«What, the Russians invaded Ukraine? The Americans must be behind this!” Anti-Americanism is widespread. He often veers into conspiracy theory.
Demonstrators protest against the US’s Middle East policy at an event organized by the Left Party in Berlin in June 2019.
Ipon / Imago
A few days before the election in the USA, there is a debate in Germany as if the country had been transported back to the peaceful times of the 1980s. It’s about the future of NATO, about arms deliveries to Ukraine, about the relationship with Russia, about the stationing of American medium-range missiles on German soil.
The newly founded Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) is urging its potential coalition partners in the East German states of Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg to make peace commitments that are as Russia-friendly as possible. Social Democrats are stabbing their own Chancellor in the back, only his name is no longer Helmut Schmidt, as he was in the early 1980s, but now Olaf Scholz.
Scholz actually stands for a robust security policy and has so far acted in close coordination with American President Joe Biden. But what will happen politically in America is completely uncertain. And Scholz’s government is not doing well. In the looming federal election campaign, the question of transatlantic relations could become crucial.
It is important to know that Germans generally do not have particularly positive views of their American friends and allies: 80 percent of those surveyed consider the USA to be the epitome of a “consumer and throwaway society”. More than 70 percent believe that no other country in the world represents its interests as ruthlessly as America. And only 15 percent associate the United States with democracy, freedom and human rights.
The “underdog arrogance” of the Germans
These findings emerged from a representative survey by the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy, conducted shortly after the 2020 American presidential election, after four years of Trump bluster. The Biden presidency may have brightened the picture somewhat. But critical reserve is part of the German habitus.
According to an Insa survey from last September, almost 60 percent of Germans are convinced that the USA is treated “somewhat” or “very” friendly. In contrast, almost 70 percent believe that Germany is “very” or “somewhat” hostile towards Russia.
The Allensbach social scientist Thomas Petersen describes the German tendencies of anti-Americanism in his new book “The Face of the Totalitarian” as part of the basic emotional makeup of many Germans. He uses the term “underdog arrogance” that the East Germans showed towards the West Germans and the West Germans towards the Americans, according to the motto: “The West Germans or the Americans may be richer and more powerful than us, that’s what they are for but superficial people who are only after money and have no culture.”
This attitude, which has been stable for decades, has historical reasons. In the West, the Americans were by no means just seen as liberators from the National Socialist tyranny. As a victorious power and as representatives of “reeducation”, i.e. education for democracy, they also painfully reminded the Germans that their contemporaries had a share in the “Third Reich” and its crimes. After all, it was not “Adolf Hitler all alone” who built the highways and heated the ovens in Auschwitz, as a poem by the German poet Kurt Bartsch sarcastically says.
Only “capitalists” and “imperialists”?
The former American ambassador to Berlin John Kornblum used to say that the Germans never forgave the Americans for their moral superiority after the Second World War.
In the socialist East, in the German Democratic Republic, people didn’t bother with democracy or coming to terms with the Nazi era, but immediately began to demonize the Americans as capitalists and imperialists. This is impressively documented in GDR propaganda films from the post-war period.
Demonization of the USA was also considered good form in parts of the West German left and the peace movement – although at the same time a lot of pop and protest culture was adopted from the United States, from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift. And of course it has always been absurd to arrogantly ignore the achievements of Americans in the fields of literature, film, music, architecture and art.
The SPD is probably the most important German party that has traditionally been and is the most susceptible to anti-Americanism. This also had to do with the fact that their youth officials were so fond of making pilgrimages to busybodies in East Berlin, Moscow and Havana until shortly before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and before the change in 1989. Although most of them dutifully rejected Soviet communism, they were always looking for a “system alternative” to capitalism.
German equidistance between Russia and the USA
The authors of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” Reinhard Bingener and Markus Wehner describe in their book “The Moscow Connection” how entire generations of SPD politicians tried to at least maintain equidistance between Russia and the USA. The influential SPD parliamentary group leader and later Defense Minister Peter Struck is an example of this.
