Germany in crisis

cc. Following his trip to Germany in autumn 2024, Patrick Lawrence wrote a four-part essay about Germany: about the background to the current crises and what the country’s citizens think about Germany’s future path. The first part of this series, “The lost man of Europe,” can be found in Current Concerns No. 9 of 22 April 2025, and the first instalment of the second part, “Wanderers and Seekers,” in Current Concerns No. 11 of 20 May. Below we publish the second episode of “Wanderers and Seekers.”

Dresden

Dresden sits hard by the Elbe. It was on the river’s opposite banks on 25 April 1945, that Allied and Red Army soldiers stared at one another, eventually crossing it in one of the great encounters of World War II’s concluding days. My excitement on seeing the Elbe for the first time, during my recent reporting travels, will always remain with me.
  The stone buildings that survived the infamous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 are charred black, giving the city the look of an eternal memorial to the 25,000 lives lost over those two dreadful nights. One of these is a church called Frauenkirche, a splendidly proportioned Baroque specimen that was burned badly. Reconstructed in the 1990s, it is now crowded with tourists daily.

East-German address

As I stood in line to enter the church one bright, blustery day, there was a man off to the right selling the usual cellophane-wrapped prints one sees at tourist sites the Western world over. My companion pointed to one that, with no picturesque image, was simply some lines inscribed in Fraktur, the old German script.
  “You had better let me translate this for you,” my companion said. She wore an amused smile as she spoke. And then her impromptu translation: “It is not enough to have no ideas. You must also be incapable of executing any.”
  I instantly burst into a sort of baffled laughter. What supremely ironic sensibility had produced this? How many levels of meaning did I have to plumb? Why was this on offer outside a solemn site that has become a symbol of post–Cold War reconciliation?
  I looked at the man sitting in a folding canvas chair beside his rack of wares. He was somewhere in his 50s or 60s, graying blond hair, toothy smile. He might have been a carpenter or a clerk or a teacher, and, for all I know, he was one or another of these. Our eyes met. And as my amusement tipped into uncontrolled guffaws, he burst into laughter with me. He seemed to think I understood, or he wanted me to understand: It was one or the other.
  I bought the hand-lettered sheet, good paper under a beige matte board, for 10 euro. It is a small treasure.
  An ordinary afternoon in a square in central Dresden, the mirthful man and his bins of prints, one artfully lettered piece mixed in with quaint images of townhouses, church spires, cobblestone streets: I have thought often since that day of the scene outside the Frauenkirche. And over time I have come to understand. This is how the people of the old East Germany address the people of the old West Germany. They speak with irony and disdain – piercing sarcasm and bitter humor an habitual resort. You hear in them what I came to read in the phrases rendered in Fraktur: You hear reproach, you hear refusal, you hear an independent intelligence, you hear truths you do not hear elsewhere.

Inequalities

There are commonly accepted ways to measure the inequalities between the two halves of the reconstituted Federal Republic. Wages are lower in the former German Democratic Republic than in the west, by 25 per cent. Unemployment in the east is higher than in the west – by a third. Good jobs are scarcer in the old GDR, as most of the strong, powerful industries that earned Germany its success – steel, autos, machinery, chemicals, electronics – are in the western half. As those who live in the old GDR will readily explain, most senior positions in the eastern half – in the now-privatised enterprises, the universities, the banks, and so on – are held by Germans from the west.
  In this way “reunification” is not quite the word for what happened on 3 October 1990: Better to say it effectively turned East Germany into a colony of West Germany. Resentment, an obvious consequence, is easily legible in the 23 February results. In the eastern states the three opposition parties mentioned earlier – AfD, Die Linke, BSW – easily outperformed the mainstream parties as measured against the previous elections. There are some protest voters in the numbers, as many of the German with whom I spoke – not all, I must add – told me. But protest is not all there is to read into the results. Voters in the old GDR are also more ardent than in the west as they search for a new national direction.

Identity

I come again to questions of identity and consciousness. East Germans were never subjected to those fateful Americanisation programs the postwar Federal Republic endured during the Cold War years. There was no unmooring as occurred among West Germans. This different experience has born profound consequences. East Germans were not, so to say, separated from themselves as West Germans were; their identities were by comparison undisturbed. As those in the eastern states often explain, they developed an abiding distrust of authority during the GDR years. But a paradox here: It was in their resistance to the East German state that East German people preserved who they were, what it was that made them German. And it is this distrust and resistance that informs their views and attitudes today toward Berlin and the west of Germany – their disdain, their refusals. More than one easterner told me they view the centrist regime in Berlin as another dictatorship.

