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The animal being, he told me as he took a aseptic sip, is a “very difficult type.” It is not in our attributes to attach to some austere political credo like communism or Nazism, he said; rather, animal beings care to be aloft according to their inclinations. “There’s commodity the animal achievement can achieve, commodity he can be. It’s in this administering that he care to be raised. And we care never to cull him abroad from that.” Is this a aphotic charlatan or a Montessori schoolteacher, I asked myself, but Kubitschek had already confused on to the affair of Germanness. “The abstraction that there is such a affair as a authentic German is wholly absurd,” he said — populations drift and blot added influences. Naturally, he said, an immigrant could additionally become a German, aloof as connected as that achievement “is accommodating to accord aggregate for this country and is accessible to analyze with it.”
I asked Kubitschek to ascertain “Germanness” for me. He seemed acquisitive to altercate the subject. Few added people, he said, are so thoroughly absent with the catechism of who they are: Germany is both Catholic and Lutheran, he said, both Prussian and Bavarian; Germany is the sensitive, able nation that produced poets like Goethe and Schiller and the historically angry one that produced the Waffen-SS. “Germanness is a fissure,” he said. “Germanness is a catechism afterwards an answer.”
This, I thought, was hardly the affectionate of positivist eyes of German abundance aloft which you ability body a bourgeois nationalist movement. I was, for the moment, accepting a bit of adversity abracadabra the adaptation of Kubitschek who had, with an about apocalyptic fervor, warned of the looming annihilation of the German Volk (literally the “folk,” but generally acclimated to announce a civic character in indigenous terms), the man who had argued at an anti-immigration assemblage that Germans are achievement “replaced and exchanged” by migration, the man who had appropriate that the “pathological” address with which Germany processes the crimes of the Nazi accomplished leads to a allurement ache of civic self-hatred. Kubitschek promulgates these account not abandoned through books and in seminars but additionally through his access to some of the best abolitionist politicians in Alternative for Germany, or the AfD, a far-right affair that won about 13 percent of the civic vote in September, authoritative it the best acknowledged nationalist affair to sit in the German Parliament aback the Second Apple War. Alternative for Germany has become anytime added abolitionist aback it was founded in 2013 — added assuming itself as the apostle of the Volk and of German character — a transformation that Kubitschek, abaft the scenes, has been active in bringing about.
As Kubitschek nursed his beer at the table, however, he was aural appealing measured. Afore I got about to allurement him about his affiliation to Alternative for Germany, a adolescent babe in a white dress, the babe of a visitor, approached our table. She had been alfresco arena with some of Kubitschek’s adolescent accouchement (he has seven). “Mr. Kubitschek!” she said. “One of the rabbits got out and is active about the garden.”
“What?” replied Kubitschek with feigned, antic drama. “Then bolt it and put it aback in the cage!”
“O.K.!” the babe said, dispatch aback out.
A few account later, a adolescent woman agilely abreast Kubitschek of addition problem. A bairn babyish dupe was “very agitated.” Kubitschek, who decries avant-garde man’s disconnectedness from the sources of his food, promptly absolved himself and rushed out, abiding a few account afterwards to explain that his bairn goats sometimes acquire agitation digesting their mother’s milk. He rubbed the afflicted newborn’s belly, he said, and it anesthetized a stool. All was able-bodied at the estate again.
Kubitschek does not clearly accord to the AfD — he and his wife activated and were abandoned as too abolitionist in 2015, aback the party’s administering was added abstinent — and he doesn’t see affair backroom as his domain. (His wife has aback abutting the party.) He prefers to advance his account in what he calls the meta-political realm, area he can amplitude a ability that, in his view, is bedeviled by apostle thinking. Kubitschek does not alternate to abet in the account of his New Appropriate cause, but he additionally has a aptitude for couching his accustomed credo in innocuous-seeming, alike liberal-sounding precepts that accumulate him aural the bound of adequate address alike as he expands them. The idea, for instance, that no one should be affected to acquire by a austere credo sounds wholly unobjectionable. But for Kubitschek and his adolescent New Appropriate thinkers, the calendar of austere ideologies includes liberalism, multiculturalism, capitalism and feminism, all of which are “social experiments” (as Kubitschek puts it) imposed by the political aristocratic on the afraid Volk.
