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The National Interest
Sonderweg: The Closing of the German Mind
by Uwe Siemon-Netto
. . . So here we are, 82 million people on a Wyoming-sized plot of land, peering anxiously across ten open borders and pretending that we live by ourselves, fighting our nightmares out of consciousness through our near manic pursuit of the post-historical, of the modern. And Germany is nothing if not modern. We have "gay pride parades" like the Americans, bourgeois teens pimp-walking around town in grunge garments like ghetto kids in the United States, and we outdo any American social engineer in sheer folly. We have been known, for example, to send juvenile felons on "therapeutic" adventure trips to New Zealand, accompanied by a social worker, at taxpayers’ expense. Like the Americans, too, we bastardize our language with politically-correct neologisms; we call this Dummdeutsch ("dumb German"). We no longer say "Guten Morgen", but "Hi, Brigitte, wow", not knowing what this signifies; it just sounded good last night on television. Our feminists can out-snarl their American counterparts, as well, and we have guitar-strumming pastors blessing same-sex unions and experimenting liturgically with heavy metal clamor in the vain hope of filling their empty churches.
Yet these superficial attributes of modern cosmopolitanism notwithstanding, Germany is parochial. It is because its parochialism is so deep, in fact, that its expressions of cosmopolitan modernism are so over-the-top. Few of its most modern, progressive leaders speak a foreign language competently; the current chancellor certainly doesn't, and so it is fitting that during his successful election campaign he stressed a new--a modern--German Sonderweg, a new autonomous national path. He did this even though Germany is utterly dependent on foreign trade, especially with the United States, which he so crassly offended. And most of those around him helping to govern Germany thought all this not the least bit odd. . . .