When Germany was reunified, I was still a child. In the winter of 1990 I went with my parents from Switzerland to Berlin on vacation. The city seemed huge and empty back then, but somehow the emptiness felt euphoric. A place in the tragic succession of political failure had become the possible place for a new beginning.
Ten years later, in the summer of 1999, I came to Berlin as a student. Every day I rode my bike on the way to the FU across Potsdamer Platz, which was a huge construction site at the time. While the building gaps were closing, the first contradictions arose. In the spring of 1999, the red-green government led Germany into the war in Kosovo. The country had navigated itself into what – after the historically insignificant “Bonn Republic” – was expectedly called the “Berlin Republic”.
Ten years later I met the Berlin philosopher Friedrich Kittler to interview him for a book about the turnaround. Back then, Kittler used a term that struck me: “historical wear marks”. By this he meant that all major revolutions – the weeks of the round tables and poetic declarations are over for the time being – will be administratively cashed in.
But seldom has this happened so unnoticed in terms of debates as in reunified Germany. The Wikipedia entry dryly notes in the paragraph “Characteristics of the Berlin Republic”: “Restriction of fundamental rights and the right of asylum”, “Extended military role” and “Change in the five-party system”. Translated this means in excerpts: rise of the neo-fascist AfD, invasion of Afghanistan and shameful withdrawal, support of the deadly refugee policy at the EU’s external borders.
German history is one of lost innocence
Of course, there are also clear plus points such as “energy transition” or “dealing with the National Socialist past” on the list. But grosso modo the German history of the past thirty years is a story of lost innocence. One would have expected that after the bombing of Belgrade, Trump’s motto would have come into effect: Once the reputation has been ruined, it is completely unabashed. A triumphalism of realpolitik, like in the USA or Russia.
But in Germany there is a kind of toggle switch based on debate that turns contradicting political decision-making questions into moral phantom pain. Whenever the good intentions of the Berlin Republic are caught up in reality, the feeling in Germany of having been set up is spreading. If you follow the parliamentary debates, for example, it seems as if the Bundestag is not doing politics, but as if it is happening to it.
The turn towards the Berlin republic is still pending
To be directly responsible for ten thousand times the deaths of refugees in the Mediterranean with dozens of votes is one thing. But discussing it as if it were not a political crime, but a tragic event, a kind of natural disaster, is another. The same with the city palace or politics in Afghanistan: everything happened somehow, like a mishap.
Even 30 years after the fall of the Wall, the transition from the Bonn Republic, in which the given was administered, to a creative Berlin Republic is still pending. And maybe that’s what the upcoming federal election is for: to swap the politics of hypocritical sensitivity for a politics of responsibility. With all its moral contradictions.