By Klaus Boldt · Monday, April 12, 2021 
The following interview appeared in the Welt am Sonntag. This translation is published here with permission. Wolfgang Reitzle is one of Germany’s leading business executives. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
Welt am Sonntag: Mr. Reitzle, the corona crisis robbed many Germans of their illusions about this republic. They don’t recognize their country anymore. They used to think of it as progressive, organized, digitalized, and well led. Was that image of modern Germany just a fantasy?
Wolfgang Reitzle: There have been plenty of signs of a discrepancy in Germany between appearance and reality: despite a defense budget of 47 billion euros, our guns can’t shoot, our tanks can’t roll, and our airplanes can’t fly—this doesn’t seem to bother anyone here, but other countries have taken notice. Our inability to build an airport for our capital city astonished the world.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, April 12, 2021 Wolfgang Reitzle is one of Germany’s premiere business executives, and Klaus Boldt, part of the editorial leadership of Die Welt, one of the foremost business journalists. The wide-ranging interview here points to the multiple dimensions of the problems facing Germany at the end of the Angela Merkel era. The general elections in late September are sure to lead to a new coalition government in Berlin—and a new chancellor—who will face all the problems that Reitzle diagnoses, with the possible exception of the pandemic, hopefully over by the fall, even in Europe. While the coronavirus’s economic, social, and political consequences are however sure to linger on, it figures here primarily as an example of massive government failure and the toxic mixture of bureaucracy, ideology, and incompetence that Reitzle denounces and that leads him to call Berlin “a failed state.”
Those are harsh words from a prominent leader of the German business community, especially when one recalls how in the U.S. political discussion in recent years Germany has been repeatedly held up as the better alternative to the Trump administration. Not long ago the myth of Angela Merkel as the new leader of the free world circulated through the press. That once-glowing imagery has now vanished in the face of the catastrophes of the German and the EU corona response, and the prospect of continued slow economic growth, fraying infrastructure, and insufficient support for technological innovation in the country where one would least expect it. Reitzle helps us understand why.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Monday, February 8, 2021 Matthias Küntzel is a German political scientist with a focus on the Middle East. His books with Telos Press include Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 and Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, both of which are available in our store for 20% off the list price. His English-language website is matthiaskuentzel.net.
The days are over when Europeans only had to point to Donald Trump to legitimate their appeasement politics toward Tehran. But what will the new American administration and its European allies do to prevent Iran from getting the bomb?
Of course there is the nuclear deal with Iran. For months its proponents have been hoping for Joe Biden’s electoral victory. He would revoke Trump’s leaving the deal and loosen the sanctions on Iran; in return Iran would revise its violations of the agreements, and everything would be good again.
And now? Biden is still holding onto his controversial promise to return to the deal. He has filled the most important positions in the State Department with people who played leading roles in the negotiation of the deal under Barack Obama, including some who—like the new Iran envoy Robert Malley—proved to be particularly accommodating toward Iranian demands. And Biden has not at all insisted that the regime change its missiles program or aggression policies in response to a lifting of the American sanctions. He has only asked for one concession: that Iran return to the terms of the deal before lifting the sanctions that Trump imposed.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, August 26, 2020 The following essay comments on the interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen conducted by Moritz Schwarz and published in Junge Freiheit on August 14, 2020. An English translation of the interview appears here.
In the wake of the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared that liberal democracy was on an inexorable victory march around the world. The Soviet satellite states threw off their Communist shackles, and the occupied Baltics regained their independence. Even Russia seemed briefly to be lurching toward modern governance structures, and the Central Asian states, the “stans,” claimed their own sovereignty (if only, often as not, to revert to indigenous forms of authoritarianism). The age of Latin American dictatorships belonged to the past, certainly in the southern cone and in Brazil, although not in Venezuela and Cuba. The last aftershocks of that democratic optimism informed the hope that toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq would set off a similar democracy wave in the Middle East; no doubt the demonstration of the vulnerability of the dictator in Baghdad set the stage for the Arab Spring of 2011, another burst of hope.
That Arab Spring of hope gave way to a new winter in the Middle East and not only there. The wave of democracy has been followed by a wave of repression. Perhaps one should have paid more attention in 1989, which not only witnessed the November celebration in Berlin but also the bloody June in Beijing, where the democracy movement at Tiananmen was murdered by the Communist Party and its tanks. It was wrong to assume that the formal end of the Soviet Union meant the end of Communism altogether or that Communist agitation would cease to undermine free societies. That old mole continues to burrow.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, August 18, 2020 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.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, September 18, 2017 The following paper was presented at the conference “After the End of Revolution: Constitutional Order amid the Crisis of Democracy,” co-organized by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the National Research University Higher School of Economics, September 1–2, 2017, Moscow. For additional details about the conference as well as other upcoming events, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.
Theodor Fontane, the master of German realist fiction, published his first novel, Before the Storm, in 1876. Set during the winter of 1812–13, in and around Berlin, it explores the decisive historical moment when Prussia changed sides—breaking out of its forced alliance with France in order to side with Russia in the anti-Napoleonic war. Yet the dialectic of the moment was such that Germans could join in the rout of the French while nonetheless embracing aspects of the French revolutionary legacy. Thus near the conclusion of the novel, the Prussian General von Bamme, commenting on social changes around him, a reduction in traditional structures of hierarchy, speculates, “And where does all this come from? From over yonder, borne on the west wind. I can make nothing of these windbags of Frenchmen, but in all the rubbish they talk there is none the less a pinch of wisdom. Nothing much is going to come of their Fraternity, nor of their Liberty: but there is something to be said for what they have put between them. For what, after all, does it mean but: a man is a man.” Mensch ist mensch.
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