Bautzen

An hour’s drive east of Dresden, across vast flat stretches of what were once collective farms, you come to a town in Saxony called Bautzen. The French commonly speak of la France profonde, “deep France,” literally – the untouched France of the old villages and farms. Bautzen, it seems useful to say, lies in what we can think of as deep Deutschland. You find in the place and its people another idea of Germany – alive and well enough, precisely the Germany the neoliberal centrists in Berlin appear determined to extinguish.
  Bautzen, with a population of 38,000, has a varied history. It traces its beginning to the early 11^th century and is pleased today to display its origins in the Middle Ages. (If you like Medieval towers, this is your place: A dozen of them still mark out the town’s perimeters.) The Third Reich operated a concentration camp there, part of the Groß–Rosen network. The Red Army liberated the Bautzen subcamp on 20 April 1945, five days before Soviet troops met the Allies at the Elbe. From 1952 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East German Stasi used the former camp as a notorious prison nicknamed Gelbes Elend, “Yellow Misery,” for the color of its walls.

Resistance …

During the GDR days the people of Bautzen began what they called “Monday night demonstrations” at Gelbes Elend. At their largest these weekly occasions attracted up to 5,000 people, and they had a standard slogan. “We are the people” can be fully understood only in its historical context. The GDR advanced itself as “the people’s democracy,” or “the people’s republic.” The words chanted at the protests outside the Stasi prison on Mondays were a pointed reply, the stress in the phrase falling in translation on the first word: “We are the people.”
  At the end of my visit to Bautzen, I met for dinner with some of those who led those demonstrations. We gathered at a cavern-like restaurant that had long ago been a monastery. The waiters wore monks’ robes and the menu featured (for better or worse) Medieval dishes. The beer (for the better) was also from an old recipe – a rich red brew served in crude clay steins. I do not know whether our hosts intended this, but “Mönchshof zu Bautzen”, as the place was called, was faintly suggestive of their project. This was to rediscover what it means to be authentically German – not in any kind of nativist or reactionary fashion, but as self-preservation, a defense against the neoliberalism Berlin sponsors.

… against the pretensions of power

The Monday demonstrations spread widely during the GDR decades and were six-figures large in Dresden, Leipzig, and other cities. They continue now, if on a much smaller scale. And the slogan at all of them is a straight carryover: “We are the people” is still in its way a response to the pretensions of power in Berlin. Working through an interpreter, I asked those ranged around our table, an assemblage of rough-hewn boards, what their politics were. “AfD? Die Linke? Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW?” The last is a left-populist breakaway from Die Linke.
  “We take no interest in the political parties, none of them,” one of my hosts said. “We don’t think in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ either. We come together on the basis of facts. We’re trying to build what you would call ‘a people’s movement.’”
  The phrase – how to say this? – did not instil confidence. To an American ear “a people’s movement” suggested I was at a table of dreamers in one of who knows how many towns reunification had served badly. When I mentioned this to Karl–Jürgen Müller, the student of German politics quoted earlier, he replied, “You’re looking at the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the surface there’s a lot more of this.”
  This seemed the case as the evening went on and those assembled told me of the conferences and congresses they organise regularly with other communities. In the back of the notebook, I used that evening I find a well-produced accordion brochure announcing a “Kongress Frieden und Dialog,” a “Congress for Peace and Dialogue,” in Liebstedt, a Thuringian town near Weimar, 260 kilometres distant.

“Looking for our country”

I had heard the same frustration with Germany’s traditional party politics many times in the course of my reporting. I do not mean to suggest any kind of imminent nationwide insurgency. What I saw at ground level seemed to me nascent, a suggestion and no more of a possible future. As we drove back from Bautzen to Dresden, I thought of something Dirk Pohlmann, the broadcast journalist and documentarian, had said when we spoke in Potsdam. “We’re sitting atop a tectonic shift,” he told me. “The Greens are done. The Free Democrats [among the other big losers in February] are done. The major parties are weak. People are looking for unities on questions of right and wrong. ‘Left’ and ‘right’ have nothing to do with this.”
  “Maybe” is my view on this question.
  Pohlmann and those I met in Bautzen explained another mystery – the strange “voter migration” evident in the February election results: Social Democrats jumping to AfD, Christian Democrats crossing over to Die Linke and BSW, Die Linke voters going over to AfD. It seemed indecipherable as analyses of the results first came out – Germany as a kind of madhouse of wanderers. But after my time in Bautzen I twigged: Yes, it is a nation of wanderers, but it is also one of seekers. “We’re all looking for our country,” Dirk had said. It was too early in my sojourn among Germans, and I hadn’t understood this truest of things then. •

First published on: ScheerPost on 6 May 2025

* Patrick Lawrence is a long-standing foreign correspondent, mainly for the “International Herald Tribune”. He is also a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His penultimate book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century”, Yale 2013. His new book “Journalists and Their Shadows” was published by Clarity Press (ISBN 978-3-85371-543-7) in 2023 (German translation since March 2025). His website is patricklawrence.us. Support his work via patreon.com/thefloutist.