Home—Blog—How the past still haunts Germany
Jul 20, 2012, 03:01
Posted byMerryn Somerset Webb
Comments (12)
If you pop down to any pub in the home counties where men aged 60-plus hang out, you’ll find that a good number of them think Germany has caused the financial crisis on purpose in order to impose German political leadership on the eurozone.
There’s a fairly incendiary pamphlet doing the rounds called The Fourth Reich and the theory has also been picked up in our own national newspapers.
Here’s Simon Heffer, the poster boy for this kind of stuff, in the Daily Mail last year, talking about “how Germany is using the financial crisis to conquer Europe.” Their aim, and one they are fast achieving, he says is “a complete fiscal union in which Germany as the EU’s most powerful economy and principal paymaster makes the rules and makes them unbreakable.”
The result? A loss of sovereignty not seen in much of Europe “since many were under the jackboot of the Third Reich 70 years ago.” Think “one economic policy, one taxation system, one security system, one debt, one economy, one finance minister... and all... German.”
This sounds mildly insane. But it’s a view that has gradually spread from the Daily Mail and the nation’s pubs into the minds of the normally relatively sane. I give you hedge fund guru Crispin Odey’s latest manager’s report (I say guru because the long-term performance of his fund is stunning and he appears in the Sunday Times Rich List with wealth of around £450m).
He used to think, he says, that financial crisis in Europe was avoidable. Now he thinks that Angela Merkel has failed to avoid it on purpose in order to turn “a crisis into a political opportunity”, something at which Germany has form (this, says Odey, is how Bismarck managed to unify Germany back in the 1800s).
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She has “played a blinder” by continuing to refuse to give money to the bankrupt southern European countries and constantly stating that the “only solution would be a fully fledged unified state of Europe.” Everything she says points to the only solution being this. But for this to be an option that the rest of Europe will accept “the crisis must worsen and importantly the situation in France must fast deteriorate.”
It’s pretty Germanophobic stuff. But is there anything in it? I suspect there is not. It is absolutely true that the crisis has worsened as a direct result of policy inaction. It is also true that Germany’s refusal to allow the European Central Bank to get on with buying time via money printing like the rest of us probably isn’t helping much. Nor for that matter is its insistence on austerity. But that doesn’t mean that Merkel’s behaviour reflects some kind of crazed domination plan.
Much more likely is that it reflects something else: not aggression, but fear. There was an interesting article in the New Statesman last year pointing some of this out. Imagine, says Richard Evans, that you were born in Germany in 1910. There’d have been “a childhood spent amid the violence and deprivation of the First World War, with an Allied economic blockade leading to the death of more than half a million Germans through starvation and related diseases; the hyperinflation and political violence of Weimar's early years and then the mass unemployment that put a third of the workforce out of a job by 1932, coming along just at the time when someone born in the run-up to the First World War was entering the job market.
Then, in 1933, the Nazi seizure of power, followed by mass conscription in 1935 and continuous warfare from 1939 to 1945. If you survived that, there were more years of inflation and poverty until the currency reform of 1948 began to put things right.”
Then there would have a long period in which Germans “experienced peace, prosperity and stability” along with their economic miracle – it appeared to be finally proven that “political democracy could deliver economic prosperity.” Look at it like this and is the fact that Merkel doesn’t much fancy the idea of allowing endless money printing really that much of a surprise?
Evans' conclusion? “It's not ambition that lies behind the German stance - it's fear, even paranoia, deeply embedded in the national political culture. It is a fear that Germany needs to overcome.” The result may be the same either way – at this point the choice is pretty much down to European collapse or more European union. But I am not sure it is particularly helpful for us to confuse fear with agression along the way.
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(20 July 2012, 07:03PM) Complain about this comment
You are correct Merryn.It is fear.Fear starts many wars as pre-emptive strikes against foes who are usually misunderstood, often due to the machinations of idiotic childish pamphlets like the Daily Mail.Two points in the article are iffy. Germany lost 2.6 million citizens in the Great War and the Nazis did not seize power. They won a free open democratic election. Many people in Germany had to want them to win or be happy to collude with their evil brand of violent racism. Don't try to excuse them. But equally, don't blame their grandchildren for what is going on now. They are as bewildered and powerless as we are.
