WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Once upon a time, before the dark events of the 20th century clouded its previous history, Germany was celebrated as the “land of poets and thinkers,” thanks to intellectual giants like Goethe and Kant.

Even today, Germans still revere their intellectuals. So when Juergen Habermas, the country’s greatest living philosopher, lashes out at German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her European policies just weeks before national elections, people take notice.

German philosopher Juergen Habermas has particularly harsh words for Angela Merkel. Getty Images

“It’s worth repeating again and again,” Habermas wrote this month in the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, “The suboptimal conditions under which the European Monetary Union operates today are the result of a design flaw, namely, that the political union was never completed.”

And he continues: “That’s why pushing the problems onto the shoulders of the crisis-ridden countries with credit financing isn’t the answer.”

With its counterproductive policies on Europe, the philosopher says, Germany is reversing all the postwar efforts to resolve the conundrum of a country too weak to dominate Europe but too big to fall in line.

Apparently playing on the title of a popular prewar film “Dance on the Volcano,” the 84-year-old Habermas says, “Germany isn’t dancing, it’s sleeping on the volcano.”

He has particularly harsh words for Merkel, whom he accuses of deceiving voters by not debating the policy on Europe during the campaign.

Merkel and the other politicians, Habermas says, should take the lead in what is bound to be a polarizing dispute over alternatives in Europe, all of which are costly.

“And when should one do so, if not before a parliamentary election?” Habermas asks rhetorically. “Anything else is patronizing deception. It is always a mistake to underestimate and ask too little of voters.”

The philosopher says it will be “a historical failure” if politicians continue to behave as if it were business as usual and conduct their short-sighted wrangling over policies behind closed doors.

“We know Angela Merkel’s response: soporific bumbling,” Habermas rails on. “Her public persona seems to lack any normative core.” Since the Greek crisis erupted in 2010, the philosopher says, “She has subordinated each of her considered steps to the opportunism of staying in power.”

It would be hard to find an equivalent to Habermas in this country, which, in any case, has considerably less reverence for poets and thinkers. We may have philosophers of similar stature, but none who are known, like Habermas, to every high school graduate in the country.

Other thinkers are also being heard. When a Wall Street Journal reporter interviewed an undecided voter at a recent rally of the anti-euro EURUSD, -0.08% Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a 57-year-old advertising salesman said that a column by Henryk Broder, a prominent journalist and author, had motivated him to attend.

Broder, a confirmed leftist, complained in the daily Die Welt that he doesn’t know who to vote for in the Sept. 22 election, because none of the left-wing parties seem to uphold truly progressive values. Read column (in German).

“I only have the choice among a bunch of parties in the middle that are competing to promise voters everything under the sun,” he said, “more justice, more security, more solidarity, more subsidies for parents, more subsidies for children, more nature, less harmful substances in food, less carbon dioxide in the air, less stress at work and less fear of tomorrow.”

Broder was looking for a politician who would honestly discuss issues in real terms. In the meantime, he apparently made up his mind how to vote because when the reporter, Anton Troianovski, asked him about it, the writer said he plans to cast his ballot for the AfD. “I’m not anti-euro,” he told Troianovski. “I just don’t want to be told I don’t have alternatives.”

Germany says Europe's aid to Greece isn't enough

Poets are weighing in, too. Last year, Guenter Grass, a Nobel Prize-winning novelist but also an accomplished poet, took Europe — and by implication, Merkel — to task for the austerity policies in Greece in a poem titled “Europe’s Shame.”

“Close to chaos, because not suitable to the markets, you are far from the country that was your cradle,” Grass begins his somber poem bemoaning Europe’s abandonment of Greece. He concludes: “You will waste away mindlessly, Europe, without the country whose mind invented you.” Read poem (in German).

However much or little attention poets and thinkers get in today’s Germany, Merkel can probably look upon this criticism from intellectuals with a certain amount of serenity as she contemplates a third term in office.

Unless, perhaps, Habermas is right and politicians are selling voters short. Unless other undecided voters read a column by Broder or another pundit questioning Germany’s European policy. Unless the shame of what Europe has become does start to sink in.

Then, even if she is returned to office, Merkel may not remain so serene.