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      The Disappearing World of Wolfgang Tillmans

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      It doesn’t seem like a titillating photograph: an orderly queue of Germans, waiting to enter a nondescript industrial site. It is dark. Just a single light illuminates the door. What does it look like? Like a color remake of Depression-era imagery: the factory entrance, the bread line.But the men in single file — they are all men — are at this factory not to work but to play. This old train shed in the former East Berlin has been reborn as Snax, a raunchy gay nightclub, and that light in the darkness is the gateway to pleasure. It’s 2001 now, the wall is a memory. The world is flat, we are young and proud. We got here on a train, there are no more border controls, or maybe we got here on a cheap new airline called easyJet.We are ready to dance, and to do other things in the dark. The party will go on well past sunrise. It feels like it might go on forever.Wolfgang Tillmans, “Outside Snax Club,” 2001.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Outside Snax Club” (2001) is one little star in a constellation of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans at the Museum of Modern Art: one node in a life’s network of tender portraits, straightforward still lifes and streaky abstractions. The sky from a window seat. A boy’s feet in tube socks. An apple tree in the London morning, a kiss stolen in the London night. The German photographer has been taking these deceptively natural pictures since 1986, and linking them in exhibitions and books that absorb different modes of photography into idiosyncratic associations. These have made Tillmans (especially to gay audiences) not just a renowned artist, but someone we feel we know personally. He is just “Wolfgang,” even to many who have never met him; his photos are intimacy enough.“Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear,” which opens to museum members this weekend and to the public Monday, is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year; actually, it’s been anticipated longer than that. Roxana Marcoci, a MoMA senior curator, has been working since 2014 on this tremendous, pandemic-detained overview, the largest of Tillmans’s career. It rambles across the museum’s sixth floor, vacant for more than a year and a half. It includes 417 works (mostly photographs, though there are a few minor videos) displayed, as always with Tillmans, in asymmetric arrays of large and small prints. He affixes the majority to the wall with Scotch tape or bulldog clips — although, as with the soft lighting and easy cropping of his photography, the ostensibly “informal” hang is actually calculated to the quarter-inch.Tillmans presents his photographs taped to or clipped to the wall, and prints them anew for each exhibition. Left, “Deer Hirsch” (1995). Right, “Smokin’ Jo” (1995). Emile Askey/The Museum of Modern Art, New York“Omen” (1991), printed at small scale and taped to the side of a free-standing gallery wall of the Museum of Modern Art.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe show is candid, unaffected, breezily intelligent; moralistic, too, in the later galleries. It is required viewing for both photography scholars and sportswear fetishists, and a worthy retrospective of one of the most significant artists to emerge at the end of the last century. (The show will tour next year to Toronto and San Francisco.)It is also — in a way I was not prepared for — one of the saddest museum exhibitions I have ever attended. It is a show of friends lost, of technologies abandoned, of cities grown insular, of principles forsaken. It maps, over 35 years, the ascent of a photographer to the height of his profession, and then the disintegration of almost everything he loved, the art form of photography not least among them.We follow the fragile peace of the ’90s into a century of war, extremism, post-truth and privation. We follow the artist through the last days of the darkroom and the rise of digital cameras, which he adopted with only moderate success. A sunset in Puerto Rico, a club night in Hackney, the transit of Venus, liquid concrete before it hardens: “To Look Without Fear” confirms that Tillmans has always been a photographer of transience, of things here today and gone tomorrow. Now his two hometowns, Berlin and London, are both facing frigid winters with life-threatening power shortages, and his whole world feels on the cusp of vanishing.Tillmans was born in 1968 in the industrial heartland of West Germany. He had a childhood love of astronomy, acquiring his first telescope at age 12, and of British pop groups like New Order and Culture Club that inspired a lifelong passion for London. (In 1983, on an exchange program in the British capital, the 14-year-old Tillmans somehow got past the bouncer at the gay nightclub Heaven, but left early to get the last Tube home.)The artist considers “Lacanau (self),” from 1986, to be his first self-portrait. Lila Barth for The New York Times“Selbstportrait (Self-portrait),” from 1988, when Tillmans was 20.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Faltenwurf (Keithstrasse),” a 2021 example of Tillmans’s drapery studies.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London.Photography came more accidentally. On the beach in France one summer, Tillmans aimed a point-and-shoot camera at his flexed knee and silky black Adidas shorts: a first, abstracted self-portrait. That picture is in the first room at MoMA, and one of the funnier leitmotifs of “To Look Without Fear” is the three stripes of the Adidas logo, a queer sportswear fixation that endures even as cities and bodies change. At the show’s entrance we see the 20-year-old Tillmans in a skimpy red Adidas bathing suit. At its exit is a photograph from three decades later of another, crumpled pair of glistening red Adidas shorts: a drapery study, a memento mori.He moved to Britain for art school but got his break in magazines, shooting raves, festivals, and also fashion editorials. The London indie magazine i-D first published this show’s well-traveled photographs of his friends Lutz and Alex, gripping each other’s androgynous bodies. A giant portrait of the British DJ Smokin’ Jo, her silver sequined dress twinkling in the golden hour, was a commission for Interview. There were new gay magazines like Attitude, for which he photographed Tony Blair, and Butt, which printed his images of half-dressed fashion designers on pink paper, like a not-safe-for-work Financial Times.“Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees” (1992), a double portrait of Tillmans’s childhood friends.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHe was shooting on 35 mm rather than in large formats; he disdained the tripod, abjured conspicuous lighting. Nan Goldin comes to mind before some of his halcyon ’90s pictures, and she herself appears with two nudes in a 1996 Tillmans idyll: a millennial remake of Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.” But he’s far less diaristic than Goldin, and a more relevant influence may be the New Objectivity of 1920s Berlin, where painters and photographers like Christian Schad and Otto Dix made a virtue of hard surfaces and louche life.His partyers are often standing still. His nudes are almost always staged. The same cool, surface-level gaze falls upon the windows of London skyscrapers, the water of pools and oceans, and the great love of his youth, the painter Jochen Klein. Klein appears in two of this show’s largest prints: “Deer Hirsch” (1995), a rare black-and-white photograph of Klein and a young buck, staring wondrously at each other on an empty beach, and “Jochen taking a bath” (1997), shot months before his death from AIDS-related pneumonia. (The memory of that photo haunts a 2015 image of the singer Frank Ocean, another sad young man with closely cropped hair against white tiles.)Wolfgang Tillmans, “Jochen taking a bath,” 1997.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Frank, in the shower” (2015), depicting the singer Frank Ocean.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonWhat mattered more than the photographer’s subjects was the photographer’s regard. It was applied equally, unobtrusively, across genres — portrait, landscape, nude, still life — and united in the taped-up arrangements he first tried out in 1993. All together, on the gallery wall, the modest photographs could express a new, politically and sexually charged way of being in the world. They were promiscuous: not (or not only) in the word’s libertine sense, but freely mixing, ready to be rearranged, most themselves when with others. They were urban, too, and came to typify a newly vibrant and international London, where the mammoth Tate Modern opened in 2000 and, in the same year, Tillmans became the first non-British laureate of the Turner Prize.Later, in the 2005 exhibition “Truth Study Center,” Tillmans introduced a new display module that mixed his photographs with newspaper clippings (about war, fundamentalism, and also scientific breakthroughs) on low wooden tables. With these didactic works he meant to resist the absolutes of Bush-Blair rhetoric, but they ended up as preachy show-and-tell displays: a first act in the 21st-century domestication of Tillmans’s youthful freedom. Anyway, by the time of “Truth Study Center,” different and more disruptive photographic arrangements were coming into view on our (desktop) screens. The tacked-up pictures and the carefully laid-out tables would give way to the image-search grid and the social feed. Tillmans’s unframed printouts were becoming atavistic. The independent magazines where he found his voice were on their last legs.“Freischwimmer 26,” 2003. The abstract work is one of a series of pictures Tillmans has made without a camera, by exposing photo paper to lasers and other light sources.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHis most powerful response to this century’s explosion of images has been the cameraless “Freischwimmer” abstractions, begun in 2003. So beautiful, these pictures: grand, streaky expanses of color, suggesting bodies or currents, made by exposing photosensitive paper to lasers and other hand-held lights. Yet something began to go sour in the Tillmans method around the time of his adoption of a digital camera in 2008. Large, colorful prints of a Shanghai street or an Argentine shantytown are too crisp, artificially alienated. Recent portraits, such as the Frank Ocean photograph, forsake the soft-focus intimacy of the ’90s for hard-candy sheen. The later party pictures are really dreadful: The black tones have lost all their mystery, the sex appeal has drained, and in a time of ubiquitous cameraphones his no-style style feels redundant.Absent at MoMA, though discussed in Marcoci’s catalog, is Tillmans’s most widely seen digital endeavor: his posters for the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Made in a season of now justified panic, these balmy images of jet-trail-crossed skies or the cliffs of Dover, overlaid with pleas for apathetic youth to vote Remain, were freely distributed online. “What is lost is lost forever,” read the caption on the most ethereal of these posters, and he wasn’t kidding. With Brexit, the imagery of borders introduced earlier that decade — the concrete walls of Gaza, the customs line at Gatwick — arrived at Tillmans’s doorstep. He thought the lack of artifice, the pictures everyone could read, might inspire people to live together; it turned out he was speaking a language narrower than he’d ever known. A 2021 photo of worn-out maroon passports (the color of all E.U. member states’ travel documents; the Johnson government replaced Britain’s with a blue one) might as well be a grave marker for Tillmans’s London. Some people really did have more freedoms when they were young.Recent works by Wolfgang Tillmans at MoMA, including, at center, “Kae Tempest” (2021).Lila Barth for The New York TimesWe all age. We all lose things. And yet I don’t blame Tillmans at all for considering, as he tells my colleague Matthew Anderson in this Sunday’s New York Times, that he might take a sabbatical and leave art for electoral politics. The democratic impulse in his photography, manifested through simple commercial lenses and unpretentious printouts, has receded into self-righteousness now, and his collisions of self-portraits, celebrity pictures, handsome sunsets and political slogans — well, how can these retain their force when a hundred million social media profiles do the same? He has reached the end of something, summed up with panache and great melancholy in this important show, and his accomplishment, not unlike E.U. membership, is easier to appreciate once it’s lost. Those late, sweaty ’90s nights: then, we were sure we had met the chronicler of a new millennium’s freedoms. What if Tillmans was instead a harbinger of the artist as entrepreneur of the self, and of how we would all go on posting pictures even as our misfortunes piled up offscreen?Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without FearOpens to members Sept. 9 and to the public Sept. 12 through Jan. 1, 2023, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, moma.org. More