Kubitschek’s angle are extensive a growing audience. Despite the altered cultural taboos arising from the actual anamnesis of Nazism, Germany has abutting a connected account of European countries — Austria, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Slovakia amid them — area far-right, sometimes actually racist political parties command cogent minorities in civic elections. This ethno-nationalist renaissance presents an odd paradox. European nationalists who at one time ability acquire gone to war with one addition now advance a affectionate of New Appropriate bubble coalition, in which absolute states acutely advance their indigenous and cultural identities in account of some aloft “Western” ideal. This “ethno-pluralism,” as New Appropriate activists alarm it, is not based on Western advanced notions of adequation or the ability of abandoned rights but in action to added cultures, usually nonwhite, that they say are aggressive to beat Europe and, indeed, the absolute Western apple by agency of immigration. The blackmail to the West is additionally generally casting in ambiguous cultural agreement as a affectionate of centralized decay. Aback President Trump visited Poland, he argued in a accent that the United States and Europe were affianced in a accustomed cultural battle. “The axiological catechism of our time,” he said, “is whether the West has the will to survive.”
That catechism has abysmal roots in Germany. In 1918, the German philosopher Oswald Spengler arise the aboriginal aggregate of “The Abatement of the West,” arguing that cultures abatement as consistently and predictably as any added amoebic commodity — and that Western acculturation was abreast the end of its cycle. Germany had aloof absent a war, and Spengler’s book addled a ambit with disillusioned Germans adorable to explain their faculty of downfall. Spengler belonged to a about authentic accumulation of German thinkers alleged the Bourgeois Revolutionaries, who argued that Western abatement was the assured aftereffect of materialism and apathetic democracy. They adjoin the awkward aldermanic capitalism of the time, the advanced ethics of the French Revolution and ultimately change itself. They alleged for civic activation by way of an absolute baton who could accompany about an almost-mystical about-face of the Volk — in allotment by pitting them adjoin the Volk of added nations. “A bodies is abandoned actually such in affiliation to added peoples,” Spengler wrote, “and the achievement of this achievement comes out in accustomed and abiding oppositions, in advance and defense, abhorrence and war.”
The German New Appropriate portrays itself as the abreast reincarnation of the Bourgeois Revolution. Kubitschek consistently echoed Spengler in our conversations and on added than one break told me that Germany was a “tired” nation in its afterglow years. The New Right’s efforts to accost this anachronous political and bookish movement serve a purpose. Despite their credible brainy overlap with the Civic Socialists, abounding Bourgeois Revolutionaries were clashing adjoin them and abandoned Hitler as a proletarian brute. That credible ambit provides New Appropriate thinkers not aloof with a nationalist, antiparliamentary attitude abiding in German history but additionally with a advantageous argument: Civic Socialism is a aberration from their alleged ideology, not its assured conclusion.
The account of the Bourgeois Revolutionaries, however, cannot be afar from the acceleration of Hitler. In 1923, one of the movement’s best arresting thinkers, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, arise “The Third Reich” — addition appraisal of Western liberalism. As the appellation suggests, Moeller van den Bruck had some access on the Nazis (Goebbels said his book was “very important for the history of Civic Socialist political ideas”), admitting they afterwards repudiated the columnist himself. The Bourgeois Revolutionaries’ added consequential influence, however, was on the added population. Their anguish over change contributed to the “debility of democracy” and fueled a “politically accommodating discontent,” the historian Fritz Stern wrote in “The Backroom of Cultural Despair.” In added words, their account helped pave the way for the accession of a Führer, alike admitting the one who accustomed was not necessarily to their liking.
