The media are alive with crumbling firewalls (Brandmauer) in Germany. State elections in Thuringia have delivered the first win for the extreme right since 1945 in the region where the Nazis first entered regional power in 1929, and on the date Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.
“The East will do it!” The Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) campaign mixed the usual right-populist themes with the suggestion that the East is where the real Germany resists the liberal horrors of multiculturalism and windpower.
A panic-stricken commentator announces that “there’s only one way to keep Germany’s far-right AfD at bay. Address the concerns it exploits” with “constructive debate on sensitive issues”.
Other writers are horrified that Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is suddenly concentrating its national firepower on, of all people, the Greens. Are Germany’s Tories copying all those former centrist conservatives of recent years (take a bow, Boris Johnson) and adopting the attack tactics of rightwing populists? That’s the firewall that really matters, and if that goes…
Some facts. At the last Thuringian election in 2019, the AfD won 23.4% of the vote. This year, it won 32.8%. Consider those five years: Covid, the Ukraine war and the energy crisis caused by Germany’s blind dependence on Vladimir Putin’s gas. A country led by a fractious coalition under a chancellor whose party got less than 26%, and who seems to do whatever he does (if anything) late and unwillingly. Five years of an ideal breeding ground for anti-“system” populism and conspiracy theories – at the end of which the AfD has managed to convince less than 10% more voters in its strongest state.
And in Germany, of course, being the biggest single party doesn’t mean you’ve “won”, because (imagine the rationality!) your seats are in proportion to your vote. Without an absolute majority, all you win is first dibs at a coalition. If everybody refuses to work with you (say, because you’re a pro-Putin fascist), tough. So the AfD won’t actually govern little Thuringia (home to only 2.5% of the German population, and falling), there’s no path for it into central government (the latest national polling last week puts it on 17.4%), and the moderate German centre is actually holding up, despite everything, better than anywhere in Europe, with the four mainstream pro-Nato, pro-EU parties enjoying almost 63% support.
Yet Germans are still told they must address AfD voters’ “concerns”. Or, how about we admit that, despite the Berlin Wall having been gone for longer than it stood, the German East remains profoundly different – not because the arrogant West was so heavy-handed after 1990, and not even because of 40 years of Soviet occupation. Because of history.
One word: colonialism. In 1147, Cologne, Bonn, Mainz and Frankfurt were 1,000-year-old centres of high medieval Europe; since the day Julius Caesar himself named them, no one had ever disputed that Germania was where the Germans lived; and Berlin was a Slavic river-fishing village.
That year, the northern arm of the Second Crusade sent German knights crashing across the River Elbe, intent on converting and conquering the pagan Slavs and Balts. The end result was almost-full German-speaking colonisation in westernmost Transelbia (almost: the Sorbs remain as witnesses, just north of Dresden); further east, in present-day Poland, the land remained forever disputed between mass settler-colonists and natives, while farther east still, in present-day Russia/Lithuania, the state of the Teutonic Knights established full elite-settler dominance over local peasants. In 1525 it was the first to adopt Luther, renaming itself (after a native tribe it had crushed) Prussia.
It’s a long story, but the result was the settler-colonial paradigm we find so often, be it in British Kenya, French Algeria, Loyalist Ulster, or the illegal settlements of Israel. It also applies, with obvious modifications, to the ex-slave states of the US.
By the late mid-18th century, Prussia was on the radar as the most militarised culture in Europe – as Voltaire put it: “Other states have armies. In Prussia, the army has a state.” The backbone of this Prussia (which still crowned its kings in Königsberg) were the Junkers of East and West Prussia.
In return for total loyalty to the House of Hohenzollern, they got exclusive access to the officer corps and top government. On their often vast but poor estates, they were (like the Protestant Ascendancy in Georgian Ireland) not just the landowners, but also the magistrates and militia commanders: Poles, Balts and Russians worked for them, under a more privileged level of German tenants. These, being most-favoured colonial underlings, stuck closely to, and (once they were enfranchised) voted for, the Junkers in their big houses. The resulting society was so utterly different to the largely Catholic west that in the 1890s Max Weber, the founder of sociology, decided it needed its very own name: Ostelbien (“East Elbia”).