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      Your Monday Briefing: Europe’s Energy Protections

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      Plus Chileans vote on a new constitution and rickshaws lead India’s electric vehicle transition.In Europe, natural gas costs about 10 times as much as it did a year ago.Hannibal Hanschke/ReutersEurope tries to protect its economyThe war in Ukraine has roiled Europe’s economy. Now, as energy costs surge, countries are scrambling to prepare for winter.This weekend, Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic moved to introduce measures aimed at tackling soaring energy costs and inflation; France is also embarking on its biggest conservation effort since the 1970s oil crisis.Concerns that rising prices could stoke social unrest are growing. Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Prague on Saturday, and other protests are being planned in Germany.The moves came days after Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy giant, announced an indefinite halt to the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which ends in Germany and provides gas to much of Europe. On the same day, finance ministers for the Group of 7 countries had agreed to impose a price cap on Russian oil in an effort to cut some of Moscow’s energy revenue. Here are live updates.What’s next: E.U. energy ministers are preparing for an emergency meeting this week.Other stories:The U.N. stationed two nuclear experts at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, hoping their presence would lower the risk of a catastrophic attack. But the plant lost the connection with its last remaining main external power line after shelling on Friday.Thousands turned out for Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral in Moscow on Saturday. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, did not attend.Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive has retaken several Russian-controlled villages. Deadly shelling continues in the east.Some Chileans worry that if the new charter is approved, it will change their country too drastically.Tomas Munita for The New York TimesChile votes on a new constitutionChile voted yesterday on whether to adopt a new constitution that would enshrine over 100 rights, more than any other nation’s charter.In a single ballot yesterday, Chileans decided whether they wanted universal public health care; the right to legal abortion; gender parity in government; empowered labor unions; greater autonomy for Indigenous groups; rights for animals and nature; and constitutional rights to housing, education, retirement benefits, internet access, clean air, water, sanitation and care “from birth to death.”The results of the vote have not yet been released. If approved, the new constitution could transform what has long been one of Latin America’s most conservative countries into one of the world’s most left-leaning societies.What’s next: Polls suggest that Chileans will reject the new charter. Many Chileans worry that it would change their country too drastically, and the country’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, has faced plummeting approval ratings.The State of the WarPrice Cap: Finance ministers from the Group of 7 nations agreed to form an international buyers’ cartel to cap the price of Russian oil, a move that could drain President Vladimir V. Putin’s war chest.U.N. Inspection: Amid fears of a possible nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, a United Nations team braved shelling to conduct an inspection of the Russian-controlled station.Russia’s Military Expansion: Though Mr. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, he seems reluctant to declare a draft. Here is why.Unusual Approaches: Ukrainian troops, facing strained supply lines, are turning to jury-rigged weapons and equipment bartering among units.Details: The national vote was mandatory and followed three years of protests, campaigning and debate over the new constitution, which was written from scratch. The current constitution has roots in the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990.Indigenous rights: The most contentious proposal would define Chile as a “plurinational” state representing some of the most expansive rights for Indigenous people anywhere.A driver swapping a fresh battery into an electric moped.Atul Loke for The New York TimesIndia’s electric rickshawsIn India, low-cost mopeds and rickshaw taxis are leading the transition to electric vehicles.The two- and three-wheeled vehicles sell for as little as $1,000, a far cry from the electric car market in the U.S., where Teslas can cost more than $60,000. Even relatively cheap models can cost more than $25,000.In India, where the median income is just $2,400, competition and subsidies have made electric mopeds and rickshaws as cheap as or cheaper than internal-combustion models. The market is growing: Indian automakers sold 430,000 electric vehicles in the 12 months that ended in March, more than three times as many as they sold a year earlier. Most were two- and three-wheeled vehicles.Environmentalists and the government are celebrating the scooters as a way to clear oppressive smog. Their success could serve as a template for other developing countries — supplied, perhaps, by Indian manufacturers.Details: Rickshaw drivers in New Delhi can trade depleted batteries for fully charged ones at swapping stations. Fresh batteries cost about half as much as a full tank on a conventional vehicle.THE LATEST NEWSAsiaA U.S.-made howitzer during a drill in Taiwan last month.Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, via Agence France-Presse/ Getty ImagesThe U.S. plans to sell more than $1.1 billion worth of arms to Taiwan that are designed to repel a seaborne invasion. Beijing threatened countermeasures.Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted as the president of Sri Lanka this summer, returned to the country on Friday.Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s ousted civilian leader, was sentenced to three more years in prison, with hard labor, on Friday. She now faces 20 years.An explosion at an Afghan mosque killed at least 18 people on Friday, including Mawlawi Mujib Rahman Ansari, a prominent cleric close to the Taliban.News Coming TodayBritain is about to announce its new prime minister. Liz Truss, the fervently pro-Brexit foreign secretary, is the front-runner.Kenya’s Supreme Court is expected to decide by today if the results of the country’s presidential election should stand.Defense hearings are expected to begin in the corruption trial of Argentina’s vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, days after she survived an assassination attack.World NewsThe U.S. economy added 315,000 jobs in August, a sign that the labor market is slowing but staying strong.Gazan officials announced the executions of five Palestinians. Two were accused of spying for Israel.Investigators seized 27 artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, saying they had been looted.What Else Is HappeningJason Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” which was created using an artificial intelligence program, took first place in the digital category at the Colorado State Fair.via Jason AllenA picture generated by artificial intelligence incited controversy after winning an art prize at the Colorado State Fair.NASA again postponed the launch of its moon rocket on Saturday, this time because of a hydrogen leak.Serena Williams has likely played her final match. After a thrilling run through the early rounds of the U.S. Open, she lost to Ajla Tomljanovic of Australia.New footage of the Titanic shows