Hans Kundnani

Germany’s dark night of the soul

The migrant crisis is testing the country’s idea of itself

As Angela Merkel approaches her tenth anniversary in power, Germans are talking about a possible Kanzlerinnendämmerung — a ‘twilight of the chancellors’. Anger is growing at Merkel’s handling of the migration crisis. Germany, which has only recently reconciled itself to the idea that it is a ‘country of immigration’, must now integrate vast numbers of asylum seekers, beginning with the million who are expected to arrive this year. At the same time, the country has been hit by two huge corruption scandals, involving Volkswagen and the DFB, the German football federation. The odds are that Merkel will survive — it’s hard to see at the moment who can replace her. But the unprecedented challenges she now faces threaten something more fundam-ental: Germany’s post-war identity.

Germans like to believe that they have moved beyond nationhood in the classical sense; that they have developed a post-national identity based on ‘constitutional patriotism’. In other words, Germany has developed a civic (as opposed to ethnic) nationalism based on a liberal political culture and embodied in the Basic Law, the Federal Republic’s constitution.

This identity was in large part informed by a sense of responsibility and contrition for the Nazi past and the Holocaust. As the leading advocate of the idea of ‘constitutional patriotism’, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, once wrote: ‘In Germany it was only after Auschwitz — and in a sense only because of the shock of this moral catastrophe — that democracy began to take root.’ This implied that there was no sense of national identity available to Germany other than one based on the lessons of 1945.

In reality, German post-war identity is more complex than this account allows. For a long time the embryonic ‘post-nationalism’ that developed in the Federal Republic from the 1960s onwards co-existed uneasily with a rather regressive citizenship law based on the principle of ius sanguinis, or ‘citizenship by blood’, which went back to 1913.

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