From Germany: “The Foreign Ministry and the Past”

Below the opening paragraphs of a signandsight article you can read the complete version of by clicking here.

Hitler’s diplomats debunked

“The Foreign Ministry and the Past” comes as a sharp rebuff to Thilo Sarrazin’s bestseller, showing clearly that the last place Germany should seek salvation is in its elites. By Alan Posener

Two books have shaped German debate this autumn. Thilo Sarrazin’s book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (Germany is abolishing itself) and “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” (The Foreign Ministry and the past). On first appearances they would seem to have little in common, other than they are both published by Random House. Actually, though, these books are intricately bound up with one another, two souls in the breast of the politically-minded Bildungsburger or member of the German educated classes.

Former Foreign Ministers Joschka Fischer and Frank-Walter Steinmeier both recently alluded to this connection. At the presentation of the report on the Foreign Ministry during the Third Reich by an independent historian commission, they talked to a packed auditorium in Berlin about its involvement in the Nazi killing machine. Independently of one another Steinmeier and Fischer gave speeches in which they compared “The Ministry” with Thilo Sarrazin’s bestseller. Fischer reminded his audience that it was in the Foreign Ministry that he been confronted with a “parallel society“. On a similar note, Steinmeier said that anyone who wanted to learn how Germany is abolishing itself should read “The Ministry”.

Indeed the report reveals the near total failure of a highly educated, extremely cultivated, privileged class which regarded itself as the embodiment of German Leitkultur or guiding national culture. The memory of this failure has impact all the more devastating because it surfaces just as another book is breaking all sales records by arguing that Germany is abolishing itself because that same elite is not having children and all the wrong people are. The wrong people being the unproductive, uneducated and uncultivated welfare recipients and immigrants who are reproducing with disproportionate regularity and with money from the state. And the blame goes to the multicultural and anti-elitist policies that the Red-Green coalition made Germany’s national interest on entering office in 1998.

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