the ship in detail. It also highlights the next stage in deep-sea tourism: $250,000 for a seat on a submersible to see the wreck.A Morning ReadTulsi Gowind Gowda said she liked trees “more than anything else in my life.”Priyadarshini Ravichandran for The New York TimesWhen India was under British rule, the colonizers led a huge deforestation drive in the mountains of the state of Karnataka, in southern India. One woman, Tulsi Gowind Gowda, has devoted her life to transforming the vast swaths of barren land into dense forests.ARTS AND IDEASShein is officially pronounced “she-in,” though often pronounced “sheen.”Cooper Neill for The New York TimesUnited We SheinShein, the supercheap fast-fashion megagiant, is continuing its rise in America.The craze is real: TikTok is awash with “haul” clips of people showing off their large orders. The Chinese company recently surpassed Amazon as the most downloaded shopping app in the U.S., according to a recent analysis. One couple even got engaged at a pop-up store in Texas.But the brand has also faced many controversies. Shein has been accused by critics of contributing to overconsumption and waste; selling a $2.50 swastika necklace; copying the work of designers; and offering a toddler’s jacket and tiny purse with elevated levels of lead. It has also been accused of working with suppliers that violate labor laws.It’s not enough to deter devotees. One budding fashion influencer said she saw comments about the controversies on videos “all the time,” but suggested that Shein had become a target for being an “underdog.” A video she made about her Shein wedding dress, which cost $39 Canadian, has been liked more than 900,000 times.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookJoe Lingeman for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.This pad krapow gai, a one-pan stir-fry of chicken and basil, is a riff on Thai street food.FashionA Times climate reporter tested clothes designed for rising global temperatures.TravelAsk a flight attendant: Who gets which armrests?Now Time to PlayPlay today’s Mini Crossword.Here are today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaNote: Friday’s newsletter was addressed as “Your Thursday Briefing.”P.S. Natalie Kitroeff will take over as Mexico City bureau chief from Maria Abi-Habib, who’s becoming an investigative correspondent.The latest episode of “The Daily” is about Vancouver’s approach to its fentanyl crisis.You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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      The AfD’s Duplicitous Attempt to Target Germany’s National Minorities

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      in Elections

      German Conservatives Win State Election in Setback for Scholz

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      Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats scored record-low votes in the first major electoral test he has faced since taking office.BERLIN — Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, in a regional election overshadowed by the war in Ukraine, scored record-low vote percentages on Sunday as Germany’s most populous state went to the polls.The contest involved only legislative seats in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. But with the campaign’s start coinciding with the Russian invasion, the race was unusually dominated by national issues — in particular, the risks that the European land war might spread and the worry about energy supplies.Mr. Scholz has been increasingly criticized as dithering in his approach to supporting Ukraine in the war, which has become a popular cause in Germany across several parties, and his party appears to have paid a price in the first major electoral test it has faced since taking power less than six months ago.Projections showed the incumbent Christian Conservatives easing to a win and likely the governorship as the head of a coalition government. They were expected to take close to 36 percent of the vote versus less than 27 percent for the Social Democrats and 18 percent for the Greens.“It’s a huge disappointment for the S.P.D.,” said one political scientist, Uwe Jun of Trier University.“Given these results,” he said, “the S.P.D. must realize that it is obviously not perceived as the driving force of the federal government, but that it seems to be playing more of a supporting role in the coalition at the moment.”Just days after Russia invaded on Feb. 24, Mr. Scholz addressed the German federal Parliament and promised an epochal change, and signaled more spending on the Germany military. But since then the chancellor has struck many people as dragging his heels on policies that would actually help Ukraine.Supporters of the Christian Democrats after hearing the initial exit poll results on Sunday.Sascha Schuermann/Getty ImagesThere were weeks of debates on whether the German government would allow the export of heavy weapons before the Defense Ministry finally announced the shipment of dozens of armored air-defense systems.Germany was also seen as wavering on punishing Russia over the invasion. Fellow members of the European Union said Germany was trying to block decisions to boycott Russian energy imports, on which Germans are heavily dependent.Mr. Scholz was also criticized for sending his foreign minister on a state visit to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, instead of going himself.A recent poll found that nearly two-thirds of Germans do not consider Mr. Scholz a strong leader, and from respected broadsheets to Germany’s noisy tabloid Bild, commentators took the result of Sunday’s election as a damning verdict on Mr. Scholz’s first six months in office. A headline in the Süddeutsche Zeitung called the outcome “a vote of no confidence against the chancellor,” while Bild called it “a historic slap.”Voter unease seems not to have hurt one of Mr. Scholz’s coalition partners, the Greens. On Sunday, they were the big winners in terms of numbers gained over the last election, bettering their performance in 2017 by nearly 12 percentage points. Mr. Scholz’s two most popular ministers are Green party members who appear to be pushing for much of the popular Ukraine policy within the government coalition. One of them, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, traveled to Kyiv last week.The Free Democratic Party, the third coalition partner in the federal government, did not do well at the polls, claiming less than 6 percent of the state’s votes.At 56 percent, voter participation was unusually low for a state election in Germany.“It’s a test of people’s mood, which just shows what people think about the government’s work at the moment,” said Professor Jun.Voters handed the Christian Democratic Union, which lost the federal election after Chancellor Angela Merkel retired, an important win. It keeps conservatives in power in the industrial west, the former heartland of the Social Democrats, but it could signal a changing tide as voters go to polls in several other big state elections in the coming years.“The C.D.U. is back, our forward-looking course has been vindicated,” the party leader, Friedrich Merz, said on Twitter.The Social Democratic leader in North Rhine-Westphalia, Thomas Kutschaty, on Sunday.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe election does not directly affect federal politics in Berlin, where Mr. Scholz has been running the three-party coalition since December. But the support for the conservative government in the big western state adds to Mr. Scholz’s woes trying to keep his government stable and the Social Democratic brand strong.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Inching closer to NATO. More