After Apple War II, Armin Mohler, a Swiss-born biographer who had approved abominably to accompany the Waffen-SS, took on the action of disentangling the Bourgeois Advocate credo from Nazism. Mohler, a self-described absolutist who had an aboriginal and abstruse access on Kubitschek, approved to actualize a added acceptable attitude for the postwar era, and he is advised the ancestor of the German New Right. Until recently, though, New Appropriate cerebration mostly remained on the bound of German society, defective grass-roots announcement or a applicable appearance in affair politics. But the German political altitude afflicted in 2015, aback Angela Merkel accustomed about a actor refugees and migrants to access the country over the Bavarian border. While abounding Germans acclaimed their arrival, others were angered, action that their worries about “Islamization,” abomination and the abrasion of German character were achievement abandoned by the political establishment. For New Appropriate activists, that acrimony is good. It is the abiding action that will accompany about the political transformation they seek.
But the German New Appropriate has added influences as well. Nils Wegner, a adolescent biographer who translates English-language books into German for Kubitschek’s publishing house, follows the American alt-right arena with abundant absorption — listening, for example, to podcasts by Richard Spencer, the white-supremacist baton who already declared afore a army of acolytes: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Wegner told me that the American abstraction of a “racially authentic ethno-state” would “come aloft as appealing awe-inspiring over here,” because Europeans are not adequate putting character affairs in ancestral terms. I asked him if this ache was absolute or abandoned semantic, and his acknowledgment was decidedly forthright. “I would say that the basic aberration is the semantic difference,” he said. “Also, the modus operandi is not actually the same.” Unlike alt-right activists in the United States, he went on to explain, activists on the European New Appropriate tend to abstain actualization alongside “orthodox” appropriate groups — neo-Nazis — because “the look” would impede their accomplishment to arise as a “new affectionate of postmodern” affectionate movement.
Wegner said addition aberration was a amount of intensity. The Americans, he said, see their country as collapsing, and accordingly they apostle advocate action — the conception of a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest, for example. European New Appropriate activists don’t see their affairs as that dire, he continued. They would be agreeable with a “roll back” on immigration.
“It’s not yet a advocate situation,” he said. “The old structures are to be kept intact.”
Kubitschek was built-in in Ravensburg, a affluent southern boondocks in what was afresh West Germany. It was a acceptable society, he recalls, one area women backward home and aloft accouchement and bodies voted for the center-right Christian Democratic Union, currently the affair of Angela Merkel. He and his accompany abstruse Latin and Greek in aerial school, and they adopted angry or horseback benumbed to soccer, which was advised a “prole” activity. This advantageous way of activity was gone, he told me — a victim of society’s larboard progression.
He now speaks of the aloft West Germany in cheeky terms. He sees “Wessis” — the bodies who alive there — as accepting been indoctrinated into a anatomy of hyper-moralistic accumulation thinking. Its cities, he believes, are “lost” to immigrants. His wife, Ellen Kositza, who writes argumentation adjoin what she calls “hyper-feminism,” additionally hails from the West — from a blah burghal abreast Frankfurt that, she said, has become about actually “foreignized.” The aloft East Germany, area they’ve fabricated their new home, has accomplished analogously beneath immigration; it’s the abode where, as Kubitschek put it, “Germany is still Germany.”
Kubitschek told me his political activation came in aerial school, aback a accumulation of classmates put calm a presentation about the Nazi aeon in their state. Kubitschek abominable the presentation, he said, because it unjustly placed answerability for the Nazi crimes on his grandparents’ absolute generation. Kubitschek, who was an editor at the academy newspaper, wrote an commodity criticizing the presentation, and it set off a association debate. The adolescent teachers, articles of 1960s counterculture, took the ancillary of the acceptance who put on the presentation. The earlier teachers, including the rector, who helped accomplish an antiaircraft gun in the war, sided with him. One affectionate abecedary appropriate that Kubitschek apprehend the assignment of the historian Ernst Nolte, accustomed for a arguable commodity he wrote about that time blue-blooded “The Accomplished That Won’t Go Away.” Nolte portrayed Nazism as a acknowledgment to the “existential threat” airish by Bolshevism and appropriate Bolshevik “class murder” was commensurable to the Holocaust, calling it the “logical and absolute antecedent to the Nazi ‘racial murder.’ ” Nolte’s agnosticism sparked a alienated agitation in Germany accustomed as the “historians’ dispute,” and admitting Nolte was denounced as a Hitler apologist, several bourgeois German historians and journalists accurate him. For Kubitschek, Nolte’s assignment has been a constant influence.
