By Franz Pokorny
With her 2022 book Machtwechsel (which awkwardly translates into English as Transfer of Power — I will use the German, because it sounds more impressive), Anna Sauerbrey, political editor at the ultralibtarded Hamburg broadsheet Die Zeit, has cemented her place as state chronist of the Berlin Republic. Although this is Sauerbrey’s first venture into political biography (her only previous book being an academic monograph on 16th century Strasbourg monasteries „through a gender history lens“), she has prior experience in translating the incomprehensible rumblings of the Berlin Bubble to a lay audience — while I am not myself sufficiently initiated to grasp the masonic intrigues that brought it about, it speaks to the stature she enjoys within the arcane, guildlike structures of German journalism that she is the rare Berlin swamp creature granted the keys to that highest hall of German transatlanticism: a monthly column at the New York Times. Machtwechsel is an indispensable historical document: the story that the Berlin political bubble tells about itself. This is not Miriam Lau (whose husband’s old desk Sauerbrey took over at Zeit) boozily musing on the True Meaning of Conservatism, but the hand of power scrapbooking.
Sauerbrey, a genteel journogirl of indiscernible class background whose nature will be known to anyone who did time at the humanities faculties of any of the older German universities, is not really the right woman for the tender, balzacquian labour of sketching the rhythms and cadences of bundesrepublican life.1 This fact is itself relevant to piecing together the great sociological tapestry of the Bundesrepublik insofar as it reveals the outer limits of journalism as a possibility of Being therein. Sauerbrey, as the ultimate insider, personifies journalism; she is probably deep enough in the loop to be invited to whatever Eyes Wide Shut-style orgies take place at the Progressive Sommerfest afterparty, and yet not sufficiently initiated into the mysteries to look down upon it all with the jovian detachment of a Gerhard Schröder or a Peter Gauweiler.
A naive sense of wonder pervades her descriptions of Café Einstein and the other haunts of democracy’s courtiers, whose lavish titles like „scientific colleague“ and the more arcane „Referent“ raise them high above the roster of „parliamentary assistants“ and juveline-sounding „spads“ that stalk the pubs of London. For this reason Machtwechsel works rather well as liberal democratic courtly literature, aimed at humanising a secluded and frankly quite strange elite by portraying it at home in a shared lifeworld with its subjects, and occupies the same plane as the cheap little statuettes of Bismarck in a blacksmith’s apron that you sometimes still find at German flea markets.
Machtwechsel went to press just after Olaf Scholz’s „traffic light“ coalition — so named for the colours of its constituent parties: the Social Democrats, Greens, and FDP — took office, but the „Machtwechsel“ that interests Sauerbrey is less a change of government than a generational baton-passing. Sauerbrey’s thesis is that the advent of the traffic light — a once unimaginable conjunction that as recently as the 2000s stood (or at least pretended to stand) for completely opposed things — marked an important waystone in the ascendancy of Germany’s Generation X to Berlin’s grey, modernist halls of power.
Although Scholz himself (1958), as someone old enough to personally remember 1968 (if not directly, then as something that older people around him surely discussed), cannot in any meaningful sense be considered a member of the cohort, most of the senior portfolios in the chancellor’s cabinet (finance, foreign affairs, economy, justice, as well as the chancellor’s chief of staff and some other minor departments) were delegated to members of this generation, to which Sauerbrey herself belongs. Sauerbrey does not really understand her generation beyond a set of LinkedIn platitudes about „work-life balance“, but even this misunderstanding reveals the contours of a lifeworld, and perhaps we can lift ourselves on her aporias towards the true light.
The astute reader will notice that this dating of the post-boomer Machtergreifung puts Germany roughly a dozen years behind Britain. This is all the more remarkable since, in purely quantitative terms, West Germany experienced a nearly identical Britpopper baby boom, while the East experienced a demographic bump even later (a fact oft forgotten in baffled discussions of the AfD’s rise). Though it could be inferred from the simple fact that the BRD’s demographic bump was less drastic than in Britain that the cohort’s cultural impact would be correspondingly weaker and shorter-lasting, this cannot explain why the Deutschpopper’s Machtergreifung took a full decade longer and only carried on the waltz to the boomers’ music.
