conveniently, the the circles that founded ndp, but rather in same sites of protests against the collapsing a group that would come to call itself “con- gdr—soon expanded into hundreds, and at servative revolutionaries.” The key figure was some rallies, thousands of people. “Winter is the historian and journalist Armin Mohler. Coming Merkel,” they chant, with placards Born in Switzerland in 1920, Mohler had that depict the chancellor as Hitler or as a failed to persuade the Nazi authorities to Muslim. “Wir sind das Volk,” they shout, ap- take him into the ss during World War II. propriating the same cheer that was used in After serving prison for deserting the Swiss 1989 against the gdr. Petry the streber and army, Mohler returned to Germany, where Bachmann the agitator have never gotten he completed a doctoral dissertation at along, but they are careful to speak respect- Heidelberg University under . fully about each other’s organizations, since He later served as a secretary for his hero, at least half of pegida supports the AfD. Ernst Jünger, and went on to be a cor- respondent for Die Zeit. His dissertation, ore than any other major country later expanded into a book, The Conserva- in western Europe, the Germans tive Revolution in Germany 1918–1932, has M have been successful at contain- become an urtext for extreme-right German ing right-wing extremism at the parliamen- intellectuals. In it, Mohler uncovers what he tary level in the postwar period. Each side of takes to be the lost conservative and right- the divided Germany dealt with the political ist traditions of Weimar Germany that were inclusion of former Nazis in a different way. obliterated by the success of National Social- The East Germans created a special party ism. Many of these “revolutionaries”—Ernst for them called the ndpd, which served as a Jünger, , Claus Stauffenberg— halfway house for former Nazis of middling supported the National Socialists at the rank who could be assured of a stable status beginning without joining the Nazi party, in the gdr, though without the promise of which they took to be a crude expression rising high. In the West, the political op- of their own hopes to reinvigorate and pu- portunities for former Nazis were boundless, rify the German race through revolutionary and the cdu, the csu and the fdp swelled violence, what the sociologist Hans Freyer with their ranks (while the intelligence agen- called the “revolution from the right.” It cies overflowed with them). In response to was more their suspicion of Hitler’s method, the events of 1968, the ndp—an openly fas- rather than any particular policy, that frayed cist party—was created by former Nazis. But the relations between some of the conserva- despite some early electoral successes and tive revolutionaries and . They wor- political pressuring, the ndp now mostly ried about Hitler’s military blunders, and functions like a wildlife preserve for the that an authoritarian state was becoming a extreme-right scene, where the German state totalitarian one, as the führer vitiated the can more easily keep track of it. In January, old diplomatic corps and the Junker class. the Federal Constitutional Court declared In a clever turn of phrase, Mohler calls con- the ndp to be too small to be dangerous, a servative revolutionaries the “Trotskyites of

Teutonic Tremors July/August 2017 59 National Socialism,” since they were, in his in by Franz Schönhuber, a protégé mind, persecuted all the more fiercely for of Mohler, but it was still too regional, at- being right-wing heretics of the Nazi cause. tached too much old Nazi stigma and too Mohler’s diagnosis of the state of Germany unfocused on any particular issue to take off. in the 1960s was acute: he believed the tri- Though one occasionally catches tidy umph of American-style decadence and ma- recitations and phrase making of right- terialism in Germany was more dangerous wing worthies in contemporary German than the Soviet threat. The Americans, ac- radical-right magazines—Gehlen, Hei- cording to Mohler, had forestalled any revo- degger, Schmitt—it is perhaps Mohler who lutionary conservatism in Germany, only al- is having the greatest moment of all. When lowing for forms of “gardener-conservatism” I attended a pegida rally in Dresden, I was and the “humility-conservatism” of the puzzled by the presence of bare-chested Christian Democrats. cowboys in Russian-flag capes and Wirmer For Mohler, 1968 was not a momentary flags around the Altmarkt square, until charge forward for , but rather a it was explained to me that the Wirmer quiet victory for the liberals, who consoli- flag was Stauffenberg’s banner, that what dated their hold on German society by mak- was needed was a “Europe of fatherlands,” ing some superficial cultural changes while and that Vladimir Putin was the only man getting the leftists to sign up as citizens of standing up to the American-brokered lib- the market state. It did not take long, as eral world order. The brilliance of Mohler’s Mohler saw it, for the new generation to “conservative revolutionary” position, and fold up its Maoism and start vacationing in what has lent it such an afterlife, is that it Tuscany. Unlike other powerful right-wing more thoroughly questions the legitimacy thinkers who never could shed their Nazi of the German Federal Republic because it diction, Mohler was among the first to mo- allows its adherents to consider themselves bilize left-liberal language for his own cause: untainted by the Nazi past. The AfDers do it would take “civil courage” to beat back the not hesitate to portray Merkel as the new ascendant liberal hegemony. He went so far führer, and embrace Putin as the antiliberal as to draw parallels between true Germans par excellence. in post-1945 Europe and the underclass of One of Mohler’s students, Götz Ku- American blacks, who he liked to claim were bitschek, is among the more curious speci- the only troops to offer water to German mens of the extreme-right intellectual scene soldiers when they liberated the concentra- today. He operates the Antaios publishing tion camps. As for the confrontation with house and Sezession magazine out of his er- its Nazi past, which the 1968ers take such satz castle, “Schnellroda,” in the Saxon coun- pride in, Mohler interpreted their effort as tryside, where he lives with his wife, Ellen a peculiar political illness: an extreme form Kositza, and their seven children. A German of moral one-upmanship that had culmi- special-operations veteran of the Balkan War, nated in a nationalism of antinationalist self- who “reads Homer in the original,” uses the hatred. This is what the conservative revolu- formal Sie form of address with Kositza, tionaries set out to reverse. Toward the end deliberately plays up his Swabian accent and of his career, Mohler found some solace in makes a display of milking his own cows the possibility of authoritarian states in the when visited by members of the German rising Asian Tigers. The 1980s saw the first press, Kubitschek is not so much a thinker arrival of a full-fledged conservative revolu- as a tender of the flame of conservative revo- tionary party, Die Republikaner, founded lution. His recent collection of essays, The

