When the previous German government fell apart, the AfD party (an assortment of Nazis and far-right populists) polled at around 16%. At the time, the conservative party (CDU) had embraced its own right-wing populist faction (“conservatives”), exemplified by Friedrich Merz who, given the polling, was destined to become Germany next chancellor. Merz had vowed to cut the AfD’s numbers in half, admittedly a noble goal.
Merz’s approach of attempting to reduce support for the AfD was to adopt many of their talking points. Following a relatively short election season, the AfD gained 20% of the votes. Merz formed a government with the social democrats and continued his approach. Now, the AfD party polls at 25%.
There obviously is a lesson here: Adopting far-right talking points and policies will only strengthen the very people who came up with the ideas in the first place. German “conservatives”, however, do not want to learn this lesson. Instead, they keep going (most likely because they simply have no problem with far-right ideas in the first place).
Part of the “conservative” play book is the frequent use of culture-war topics. As in many other countries, “tradition” plays a huge role (in this context, “tradition” is a loaded term, it almost inevitably is a smorgasbord of hard-line conservative and outright reactionary ideas). In Germany, working with tradition is a little bit more difficult, given the country’s history. Unless you are an outright Nazi (of which there are many, and they’re now out in the open), you can’t simply pursue a red thread through the country’s past.
For German “conservatives”, the work-around has been what they call Leitkultur (which you might translate as dominant culture). Germany still bills itself as the Land der Dichter und Denker (the country of poets and thinkers), so a focus on culture and language mostly gets around the Hitler problem. At least that’s the idea.
Given that outright racism in Germany is still shunned, Leitkultur can serve as a neat foil to fold someone’s racist or anti-Muslim sentiments into what looks like a presentable package. The idea is simple: people may arrive from somewhere else, but they need to adapt to Germany’s “traditions” and culture. How or why new arrivals are not allowed to enrich German tradition or culture in their own ways is never explained.
Also note how this approach repackages basic intolerance or racism into something that looks presentable. If, for example, someone won’t eat pork because of their religion, religious prejudices are simply reframed. Now it’s the newcomers fault that they won’t conform: hey, it’s out Leitkultur to stuff our faces with sausages (this might sound like a crass description, but Bavaria’s right-wing populist governor has made a whole career out of exactly this approach to repackaging bigotry as a love for very specific food [example]).
As I already noted, one of the ideas behind Leitkultur is that German culture survived unscathed during the Nazi years (1933-1945). Work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, say, was not marred by the presence of a dictatorial government that not only committed vast atrocities but was also responsible for the Holocaust — at least that’s the idea. Of course, the reality of how German culture went through the Hitler years is vastly more complicated — and not quite as rosy as conservatives would want you to believe.
A little while ago, I decided that I needed a book with work by Lotte Jacobi. Born and raised in Germany, and trained as a photographer, Jacobi worked in her father’s photography studio but also established herself as a photographer.
She quickly became known for her skills at making portraits, resulting in a large number of well-known Weimar Republic figures being portrayed by her. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, her work was being praised. But Jacobi was a dedicated leftist, and she was Jewish. In 1935, she fled to the US with her son, leaving behind a vast amount of her work. Jacobi re-opened a studio in New York and continued the work she had been doing in Berlin.
Among the people she photographed in the US were many others who, like her, had left Germany, most famously Albert Einstein. When trying to find a book with her work, I wasn’t necessarily looking for one with only photographs of emigrés. But I came across a book entitled Berlin–New York (Porträts von Lotte Jacobi) for $9.49, so I ordered it. There wasn’t much information about it other than a few spreads (including a portrait of Lotte Lenya that I had wanted to have somewhere in my library).
When the book arrived, I learned that it contained only portraits of writers, many, but not all, emigrés. That wasn’t quite what I had been looking for, but things quickly got a lot more interesting. To begin with, the book includes a bookplate that says “Acknowledging special achievements in German literature and language. Presented by the German Consulate General Boston.” (my translation)
Given that there’s no name of the original recipient listed, I can now pretend that I have been awarded for my non-existing achievements in German literature.
Joking aside, though, the sticker immediately made the book more interesting, in light of the people who Jacobi portrayed and in light of the various Leitkultur discussions in today’s Germany (the book was published in 1983, I have no way of knowing when it was presented to the original recipient).
About half of the portraits were done in Germany, the rest in the US. For example, Thomas Mann, widely considered one of the giants of German literature in the first half of the 20th Century and recipient of the 1929 Nobel Prize, was photographed in Princeton (there are two photographs, one shows him sitting next to and in conversation with Einstein).
For each of the photographs, there’s a name, year and locale of birth and death (where applicable), and the year when the picture was taken. What threw me were the places where Jacobi’s subjects had died. Here is an assortment of some of Germany’s most well known writers, many of them emigrés — and many never returned to Germany after the war.
Unless I’m overlooking someone, two, Carl von Ossietzky (awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize) and Erich Mühsam, were murdered by the Nazis (Mühsam died in a concentration camp in 1934).
Thomas Mann died in Kilchberg (Switzerland), never returning to live in Germany after the war (he did visit). His older brother Heinrich died in Santa Monica (USA). Lotte Lenya, whose portrait by Jacobi I had always admired, died in New York City (USA; by the way, the book groups Germans and Austrians together, which might be a topic for a different discussion). Lion Feuchtwanger died in Los Angeles (USA). And there are many more.
I’ve been trying to square these facts with the idea of Leitkultur. If the leading literary proponents of what you call your Leitkultur decided to leave Nazi Germany, I suppose this might prove that culture itself was not affected by the Nazis (even as the writers themselves were).
But if a large number of the writers never came back, then the distinction one could make between writers and their work starts falling apart pretty quickly: after all, what should have re-emerged after the war is the good Germany (for a lack of better words), the real Germany, the one with that tradition of Goethe and all the other people.
Apparently, many of the writers didn’t see it that way. And — how awkward for the West Germans who produced the book – some writers decided to move to East Germany.
In the end, the real problem, of course, is the very idea of Leitkultur itself. Ignoring the fact that decreeing that some parts of a country’s culture should be more dominant than others is bad enough, the idea that you somehow can separate culture from people is immensely flawed. Furthermore, the idea that culture is its own entity that exists in parallel to what actual people do is also flawed.
As I noted already, German conservatives using Leitkultur are engaged in an exercise in culture war. But it’s actually worse than that: contemporary Germany prides itself on having dealt with its past. But insisting on a Leitkultur that only consists of the good parts, while pretending that the bad parts do not matter, is exactly the opposite of what Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with one’s past) supposedly is all about.
Instead, it’s an exercise in denial. The difference between German conservatives’ Leitkultur and the AFD’s idea of a glorious German past is a difference of degree and not of kind.
You do not get to cherry pick your past; you have to accept all of it.
Of course, it’s the biographical details in Berlin–New York that drive home this point. You wouldn’t know from the photographs what someone’s life story was.
What you do know from the photographs, though, is that all of those portrayed knew of their power. By that I mean that in the photographs I see that they knew what they could do with the written word. There is a confidence in the way they look at the camera, the way they comport themselves in front of Jacobi’s camera.
It is as if they all were convinced that they were part of a larger endeavour, an endeavour that united them in ways that was never to be divided by petty penny pinchers in power.
Lotte Jacobi also never moved back. She continued her career first in New York and later in New Hampshire where she died in 1990. Her archives are now held by the University of New Hampshire.
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