Then the SPD candidate for chancellor in the 2017 federal election, Martin Schulz; the SPD chairman, Federal Finance Minister and later Left Party founder Oskar Lafontaine. The latter wanted to dissolve NATO as early as 1983. The former SPD chairman Matthias Platzeck also belongs to this group. Always there was the party strategist and architect of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik Egon Bahr, who had his own office in the party headquarters until his death in 2015. He tirelessly advised the Social Democrats to be more understanding of Russia.
And of course the former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who took positions in Russian companies after leaving office and wrote in his autobiography “Decisions” in 2006 that Germany should not cling to the coattails of the Americans again: “Is our foreign policy subject to America’s, or Isn’t she?”
With the “unrestricted solidarity” after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the German “no” to the Iraq War in 2003, Schröder’s red-green government demonstrated a new German understanding of sovereignty that was popular at the time. In 2021, Schröder called for “Last Chance. Why we need a new world order” even the dissolution of NATO in order to free Germany from American tutelage.
The current chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, Rolf Mützenich, is anything but a friend of America – and influences the parliamentary group and the Chancellor in his interests. The Brandenburg Prime Minister Dietmar Woidke not only made it clear during the state election campaign that he could do without the Chancellor’s appearances, but has now also switched to the peace line of his future coalition partner BSW, which is critical of the Chancellor.
Lafontaine doesn’t care about Ukraine’s sovereignty
With the ex-Social Democrat and Wagenknecht’s husband Oskar Lafontaine, the hostility to America is now taking on conspiracy theory traits. They probably do not remain completely without influence on the positions of the BSW. “You don’t want to believe it,” Lafontaine recently wrote in “Weltwoche”: “Just as they reduced the Middle East to rubble with a view to oil and gas reserves, the USA is now fighting to the last Ukrainian, to deny Russia and China access to Ukraine’s raw materials.”
The extent to which Ukraine’s sovereignty in Lafontaine’s thinking no The role played is breathtaking, but apparently not untypical of German anti-Americanism. “You often come across this argumentative figure,” says Thomas Petersen from Allensbach: “What, the Russians invaded Ukraine? The Americans must be behind this!”
Lafontaine’s wife, BSW boss Sahra Wagenknecht, has already spoken out against NATO’s allegedly aggressive and interventionist intentions and its “rearmament goals” in her book “The Self-Righteous”, which was published in 2021. She accuses American politics of “venality” across the board – although since the founding of her own party, she herself has not seemed to be particularly critical of large donations from individual entrepreneurs. In February 2023, she demonstrated together with the now very old feminist Alice Schwarzer for a “peace” that would clearly be to the detriment of Ukraine.
Some on the left and some on the right in Germany are united by the belief that “human rights” are actually an invention of “the West” and therefore of America, which should not simply be imposed on other cultures. And they view the West, i.e. America, critically, writes the German-Israeli historian Dan Diner, because they essentially see it as a metaphor for the dark side of modernity. Romanticizing glorifications of the past and the rejection of capitalism go together surprisingly well.
“The American government and its backers”
Right-wing authors like the AfD MEP Maximilian Krah, for example, are talking about a major global conspiracy of capital that first wants to destroy the indigenous peoples through mass immigration and then replace them with mauled “uniform people”. Krah argues against this conspiracy and against the “spatially connected, intellectually and sociologically homogeneous milieu of Silicon Valley” and its desire for world domination in his book “Politics from the Right”.
Björn Höcke, state chairman of the AfD in Thuringia, who achieved a record result of 32.8 percent with his party in the recent state elections, writes in his book “Never in the same river twice” in a whisper about the “dual strategy of the American government and its backers.” And about the pernicious plans of “our rulers, who belong to a closed transatlantic political elite” to “denationalize” the European nation states.
In the relevant circles, the CDU candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz, who worked for the New York investment company Blackrock and was also chairman of the “Atlantikbrücke” association, is certainly counted among this supposedly American elite.
Perhaps people in the German cultural nation should remember Johann Wolfgang von Goethe more often. He still saw the USA as a place of longing and wrote in 1827: “America, you have it better. . . / Nothing bothers you inside / While you are still alive / Useless memories / And vain arguments.” Of course that was a long time ago – and was always just a poem. But after the strenuous years of the Berlin traffic light coalition, it wouldn’t be a bad motto for the next German government.
