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One word: colonialism. In 1147, Cologne, Bonn, Mainz and Frankfurt were 1,000-year-old centres of high medieval Europe; since the day Julius Caesar himself named them, no one had ever disputed that Germania was where the Germans lived; and Berlin was a Slavic river-fishing village.
That year, the northern arm of the Second Crusade sent German knights crashing across the River Elbe, intent on converting and conquering the pagan Slavs and Balts. The end result was almost-full German-speaking colonisation in westernmost Transelbia (almost: the Sorbs remain as witnesses, just north of Dresden); further east, in present-day Poland, the land remained forever disputed between mass settler-colonists and natives, while farther east still, in present-day Russia/Lithuania, the state of the Teutonic Knights established full elite-settler dominance over local peasants. In 1525 it was the first to adopt Luther, renaming itself (after a native tribe it had crushed) Prussia*.*
“ Are Germany’s Tories copying all those former centrist conservatives of recent years (take a bow, Boris Johnson) and adopting the attack tactics of rightwing populists?”
Um, James? Centrist? Really?
Oh, this guy again.
I read his “Shortest history of Germany”, and it was quite unhinged. You could summarise his position on everything post Napoleon as "And then Prussia happened, which was a mistake ".
His entire thesis is that Good Germany is western, catholic and Atlanticist, while Bad Germany is eastern, protestant, socialist and inherently authoritarian, and please ignore how these don’t go together at all.
He’s also at heart a Zentrumite, devoting paragraphs to exactly how they were cruelly decieved into voting for the enabling act, while glossing over the SPD actually voting against.
Samesies. I picked it up because it seemed interesting.
And, in it’s very own… special… way, it is.
The very first association my brain came up was Uncle Victor from Harold an Maude.
I’ve noticed that “colonialism” has become the buzzword of the day among certain types of (mostly online) leftists, using it to describe anything bad even if it doesn’t actually have anything meaningful to do with actual colonialism.
Certainly, invoking “colonialism” that took place almost thousand years ago as an explanation as to why German right wing is bad sounds… unconvincing to me.
Yeah, that was weird. That article has exactly one redeeming feature, that it puts things into perspective for those that think that basically Nazi forces will march over the border to Poland tomorrow. But that’s it. It’s this part[1]
And in Germany, of course, being the biggest single party doesn’t mean you’ve “won”, because (imagine the rationality!) your seats are in proportion to your vote. Without an absolute majority, all you win is first dibs at a coalition. If everybody refuses to work with you (say, because you’re a pro-Putin fascist), tough. So the AfD won’t actually govern little Thuringia (home to only 2.5% of the German population, and falling), there’s no path for it into central government (the latest national polling last week puts it on 17.4%), and the moderate German centre is actually holding up, despite everything, better than anywhere in Europe, with the four mainstream pro-Nato, pro-EU parties enjoying almost 63% support.
The rest just reads like the author has a personal vendetta against 19th century Prussia that he tries to bring up in conversation every time someone mentions Germany.
And this is not to say that these two elections weren’t horrifying (if predictable) or on the other hand that there isn’t a fundamental cultural divide between East and West Germany that is hard to understand from the outside, but neither point is really made by this article in any way that is recognisable as being based in reality ↩︎
Kind of wonder what Prussia ever did to him…
Maybe blue just isn’t his colour?
Even that paragraph is dripping with his condescending world-view. He’s openly saying that the two left parties are just as outside his “mainstream” as the AfD, and his hatred of the East is clear with his jabs at “little”, depopulating Thuringia.
I’m also not keen on his “You Brits are just too dumb to understand the German polical system.” Attitude, either, but such externalised self-loathing is not unexpected given where this was published.
Fun fact: making fun of Prussians in general and the Prussian military especially is the central theme of classic Cologne carnival:
Stippeföttche:
And Cologne being Cologne …
… since 1995 there is an alternative pink version which has become a regular, fully integrated fixture over the years.
He married into a Prussian Junker family.
My father-in-law, who died in 2017, was an East Prussian landowner. His 1920s/30s childhood world (now part of Russia) was a German colony: a Russian stableboy taught him to ride and his parents spoke Lithuanian to their tenants.
His story starts with Cologne in 1147, so what he really means is Colognialism.
