The pandemic crisis has surfaced fundamental tensions between the scope of state power and commitments to democracy and dissent. Facing an emergency, the state must act vigorously, but liberal democracies are premised on understandings of basic rights, maximal freedom, and limited government, desiderata at odds with state power. This opposition has been playing out in different ways in the United States and in Europe, and in Europe nowhere more saliently than in Germany.
A recent controversy in Germany provides insight into the process by which the need to respond to the pandemic acts as a vehicle to enhance state power in a way that threatens basic freedoms. This is the core conflict: the genuine urgency of developing public health measures to contain the pandemic can contribute simultaneously to the augmentation of state power. Questions of the vitality of democracy are at stake, and not only in Germany.
Arnold Vaatz is a member of the Bundestag, where he serves as one of the acting leaders of the Christian Democratic (CDU) legislative group. He grew up in Communist East Germany, where he spent time in prison for refusing military service due to his dissident views, and he participated actively in the movement that ended the Communist regime. He has been in the Bundestag since 1998, a politician deeply experienced in the character of unified Germany, but with his own memories of the East German dictatorship.
On August 5, 2020, Vaatz published a short piece in the conservative blog Tichys Einblick, available here in translation. His primary concern involves the differential response, on the one hand, to the wave of anti-racism protests that began in Germany in June and that were prompted by the Black Lives Matters events in the United States, and on the other, to the Berlin demonstration of August 1, that opposed the Merkel government’s anti-corona ordinances (see also here). Vaatz makes clear at the outset that he himself supports the ordinances. However, he criticizes the state and the press for applying different formal expectations to the two versions of public assembly: in his account, the anti-racism demonstrations were shielded from criticism concerning insufficient social distancing or use of masks, while the same tolerance did not apply to the August 1 demonstration. In that view, the right to demonstrate was made contingent on a political litmus test.
A few remarks on the events themselves are necessary. The anti-racism protests began in Germany at the end of May, as already noted, building on the movement in the United States sparked by the killing of George Floyd. Given the presumed message of the protests—critiques of racial discrimination—it is noteworthy that the German demonstrations against the Minnesota killing were orders of magnitude larger than any responses to racist attacks in Germany itself, as recently in Hanau, or with regard to the German police, against whom charges of racism have been leveled (rightly or wrongly). Nor has there been much response to police violence or racism in other European countries, notably France, nor to Russian-backed assassinations in Germany, let alone to state violence in Russia, China, or elsewhere. One cannot take issue with the anti-racist program of the demonstration, but it is likely that the opportunity to demonstrate against specifically American racism was particularly appealing to part of the German public. Anti-Americanism has deep political roots in Germany; the United States is the country some Germans love to hate, while demonstrating against American racism also amounts to an opportunity to avoid addressing racism closer to home.
Meanwhile, the August 1 demonstration too deserves closer scrutiny. Organizers labelled it “the Day of Freedom,” and critics have accused them of using that phrase as a dog whistle to the far right because it is the title of a 1935 film by Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl. It is difficult to determine whether this was an intentional reference to an ultimately obscure film from the Hitler era or whether it was a historically uninformed choice of a title to convey “freedom” from the corona restrictions. Sometimes words may be used without intending their history, e.g., not every reference to Olympus (or variations of the word) necessarily points back to Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Olympic Games. The connection between the title and the German past may be more in the eye of the critics than in the intention of the organizers.
Nonetheless, it is the case that the demonstration did attract a mixed bag, both from the far right and from the far left. Vaatz points out how the demonstration as a whole was denounced due to the participation of some extremists, which raises a general question about political responsibility in any heterogeneous political assembly: Should we judge the middle by the fringe? Should we blame peaceful demonstrators for a violent margin? Are centrists in a political party tied to the extremists? The problem is endemic to any heterogeneous phenomenon; the alternative to such heterogeneity would be a disciplined and centralized Leninist party, a model that brings with it a host of other problems. In any case, Vaatz appropriately objects to the argument that the center of a demonstration can be rejected because of the fringe: it is a political version of an ad absurdum fallacy and a form of guilt by association.
