I’ve struggled to ascertain from afar the true nature of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland. Progressive media love to quote its supporters’ politically off-key comments, but no party can answer for a membership’s every daft remark; even the odd dodgy politician comes with the territory.
Yet the country’s two mainstream but increasingly unpopular parties – a disenchantment Brits will recognise – portray the AfD as chocka with swastika-waving Nazis building scale models of Treblinka in their basements. After anti-Trump Democrats screamed ‘Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!’ until they were blue in the face last year, I can’t help but view the German elite’s hyperventilation with scepticism. These days, the ‘far right’ comprises everyone not cock-a-hoop over abdicating their countries to droves of destitute, undereducated foreigners –in which case the AfD, now polling almost even with the leading Christian Democrats, certainly qualifies as ‘far right’, and so do two-thirds of their compatriots.
From an arm of the German political establishment, of course, this conclusion was foregone, but on what basis did its domestic spy agency formally classify the pariah party earlier this month (a label now ‘paused’ due to the party’s bid for an injunction) as ‘right-wing extremists’? The AfD has an unacceptable ‘ethnicity and ancestry-based understanding of the people’. Thus the party perversely insists that there’s such a thing as being German; that the qualities intrinsic to Germanness cannot be bestowed by a piece of paper alone; that in comparison to the indigenous population on whom these visitors have imposed themselves, the millions of often-Middle Eastern immigrants who’ve poured into the country in the last decade are ever so slightly, well, less German.
What does it mean to be German? The British are familiar with this variety of tortured interrogation, most recently illustrated by the difference of opinion between Fraser Nelson and Konstantin Kisin over whether Rishi Sunak is legitimately ‘English’. The frequency with which Europeans are asking themselves what defines who they are betrays a rising insecurity and bewilderment. Self-confident peoples don’t worry into the mirror all day. Rattlingly tectonic demographic change, little of which locals asked for, has triggered a continent-wide identity crisis.
Surely there’s still such a thing as quintessential Englishness, more broadly Britishness, as well as Germanness, Irishness, etc. While these elusive clusters of attributes aren’t implicitly genetic, they do have an ethnic and ancestral component. National characters are sensibilities, textures, demeanours. They’re hard to pin down, but you know them when you see them. Never mind the bleeding tea; for outsiders, Englishness summons reserve, diffidence, reticence, politesse, a certain precision, a reluctance to complain and a sense of honour – a civilised version of England’s inhabitants that’s grown increasingly archaic.
To me, Germanness summons orderliness (if not rigidity), fastidiousness, boisterousness, vigour, resolve, mastery, exactingness – as well as a bundle of stray associations: beer and polkas. Wurst and loaves of health bread that would double as shotputs. Compulsive cringing over the second world war. Pedestrians’ insistence on not crossing against a red light though there’s no traffic for miles, and a weird obsession with poo. The arbitrary or even trivial-seeming elements that contribute to the touch and feel of a given heritage are always more than the sum of their parts.
The frequency with which Europeans are asking what defines who they are betrays a rising insecurity
These semi-ethnic designations needn’t be absolute. If I may borrow from gender ideology, embodiment of a national gestalt is a spectrum. For example, Fraser and Konstantin are both right. Born and bred in England, with the manner and manners to match, Rishi is exquisitely English. Yet as a practising Hindu whose Indian parents emigrated from East Africa in the 1960s, he’s inevitably an increment less English than a counterpart whose English forebears go back a thousand years. Why is that observation inflammatory? Born and raised in the US, I’ll never be British, though after my 36 years in the UK maybe you folks rubbed off on me a tad. After all, the most British thing I’ve ever done was leave Britain.
What shouldn’t be up for grabs is that Muslims born in Syria or Afghanistan, raised on flatbread and hummus and praying five times a day facing Mecca don’t seem especially German, even if they land in Homburg as adults. Yet now that the continent’s leaders have welcomed millions from the culturally far abroad – nearly a quarter of Germany’s population has an ‘immigrant history’, according to its own stats – Europeans are being forced to adopt an American conception of their peoples. After all, it’s a truism that ‘anyone can become an American’. These days, then, anyone can become British, if not English. Anyone can become German, and claiming that genuine Germanness can’t be conferred by mere bureaucratic abracadabra makes you an ‘extremist’.
Believe it or not, there was once such a thing as Americanness. Europeans used to make fun of it. In broad strokes, Yanks were seen as open, trusting, innocent, gormless, guileless; a little stupid, or at least ignorant; optimistic and heartbreakingly credulous; sometimes irksomely likeable; unsophisticated, loud; insensitive, if often unwittingly; not very funny, but quick to laugh; badly dressed, before everyone was badly dressed; fat, before everyone was fat; easily awed and jarringly direct. But that portrait is growing as dated as the reserved one of the English has become, and I don’t mean there’s a new version. There’s no version. After the onslaught of tens of millions of immigrants from every point of the compass in only the last 30 years – newcomers decreasingly inclined to assimilate – my country grows ever more incoherent. Any quality or behaviour seeming ‘awfully American’ is a notion of yesteryear. The United States is a geographical location and, as its politicians love to boast, an ‘idea’, an abstraction. The country less and less connotes a people.
Until recently, most Americans had European roots. That civilisational commonality is finished. The American model of nationality is being tested to the utmost. As Europe embraces the same formula – any freshly arrived foreign resident, presto, is as German as Oktoberfest – national identity becomes an empty suit. ‘Culture’ is one of the hardest words in English to define. Maybe it’s easiest to grasp what a culture is when you’ve lost it.
Comments