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      German Far-Right Conspiracy Theorists Step Up Attempts to Undermine Schools

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      Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, independent schools in Germany, particularly the Waldorf (also known as Steiner) schools attracted far-right conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. Over the past two years, reported incidents of COVID-19 skepticism coupled with far-right conspiracy theories at Waldorf schools appear to be on the increase. Some COVID-19 deniers even attempted to establish their own schools in order to withdraw their children from government influence. Which far-right groups have been the driving force behind these developments, and what have the authorities done about it?

      Gravitational Pull to the Right

      As of February 2020, across Germany, approximately 90,000 pupils attended the 254 state-recognized Waldorf schools, whose curricula originate in an anthroposophical worldview. According to the Anthroposophical Society, the Waldorf pedagogy system, which was developed by the Austrian spiritualist Rudolf Steiner in the early 20th century, encourages “ways of recognizing and exploring the supersensible-spiritual world that exists in the sensory-material world. This ‘spiritual science’ sees itself as a new approach to a deeper and more comprehensive knowledge of nature and man.”

      German Pharmacies at the Heart of an Anti-Racism Debate

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      The concept behind Waldorf schools is a “developmentally appropriate, experiential, and academically-rigorous approach to education.” Compared to the pressure to perform in state-run schools, the goal is to strengthen individual responsibility as well as creative, practical and social skills. Another difference lies in self-administration by parents and teachers instead of a “hierarchically organized external control of the state schools.” 

      Through close personal ties with teachers, parents can actively influence everyday school life according to their beliefs with fewer interventions of internal school control bodies compared to state schools. Hence, the self-administration model makes independent schools susceptible to infiltration by far-right actors and conspiracy theorists. According to Ansgar Martins, a religious studies scholar at Frankfurt University, this structural weakness is compounded by the “pronounced anthroposophical inclination toward conspiracy theories” of Waldorf schools that stems from Steiner’s original teachings.

      Steiner held a developmental, esoteric and essentially racist view of humanity that saw the world divided into superior and inferior races, exemplified by countless discriminatory statements against Jewish and especially black people: “How can a Negro or an utterly barbaric savage become civilized? … The Negro race does not belong in Europe, and it is of course nonsense that it now plays such a large role in Europe.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      These remarks are joined by Steiner’s pseudoscientific conception of the physical and intellectual superiority of the white race, reminiscent of the Nazi-era Volkstum concept according to which humanity reached its developmental endpoint in the white race: “If the blue-eyed and blond-haired people were to die out, people would become increasingly stupid unless they developed a kind of cleverness which is independent of blondness. … The white race is the future race, is the spirit-creating race.”

      According to Germany’s Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, these statements “are to be regarded as particularly serious, since they are by no means random products or racist stereotypes caused by the spirit of the times. Rather, they are to be seen as manifestations of a specifically Steinerian esoteric racial science.” In the Stuttgart Declaration of 2007, the Association of Independent Waldorf Schools condemned “any racist or nationalist appropriation of their pedagogy.” Nevertheless, this declaration did little to prevent attracting far-right conspiracy theorists even before the pandemic.

      Far-Right Infiltration

      In 2013, the managing director of a Waldorf school in the German town of Rendsburg was dismissed because of connections to the far-right Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich) movement. He attracted attention by distributing leaflets in the school spouting that “the Federal Republic of Germany … is not a state, but the managing legal advisor of a state simulation [is]. There is no de jure and de facto state of the Federal Republic of Germany.” 

      The Reichsbürger is a heterogeneous movement that, referring to the historical German Reich, rejects the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and its legal system, thus denying legitimacy to democratically elected representatives. A small proportion of the Reichsbürger movement is made up of right-wing extremists, but the anti-state and conspiracy theory tenets of the entire scene facilitate a connection to anti-Semitic narratives that are central to the far-right domain.

      Embed from Getty Images

      At another Waldorf school in the German town of Minden, a teacher taught unchecked for 20 years before his connections to ethno-nationalist right-wing extremist groups became known. Even before Wolf-Dieter Schröppe became a teacher, he maintained contacts with veteran Nazis, including the war criminal Erich Priebke — the man responsible for the massacre of 335 people as a captain in the SS and sentenced to life in prison. It took more than four months before the school terminated Schröppe’s employment contract, partly because some colleagues spoke out in his support.

      In 2015, these incidents prompted the Association of Independent Waldorf Schools to publish a brochure conceding that the anthroposophy-based Waldorf pedagogy has a “great attraction” for the right-wing extremist conspiracy theorists, specifically for the Reichsbürger.

      During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Waldorf anthroposophy again garnered attention. To this day, Steiner’s worldview translates into a greater vaccine skepticism in Germany as a whole and in Waldorf schools in particular due to public acceptance and influence of anthroposophy. Underlying Steiner’s philosophy is the dangerous belief that diseases serve a karmic purpose by stimulating child development and making amends for mistakes in past lives.