The obvious explanatory variable is the absence of a British 1968, which in Germany as in Western Europe writ large meant a protracted Kulturkampf between the generation that experienced the war as teenagers (Habermas, Grass, and Enzensberger, to name three representatives example off the top of my head, were all born between 1927-29) and that which did so as bureaucratic ladder-climbers (Kiesinger, Globke, and Reinhard Gehlen were all sons of 1898-1904). In Britain, the epicentre of Woke long before 1968, the political and academic establishment had already seamlessly integrated „the ideas of the age“ into their own worldview, which in the world of ladybird illustrations and milk vans formed a hidden doctrine into which young elites were initiated at the nation’s medieval universities (although initiation should not be confused for acceptance on behalf of the initiated: little seems to have survived Boris and Dave’s galkovskian socialisation but an abiding respect for „that sense of fairness“).
In Germany, the 68ers found themselves blocked from social ascendancy by a brittle, amoral elite with an arcanum that it itself disavowed, having served the Reich not as men of conviction but as opportunists. The first generation absorbed into an expanded university system that by its very bulk could not perform its function as a vector for a brisk march through the institutions (there is no German Oxbridge to preserve the elite-rearing function of the university amidst the dark satanic Russell Group degree mills), the 68ers struck out by revolting in the name of openness and transparency, creating a new vocabulary which allowed them to define themselves in opposition to the arcanum that its initiates could and would not defend, thereby breaching the regime’s spiritual defences at their weakest point.
So intensely politicised was the generation of 1968 that its bright star pulled the formless dust of succeeding generations into its orbit; its gravity proved stronger than that of the war in that no worldview has ever galvanised the youth in a broad front against its principles up until very recently. The 68ers succeeded in identifying themselves with the very concept of the political (for their conservative opponents, who had resisted the encroaches of working class activism in the early postwar years by cloaking themselves in the apolitical language of common sense and social consensus in an effort to piece together a broad, anticommunist collision, were reluctant to define themselves politically) to the extent that the negation of 68 was tantamount to a negation of politics.
Left to its own devices, this would likely have produced a Thermidorian age of soft touch, merkelo-houellebecqian feminism in which the 68ers’ gains in the domain of sexual equality were entrenched and egalitarian social taboos upheld (especially around „racism“, which would have been largely meaningless in a nearly all-white country with a rigid system of social segregation maintained by an educational system of grammar schools and an eleven-plus exam), while the white collar professions remained sufficiently meritocratic to avert the dysfunction that befell the Anglosphere in the 2010s and even today remains less acute on the continent — what turned the dial was the policy of mass replacement migration inaugurated by Merkel and carried on by her successors, but this was by no means the necessary consequence of an incoherent, „pragmatic“, and rudderless order built on compromise and an unwillingness to reverse anything that had been set down, although all these traits contributed to locking it in once Merkel had given her orders.
Sauerbrey, who has done her reading (she extensively cites Mannheim, Koselleck, and has even read Toby Young’s father), is quite circumspect about all this. While her „theory chapter“ (this is, after all, a daughter of bundesrepublican academia) conservatively sticks to the well-trodden American generational categories simply taken for granted by Germany’s eminent demographers, she plays more loosely with her definition of the unnamed ascendant cohort in the main body of the text. Generations, Sauerbrey is not the first to note, are forged by common historical experience: for the post-68ers, who came of age in the relatively tranquil 1980s and 1990s, this „common historical experience“ is paradoxically an absence thereof. Sauerbrey’s cohort knows no permanent, living history in the sense of grand movements, „factors and forces“, or entrenched social divisions like the cleavages of confession and class formative for the political culture of the early Bundesrepublik.
Instead „history“ is a reel of sporadic baudrillardian set pieces where „we all remember where we were when it happened“ — the fall of the wall and 9/11 are the most important of these for Sauerbrey’s cohort. Sauerbrey does not draw the inference herself, but it is obvious that Merkel’s „Wir schaffen das!“ was meant to be a similar television special — that it has spiralled into a racial war of attrition more comparable to the deep cleavages laid down by the Thirty Years’ War or the partitions of Poland is in any case beyond their comprehension.