Vaatz’s argument about the uneven response to the demonstrations has sparked a controversy that goes beyond the standard “gotcha” sniping of German domestic politics. He clearly hit a nerve because his remarks raise questions about the fragility of liberal democracy, there and elsewhere. There are four key points:
First, Vaatz scandalized the opinion-making public by suggesting a comparison between the political culture in contemporary Germany and aspects of the East German dictatorship (as well as, more in passing, the Nazi era). The Federal Republic understands itself as the antithesis of the dictatorships of the past, and Vaatz broke a taboo in his accusation. Despite the recriminations against him, the question is now in the air: Is unified Germany, the so-called Berlin Republic, a continuation of the liberal democracy that was West Germany? Or has today’s Germany, especially in the Merkel era, inherited elements of an authoritarian past? Vaatz surely does not make this claim, but the door has been opened. The grand coalition, the ruling arrangement of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, leaves a parliamentary opposition that is made up of small, hapless, and powerless parties, as all power flows toward the chancellor, who has a history of successfully destroying her partners. Against that backdrop, the cardinal sin of the August 1 demonstration was not the opposition to wearing masks but the temerity to oppose Merkel. We need an adequate vocabulary to describe this political formation, especially if she pursues a fourth term, as is now increasingly speculated.
Second, Vaatz in fact supports the government’s corona program, but he also defends the freedom to criticize it. Although a conservative politician, he stands very much in the lineage of the radical heroine and martyr of the left, Rosa Luxemburg, who famously declared that freedom is always the freedom of the other. That dictum was part of her early critique of Bolshevik rule in Russia, which quickly set out to suppress heterodox opinion. A survivor of the East German dictatorship, Vaatz evidently has a particular sensitivity to the suppression of viewpoint diversity. Americans should be familiar with this phenomenon from our current experience of cancel culture.
Third, particularly worrisome is Vaatz’s identification of a consonance, if not coordination, between government and press. To be sure, there still remains some critical journalism in Germany, although its criticism is more often directed toward Washington than Berlin. Yet the historically prestigious national press organs—let alone the publicly funded broadcast media—display very little critical will or curiosity toward the Merkel government, at best adding minor grace notes here and there. The difference between that cozy press–chancellor relationship in Germany and the taut agonistics between president and press in Washington is enormous; of course, to be fair, the same American press often handled the previous administration with kid gloves. In general, one has to conclude that a press as a robust fourth estate, truly independent, has grown weak. The mechanisms that underpin this “structural transformation of the public sphere” need closer scrutiny.
Fourth, while Vaatz is clearly not a fan of President Trump, as indicated by his aside concerning hydroxychloroquine, he focuses on how the government–media conglomerate in Germany operates with the production of Feindbilder, images of the enemy: in addition to Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. These enemies abroad are regularly rolled out by loyal journalists, in Orwellian fashion, to reaffirm the order at home. Press accounts are often gleeful to report worse corona results in those other countries, as compared to Germany, but they seem never to report how countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Turkey have an even better record than Germany as far as corona fatalities goes. Enemies have a particular role to play in the obligatory narrative.
There is a German phrase from Goethe, man merkt die Absicht und man ist verstimmt, which here might be understood in the sense that a too obvious agenda undermines credibility. Such is Vaatz’s warning to the government and the press: liberal democracy requires equality before the law and an objectivity toward the citizenry. Where that objectivity is abandoned in the name of partisanship, the democratic expectations of the people go unmet and the social contract comes under pressure. The optimism of his text is the possibility that the government might reverse course and avoid a credibility crisis of its own making. Otherwise his diagnosis suggests two divergent lines of thought. The conclusion to draw might be that in the face of an emergency in any country, objectivity and neutrality are not viable options, no matter how great the threat to civil liberty. That is a troubling prospect. Alternatively, we can read this one controversy as a snapshot of political culture in Germany, where liberal democracy may be more fragile than many had expected and hoped.