After aerial school, Kubitschek abutting the German Army, acceptable allotment of a appropriate assay unit, and afterwards abutting the reserves. His aggregation was “very right,” he said. It drew from an “unbroken actual tradition” that accomplished aback at atomic as far as the Brandenburgers, a Nazi covert-intelligence unit, and symbols like the “swastika and so on” afraid on the aggregation walls. Several of the men I met in Kubitschek’s amphitheater additionally served in the military; in postwar irenic Germany, one of them told me, it is adorable to a lot of rightists who saw German demilitarization as an emasculating development. In 2001, Kubitschek himself was absolved from the affluence for “right-wing-extremist endeavors,” but the accommodation was afterwards revoked afterwards supporters petitioned the Army.
Kubitschek now keeps abutting acquaintance with a band of Alternative for Germany politicians who accredit to themselves as der Flügel, or “the Wing.” It is led by some of the best acute politicians in the party, including a aloft history abecedary alleged Björn Höcke, a arch of the affair in the eastern accompaniment of Thuringia. Kubitschek and Höcke acquire accustomed anniversary added for about two decades, and Kubitschek speaks actual awful of the affair leader, calling him an “idealist” and a “romantic.” But in Germany, few politicians acquire done added to becloud the already-fuzzy band amid the New Appropriate and the old right. In Advance 2015, it was Höcke who accomplished an centralized affair defection adjoin the party’s founder, an economist alleged Bernd Lucke, absolution a resolution that accused the party’s administering of disproportionately all-embracing the “establishment” and declining to abide “the added abrasion of Germany’s ascendancy and identity.”
The resolution, which set into motion Lucke’s atrophy as affair leader, apprehend like commodity Kubitschek could acquire written. In fact, Kubitschek told me, he drafted it in his library in Schnellroda. What Lucke had bootless to grasp, Kubitschek said, was the amount to which Alternative for Germany represented an affecting “outbreak” that went way aloft the economist Lucke’s “technocratic dissatisfaction” with the euro.
Flügel politicians are now antecedent aural the affair — and they are added bond their bellicism with the antiliberalism calendar of the New Right. Afore the election, I abounding an Alternative for Germany assemblage in Artern, a depressed-looking boondocks not actual far from Schnellroda. There, I was addled by how Flügel politicians adherent abundant of their speeches to a cardinal of bread-and-butter issues commonly admitting of as apostle — low wages, abjection in old age, bereft amusing benefits, address advised to about-face the affair abroad from its roots in bread-and-butter liberalism. One of the politicians, a man alleged Jürgen Pohl, who was afterwards adopted into Parliament, denounced the affirmation that Germany is accomplishing “better than ever” economically. Should Angela Merkel and “our new African citizens” appear to the aloft East Germany, he said, they’d see the “poor abode of Germany.” Addition speaker, André Poggenburg, the arch of the affair in Saxony-Anhalt, declared Alternative for Germany to be “the new affair of amusing justice.” The bulletin was simple enough: added allowances for the Volk, and beneath foreigners to booty those allowances away. In the aloft East, area unemployment charcoal college and salaries abide lower than in the aloft West, that bulletin seems to resonate, allowance the affair bark abroad hundreds of bags of voters from die Linke, the brood of the East German Communist Party.
The about-face is not actually surprising. New Appropriate thinkers generally absorb the abstraction of establishing a querfront, or a “cross front” that would affiliate opponents of capitalism on both extremes of the political spectrum. During my talks with Kubitschek, I generally activate myself audition what at aboriginal seemed to me a abstract apostle bent, an abhorrence to American-style materialism. You had abandoned to go the arcade centermost on a Saturday morning, he already told me, and beam bodies in their “consumption temple” to see how there is “nothing at all there, spiritually.” For Kubitschek and added New Appropriate thinkers, American capitalism — with its accent on abandoned rights and the abandoned afterward of beatitude — is conceivably the best acerb force bistro abroad at the character of the Volk, replacing a faculty of “we” with appearance and profit-seeking self-interest.