60 The National Interest Teutonic Tremors Width of the Narrow Edge, draws on the same comprehensive defender of Merkel’s policies, repurposed 1968 language that Mohler used the chancellor’s most articulate explainer is to ask why the Holocaust cannot at least be the political scientist Herfried Münkler, who questioned by a free-thinking society, and argues that Merkel did not have much of a whether Germans, paralyzed by their mem- choice on the refugee question: she could ory politics, are also too afraid to ask crucial either pretend to control the situation by questions about their self-preservation. In granting them entry, or lose control of it by the manner of his fellow Identitarians, and declaring a state of emergency. (This read- like Mohler before him, Kubitschek chan- ing has been recently been substantiated by nels the language of indigenous rights—the Die Welt journalist Robin Alexander’s insider rights of Palestinians to the occupied territo- account of Merkel’s decision to open the ries, the right of Laplanders to their ancient border.) Münkler criticizes Merkel for not sled routes—but applies them, perversely, to using her diplomatic skills to get eastern the rights of working-class ethnic Germans European neighbors to share the burden, to maintain their industrialist and agricul- which she had often been able to do in the tural identities that have been under sus- past. The only point to add is that Merkel, tained threat from Anglo-American liberal ever vigilant of the barometers of popular capitalism for more than a century. Though opinion, was in fact late to the party of pro- Kubitschek has been kept out of the AfD by refugee sentiment across Germany when she the Petry-Pretzell faction, he freely dispenses opened the border to refugees in 2015. Her tactical advice to the party in his essays, problem was more one of timing in rela- believing that the AfD will squander its mo- tion to German public opinion. By the time mentum if it becomes a normal conservative she had embraced her open-door policy, the party. To consider the party as an instrument public enthusiasm had waned, and she shift- for budging Merkel to the right is far too ed her policies rightward accordingly. New modest a goal; to reach its potential it must restrictions against asylum seekers were put make the most of the antiasylum moment in place, a burqa ban was coyly entertained, and upend domestic politics by proving that and Erdoğan was handsomely paid off to the bien-pensant parties cannot govern Germany point that other bouncers at Europe’s gates or protect its sovereignty. demanded their own bonuses. Facing nation- alist pressure from without and within—and he German debate over the refu- what seems increasingly like a mosquito- gee crisis of 2015 has cut through sized threat in the form of Martin Schultz, T families and friendships across the the Social Democrat candidate who buzzes a land, and precipitated a series of feuilleton few centimeters to her left—Merkel appears debates not seen in the country since the ready to give room on the question of Islam Historikerstreit of the 1990s. Unlike the de- and the question of refugees, but she is likely bate about that German past, which the to stand firm against any necessary reform liberals handily won, they seem poised to of the euro, unlikely to be seduced by the lose the current one. In the pages of Cicero “Mozart of Finance.” The numbers for 2016 magazine, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk have come in. At 6.6 million euros, Berlin’s upset liberal sensitivities when he used the budget surplus has exceeded even the most language of to argue that in optimistic expectations. It is a political eco- today’s Germany it is the refugee, rather than nomic arrangement better left unmentioned the state, who takes the “decision” by cross- by politicians across the land: bad years for ing the nation’s borders. Though hardly a Europe are now good years for Germany. n

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