A few years ago, Germany seemed like it had all the answers. But in 2024, we find ourselves in a land of bleak absurdity
Germany doesn’t have a reputation as a funny country, but its dark humour is currently shaming the best recent efforts of both Britain and the US. Not that there is a sudden bumper crop of talented comedians in Germany, but who needs them when reality itself is already so bleakly cartoonish? A few years ago, Germany seemed like it had all the answers: a robust economy and a stable and broad-based coalition against the far right. Now, the economy is faltering as the combined effects of mismanagement collide with a bureaucratic culture that makes investment and innovation difficult. Striking rail workers and protesting farmers have brought chaos to the cities. The only thing collapsing faster than the German economy is the country’s status as a moral example, which hit an all-time high with the refugee crisis of 2015-16 and has now tumbled like a vaudeville star on a banana peel.
Jewish critics of Israel being arrested by Berlin police for allegedly antisemitic speech? It’s a joke worthy of Franz Kafka, who would also certainly have got a kick out of the enormous disparity between the treatment of protests in support of a ceasefire in Gaza and the farmers’ protests and their cavalcades of tractors. While the former were often broken up or banned on questionable charges of antisemitism, the latter have been tolerated or even celebrated by the press and by politicians, despite evidence that in some regions, rightwing extremists and neo-Nazis have become involved in organising the expression of rural discontent. Indeed, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the state is most permissive of protests organised by rightwing Germans. The same tactics that have been broadly tolerated in the context of the farmers’ protests have been subject to increasingly draconian punishments when deployed by climate activists. “We’re allowed,” frustrated protesters wrote on a sign at one recent traffic-stopping action, where one young man sat on a toy agricultural vehicle: “We have a tractor.”
The contradictions that have rendered German life such a darkly comedic goldmine are more than just a matter of political showmanship – they cut through the country’s political and cultural life. Germany made massive early investments in renewable energy, for example, but it also allowed the violent clearing of an old-growth forest to expand coal mining, and continues to resist reasonable steps to reduce its dependency on cars…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/06/germany-tractor-neo-nazi-economy-politics
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After the truth-shower 