The social and historical deracination of Sauerbrey’s cohort, by contrast, gives a rise to a certain matter-of-factness in their worldview that its members, including Sauerbrey herself, mistake for „objectivity“. Many of the politicians and sociologists Sauerbrey interviews believe that it in fact has no worldview at all; this is a contradictio in adjecto on which we need not waste our time. It is nevertheless significant that, in Sauerbrey’s portrayal, the cohort has no ideology in the blunt sense of an idea to whose logic the material world is to subordinated; no vision for which it will fight and die, no arcanum, and no romance. If this sketch looks familiar, it is because in Sauerbrey the state of Consciousness in Germany has finally caught up to where Adam Curtis brought it in Britain during the Coalition’s ill-fated reign — this puts her on an exact course to invent one nation conservatism in around five years time. Like Curtis, Sauerbrey confuses the cohort’s „objectivity“ and distaste for politics for a technocratic ethos — a mind virus which her descriptions of the Berlin bubble subsequently explode. Sauerbrey’s picture of mass democracy and the dehistoricised, deracinated Mass Man it produces confirms all the darkest fears of early 20th century conservative sociology, yet she is no amateur archivist of legitimist thought, and thus fails to see it.
The shifting social composition of the Berlin bubble is something to which Sauerbrey is also naive, although the careful reader can use her descriptions to form a picture in his mind. Her interviewees are mostly middle-class or proletarian nobodies; the only person she talks to from a classic elite background (Prussian aristocratic lineage, studied law in Heidelberg or Bonn) is the Green „extremism expert“ Konstantin von Notz (whose grandfather, one imagines, would rather he were doing other things). Von Notz plays an important role in Sauerbrey’s narrative as the convenor of the traffic light’s informal predecessor; a Green-FDP discussion circle in a Berlin bar whose atmosphere he for some reason thinks fit to describe as evocative of the atmosphere of the Weimar Republic.
Aristocratic in countenance and mannerisms; he and his wife are both active in the turbowoke Lutheran church, yet it would be incorrect to see him as the avatar of a German „posh turn“. The Greens are not middle-class parvenus cloaking themselves in the snakeskin of a world they abolished, but the hand of Militarism reaching out from the grave. While a handful of diversity hires cling onto the party’s skirts for PR purposes, the Greens genuinely are the party of Germany’s old elites, fundamentally ill at ease in a democratic world and grasping onto the aesthetics of a played-out 68ery because they wish to disguise themselves as good democrats. More should be written about this silent guardian of Tradition Konstantin von Notz and his equally fascinating ultrawoketaine academic blogger wife Anna, but Sauerbrey, being of the same milieu, can be forgiven for not delving deeper into this Lebenslüge of the Berlin Republic.
I read Sauerbrey’s book parallel to another study of the lifeworld of an insular political elite, Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government. Slezkine early on emphasises the parallelism of eros and the Old Bolsheviks’ concept of the political. „Revolution“, writes Slezkine, „was inseparable from love. It demanded sacrifices for the sake of a future harmony, and it required harmony—in love, comradeship, and book learning—as a condition for fulfillment. Most revolutionary leaders were young men who identified the Revolution with womanhood; many of them were men in love who identified particular women with the Revolution.“ The most deeply held certitude shared across Sauerbrey’s cohort similar concerns the right relations between the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve; namely the notion that one’s public existence must not intrude on the domestic sphere. „Work-life balance“ is so fundamental a tenet in Sauerbrey’s moral cosmos and that of the bubble creatures she talks to that one young Green MP even goes so far as to describe this new ideal of familial life and the shared division of domestic labour it entails as representing nothing less than a new image of man.
