Botho Strauss is a Conservative German writer critical of Chancellor Merkel and Germany’s current open borders policies, which he blames on paralysing German self hatred and a sense of cultural rootlessness.

In an essay in Der Spiegel (paywall) he argues that the latest refugee crisis exposes German as a “spiritual desert landscape which long ago lost the right to call itself a Cultural Nation.” He calls his compatriots “the social Germans who are no less rootless than the millions of rootless people who now mix with them”.

On questions of tradition and roots, Strauss argues that the Germans will now be receiving a lesson from the new arrivals. “The most important thing the follows of Islam will teach us is the importance of tradition.”

He accuses the German political and media elite of using “meaningless and abstract concepts like freedom and rights, applied without the slightest afterthought to the new arrivals”. By “praying to the constitution rather than Germany’s literary and spiritual tradition, the German right has betrayed the country’s tradition of spiritual freedom, in favour of the political correctness that applies to everybody regardless of party loyalties.”

“Every Libertarian expression of opinion, every manifestation of political correctness, illustrates a kind of behaviour that most immigrants can follow only if they say farewell to their beliefs and customs and thereby in the process accept even more rootlessness.”

In Der Spiegel he laments the inability of German politicians to raise the country out of its self loathing created by the Second World War. German politics has been reduced to “drivelling parade of opinions which under the guise of free thinking and pluralism in practice creates conformism and kills every deviant thought.”

He concludes that the “Germans have been denied their right to be opponents to an ever more power hungry moral-political conformism”. Parliamentary parties only nail their colours to one mast, that of “homosexual marriage”, and most of all he loathes the “culture of welcome” that has been on global display since Angela Merkel started inviting in the Syrian refugees in Hungary.

Germany was praised the world over, but Botho Strauss sees only the hypocrisy, anxiety and self deception behind the German helpfulness.

“The warm reception and welcome is so forced that even the most simpleminded person must be able to recognise the embrace, which is only a kind of euphemisation of fear, a kind of magical attempt to ward off misfortune.”

http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/botho-strauss-schreibt-anschwellenden-bocksgesang-fort-a-1055731.html