      Hence, over the last decades, vaccine skepticism has manifested itself in lower vaccination rates in Waldorf schools, resulting in regular measles outbreaks. In this respect, an incident at a school in the city of Freiburg came as no surprise when 117 COVID-19 cases were recorded and more than 50 forged medical certificates were discovered exempting students and teachers from wearing a mask.

      Embed from Getty Images

      At a Waldorf school in the Bavarian town of Landsberg, a father who is both a doctor and a homeopath issued certificates to families of other students to circumvent mandatory mask-wearing, denouncing people who choose to do so as “mask hypochondriacs.” At a demonstration against COVID-19 measures, he showed the indictable Hitler salute that resulted in criminal charges.

      The Bavarian Ministry of Education confirms these incidents are not isolated cases. Mask exemption certificates were seven times more likely to be issued at Bavarian Waldorf schools than at state schools. Nevertheless, many Waldorf parents show resolve against COVID-19 deniers and far-right activities. According to the mobile counseling service against right-wing extremism in Bavaria, Waldorf parents “disproportionately often” reported similar incidents at schools during the pandemic.

      COVID-19 Denier Schools

      To evade resistance at state but also independent schools and shield children from COVID-19 measures, some parents and teachers went a step further, founding their own learning initiatives and so-called supplementary schools. Insights into the network groups behind those supplementary schools reveal political affinities not only with the Reichsbürger but with another the far-right esoteric movement.

      In Rosenheim, Bavaria, an elementary and middle school teacher founded a Querdenker (Lateral Thinkers) school to reflect the movement’s pandemic skepticism. More than 50 pupils were taught here by parents and educators, including herbalists, music teachers and shamans. On advertising leaflets, the school falsely claimed to be located on Russian territory so that German law would not be applicable.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The school principal was active in networks spreading far-right esoteric ideas of the Anastasia movement, a decentralized conspiracy group of far-right esotericists and settlers, based on the protagonist of the “Anastasia” fantasy novel series by Russian author Vladimir Megre. According to sociologist Matthias Quent, the novels “transport cultural racism and anti-Semitism. These are ideological patterns that we also know from National Socialism. According to them, modern society is doomed, and people must retreat to the native soil or family estates.”

      Connections to the Anastasia movement also existed in the newly founded Bauernhofschule (farm school) in the state of Hesse, which was registered as a supplementary school. Hesse’s school law enables parents to establish schools with scant bureaucratic hurdles as long as they supplement, not replace state curricula. According to the German state of Hesse’s public broadcaster, HR, Telegram chat transcripts revealed that the school operators proclaimed to teach children how to keep animals, grow vegetables and live in harmony with nature. Nevertheless, the chat was inundated with extremist, anti-Semitic views from the Reichsbürger and Anastasia movements.

      Even Holocaust denial — a criminal offense in Germany — received indifferent or approving reactions in the chats. The ideological connections of the Bauernhofschule reach as far as the fringes of the QAnon movement, as Martin Laker’s membership in the group suggests. Laker is an active member of the Anastasia movement and runs his own online platform where he spreads QAnon myths.

      Underestimating the Problem

      Germany’s political establishment has been slow in reacting to the growing problem. While the authorities are taking action against the newly founded supplementary schools, including enforced closures due to a lack of permits, there is still no sign yet of German politicians taking the danger posed by far-right anthroposophists seriously enough.

      In January 2021, the Green Party’s national parliamentary group issued a request asking what connections between right-wing extremist opponents of the COVID-19 measures and anthroposophical groups are known to the German government and how it assesses “the potential danger in this regard, given the fact that anthroposophy in Germany maintains a far-reaching network of companies, foundations, and public institutions.” The answer: “The Federal Government has no knowledge of this.” 

      This rection is particularly disappointing considering the fight against right-wing extremism has gained political traction in recent years due to record high numbers of politically motivated crimes by right-wing extremists. In 2020, the government published a substantial catalog of measures accompanied by a 100-page final report on combating right-wing extremism and racism the following year. According to the report, programs to prevent extremism in state schools are to be promoted more vigorously but fail to mention the right-wing extremist slant of anthroposophical groups and independent schools.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      It remains to be seen whether the new government under the leadership of Angela Merkel’s successor Olaf Scholz will turn its eye to this blind spot. There seems to be no lack of will on the part of Scholz’s fellow party member and the new minister of the interior, Nancy Faeser, who announced at her first public appearance in the new role that “A particular concern of mine will be to combat the greatest threat currently facing our free democratic basic order, right-wing extremism.” 

      The threat posed by far-right conspiracy theories and fake news might have only entered the public consciousness with the triumph of social media platforms. But conspiracy theories don’t germinate in a vacuum. Instead, often far-reaching causes are behind their emergence. In Germany, the societal impact of widespread anthroposophic views, promoted in state-approved institutions like the Waldorf schools, is one of the many causes that deserve increased critical, not at least political, attention.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The week where decades happened: how the west finally woke up to Putin

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      The week where decades happened: how the west finally woke up to Putin From Germany’s shock military spending rise to sanctions unity, leaders have come together over the war in Ukraine

