Merkel and the Deep State (part 3)
Rudolf Novotny
„Und mich ergreift ein längst entwöhntes Sehnen
Nach jenem stillen, ernsten Geisterreich…“
— Goethe
The Merkel years coincided with the arrival of Obama-style comms in Germany. The idea was that the internet represented no more than an acceleration of the televisual public sphere; a distillation of the old spirit into a purer substance. The new age of short attention spans and omnipresent black mirrors would be governed by a simple maxim: he who controls the hashtags and makes up fictitious holidays, controls the world.
The Merkel era came to be defined by these catchy, aesthetically maoist bon mots. Alongside the notions of Staatsräson, Wir schaffen das, and, yes, even Leitkultur as a cheeky conservative counterprogram, the motto Wandel durch Handel („change through trade“) metastasised from an old Bonn stock phrase into an aspirational platitude for would-be LinkedInfluencers with „a passion for geopolitics“. With the former Soviet satellite states brought safely home into German value chains, the new frontiers to be changed through trade were China and Russia. Now, a people like the Phoenicians, the Jews, or the Chinese may be able to expand their trading networks across the globe without its cultural forms undergoing any alteration, but as we in Britain know all too well, a culture as dynamic as those of Northwestern Europe cannot set out to change through trade without itself being changed through trade.
The great poet Eichendorff, as sensitive young Germans of his day and age were wont to do, saw all things sleeping a deep sleep, suspended in uneasy dreams of being awoken by a magic word. The burgher’s „magic word“ is history: insofar as I historicise the world, I call things into being, and thereby remake myself in the image of God. The formula „change through trade“ is precisely such a call, one that holds the answer to the questions that preoccupied us in the first two parts of this series: who was Angela Merkel, and why did the „ordinary men“ of the German deep state stand back and stand by her throughout her Woke rampage?
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What is trade, really? Friedrich von Hayek saw the basic fact of „the economy“ as the inability of any single operator to grasp the Whole. The task of the entrepreneur, so sayeth Hayek, is to leverage hidden knowledge to make a profit and thereby show other economic actors the secret path through the gloom of informational asymmetry — in other words, to exotericise the esoteric. Yet Hayek neglected the obvious conclusion: since the market mechanism only functions through the activity of the entrepreneur, and entrepreneurship is simply demand for esoteric information, the market mechanism can only function where supply and demand for the esoteric are permanently disequilibreated; i.e, where the latter is permanently higher.
Supply in this model is a function of the prevailing information technology, whereby the effectiveness of the means of communication is inversely proportionate to the quantity of the esoteric. The secular reduction of informational asymmetries implies a natural tendency for the rate of profit on arbitrage to fall. The world is disenchanted by the internet and the English language; no longer do local customs and „indigenous ways of knowing“ govern the distribution of goods and services, but open dialogue and „the forceless compulsion of the better argument“. The shortage of the esoteric that incentivises entrepreneurship threatens to turn into a permanent drought. The nanny state must step in on the supply side to reenchant the world.
How to restore the esoteric is a disenchanted age? The state can hardly establish a Works Progress Administrations or an Organisation Todt to forge magic lamps, carve hidden caves into the rock for a poor fisherman to stumble on, or mass produce enchanted doors that reveal themselves every morning when the dawn casts tall shadows over the dunes, only to flicker again into the sand under the withering noonday sun. The simplest way out is through regulation: by restricting activity with inelastic demand to all but the hieratically initiated. This is the great joke of anti-colonialism, whether in Africa, Latin America, or Russia. Economic sanctions, international human rights law: all of this Woke nonsense is a fairly transparent means of preventing honest mom-and-pop multinationals from competing with a priestly class of middleman minorities, and to channel the repressed urges of these would-be conquistadores of the free market into make-work jobs at Magic Circle firms.