One evening, as we sat in the dark billow of his library, Kubitschek delivered a connected complaining about what he perceived to be the ills of modernity: blah consumption, the abatement of Christian acceptance (Kubitschek is a Catholic), mechanization that is authoritative workers superfluous. These armament were abrasive the Volk, he told me, and there was actual little that could be done to stop it.
I asked him afresh what was larboard for him to do. Despair?
I was bisected joking, but he nodded in all seriousness.
“You’re desperate?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
What, I asked, does political achievement attending like for a movement of despair?
The best that could be done, he said, was “to anticipate the worst.”
On the Monday afterwards my aboriginal appointment to Schnellroda, I went to see Kubitschek allege at a affirmation in Dresden. The accident had been organized by “Patriotic Europeans Adjoin the Islamization of the West” — accustomed by the German acronym Pegida — which had been captivation rallies in Dresden on Monday evenings aback 2014. By the afterward year, as the all-around refugee crisis accustomed in Germany with abounding force, the demonstrations generally drew added than 10,000 people, but appearance has aback dwindled, and on this night abandoned a few thousand bodies were expected.
The assemblage took abode in a axial aboveboard abreast an airedale canonizing appearance the atom area bags of corpses were austere afterwards the 1945 Allied bombing that destroyed the city. Afore the accident began, I activate a accumulation of demonstrators — mostly men and women of retirement age — awash about an accordion player. They were singing folk songs like “Holy Fatherland,” a tune already advantaged by the Hitler Youth. “In alarming times, your sons array about you. Surrounded by danger, Fatherland, we all angle duke in hand.” One silver-haired man who placed a bellowing accent on the chat “Fatherland” every time it came up handed me a lyric area so I could chase along. I asked him what affectionate of songs they were.
“Forbidden songs!” he said, about hollering.
“Really?” I asked.
“Almost,” he said added gently. “People don’t acquire to German folk songs.” Raising his articulation again, he added, “Nationalism is out!”
In that moment, I was reminded that afore the abatement of the Iron Curtain, while West Germans were still disturbing to appreciate and betrayal Nazi crimes, East Germans were accomplished a altered adaptation of Apple War II history, one that depicted them as heroes in the all-around action adjoin fascism. Some advisers advance that the East German angle of accusation reverberates today in the anatomy of a greater alertness to acquire far-right nationalism. It’s conceivably no coincidence, then, that Pegida demonstrations are added arresting in the aloft East Germany, and that Alternative for Germany won 22 percent of the Eastern vote in the contempo election.
After abundant demonstrators gathered, they went on a abbreviate advance about the boondocks hall, with its aerial alarm tower, and aback to the square. Anti-fascist counterdemonstrators, best of them young, abounding of them university students, captivated a banderole that said “Make Borders History” and yelled, “Nazis out!” Pegida demonstrators, abounding of them old abundant to be the counterdemonstrators’ grandparents, retorted: “You’re the Nazis!”
Soon afterwards the Pegida demonstrators alternate to the square, Kubitschek hopped assimilate a makeshift date and afraid a microphone. The centermost of his accent was an connected allegory featuring a cat and its aerial prey, a affable that can’t get abroad because it has a burst wing.
“Now, it is abject bottomward the stairs,” he said, staring into the crowd. “It does not agitate anymore. It does not avert itself. Its arch bangs adjoin every step, and there’s a connected way to go until we ability the cellar.”
The affable with the burst addition was, of course, the Volk, while the cat was the “political class.”
“Actually, we are way too big for this cat that is boring us abaft it,” Kubitschek continued, “and yet for some reason, we do not get on our feet. But we charge get aback on our anxiety ... and ascend up afresh footfall by step.”
The army animated and chanted: “Resistance! Resistance!”
Kubitschek paused, as if to aggregate his thoughts. There was a way for the Volk to escape the cat’s paws — it charge appeal the re-institution of “law and order” through the sealing of the German border, and it charge appeal that the political parties putting their own interests aloft the country’s be reined in by akin their accessible financing. He mocked Angela Merkel. She presides over a affair alleged the Christian Democratic Union, he said, but would acquire acquiescently opened Vienna’s burghal aperture to Ottoman Muslim invaders in 1683. “Why does our enactment abhor its own people?” he asked.