Yet the autonomy of family life does not guarantee an equal status for the public sphere, onto which domesticity constantly intrudes: though not mentioned in Sauerbrey’s book, examples include a cross-party group (including Kristina Schröder, Merkel’s former family minister and ostensibly one of the CDU’s „conservatives“) successfully lobbying to introduce a „children’s area“ into the Bundestag, and Green MPs give parliamentary speeches with babies tucked under their arms. The novelty of this relationship between public and private realms does not escape even Sauerbrey, who observes drily in out-of-place academic German how Annalena Baerbock „justifies her concept of the state biographically“, yet like everything in the Bundesrepublik, it has its forerunners in earlier cultural forms. The ideal of the Vormärz was a post-liberal retreat from the turbulence of revolutionary politics into hearth and home; the practice of the GDR regime critic was to slip away from an unjust and paranoid public life into private „niches“ — the ideal of the cohort is to smother Politics entirely under a private happiness defined by the notion of „partnership“.
The idea of „partnership“ is a spenglerian Ursymbol that will follow Sauerbrey’s cohort on its passage through the vale of tears; this is the most potent mind virus festering in the wet market of the cohort. It finds its apotheosis in a strange notion which Scholz’s economy minister Robert Habeck calls the „porpoise truce“, an agreement between some Baltic fishermen and their bothersome climate activist opponents the details of which are not relevant, but to which Sauerbrey keeps returning to as a microcosm of cohort’s concept of the political. Let us leave aside that this particular notion of compromise is inherently absurd, for what is at stake in the purpose truce is not a distributive conflict between the material interests that necessarily arise under any complex division of labour, and which can generically be resolved through a burden-sharing agreement, but ideological demands made against a group of producers by radicals who do not forfeit anything but their ideals in the bargain, and instead turn our eyes to the provenance of the idea of „partnership“ itself.
The idea of partnership and the cognate concept of „solidarity“ hold a powerful sway over the German mind. Unlike the West, which preached the water of individualism while drinking the collectivist wine, the German body politic is still animated by what Rudolf Kjellén in a now largely forgotten text proclaimed to be „the ideas of 1914“; the moulting out of the Wilhelmine Reich’s Nietzschean modernism into the camaraderie and sense of common destiny of the Great War. The Weltgeist’s long march from the Somme to the Bundestag breastfeeding chamber is charted in Ernst Jünger’s progression from stern-lipped front soldier to the whimsical, LSD-taking, antifascist green man of democracy’s enchanted garden, although the author of Storm of Steel mercifully exited the scene before he could witness the final resting place of the conservative revolution. Yet this is all matter for a three-volume treatise with a title longer than the book itself, and we can only touch on it in passing here.
German intellectuals have developed a number of discourses on the country’s past that must seem baffling to the outside observer. Like most ideologies, these can be divided into a low church and a high church variant. The former is by now well-known to the cultured foreign observer and consists of a superstitious „guilt cult“ of folk devils and original sin mainly centred around the person of Adolf Hitler. The second is a sombre, pessimistic religion similar in mood if not content to northern pietism. The centrepiece of this creed is a variation of the thesis laid down in Snyder’s Bloodlands that the Second World War was a single, great tragedy experienced by the Central European peoples collectively and in which no one but „the victims“ can claim any moral high ground — this is applied not simply to WWII, but to „the past“ writ large. The Ursymbol of this world-picture is Benjamin’s Angelus Novus; „the past“ is a rubble heap of tragedies through which the observer must pass on his way to the democratic present; it is not uncommon to hear German conservatives solemnly speak of the war as a „civilisational breach“; a metaphysical rupture separating the here and now from the pre-bundesrepublican Hades.2
What separates the „left“ and „right“ heirs of 1968 from each other is their response to this gash in the fabric of Being. For the left-68ers, this incommensurability of experience was polemicised into a total war on the past occasionally fought with real weapons; for the right-68ers (Edgar Reitz’s Heimat is perhaps the first cultural documentation of this unsystematised yet extremely influential current of thought), the response was predominantly emotional, and had to be worked out inwardly before it could be brought to bear within the democratic public sphere. This sentimental journey began with an implacable sense of loss — the atmosphere of gloomy, concrete protestant churches one finds in silent Bavarian suburbs with streets named Königsberger Weg, Ostpreußenstraße, and Memelstraße — that precipitated in a pathos of intergenerational solidarity or „generational justice“ (Generationengerechtigkeit), an immensely potent phrase in the political rhetoric of the German centre-right that manifests emotionally in a sense of urgency, and on the plane of rational thought in a number of ethical imperatives including everything from climate, a balanced budget, or the passing down of „our values“ through symbolic impositions on immigrants in their interactions with the state. In the CDU, this burning desire for „generational justice“ set in with the generation of Helmut Kohl and Wolfgang Schäuble, whose outreach to the Greens in the 1990s was not merely a matter of political expedience, but emotional necessity. It is significant to note that the CDU politicos to whom Sauerbrey talks have all lost sight of this original rationale entirely, and treat „partnership“ like a kind of garlic they have to hang around the house to prevent Hitler from sweeping back.