„The meaning of the amity lines for the international law of the 16th and 17th centuries,“ writes Carl Schmitt, „was that great spaces of freedom could be delineated as battle zones for the struggle for and division of the new world […] through the isolation of a free zone of conflict, the area of European public law would not be endangered as a sphere of peace and order by events on the other side of the line.“ The Cold War division of the world clandestinely established precisely such a „great space of freedom“ for Western merchant-adventurers bored with the tedium of the end of history in the universal and homogenous state. To grasp this, it helps — following the Gehlen memorandum cited in the first part of this series — to think of the Iron Curtain as a guelphoid meme to maintain a divided continent in keeping with the old British strategy of offshore balancing. But fate threw the Ghibellines a lifeline. Through careful diplomacy, Bonn was able to affect a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, marked by Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow in 1955. The twin crises of 1956 saw British (and, equally importantly, French) power degraded in the Mediterranean, while the Soviets’ „legitimate interests“ within its sphere were tacitly affirmed by the United States and its German ally. Britain was out of play, France was now isolated in Europe, and the spirit of Rapallo wafted on the moody Rhine air.
Bonn now found itself in a position shape the new European order through old-style cabinet diplomacy. The result was the creation of a democratic concept of „international society“ with, if not a commitment to perpetual peace among its members, at least a modus vivendi, reminiscent in that sense of the old Res Publica Christiania. This was the society that announced its existence with the Helsinki Final Act; it was born, however, in 1956.
The new order was a regression from the 19th century concerto of holistic and fully self-realised nation-states. Like Europe between the twilight of the Hallerian private law commonwealth and the dawn of the Westphalian order, it was a world of separate jurisdictions subsumed within a single political order with a single source of legitimacy; not God or his Statthalter, but the democratic sovereign. On the „peace and order“ side of the line, Federal Republican society was to be organised on solidaristic, corporatist principles; industrial paisans and Mittelstand hidalgos were to be protected from the chaos of „Manchester capitalism“ by „public goods“, agricultural subsidies, and a competitive domestic market, while the great questions of state were left to the sovereign export sector — to whom corvée was owed in the form of wage restraint and fiscal discipline. This was Kojève’s „end of history“ as we know and love her.
To the East, anarcho-tyranny reigned in its purest form. Western entrepreneurs were subject to the „anarcho“ side of the hyphen, carving up Soviet gold reserves and export concessions over boozy lunches with the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade. The Eastern trade served an important psychological function in the context of the Western Allies’ grand project of socialising German elites into a democratic lifeworld. The businessman’s natural drive and ruthlessness were mellowed in intercourse with his fellow citizen by the prospect of free expression in the sprawling vistas to which the latter was denied entry; to prowl through the Moscow night in a black chaika was as close as one could come to the oceanic feeling in the Federal Republic of Klaus Theleweit. Real existing socialism was a giant safari park in which man could hunt the highest prey of all.
One man had seen enough of this Woke insanity. Helmut Kohl’s Europe peeked out from under a Rawlsian veil and saw a world of free minds & free markets, midwifed by open and frank dialogue in the democratic public sphere. The liquidation of the Soviet Special Economic Zone was a liberal breakthrough on par with the abolition of the guilds — and a sharp discontinuity in the political economy of the Dark Rechtsstaat. It meant the transformation of the world under the aryan Ursymbol of the even space, proclaimed in Tocqueville’s law of the progressive equalisation of conditions, in the Leibnizian world-picture of the number approaching but never reaching zero, and in the idea of the liberal democratic Rechtsstaat. The freedom of movement of goods, services, capital, and persons transubstantiated man into a pure value equal to other values; that is, a creative value — the imago dei! From the spirit of tragedy was born music, Schiller’s Ode to Joy rang out, and the railway tracks hummed along to the sound of maglevs revving up to deport every last Turk in the country to the blackest corner of Anatolia. But just one thing, Mr. Chancellor — what are you going to do about The Rise of China?
