NYT: Germany's Newest Intellectual Anti-Hero

According to Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times, Rolf Peter Sieferle was a highly respected German historian before his death last September. After his death, a collection of his observations on Germany called "Finis Germania" was published and he seems to have become a pariah in intellectual circles. However, his book has become a best-seller in Germany.

Sieferle sounds like an interesting man:

A socialist in his youth like most German intellectuals of the 1968 generation, Mr. Sieferle was drifting out of sync with that tradition by the 1990s. He came increasingly to aim his sarcasm at naïve idealists. At the height of Germany’s refugee crisis two summers ago, he wrote, “A society that can no longer distinguish between itself and the forces that would dissolve it is living morally beyond its means.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described him as “embittered, humorless, ever more isolated.” 

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On the other hand, “Finis Germaniae” (“the end of Germany”) is a familiar and resonant phrase. (Why Mr. Sieferle chose to drop the final “e” in his title has been much discussed.) The phrase captures a fear, or paranoia, about national decline that has been widespread in German history — and explains much about that history. Prosperous though Germany is, one can see reasons such fears might be reviving. Germany is senescent, with a median age of about 46. It is helping construct a European Union meant to supplant the German government in many of its traditional competencies. Germans appear to want to disappear. This, in fact, is the thesis that drives Mr. Sieferle’s passionate book on migration. 

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After World War II, the Allied occupiers, as Mr. Sieferle sees it, saddled Germans with a false idea of their own history — the idea that there was something premodern about Germany, a fundamental difference between it and the West. That may describe Russia, but not Germany, and Germany’s modernity is painful for Westerners to face. “If Germany belonged to the most progressive, civilized, cultivated countries,” he writes, “then ‘Auschwitz’ means that, at any moment, the human ‘progress’ of modernity can go into reverse.” 

Mr. Sieferle neither denies nor minimizes the Holocaust. ... But Mr. Sieferle is critical of Germany’s postwar culture of Holocaust memory, which he argues has taken on the traits of a religion. The country’s sins are held to be unique and absolute, beyond either redemption or comparison. “The First Commandment,” he writes, “is ‘Thou shalt have no Holocausts before me.’ ” Hitler, in retrospect, turns out to have done a paradoxical thing: He bound Germans and Jews together in a narrative for all time. In an otherwise relativistic and disenchanted world, Mr. Sieferle writes, Germans appear in this narrative as the absolute enemies of our common humanity, as a scapegoat people. The role is hereditary. There are Germans whose grandparents were not born when the war ended, yet they, too, must take on the role. 

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Mr. Sieferle’s is a complex argument. It is linked to his concern, in “Das Migrationsproblem,” with the challenges of mass migration. He believed that Germany’s self-demonization had left it unable to say anything but yes to a million or so migrants seeking entry to Europe in 2015 and that such a welcome was unsustainable. Whether he was right or wrong, this was a concern shared by many Germans, and not necessarily an idle expression of animus.

I am always wary of commenting on intellectual works from other cultures published in languages I can't read, so please take my comments as tentative.

First, I had not heard the idea that there was something premodern about Germany, but it would make sense that Progressives would claim that. But Germany was instrumental in shaping modernity; if anything, it has been one of the most modern of nations.

I think Japan, too, suffers from the way it handles the memory and history of WWII, and they, too, seem to have a desire to disappear. Japan and Germany both seem to have developed a sense that their nations have done uniquely evil things. However, that seems to be SOP for Progressives: I feel they want us to believe that about the US as well. I think it's part of destroying the soul of the nation so they can take over the body.

I think it would be healthy for both Germany and Japan to develop a new sense of patriotism. I can't say nationalism, because for both nationalism is tied to a "blood and soil" idea of the nation that I believe leads to racism. But a love and appreciation for all of the good things their nation has done would be a good thing, I think, along with a desire to see their nations continue. That's healthy, whereas ongoing, generations-long self-flagellation is not.