This led to the unbalanced politics of late-imperial Germany, torn between the social and military goals of western industrialists (basically, to supplant the British empire before it linked up with the US) and those of the Junkers (basically, to smash Russia before it got too strong). It was this which, ultimately, led to a suicidal two-front war.
The Prussian general staff showed their colonial hand from 1915 to 1918, when the high command (East) ruled a great chunk of conquered land in the East with no civilian oversight: a military colony to produce food for the motherland (using forced labour, naturally) and be the jump-off point for the total conquest of Russia, which they insisted on attempting in early 1918, when they could have had any halfway reasonable settlement they wanted, despite knowing that the Americans were coming in the West. It’s only recently that anybody has really examined this Prussian overture to Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa.
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After defeat, the Eastern Germans kept on voting as they had done before: the anti-democratic, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, assassin-linked DNVP (the German National People’s party, the second-largest in the Weimar Republic in 1924) was almost entirely dependent on Eastern votes. And when the deluge came, it came from the East: if everywhere in Germany had voted the same way as the Rhineland and Bavaria in 1930-32, Hitler could never have done it – and he still needed the help of the DNVP, which (as ever) got practically all its votes from the East.
This colonial past isn’t history – it’s not even past. My father-in-law, who died in 2017, was an East Prussian landowner. His 1920s/30s childhood world (now part of Russia) was a German colony: a Russian stableboy taught him to ride and his parents spoke Lithuanian to their tenants. There are tens of thousands alive today, in Poland and Germany, who in youth could have been shot – either way – for calling their home town the wrong name (Posen or Poznan? Colonial or native?). And the colonial mindset always long outlasts any real danger. Ask anybody in Northern Ireland. That, in a nutshell, is why the German East always voted differently to the German West – and still does. We are not talking about rationally addressable “concerns”, but a political and cultural division deeper than the Mason-Dixon line in the US, and far older.
The CDU, it seems, has grasped that the political future of Germany is veering away from the comfortable postwar West German dream of democracy meaning that more or less everybody is more or less satisfied more or less all the time. It’s heading instead to something more like blue/red America.
As historian Adam Tooze puts it: “If Germany operated a first-past-the-post system, the CDU would sweep most of the West of Germany and the AfD would take the entire East of the country.” That’s why the CDU is reacting to AfD success in the East by attacking the Greens in the West. There’s nothing mad about it: they are simply campaigning for 2025 as though Eastern and Western Germany are two entirely different political battlefields.
And why not? Bavaria, the largest and one of the richest German states, is permanently governed by the Christian Social Union (CSU), which doesn’t even stand anywhere else. Yes, it’s hard to give up on the dream of consensual democracy and Germany, with its history, is understandably fearful of what might come instead. But the more closely you look at the vision of a culturally and politically homogeneous nation-state, the more it feels like a 19th-century fantasy, whose actual purpose was to construct an invented national culture ready to be imposed on an empire.
We British voted for the insanity of Brexit thanks to that fantasy; it’s led Germany to ship €2tn eastwards since 1990 (rather than strengthening social cohesion in the West) in the name of national unity – despite which the Easterners still vote as Easterners vote, shout they’re the real Germany, and demand more.
Well, the “reunification” can’t be undone now, but at least it has a consolation built into it. Half the German East went forever in 1945 – good colonial riddance: as my late father-in-law put it: “Me, miss East Prussia? What’s to miss? Thirty degrees of frost and the Russians across the river?” It no longer has the muscle to wreck everything and its politics will no more spread to the Rhineland than New York will adopt West Virginia gun laws, because Germany still has the biggest firewall of all: the East-West divide.