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China was the core of Merkel’s foreign policy. Every unexpected crisis, every contingency that arose was handled with a view to the endgame: the sublation of the exhausted continent into a fintech Greece to Beijing’s industrial Rome. Under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, the Chinese Communist Party had given the old postwar model new impetus by allowing just enough market forces into the hermetically sealed box of the socialist economy to keep the spiritually vacuous contented, while keeping the higher mysteries hallowed for insiders domestic and foreign. Merkel, who usually travelled to China with a business delegation, understood the game and played it well.
The numbers speak for themselves. Merkel paid 11 official visits to China over the 16 years of her chancellorship. Her time in office coincided with China’s economic boom: when she ascended the dragon throne in 2005, China was the 11th in the list of German export destinations; by the time she departed, it was second only to the United States and had firmly established itself as both Germany’s #1 importer and its largest overall trade partner. Merkel emerged as a reliable advocate for China in Brussels, leading the charge against a planned EU anti-dumping tariff on Chinese solar panels in 2013 (seen in Brussels as a precedent-setting initiative for future protective measures against China) while inking a „comprehensive strategic partnership“ with the Middle Kingdom. This was not just an aspirational turn of phrase: Chinese demand acted as a guarantor of political stability, with Chinese industrialisation naturally complementing Germany’s specialised machine tool industry (and later, when there was money to be splashed around, the automotive sector). Thanks to China, business could carry on as usual. The 2008 financial crisis could be weathered without having to tweak the German growth model, and Mittelstand barons the length and breadth of the Rhine could simply raise the drawbridge and keep merrily voting CDU as Merkel brewed up a woke mind virus in the bowels of Wuhan’s wet markets…
One only needs glance at the major foreign policy files on Merkel’s desk — the Eurocrisis, the NSA Affair, and the relationship with Russia in general — to see how each reinforced the German pivot to Asia. These incidents are interpreted in the popular Merkelology as discrete, separate „crises“ to which the Chancellor simply reacted: it was, in fact, precisely this Adam Curtis-style exegesis that the unnamed Merkel advisor we met in the previous instalment of this series offered to me when I queried him. It is true that Merkel did not control the pace of events, but if you have read your Luttwak or even just your Tolstoy you will know that large-s Strategy is not an algorithm to be hammered out at the Zeitenwende On Tour symposium any more than it can be reduced to Mr. Pfuel’s war council moving pieces around on the map at Borodino. It is a set of instincts, reflexes, general principles to be adapted and applied to the needs of the situation with reference to a long-term goal, and Merkel’s instincts for it were unusually acute (or at least those of whoever happened to be whispering in her ear on those long, trans-eurasian flights).
The Eurocrisis was the first instance where this logic was applied. J’accuse’s youthful, urbane readership will probably have little direct memory of the crisis beyond the turborachmanified fable of Germany as „the reluctant hegemon“ with which those foolish enough to have sat in on an undergraduate seminar on „European Political Economy“ have been familiarised. It was here that the Guelphs first tested out the only story they still know how to tell about Germany, viz. that Merkel’s government had to step up and „show leadership“ — meaning, in this case, to „enact policies“ to reduce its current account surpluses vis-a-vis the Eurozone’s other members. The fiscal discipline and wage restraint on which the German economic policy consensus had alighted were self-defeating: to „lead the recovery“, Germany would have to overcome its „savings glut“ through a deficit-funded investment drive and/or a formal Eurozone surplus recycling mechanism to redirect its grandiose current account surpluses to the Eurozone periphery.
That Berlin did not do so was because — so diagnosed Venetian stooges like the European Council on Foreign Relations and shady SWP alumni like Adam Tooze — „bad ideas“ still reigned at the Bundesbank and the German Finance Ministry, namely ordoliberalism, neoliberalism, and perhaps even Tory Austerity. This narrative would have Merkel as a stingy Swabian housewife, and Schäuble a confused and traumatised fiscal policy veteran summoning a hard rain to fall and wash the scum off the Acropolis. Britain’s is the most banal of all satanic pedophile elites: it reduces everything to a question of proper decorum and political correctness.