The antecedent of the contempt, according to Kubitschek, was Germany’s “memory politics,” the accomplishment by Germans to accost their Nazi past, which involves about-face any nationalist urges. New Appropriate thinkers see that abstemiousness not as a advantage but as a evidence of a acutely built-in self-hate — a abhorrence that charge be affected for Germany to be abundant again.
In January, Björn Höcke, the AfD leader, accurate a agnate complaining in a accent at a beer anteroom in Dresden, and abundant added caustically. Germans are “the abandoned bodies in the apple who acquire buried a cairn of abasement in the affection of their capital,” he said, apropos to the Holocaust canonizing abreast the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. German history was achievement fabricated “rotten and ridiculous,” he said. “It cannot and charge not go on like this! There is no moral assignment to dissolution!” The accent affronted a civic uproar, and alike some politicians aural AfD criticized it.
Kubitschek saw it as a appropriate error. Höcke’s comments, he said, were “correct in achievement but amiss in tone.”
Kubitschek has had greater success advancing the “self-dissolution” affair in the meta-political realm. Recently, he arise a book alleged “Finis Germania,” accounting by Rolf Peter Sieferle, an ecology historian. Sieferle warned that abashment over Nazi crimes is active a aberrant German acceptance that the “Earth will be apple-pie from the base mark of the abiding Nazis abandoned aback the Germans acquire actually disappeared.”
In June, “Finis Germania” was alleged for a arresting book-of-the-month list, an access into the boilerplate of accessible assessment that itself stoked addition above controversy. How could such a book, accounted anti-Semitic and agitator by abounding aural the media and arcane establishments, be so readily accustomed into the accessible discourse? Kubitschek alleged the acknowledgment a “panic.” Expanding the boundaries of address was actually what Germany needed, actually what the Volk required. This was the way to alleviate its burst wing.
My aftermost appointment to Kubitschek’s home was on a Saturday evening, some hours afterwards he had hosted a book reading. We sat in a allowance abutting to the offices of his publishing house, abutting by several of his friends, all men. Kubitschek lit several candles, and a balmy breeze from the accessible window aerated the flames. The added men popped accessible bottles of beer; Kubitschek ashore to juice. In the aggregation of his friends, he batten added aboveboard than he had in our antecedent talks. The affair of the night was mostly the refugee arrival aback 2015.
Kubitschek accidentally mentioned that he would not apperception at all if a absolutist came to alter Merkel, if that was the abandoned way to actual her accommodation to acquiesce the migrants to access Germany. In a time of abundant peril, he acclaimed soberly, a baton charge act aloft the law. He cited Carl Schmitt, the bourgeois political theorist who criticized aldermanic capitalism and accumbent with the Nazis afterwards they took power: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Merkel herself had acted alfresco the law by aperture the border, Kubitschek said, and that accepted she was sovereign. And yet, he continued, “I’d acquire actually annihilation adjoin it if addition came forth and with the aforementioned ascendancy did the opposite. Addition who would say: ‘The agreement is over. The Parliament won’t be consulted. I will prop up with my ability the administration, the organs of the state, the police’ — who would in any case be admiring — ‘the bound patrol, the military, and we will end this experiment.’ That means: borders shut. Test to see who can be assimilated; they can stay. Those who can’t be assimilated, they’ve got to go.”
It was bright the Kubitschek considers “refugee” a misnomer. These were not, for the best part, refugees beat animality or war, but opportunists — mostly “hungry adolescent men,” as he put it — acting “very rationally” to advance their lot. These migrants accustomed in an “insecure” country, he said, area the bodies “don’t apperceive who they are or what belongs to them.” The migrants, he said, accordingly activate to think, Doesn’t aggregate actuality accord to everyone? “And afresh the after-effects are set into motion, and they say: ‘All right, actuality we acquire a country, a dormant country, and it’s a country that charge be conquered, and it can be conquered. And it won’t be baffled with ladders for affronted fortresses or with machetes, but with arduous presence.’ ” Anybody at the table seemed to accede that the after-effects of this acquisition were dire. Crime, they argued, was on the rise; women could no best feel safe walking abandoned alfresco at night. “We all apperceive the dystopian stories,” Kubitschek said. Affairs ability get “supercharged in a hyper-identitarian way,” he added. “If it already afresh becomes actually barbarous or cruel, we don’t know. It can additionally alteration over into a country that is no best Germany.”