(20 July 2012, 07:42PM) Complain about this comment
Boris,Not sure the Nazis won as democratically as you suggest. As far as I am aware they were the largest party in 1933 elections but did not have an overall majority.Did they not seize power after the burning of the Reichstag in which most historians believe they were implicated?
(20 July 2012, 08:22PM) Complain about this comment
Thank goodness somebody is temporing inflation; you've got to hand it to the Germans ... they know on which side their bread is buttered. They know the importance of a positive Balance of Payments...It may seem callous but forcing genuine austerity upon those Euro countries which can't 'hack it' is probably the kindest solution for them in the longer term.Hopefully the temporing of inflation by the Germans will have a knock-on effect of temporing inflation over here. And if that forces genuine austerity on us in the UK then sobeit; surely that, in the longer term, would be preferable to hyperinflation; would it not?
(20 July 2012, 09:20PM) Complain about this comment
I live and work in Berlin.Germans have no desire to rule Europe. What they are terrified of though is inflation. They do indeed associate the rise of the Nazis with the hyper inflationary collapse of the Weimar Republic.The result is the general populace are a lot more aware generally about what money is and they are a lot more careful about money than brits. There are many coin stores still in Berlin high streets where people can purchase gold and silver and it is a far more popular investment than the UK.
(21 July 2012, 04:23PM) Complain about this comment
Good article Merryn.I'm shocked how easy people's opinions are swayed with just the slightest of insinuations. Maybe there is something inherently ugly in all of us, something that can be coaxed out with the right stimulas and in the right circumstances.Der Sturmer was a comic, not comic as in funny, just laughable that people believed it. It's a terrifying thought that such blind unthinking is resurfacing in the main stream psyche and by those purporting to be of intelligent mind.
(21 July 2012, 10:50PM) Complain about this comment
Perhaps financial journalists should stick to writing on topic and leave accurate historical analysis to historians? Paranoia can excuse many a vice, but the more accurate concept to apply to Germany is Ambition. Ambition is a good thing, but it depends who or what you trample over to achieve your aims. The Germans are single-minded (again a virtue), but thankfully - in general terms - their weakness can be an over reliance on method, structure and hierarchy. In that sense, Germany is predictable. Perhaps the use of the word 'solution' isn't the wisest choice of rhetoric from the German leadership, but Merryn's article seems to suggest we empathise with the bully that steamrollers others because its own angst leads it to fear losing out to what it might consider are some-how 'inferior' nations. But, hey, what do '60-year olds plus' know about Germans compared to a clever journo with a laptop?
(22 July 2012, 10:51AM) Complain about this comment
“No matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.” ― John F. Kennedy“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. ” ― Joseph Goebbels"If suckling on your Mothers breast is the extent of your WW2 experience, you're only really in a position to offer a view of her breast not of the war" - Romford Dave
(22 July 2012, 02:48PM) Complain about this comment
"Imagine, says Richard Evans, that you were born in Germany in 1910."Yeah, but the people in power and making the decisions in Germany now weren't born in 1910, they were born in the 1950s.The likes of Angela Merkel (born 1954) and her colleagues and the leaders of Germany GmbH have no more memory of Weimar inflation than Cameron and Osborne have of the 1930s depression.
(23 July 2012, 12:39AM) Complain about this comment
From someone living in the Southern European country of Spain. I wish that we, or Portugal or Greece or xyz, say to the Germans. Look you print more money or we are leaving. In a political/fiscal union, you can not have one dictator, you have a collection of countries and economies with different self interests. If one country says, it is enough. We are going to be independent, we have had enough we are not bowing down to IMF, Troika, ECB, whoever, we will do it our way. We have survived for hundreds of years on our own we will do it again.
(23 July 2012, 07:58AM) Complain about this comment
@Darren"We have survived for hundreds of years on our own we will do it again."I suggest you read up on history of Greece and then come back and they that Greece has "survived" "on its own" for most of last 500 years.
(23 July 2012, 05:52PM) Complain about this comment
There is an rgument that it is the future that haunts Germany. A fear of what could happen if the dogs of war were ever let back out of the bag and if they lose that famous self-control.....again.
(23 July 2012, 07:23PM) Complain about this comment
The evidence of the 'German' economic culture - in particular their understanding & repsect for money is there for all to see. The evidence of why Germans should not change their position is also there for all to see - right across southern Europe.Why should Germans change their position on money supply control ? The alternatives have been a corrupt failure.
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