Sauerbrey’s vision of perpetual comity comes off as duplicitous, because there is one element in the body politic to which she refuses the hand of „partnership“. This is „populism“, and its great sin is a belief in the existence of fundamental conflicts on which there can be no permanent compromise. Sauerbrey sees populism manifest in the AfD, though she makes no effort to familiarise herself with the party’s platform or talk to any of its members, and simply repeats tired platitudes about racism and xenophobia. Sauerbrey is notably getting ahead of herself — Machtwechsel was written well before remigration appeared on the cards. On the whole, Sauerbrey is largely uninterested in the AfD, believing that, like the sound of a broken carbon monoxide alarm or an ominous dripping noise from inside the walls in the middle of the night, it will go away if you just ignore it.
The research for this book, as far as I can tell, took place during the lockdown years, and it is telling that this watershed moment in the history of Western democracy also barely features. Journalists in Germany were discretely exempted from lockdown dictates, displaying a press pass was sufficient to legally skirt restrictions on leaving the house or gathering in groups larger than two („What to do against curfews? Order a press pass!“ advertised the German journalists’ trade union on its website), so one can perhaps forgive Sauerbrey for not noticing anything untowards. When reading Sauerbrey’s star-struck accounts of meeting up with so and so in „yet another cool event location [the word is always used in English] in Berlin Mitte“, one must never forget that as this all transpired, her interviewees were busy disassembling the constitutional guarantee to free assembly whilst thundering in the talkshows about the „tyranny of the minority“ of lockdown critics and conscientious vaccine objectors and openly scheming about how to „strip them of their fundamental rights“ (a term which, rather amusingly in the Habermasian republic, acquired the opprobrium of a dark, right-wing Kampfbegriff; a polemical concept). All the platitudes about „self-expression values“ and „openness to the world“ must be viewed under this surgical lamp.
But I am not here to moralise. What I look for in a book of this kind are the minutiae that express those truths of a particular culture that can only be revealed aesthetically; beams of nothingness that split the sky open and show the world as it is in the mind of its participants. There are a few passages in Sauerbrey’s book that soar above the tedium of drinks at Café Einstein, reading more like BRD fanfiction or the satires of Karl Kraus than actual excerpts from a serious work of journalism. By way of a conclusion, I submit here my favourite one for the reader’s pleasure.
„There’s only normal milk here, should I grab some oat milk?“ asks the press spokesman. „Ach, that would be great“ says Cem Özdemir [the Agriculture Minister from the Green Party], taking a seat at the conference table and fiddling with his dark tie. It was January 27th, 2022, the Holocaust memorial day…“
There is a convergence on aristocratic understatement between the genteel, yet poor, Bildungsbürgertum and the genuinely well-to-do in the egalitarian, post-protestant Germany. The exception to this is the decadent Rhineland, where no one has any taste and everyone dresses and behaves as ostentatiously as possible, leading the middle class to appear a cut above their station and the upper classes to appear several beneath theirs.
In Germany, the popularity of the low church confines this extraordinary form of the rite to the academy and other venues away from the public eye, but on the periphery of German academia’s empire it is celebrated more openly. In Poland, liberal historian like Jan Gross, the late Włodzimierz Borodziej and their followers have turned it into the fundament of an anti-nationalist historiographical canon; its temple used to be the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, at least until current Polish president Karol Nawrocki gave it a more patriotic redecorating during his spell as director. We even find traces of it in Britain in the old FBPE meme depicting European history as a timeline of nonstop War until the advent of the EU.