By Norbert Bolz · Wednesday, October 14, 2020 Are we living once more in a Weimar Republic that no longer knows a center? The toxic climate of public opinion suggests just that. The language of irreconcilability allows some to speak of “covid idiots,” while others see our politics as heading toward dictatorship. And even government pronouncements are sounding more authoritarian, as with the call for a “tightening of the reins” that Bavarian Prime Minister Söder repeated after the chancellor.
Panic and hysteria are the reliable companions to nearly every major political theme today. But of course, corona is central. The most important political effect of the pandemic could well be the growing readiness to endure whatever may come. By contrast, the “corona rebels” wanted to set an example over the weekend. Their protest drew motivation from the impression that with the slogan “because of corona,” one can at any time call a state of emergency, in which freedom and democracy then no longer play a role.
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By Norbert Bolz · Wednesday, October 7, 2020 Nietzsche once said that culture was only a thin apple peel over a glowing hot chaos. That is probably to say that even a small shock suffices to confront us anew with barbarism and dizzying stupidity. And now we are actually dealing with a worldwide pandemic. In effect, the thin apple peel tore at once and an abyss of the most dangerous folly has opened up. Thus one headline read in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit: “Mankind takes a break—the planet exhales.” One might simply accept as childish impudence calling the lockdown, the curfew that has practically brought the entire global society to a standstill, a “break.” But the madness lies in the presumptuousness of assuming a perspective above humans and of making oneself the voice of the “tortured” earth. Giovanni di Lorenzo, an intelligent, educated man, is the editor-in-chief of that newspaper. But today he evokes Hermann Melville’s captain Benito Cereno: The barbarians have his ship in their hands—and he can do nothing about it.
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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 Telos Press · Wednesday, August 26, 2020 The following interview was conducted by Moritz Schwarz and appeared in Junge Freiheit, on August 14, 2020. Published with permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman, who has written a separate note here.
Dr. Maaßen, the Mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer, has warned against a “world of prohibitions” in Germany, in which “moral condemnation” could follow the smallest mistake. This would “destroy liberal democracy.” Is he right?
Hans-Georg Maaßen: I am a jurist, out of passion, and that’s why I am frightened to have to agree with him in part. I am deeply concerned that our legal state—the rule of law—is being more and more undermined by the rule of morality.
Bärbel Bohley’s disappointed phrase is well known: “We wanted justice, but all we got is the rule of law.” Isn’t morality the better and ethically higher good?
Maaßen: No. It is true that the law only provides a moral minimum. Yet that is precisely the precondition of freedom.
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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 Arnold Vaatz · Tuesday, August 18, 2020 The following essay originally appeared in German at Tichys Einblick. Translated by Russell A. Berman, who has written a separate note on the topic here.
At the outset I want to make clear that I view the stipulations of the governments for containing the corona pandemic as appropriate and that it is necessary to obey them.
Yet this is not the central issue. Instead, the central issue is that the BLM demonstration against racism was widely praised and tolerated, while the demonstration of August 1 [against corona restrictions—trans.] was widely condemned, despite posing identical dangers.
The most valuable good for a government is its credibility. One does not need it in a dictatorship, as long as the arguments come from the barrel of a gun. In a democracy, however, credibility is one of the foundational conditions for domestic peace.
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