German politicians are unusually sensitive to criticism from the broadsheets of London, New York, and Washington, thus it was inevitable the Guelph argument would be cast in the idiom of moral reproach. Yet all this nagging and nattering about the long shadow of ordoliberalism ignored the real ideas driving economic policy in Berlin during the Eurocrisis. Wolfgang Schäuble was a man steeped in the intellectual traditions of postwar German liberal-conservatism. His great project was, after the Treaty of Lisbon had given the European Union a political constitution, to lay down an „economic constitution“ for Europe, grounded in the principles of the postwar German social contract. That contract, as I have already told you, was ultimately held together by Germany’s competitiveness in international (i.e, Asian) markets. A Keynesian stabilisation drive, with its inflationary consequences, would undermine this. Compared to Asia, Europe — whose ageing populations were indeed, as the „savings glut“ thesis had it, ill-disposed to investment — was already in relative decline as a destination for German exports. The Keynesians were correct that suppressing demand via austerity was not in and of itself a net positive for German industry, but this seemed a necessary trade-off to maintain the pivot to Asia and enlist peripheral Europe in that push. The southern Eurozone states’ were at Berlin’s door with cap in hand: here was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to teach their governments and labour unions the lesson in fiscal responsibility necessary to establish the „framework conditions“ for German firms to expand their production chains to the shores of the Mediterranean. There was even a historical precedent: in the 13th century, it had taken the best efforts of the German Emperor, Frederick II (who himself had reoriented the Southern Italian economy towards Central Europe through the introduction of a single currency), to chasten Guelph power and set the Mezzogiorno ship-shape. 800 years later, Ghibelline statesmanship would again put Europe in a position to enter into a dialogue of equals with the powers of Asia.
The Eurocrisis soon devolved into a transatlantic tussle. The timing could hardly have been worse. The Bush Administration’s bellicose course in Iraq and its brusque dismissal of European appeals for a „multilateral approach“ had alienated even the hardline transatlanticists in the CDU, who paid for their convictions at the 2002 election. Thus all the more did European democrats smack their lips when Obama emerged to liberate the Americans from themselves — I have even spoken to a seasoned Fidesz activist whose eyes glazed over with nostalgia when recalling the Hawaiian’s soaring televisual rhetoric. The Obama ascendancy was supposed to mark a return to the lazy, air-conditioned days of High Fukuyamism, where MIT and St. Gallen graduates could discuss Policy in a technocratic, data-driven way over a bottle of mineral water in the presidential suite at Davos. Cliches about the end of the end of history could finally be boxed up and stored away in a Swiss bank vault. The line on La vache qui rit shares would only go up.
What the Europeans instead encountered was the kind of arrogance that usually only bubbles to the surface on the twitter feeds of San Francisco’s world class generalists. One Financial Times columnist captured the mood: „ Angela Merkel is […] insisting that all members of the eurozone introduce a constitutional balanced budget amendment – something that is seen as a far-fetched Tea Party idea in the US but is now mainstream in Europe.“ And what blacker shame and disgrace? „On the eurocrisis,“ the FT continued, „the Obama administration is privately touting the example of the troubled asset relief programme (Tarp) to encourage a reluctant Europe to underwrite national debts. The Republican candidates’ new-found principled opposition to bail-outs of any kind must sound like music to the ears of officials in Berlin and Frankfurt.“ Comparing enlightened Eurocrats to hicks like Ted Cruz? This verged on Holocaust denial. Perhaps Robert Kagan’s quip about Americans being from Mars and Europeans being from Venus was true after all, and the Bush interregnum hadn’t simply been a populist blip. Who, in this lawless world, would stand up for the integrity of the institutions, for global norms, and well-straightened bananas?