      Russia-Ukraine war: live news
      Lenin, a Russian leader as obsessed with history as Vladimir Putin, famously said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” This has been the latter. The little more than a week since Russian troops invaded Ukraine has indeed shaken the world. Change has been telescoped, national taboos broken, moribund institutions given purpose and the spectre of a nuclear war in Europe has been raised for the first time since the 1980s. Germany has called it Zeitenwende, the turning point. It will not just be Ukraine that is changed for ever by this war.But there is something specific about how war accelerates change. In The Deluge, his classic work on how society is changed by war, the British historian Arthur Marwick wrote: “War acts as a supreme challenge to, and test of, a country’s social and political institutions. War results not only in the destruction of inefficient institutions (such as the Tsarist regime in Russia), but also in the transformation of less efficient mechanisms into more efficient ones”.The west has surprised itself with its ability to respond to the misery inflicted on the people of Ukraine. All kinds of unimaginable images emerge. The German Bundestag cheered an extra €100bn (£82.4bn) on defence spending, followed by 100,000 people on the streets in protest at Putin. Matteo Salvini, the great Italian defender of Putin, bringing white tulips to the Ukrainian embassy. Liz Truss, the UK foreign secretary, attending a meeting of the EU foreign affairs ministers meeting. The Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, sharply criticised by human-rights groups and others over the years for his hardline border policies, sitting on a school bench opening his arms to refugees.It was just a fortnight ago that the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, had appeared at the Munich security conference to caution the crisis was not the moment to try to execute an 180-degree turn on the decades-old German policy banning the sale of arms into conflict zones. Josep Borrell, the EU external affairs chief, batted away calls for Ukraine to join the EU, saying they already had an exceptional trade deal. He spoke about the “power of the EU’s language”, distancing himself from his own one-time claim that the EU must learn “the language of power”.The next day – Sunday – all the talk was of Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic initiative, and the concessions the French president had extracted from Vladimir Putin. Even on Wednesday, on the eve of the invasion, Baerbock gave an interview saying it was impossible for Germany to impose the strongest sanctions because of “the massive collateral damage” to Germany’s own economy. Putin could end up laughing at us, she warned.Yet by the following weekend, two days after the invasion began on Thursday, Germany’s coalition government had started that 180-degree course correction. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his cabinet agreed to send Ukraine 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, lifting restrictions on German weapons being sent to conflict zones by third parties in the process. The next day, Scholz told the Bundestag in his trademark matter-of-fact manner that he was injecting €100bn into German defence, but protecting other budgets, and defence spending would rise above 2% of German GDP. The MPs from government and the CDU gasped and cheered in equal measure. David McAllister, a leading figure in the German CDU and chair of the European parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, admits he nearly fell off his chair when he heard the plans.Russian forces attacked multiple targets in southern UkraineThe promised growth catapults Germany into becoming the third largest spender on defence globally, behind only the US and China. GlobalData forecasts an annual German defence budget of $83.5bn in 2024, equating to a 45% increase on 2021’s budget of $57.5bn. That is bigger than France and the UK. Overnight Germany became not just an economic but also a geopolitical powerhouse. Polls said 78% of Germans backed the decision.Matthias Matthijs, Europe senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “It is quite astonishing how fast this government broke pretty well every taboo in postwar German foreign policy.”He attributes the scale of the change to a visit to Berlin on Sunday by the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki. “I came to Berlin to shake the conscience of Germany,” Morawiecki said.Sophia Besch, from the Centre for European Reform, points out Scholz himself insisted he had not acted due to pressure from allies, but due to Germany changing its view of the threat posed by Putin. “The truth is the world did not change last Thursday,” she said. “Berlin for years has ignored the warnings that came from many of our allies and from Putin. We need to learn the lessons of how this could have happened and how we could have been so blind. We are leaving behind some of our old beliefs – that economic interdependence prevents conflict, but I am not sure we know yet with what we are replacing this belief.”Sergey Lagodinsky, a German Green MEP, argued Germany needs not only to spend more money, but to shift its mindset without becoming militaristic or interventionist. It needs to discuss how to adopt escalation, including military escalation, as leverage as part of its foreign policy toolbox. Foreign policy is not just a peace policy, Friedenspolitik in German, but also the ability to deal, manage and face conflict.But the new German coalition, faced by the need to extricate itself from Russian energy, may have to challenge other orthodoxies. The Green economics minister, Robert Habeck, does not rule out extending the use of coal-fired power plants. “This blind, naive, one-sided relationship of dependency on Russia for energy for decades is one of the biggest strategic mistakes of the past 20 years,” Lagodinsky said. “Now we are stuck. It represents a medium- and long-term problem”.But Putin’s recklessness is not just causing a revolution in Germany, but across Europe.Sweden abandoned its policy of not sending weapons to conflict zones, agreeing to send Bofors AT-4, a single-use anti-tank launcher, to Ukraine, plus medical supplies. In Finland, a bombshell poll showed 53% want Finland to join Nato. “This poll flipped everything on its head,” said Charly Salonius-Pasternak, of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Moreover the poll showed that if voters were told that politicians said they backed the plan the support went up to two-thirds. “You could sense the president, Sauli Niinisto, realised the whole defence dynamic was changed.” Niinisto, seen as one of the best readers of what Putin is thinking is now rushing to hold urgent talks with Joe Biden in the White House.Ukraine war prompts European reappraisal of its energy supplies Read moreEven in Switzerland, leaders had to catch up with the public mood in the space of a weekend, and by the Monday an emergency cabinet promised to implement the entire EU sanctions package. The decision does not formally end a policy of neutrality that has survived two world wars, but there is now pressure to track down the many oligarchs that live in the country. There are also calls for an increase in the defence budgetThere has been a mini-revolution in Italy, too, where the prime minister, Mario Draghi, accused last week of seeking sanctions carve-outs to protect Italy’s dependence on Russian gas, has also found some mettle. He told parliament on Tuesday: “Yes, we want peace, but it is obvious that whoever amassed more than 60km of tanks near Kyiv does not want peace. We cannot turn our backs on Ukraine. Italy does not intend to look away.” He proposed an international public register of those with assets of more than €10m. In France, Macron looks likely to be re-elected comfortably next month as the rightwing candidates find themselves compromised by links to Putin they cannot deny.Eastern European countries, sometimes hostile to refugees, have instead had the most open arms. Poland has taken an unprecedented 600,000 people. Orbán the Hungarian leader photographed smiling at child refugees, vows “No one will be left uncared for.”The UK too has been experiencing unusually heavy traffic on the Road to Damascus. The Conservative government promises there will be no hiding place for oligarchs, publishing the delayed economic crime bill and seemingly unnerving Roman Abramovich into selling his stake in Chelsea football club. The endless denigration of Brussels has stopped. “The quality and intensity of the contacts between the EU and UK has been different to anything since before Brexit,” one EU official said. “We have restored a level of trust”.But it has been at the level of the European Union that the action has been quickest and most surprising, revealing Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the EU Commission and former German defence minister, as a powerful advocate for action. For the EU to release €500m from the European Peace Facility to provide equipment and supplies to the Ukrainian armed forces, including – for the first time – lethal equipment, was a first. EU military staff based in Poland are now coordinating military supplies into Ukraine. The EU as a military player is no longer just the stuff of seminars.Equally, the Commission in discussing its EU sanctions package acted with an unparalleled speed, and by consensus among the member states. Some EU sanctions packages take months to be agreed as one country or other exploiting the requirement for unanimity uses their veto power to pursue a national interest.That the UK, US and EU were able to coordinate an attack on the Russian central bank, freezing out some Russian banks from the global Swift bank payment system and implementing measures to prevent Russian banks and firms raising capital, showed a wholly unexpected level of resolve. This was a financial declaration of war – an attempt to turn Russia into a pariah economy – something never tried before, using methods never deployed before. It involved, for instance, some G20 central banks freezing the Russian central bank reserves held in their own jurisdiction, so depleting the war chest of reserves that Putin had accumulated to defend his economy if it came under western attack.All this is remarkable, indeed epoch-making, but not a cause for celebration. The institutions of liberal democracy may have belatedly shown resolve and unity, but in the here and now they are still losing. Keir Giles, from the Chatham House thinktank, is blunt: “Russia will want to present Zelenskiy with an appalling choice – whether to fight on at immense human cost and to the destruction of his country, infrastructure and economy or to submit to his terms in order that life can go on.“The decision to abandon Ukraine to that fate was made by the west when it gave the green light to Putin by reassuring him that no one would intervene. Nato does not have a strategy to win the war in Ukraine because Nato does not want to be in the war in Ukraine.”European politicians will also be worrying as the price of bread and energy soars in the months ahead whether voters are willing to make the sacrifice.the Lithuanian foreign minister told the UK foreign affairs select committee that half-measures would not do. “Putin has no boundaries to what instruments he is going to use and unleash against the Ukrainians”, Gabrielius Landsbergis, said, adding the west “had to go all-in”.He wants humanitarian corridors supported by no-fly zones. But the UK and the US have firmly rejected this since it would pit Nato pilots against Russian pilots. A Polish plan, backed by Borrell for Nato to provide Ukraine with Nato jets, training and bombs, got shot down in less than a day.The other remaining option is to end the final carve-outs in the sanctions regime. “The push is now for carpet sanctions to match the carpet bombing,” said Orysia Lutsevych from the Ukraine Forum, adding the UK, EU and the US are still buying more than €700m of oil, gas and other commodities that is the equivalent of 150 tanks a day that Russia can finance.That could be stopped either through an energy trade embargo, or by reversing the EU decision to let Gazprombank and Sberbank, the vehicles through which Europe pays for Russian oil and gas, stay in the Swift payment system. UK officials briefed on Wednesday they want to abolish the carve out given by the EU. If these two banks are thrown out of Swift that might immobilise Russian oil and gas exports, or lead to unspecified retaliation by Putin.The breadth and range of economic and financial measures taken against Moscow, not to mention growing sporting and cultural isolation, has been a humiliation for Putin, but it is also a risk for the west if the Russian leader sees no answer but total victory. “He is in a corner, but unfortunately with nuclear weapons, says Giles.The west has been transformed in a week, but the question this weekend is if it would be willing, forced by the chaos of events, to go even further. The charge facing the west after a week of war is the one made by George Orwell of Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Like almost everyone at the time, he “neither wanted to pay the price of peace nor that of war”.TopicsUkraineEuropeRussiaGermanyMilitaryArms tradeSwedenfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is a Wake-Up Call for Germany