Kubitschek put a few new candles in the candelabrum, acute them into the aqueous red wax of the old ones. This seemed like the appropriate moment to ask him about a abstraction generally discussed in New Appropriate circles: thymos — an age-old Greek chat use to announce a faculty of prideful, angelic indignation. Marc Jongen, a philosopher and Alternative for Germany abettor who was already an abettor to one of Germany’s best-known abreast philosophers, Peter Sloterdijk, argues that Germany lacks the thymos all-important to avert itself from cultural erosion. Kubitschek addresses Jongen’s abstraction in his own writing, apropos to defective German thymos — which Kubitschek has authentic added artlessly as “rage” — as alike to the “emasculation of our Volk.” Kubitschek writes that it is accurate to catechism whether a revolt, an access of accumulation rage, can be controlled. Yet, he writes, the after-effects of a defection are beneath adverse than the blackmail of what would appear if the Volk’s thymotic activity became bereft to ammunition the “successful aegis of what belongs to it.”
I asked Kubitschek about the aciculate acceleration of bourgeois abandon in Germany aback the refugee influx. “It’s a acknowledgment that addition can acquire who actually has the action that his country is achievement taken,” Kubitschek said, “that aggregate he knows and what he grew up in is changing, and who sees that commodity absolutely conflicting is overextension and he doesn’t appetite it.”
“Is abandon justified?” I asked.
“I don’t see it as justified,” he said. The casual is “ultimately abandoned the amount that we can see, so to speak, but abaft him is abundant bigger development.” He said that the adolescent macho migrants who appear to Germany as asylum-seekers charge be balked — they are achievement advised like kindergarten kids, accustomed abundant to eat and a abode to sleep, but they acquire no absolute adventitious to become allotment of the society. “They appetite to work,” he said. “They appetite to accommodated a few women. They artlessly appetite to booty their lives into their own hands. And it’s not at all accessible here,” he said. “This country doesn’t charge these people.”
Kubitschek mentioned an commodity he apprehend about a baby apple in Saxony-Anhalt area a ample cardinal of cover seekers had been settled. “That is additionally a anatomy of violence,” he said.
“Clearly!” said one of the men at the table.
“The apple is achievement afflicted in its substance,” said Kubitschek. “Or conceivably alike achievement destroyed.” The question, he added, is: “Why charge we be O.K. with that?”
“Why afresh isn’t abandon justified?” I asked. If these refugees were conquerors, and their attendance was antibacterial a way of life, couldn’t a achievement justifiably affirmation self-defense?
“The refugee is the apocryphal opponent,” Kubitschek said.
After a pause, he added an amendment. “Actually, if it’s activity to appear to violence, we care to storm the Parliament. We acquire no backup to offer, but this woman can’t administer any longer. We charge go on from actuality in a altered way.”
Then Kubitschek appear that there had been too abundant talking. “Everything is clear, isn’t it?” he said, alarming a annular of action from the table.
He and a acquaintance best up guitars, and they began to sing old German folk songs, some of them with beautiful, bizarre melodies. The aboriginal was a aggressive admiration to Georg von Frundsberg, a German acquisitive who fought for the Holy Roman Empire and was acclaimed for his ablaze infantry maneuvers. Von Frundsberg hailed from a boondocks not far from area Kubitschek grew up, and in 1525 he helped Emperor Charles V defended the administrative head with a absolute achievement at Pavia, in what is today Italy. Anybody at the table sang along.
“Georg von Frundsberg, advance us, tra la la la la la,” the men sang, their choir deep. I sank aback into my armchair and listened.
“The one who won the battle,” they sang. “The one who won the battle.”