On its own, the Eurocrisis might have remained a difference of opinion between allies. That the American president saw fit to weigh in, and that the Americans were integrated into the decision making process through dialogue at formats like the G7 and G20, testifies to the spirit of comity between the powers, whatever bitterness their raw tones may have caused in the capitals of Europe. Embarrassing as it was, German statesmen were accustomed to much firmer pressure to adjust their postwar business model emanating from across the Atlantic.
The NSA Affair was different. The oft-repeated parole that „everyone spies on each other“ may have served to do damage control vis-a-vis the media, but Berlin was not so careless. There were few immediate consequences: Merkel’s team was too intelligent to risk too open a break with the United States; no one wanted to harm the Democrats and risk a return to the depravities of the Bush Administration, the weak suffer what they must and all that. But it must have strengthened Merkel and the Dark Rechtsstaat in their resolve that the new America was not to be trusted.
First on the table was to buttress the Federal Republic’s defences with a sturdier digital ramparts. A new software was needed, fitted to the ethos of the old continent — a Heideggerian contraption impervious to America and to Americanism. Who to trust? In Germany, there are three people whom one can rely on when the going gets tough: scions of ancient noble families, men without Wikipedia pages, and inconspicuous „investment managers“ from Wiesbaden. Fortunately, one IT entrepreneur embodied all three archetypes. It was Nicolaus von Rintelen, scion of an old Hanseatic burgher family whose Prussian branch had been ennobled by Wilhelm II and boasts a distinguished history in the service of the German state. A relative, Franz von Rintelen, was a naval intelligence agent posted to the United States during the Great War, where he attempted to negotiate Mexico’s entry into the war and planned and carried out a series of spectacular operations to disrupt American war production. A more distant relation, from the bourgeois side of the family, had been Austria’s ambassador to Rome under Dollfuß, and was earmarked by the July Putschists to become Chancellor had their undertaking succeeded. Yet another had fought alongside Dirlewanger at Ipolyság. A silicon Stauffenberg had arisen; Germany’s digital salvation was at hand.
The picture becomes murkier when we examine von Rintelen’s lineage on the maternal side. She descended from the Merenberg line of the ancient House of Nassau (whose seat is in Wiesbaden, where Anno Hellenbroich and the LaRouchists pitched their tents), and could additionally trace her line back to both Alexander II. of Russia and Pushkin. A separate branch of the Merenbergs moved to London; Nicolaus’ great-great-great aunt, Countess Sophie von Merenberg, married a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I. The main lines of both the Mountbattens and the Grosvenors belong to her descendants; curiously, yet another was a reclusive sinologist. Here we are entering Galkovsky territory.
Von Rintelen’s former firm, VirtualSolution (he sold it in 2022), offers a software called SecurePIM. According to the blurb on the company website, it provides secure access to „government documents“ while working remotely. From the beginning, von Rintelen targeted government bureaus as his primary clients, with little success — Virtual Solution was almost constantly in the red, and it was only his own personal capital that kept the books balanced (by all indications the family was well-off, but not rich, so where the money really came from is unclear, although there are some rather obvious indications).
Von Rintelen’s lobbying efforts found greatest resonance within the CSU. The Federal Interior Ministry and its agencies (including the Bundeskriminallamt), at the time under Bavarian management, became SecurePIM’s first government customer in 2017, but it soon proliferated to the other great ministries, eventually reaching Olaf Scholz’s Chancellery. As Finance Minister in Merkel’s last cabinet (2017-2021), Scholz had been one of the earliest adopters of SecurePIM. His close friend, chief of staff, and current intelligence coordinator Wolfgang Schmidt exchanged emails with von Rintelen (a parliamentary request by the Left Party’s Fabio de Masi, one of the most dogged WireCard investigators, revealed that these had been deleted), and, in the final months of Merkel’s chancellorship, unsuccessfully tried to override a decision by the Ministry’s grey suits to adopt one of Virtual Solution’s competitors’ software at the Federal Customs Authority. „There’s a firm called Virtual Solution, there’s all kinds of things there that will come to light“ said the SPD’s Ralf Stegner during a talk show in 2023, in reference to allegations of corruption at the Interior Ministry. Apparently, Scholz managed to keep his dealings with Rintelen secret from even his own party.
