Germany: time for soul searching

“America, you’ve got it better, [...] your heart is not troubled, in lively pursuits, by useless old remembrance and empty disputes.” These words by Goethe in 1827 could hardly be more untimely. Yet, when it comes to the main talking point on both sides of the Atlantic — immigration — Goethe’s wistful envy must capture Angela Merkel’s current thinking all too well. The world’s most powerful woman is struggling as the migration crisis lays bare Germany’s national identity problem.

The country has come to terms with its past and is praised internationally for this: many polls have Germany as the world’s most popular country. Today’s Germans have grown comfortable, proudly waving flags when their national soccer team is playing. EU politics in recent years are a testimony to the country’s political emancipation from the sins of the past century.

However, the country has avoided attempts to define itself. Ask someone how he feels about being German and he’ll most likely invoke stereotypes of being punctual or excelling at engineering. If you dig deeper and inquire about a sense of national pride or patriotism, you’ll get an awkward, uneasy response. This diffidence complicates political leadership in the current immigration debate.

The German chancellor could have celebrated her tenth anniversary in office with high public praise for astutely steering the country through the European economic crisis. Germans could be congratulating themselves on having a leader who embodies a “Merkiavellian” invincibility abroad and a soothing Mutti figure at home. But then came the migrants. More than a million are reported to have crossed the German border this year. For the first time in her tenure, Merkel is struggling to get the people and the political majority united behind her.

Hesitant at first, Merkel gave Syrian refugees the green light, exempting them from EU migration laws. This welcoming stance won her international praise and rumours of a Nobel peace prize, but people back home became increasingly anxious. The flows of immigrants that began entering the country this spring were met by surprisingly overwhelmed German authorities. And headlines about reinstatement of border controls in an otherwise borderless Europe and pictures of camps bursting at the seams led to a rapid loss of morale. As a result, the unflappable Merkel is now seen as a struggling crisis manager, but also as part of the problem: images of the chancellor taking selfies with immigrants confirmed her critics’ belief that she has “invited everyone in”. Within weeks, Merkel’s sober, often poll-conscious image was transformed into that of naive do-gooder.

She reacted with uncharacteristic pathos: “If we now need to apologize for the fact that we show a friendly face in emergency situations, then this is not my country anymore.” But many Germans are growing sceptical of this Willkommenskultur. While Merkel’s ratings slip, the right wing party AFD (Alternative for Germany) is polling a record 10%. The German attitude towards refugees is ambivalent: arson attacks on refugee camps contrast with cheers and candy for arriving immigrants. The unprecedented willingness of ordinary people to help asylum-seekers contrasts with some ever-shriller anti-immigration marches.

Some voice their anger in protest marches against the decay of the West. Mock gallows with Merkel’s name on them are not just alerting the constitutional protection authority. Crime statistics reflect this radicalization: there was an average of two criminal offenses a day against asylum camps this year. Talk of a society at its tipping point is making the rounds.

The loss in electoral support goes hand in hand with diminished political clout; what began as a revolt of backbenchers in Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has now reached the circle of her closest confidantes. The two most powerful cabinet members — finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble (who took the rap for her during the debt negotiations with Greece) and interior minister Thomas de Maizière — are publicly challenging her. In a subtle political jab, Schäuble likened the inflow of migrants to an avalanche that takes only one careless skier to set off. The conservative Bavarian sister party, Christian Social Union (CSU), questions Merkel’s sense of reality outright, and vehemently demands a yearly cap on the number of immigrants Germany allows in. And in a tectonic political shift, the opposition Socialist and Green parties have become her (unlikely) partners in migration policy.

It’s not the facts, stupid

To handle the influx of migrants is a tremendous task. Some sources even estimate that up to 1.5 million migrants arrived this year (just under 2% of the population). It is the biggest challenge since reunification 25 years ago, maybe even since WWII. The country’s only real post-war experience with mass immigration dates back to the 1960s, when so-called “guest workers” from Italy and Turkey were recruited to keep the “economic miracle” going.

Merkel’s style and track record should make her the ultimate crisis manager. But no (humane) domestic action could realistically keep people in war-torn countries from flocking to Europe. And perhaps more importantly, this crisis is not primarily about material concerns: the number of immigrants the country may or may not be able to absorb, and the concomitant fiscal challenges, are not what keeps Germans up at night.

Corporate Germany has almost unanimously expressed its support for Merkel’s immigration policy. Given the shortage of skilled labour and the country’s ticking demographic time bomb, the economic case for more immigration is easy to make. Most economists agree that initial fiscal strains caused by immigration will soon be offset by the effects of consumption and employment. And though some analysts voice doubts about the match between the skills of arriving migrants and the German labour market, such concerns are comparatively low on the list of voters’ fears.

What’s at the root of Germany’s nervous reaction to mass immigration is fear of cultural estrangement. In the face of waves of mostly Muslim asylum-seekers, public and private discourse revolves around what it means to be German. The majority opinion is “we need to take those in who are in need, but only if they are willing to integrate properly.” Many would add “German values are not up for debate.” But just what these values are remains largely unanswered. Many wonder how you explain to a Syrian refugee what it means to be German if you don’t know yourself.

Public debates about identity go from helpless to hysterical. Fifteen years ago, a discussion about German Leitkultur (guiding culture) resulted in a pointless argument between extremes: the left accused conservatives of xenophobic fear mongering; conservatives ridiculed multiculturalism as a naive utopia. Most people felt lost between the two poles. Ten years later, the then president Christian Wulff proclaimed that “Islam belongs to Germany” and stirred up another debate that ended in semantics rather than any substantive interrogation of the national psyche.

Some voices relate the question of national identity or culture to religion, especially when it comes to migration. Conservatives like CSU general secretary Andreas Scheuer demand that immigrants “must compulsorily acknowledge the leading role of German culture. That is quite clearly Christian-Jewish-Western culture.” But such calls fail to resonate with large parts of a population where religion is steadily losing its significance in regard to identity.

The only common denominator in this collective self-discovery is the supremacy of the constitution. In what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas describes as “constitutional patriotism,” Germanness is defined in purely legal terms. The importance of the constitution as the only acceptable means of expressing identity has become clear during the current crisis. Seemingly trying to steamroll immigrants into this legal sense of belonging, social democrats have begun distributing Arabic translations of the German constitution in asylum camps. The now widely evoked term “constitutional culture” is a testament to the constitution’s role as the sole nucleus in intellectual attempts to define a German identity.

No wonder then that American patriotism alienates Germans. Bumper stickers honouring the troops or singing the national anthem at league games are dismissed as artificial and ostentatious. America’s Search For A Usable Past (William Commager), during which presidents and myths became building blocks of the national fabric, couldn’t contrast more starkly with the German style of remembrance.

But there’s a gap between unconditional multiculturalism and western zealotry that could be filled with a shared understanding of national belonging that is more than just a soulless legal framework. This must not lead to a catharsis of historical consciousness, but an untroubled discussion of ideals and maybe even national icons.

Unlike US Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, mainstream parties in Germany have largely avoided linking the issue of immigration to the emerging terrorist threat. But the first successful attack in Germany could change all that.

When Goethe wrote his America poem, he saw that distant land as a beacon of enlightenment and envied its clean historical slate. Today’s Germans may feel similar envy of the US’s relatively unencumbered national identity. Polls show that the population is almost evenly divided on immigration. Yet both sides accuse each other of political extremism, preventing a healthy debate in an otherwise hard-headed country. Germans have some soul searching to do.