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      Anyone who has ever studied international relations in the United States has been exposed to the so-called Melian dialogue. The Melian dialogue refers to an episode in the Peloponnesian War, pitting the representative of Melos, a small island, against the representatives of Athens. The Athenians, engaged in a war with Sparta, demanded that the Melians submit to their power, join their side and, in the process, get absorbed into the Athenian empire. 

      Learning Lessons in Ukraine and Beyond

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      In case the Melians refused, the Athenians threatened with complete destruction. The Melians did refuse, pointing out that justice was on their side. In response, the Athenians laid siege on the island, took its main city and, after its surrender, killed every surviving male and sold the women and children into slavery.

      Exigencies of Defense

      One of the central points of the Melian dialogue is the notion that might makes right, or, as the Athenians put it, “you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” It is a prime example of what in international relations theory is known as realism. Over the past few decades, realism has gone out of fashion, especially in Western Europe — and for good reason. Nobody is eager to live in a Hobbesian world where life is “nasty, brutish and short” — in Western Europe, nobody more so than the Germans.

      This, of course, has had a lot to do with Berlin’s position during the Cold War, when Germany was, as the prominent German-American political scientist Peter Katzenstein put it, a semi-sovereign state. During the Cold War period, the Federal Republic of Germany pursued a number of strategies that marked a fundamental break with realism: toward its neighbors to the west, a process of economic integration; toward its neighbors to the east (particularly Poland) a policy of détente and reconciliation, which came to be known as Ostpolitik.

      The idea behind Ostpolitik was that rapprochement would ultimately lead to change — Wandel durch Annäherung.  When, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, it appeared that the policy had worked. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      The fall of the Berlin Wall was soon followed by the crumbling of the Soviet Union and German unification, which meant that Germany had finally regained its sovereignty — somewhat of a troubling reality, and not only among Germany’s neighbors. In Germany, too, not a few people were worried. They shouldn’t have been. Germany was perfectly adapted to the new times where the “overwhelming exigencies of defence” appeared to have disappeared and where, as the then German minister of defense would put it in 1999, Germany, for the first time in its history, was “only surrounded by friends.” 

      The end of the Cold War appeared to have ushered in a fundamentally now global reality, informed by interdependence, globalization and the end of history. Here, Germany was poised to play a prominent role as the epitome of a “trading state” and a “civilian power.”  

      Civilian powers such as Germany rely on what the American international relations theorist Joseph Nye famously called soft power. Soft power comes from the appeal of consumer products (all those sleek BMWs and Mercedes Benzes) and popular culture (TV series like “Derrick” and Bundesliga clubs Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund with their millions of fans all over the world), rather than from the barrel of the gun. 

      Civilian powers scale down their military. After all, a country surrounded by friends has little use for a military that is up to the task of defending the country. Instead, they are tempted to follow the lead of the Danish Progress party whose late leader proposed in the early 1970s to replace the country’s ministry of defense with an answering machine with the recorded message of “We surrender” in Russian.

      Mugged by Reality

      On February 24, Germany got mugged by reality and was caught flat-footed. In the face of a Melian scenario, Germany is like the emperor with his new clothes. Over the recent days, a growing number of articles have appeared exposing the sorry state of the German military and lamenting its lack of preparedness. Some of the stories would make for great slapstick comedy were they not describing a pathetic reality. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      The German soldiers stationed in Lithuania, for instance, not only lack warm jackets but even underwear, or so Germany’s defense ombudsperson has charged. At the same time, the commander of Germany’s army went public, stating that the military “stands more or less naked.” His remarks led France’s center-left daily Liberation to claim that “the generals of the Bundeswehr were ready to lay down the arms at the first Russian attack.” Another French newspaper charged that the German military, because of “deficient gear and the lack of flexibility of its soldiers,” was not in a position to efficiently support its allies in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

      None of this is new. It has all been known for years. In late 2018, for instance, Germany’s weekly Die Zeit raised alarm noting that only a third of the new tanks, fighter jets and helicopters the military had received were ready to use. Four years later, one of Germany’s major dailies, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, reported that the military continued to suffer from massive problems. The German navy, for instance, could count on less than 30% of its ships to be completely ready for action. 

      A few days before the Russian invasion on February 24, the Ukrainian government asked the Germans for anti-tank missile systems. Berlin declined. The reason is simple: Even if it had wanted to, Germany would not be in a position to supply the weapons — they were not available.

      No matter the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Germany will be collateral damage. For too long, the Germans have believed that interdependence and constructive engagement would fundamentally change international relations. This view, however, is based on theoretical constructs that ignore some of the fundamentals informing international relations: the legacy of history and, closely linked to it, emotions. Europe’s history abounds with grievances and resentment, more often than not triggering intense passions. The Balkan wars of the 1990s should have served as a reminder. Instead, they were dismissed as a remnant of a bygone era. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      There is another lesson to be drawn from this disaster. A few years ago, two American political scientists coined the phrase “weaponizing interdependence.” The authors used network theory to explain how “coercing actors could exploit interdependence and why targeted actors would find it difficult to evade coercion attempts.” Germany is a textbook case. For decades now, it has increased its dependence on Russian inputs, particularly natural gas and oil.