Amidst all this, it seems never to have occurred to anyone to take a look at von Rintelen’s CV. If someone had, he would have noticed a very unusual entry. Von Rintelen’s (only) previous job before Virtual Solution had been as „advisor“ to Leonid Mikhelson, the Russian-Israeli owner and CEO of Novatek, Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer (and SecurePIM’s first customer — interestingly, he is not sanctioned by the EU, although he appears on the British and American sanctions lists). The Merenberg side of the family has long maintained an attachment to Russia: when a journalist from Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta visited the Rintelen family home in Wiesbaden in 2003 (!), he found it full of old portraits of the family’s Russian relations. Von Rintelen’s mother, it turned out, was well-versed in Russian history, and in the churchyard of the city’s Russian Orthodox church, she and the Gazeta’s correspondent discussed Wiesbaden’s long, historic links to the motherland. Madame von Rintelen told him she brought up her sons to learn the language of their patria, although she also claimed to have had no personal contact to Russia until 1991. It is hard to know what to make of this other than that either 1) it’s an outrageous lie or 2) some names really do open doors.
It was in a hibernal, montane climate that von Rintelen’s software flourished: beyond Bavaria, Austria was where his roots reached deepest. He had met with Jan Marsalek, the former WireCard CEO, on at least two occasions, once at Marsalek’s opulent villa in Munich’s Prinzregentenstraße, the second time in a Zurich hotel merely weeks before Marsalek’s disappearance in 2020. It was apparently through von Rintelen that Marsalek came into contact with Martin Weiss, the former Austrian Verfassungsschutz (BVT) agent who assisted the troubled software entrepreneur in his flight to Minsk. Weiss had also put von Rintelen in touch with Johannes Peterlik, a Grand Officer of the Order of Malta and senior official at the Austrian Foreign Ministry, who, like his diplomat father before him, had made his career as an East Asia hand. J’accuse readers trying to connect the dots will note that Peterlik, as an old Catholic fraternity member and son-in-law of a former deputy governor of Lower Austria, belongs firmly to the Raiffeisen faction at the Viennese court.
Peterlik’s contact with von Rintelen and the Marsalek network began innocuously enough. In late 2019, the Foreign Ministry had been hit by a wave of cyberattacks of unknown origin. The Ministry’s own security software, provided by a firm owned by Peterlik’s fellow Malteser Alexander Schütz, was not doing the job. As the WireCard scandal unfolded in the media, Peterlik would be suspended from his post when the blame for supplying Marsalek with the chemical agent Novichok fell on his shoulders. I do not believe it myself — as the Foreign Ministry’s records show, Peterlik first came into possession of the formula in October 2018, whereas, if we are to believe the Financial Times’ initial reporting (to which it issued a rather suspicious correction several years after the fact), Marsalek had spent the entire summer of that year flashing around the Novichok recipe to London traders. Why was Peterlik framed?
There are a few hitherto unmentioned data in von Rintelen’s biography that may clarify matters. According to his LinkedIn page, von Rintelen now makes his residence in the country where so many of his well-to-do relations live. Franz von Rintelen also spent the twilight years of his life in Britain, where, despite his aristocratic Prussian disdain for Hitler, he maintained a correspondence with Robert Gordon-Canning of the British Union of Fascists. Curiously, even though the younger von Rintelen was on first name terms with Stanislav Petlinsky, the Russian agent who acted as Marsalek’s „handler“ according to Bellingcat/Spiegel’s recent attempt at an „authorised version“ of the Austrian entrepreneur’s entanglements, he is neither mentioned nor even alluded to anywhere in the piece, even though Spiegel had earlier reported on his ties to Marsalek. These arrows all point in one direction. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Who was Jan Marsalek, and why was his relationship to von Rintelen important in the context of Merkel’s grand strategy?