Charlemagne
The
end of Heile Welt
Germany’s
illusions have been shattered
Mar 5th 2016 | From
the print edition
MORE than 1m
refugees arrived in Germany last year, mainly young Muslim men. They
entered a society that, relative to other Western countries, has
embraced multiculturalism only recently. Suddenly these foreigners
are in co-ed schools, discos, swimming pools, hospitals and parks.
Some of their interactions with their hosts go easily. Others do
not—as epitomised by New Year’s Eve in Cologne, where gangs of
North African men sexually assaulted scores of German women who had
come to watch the fireworks.
Germans who only a
year ago oozed confidence about their economy and their country are
now losing faith that they “can manage”, as Angela Merkel, the
chancellor, likes to put it. Many fear the crisis will render Germany
unrecognisable. A sense of loss pervades many conversations.
To grasp this trauma
it helps to understand the German zeitgeist that developed (mainly in
the former West Germany) in the post-war years, and lingered in the
reunited country. Germans call it Heile Welt. The term means
something like “wholesome world”, and describes an orderly,
idyllic state. It may connote the nurturing environment parents
create for their children to protect them from life’s ugliness, or
a private oasis of peace amid public chaos. It was a state of mind
that Germans clung to after the second world war.
Because it implies a
degree of escapism, the term can be used sardonically. In 1973
Loriot, West Germany’s most incisive humourist, chose it for the
title of an anthology of cartoons skewering his country’s bourgeois
pretensions. In 1998 it was the title of a novel by Walter Kempowski,
set in 1961, in which a teacher moves to an idyllic village but
discovers that behind every silence and glance lurks a demon of the
Nazi past.
In the immediate
post-war years, with Holocaust, firebombing, mass rape and the
carving up of their nation still recent memories, Germans flocked to
watch Heimat (“homeland”) films. Usually shot in the Alps or in
heaths and forests, they featured clean, simple tales of love and
friendship between pure women and men dressed in regional garb.
Outside the cinemas, Germans revelled in their “economic miracle”,
as they rebuilt a devastated country into a commercial powerhouse.
Foreigners were
allowed into this Heile Welt, but not entirely accepted. To man its
assembly lines, Germany invited workers from southern Europe and
especially Turkey. The millionth arrived in 1964 and got a motorcycle
as a gift. By the time the programme ended in 1973, 4m foreigners
lived in West Germany. But they were called “guest workers”
rather than immigrants, on the premise that they would ultimately
leave again. Unsurprisingly, most stayed. Yet mainstream Germany
continued to see itself as ethnically homogenous—a Heile Welt in a
tribal sense.
As part of Heile
Welt, West Germans atoned for their past by becoming good democrats,
good Europeans and ardent pacifists. But they did so like a teenager
who experiments with increasing autonomy, confident that his uncool
but protective parents are always standing by. For West Germany, dad
was America, which held its aegis over the country throughout the
cold war. Mum was France, which despite its nervous vanity gracefully
accepted Germany back into the European family.
The dystopian flip
side of Heile Welt was never far away. If the cold war had ever
turned hot, Germany would have been vaporised first. (“The shorter
the range, the deader the Germans,” missile strategists used to
quip.) West Germany even had terrorism. But its terrorists were
native white leftists who killed industrial tycoons. Ordinary Germans
never felt threatened.
In their private
lives Germans created micro-idylls. They kept garden plots orderly,
guarded by the requisite gnome. East Germans seeking refuge from the
cynically implausible Heile Welt offered by communism retreated to
“the niches”: private book readings among intellectuals, or nude
bathing with friends by pristine lakes. East or west, order was
paramount. Visitors were impressed (if not intimidated) by how
fastidiously Germans separated their white, brown and green glass for
recycling.
One by one, these
facets of Heile Welt are becoming brittle. Russia is aggressive
again; Germans fret that, when it comes to it, the ageing American
dad may not show up. Having cultivated non-violence to the point of
pacifism, they now realise that defence of their state and their
values may someday require them to fight, kill and die again. The
terrorists they now face are not German leftists, but foreigners
ready to kill women and children. Globalisation no longer just means
exporting BMWs, but also allowing in Muslim refugees, some of them
with attitudes on gender and Jews that Germans find offensive.
Gnomic wisdom
Some Germans react
by fleeing into ever tinier Heile Welten. “We are becoming ever
more like our garden gnomes,” says Wolfgang Nowak, one of Germany’s
most astute social observers—inward-facing rather than open-minded.
Every Monday a movement called Pegida, or “Patriotic Europeans
Against the Islamisation of the Occident”, marches through Dresden.
For many in the surrounding area of Saxony, these gatherings have
become convivial rituals similar to American tailgate barbecues, but
to outsiders they appear xenophobic and menacing. Even moderate
Germans are turning against globalisation. Many see a free-trade area
being negotiated between America and the EU not as an opportunity but
as yet another threat to their way of life.
Above all, the tone
of German conversations is changing. Language in the era of Heile
Welt was sanitised, with political correctness often taken to
ludicrous extremes. Now, in the name of “telling it as it is”, it
is becoming coarser and aggressive. It is not clear what kind of
world will replace the wholesome one the Germans once dreamed up. But
it will be a rougher one.
From the print
edition: Europe
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