      The controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline is only the latest example of this. Dependence on Russian commodities was once again informed by the same belief in the power of interdependence to engage the other side in a way beneficial to both. But, once again, the whole thing is in shambles, and Germany is caught in the trap largely of its own making.

      Time for a Change

      But the times there are changing, and rapidly so. Over the weekend, Germany agreed to cut Russian banks off from the SWIFT payment system, announced it would deliver anti-tank missiles to Ukraine (leaving some observers wondering how they suddenly materialized) and sent a military contingent to be stationed in Slovakia. 

      What is much more significant, however, is the fundamental change in tone with regard to Russia, its assault on Ukraine and Germany’s response. The two parties that in the past have been most indulgent toward Vladimir Putin’s regime, the Social Democrats and the Left, have made a complete volte-face, condemning Moscow’s aggression. 

      At the same time, there has been growing recognition on the side of Germany’s left-wing intellectuals that the “times of illusion” are over, that the notion of “wehrhafte Demokratie” — a democracy that can defend itself — only has meaning if it is backed by real forces, and that this will require not only resources but a fundamental change of mindset. The reality is that Germany’s allies will no longer allow Germans to evoke the horrors of the Nazi regime as an explanation for their neglecting its defensive capabilities. 

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      Given the new geostrategic realities, what Western Europe needs, and desperately so, is a strong German military. It must be relieved that on Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced an allocation of €100 billion ($112 billion) toward the 2022 military budget, aiming to raise defense spending to over 2% of GDP set out in NATO guidelines going forward; last year, it stood at 1.53%.

      Finally, it seems to dawn in Germany that Putin’s aggression is driven as much by historical revisionism and revanchism as by the boundless drive to snuff out and eradicate Ukraine’s civil society and democratic spirit, turning it into a second Belarus, a Russia en miniature. It is hardly a coincidence that the invasion of Ukraine started almost to the day of the anniversary of the end of Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Moscow regime in February 2014.

      The only one who has remained steadfast in his Putinophilism is former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has always prided himself in his close relationship with the Russian autocrat. Whereas Austria’s ex-chancellor, Christian Kern, and the former French premier, François Fillon, resigned from lucrative posts on the boards of Russian enterprises, Schröder refused to follow suit, much to the embarrassment of the German Social Democrats. 

      But then, Schröder belongs to the same generation as the Putins, Trumps and Xis of this world, old men living in an alternative reality who would like nothing more than to turn back the clock. In Germany, at least, dreams and illusions have given way to a new realism, one that is likely to have profound repercussions not only for Germany but for Europe in general.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      How the G7 and UN Can Make Multilateralism Sustainable

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      “Progress towards an equitable world” is Germany’s goal for its G7 presidency program, which frames the G7 states as “leading industrialised countries and value-based partners” with a particular responsibility to “shape a positive future… in the spirit of sustainable economic recovery.”

      Clubs such as the G7 itself and the “climate club” envisaged by the German presidency are often able to make quicker decisions and act faster than more inclusive multilateral organizations such as the United Nations. Despite this, a speedboat, for all its pace and maneuverability, cannot cross the ocean on its own. So, too, the G7 cannot tackle any global challenges alone.

      Time for a Sober Look at the Ukraine Crisis

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      The German G7 presidency has thus announced in its program that it intends to forge close links with the UN and the G20 in particular, with the goal of achieving a “fair and rules-based multilateralism.” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also underscored the importance of pioneering initiatives and partnerships within the framework of an “inclusive and networked multilateralism.”

      In his report, “Our Common Agenda,” building on the commitments in the declaration adopted by the member states on the occasion of the UN’s 75th  anniversary, Guterres develops numerous ideas for how to strengthen international cooperation. He calls for progress to be made wherever there are common interests.

      Embed from Getty Images

      So, is what belongs together growing together? Unfortunately not (yet), as the G7 program is rather abstract and dutiful in its references to the UN. However, the German G7 presidency has an opportunity to change this and implement shared priorities on a collective basis.

      Tether “Strong Alliances for a Sustainable Planet” to the UN

      Both the G7 and the UN are opting for pioneer projects and partnerships with non-governmental stakeholders, such as the COVAX vaccination drive and the G7 initiative for infrastructure projects in poor countries. It is positive to see the UN secretary-general not shying away from dealing with these formats and advocating for their greater use in order to implement global goals, most notably those of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 2015 Paris climate agreement. While many UN member states may support such partnerships, there is no agreement on this kind of multilateralism beyond mere inter-governmental relations.

      In order to achieve the greatest possible impact, it is important for the G7 that as many states as possible consider its initiatives to be beneficial and legitimate. To this end, it would be worthwhile to tether these initiatives institutionally to the UN system, which would ensure that partnerships meet human rights standards, are transparent in their design, monitored on an ongoing basis and further developed in line with the needs of the target groups.

      The UN secretary-general has proposed strengthening the existing UN Office for Partnerships, which is not currently in a position to carry out the aforementioned tasks. After the failure of earlier reform attempts, due not least to financing issues, digital solutions are now to be employed. The G7 should support the development of an effective UN hub and link its own initiatives through this hub. This could help the G7 generate acceptance and, at the same time, galvanize other partners. By subjecting partnerships to this kind of quality control, the UN could strengthen its central role in global governance.

      “Investing in a Better Future” — With the UN

      Like the German G7 presidency, the UN secretary-general places a particular focus in his report on future issues in conjunction with matters of justice. The world organization needs to become far better at avoiding shipwreck — that is the UN must respond more inclusively and justly to acute and future transnational crises. Developing greater strategic foresight, taking increased account of the interests of young people and future generations, and bringing key players together quickly in the event of the outbreak of new crises — these are the ambitious proposals for placing the UN further into the center of global problem-solving.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      Here, too, the member states are divided when it comes to the increase in authority and knowledge for the UN that would go hand in hand with these measures. The issue of upgrading the UN is also contested within the G7 due to concerns about effectiveness and sovereignty and given the influence of states such as China and Russia.

      In view of overlapping interests with regard to major concerns for the future, the G7 should, nonetheless, insist upon pooling the existing capabilities of the UN system more effectively, while at the same time supporting the targeted development of the UN’s strategic capacities politically and financially. This can be done via voluntary contributions or, beneficially in some cases, the expansion of the regular budget. In 2021, the G7 committed in the Cornwall Consensus to make crisis management more effective and fair in the future. This year, the G7 should discuss the role of the United Nations in this.

      Currently, member states are discussing in the UN General Assembly which of the secretary-general’s proposals they intend to support, while preparation processes for the G7 summit are also underway. It is time to consider processes as one whole and bring them together for a future-proof multilateralism.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions relating to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More