According to a major opinion poll conducted last week, over two-thirds of Germans (68 percent) are in favor of peace negotiations with Russia. Support is particularly strong among voters of Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW Alliance (87 percent) and the Alternative for Germany, AfD  (82 percent). A clear majority of Green voters (59 percent) also favor diplomacy.

The survey by the Insa Opinion Research Institute shows a yawning gap between the German people and the federal government on the question of how the war in Ukraine should be ended. Just under two-thirds (65 percent) want Western countries to refrain from further arms deliveries to encourage a ceasefire. In East Germany four-fifths favor this approach; 62 percent in the West. As many as 58 percent of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s own SPD supporters are against further arms deliveries. Close to one-half (46 percent) of all respondents believe that the German government has failed to make sufficient diplomatic efforts to prevent the war itself.

By contrast, in  January of last year, when addressing the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (of the Green Party) declared “We [the West] are fighting a war against Russia.” Her fundamental position has not changed since, as evidenced at the recent NATO summit in Washington. No less remarkably, in September 2022 she declared that she would support Ukraine “no matter what my German voters think.”

The degree of Germany’s irrelevance in today’s world affairs is reflected in the fact that Baerbock’s de facto declaration of war on Russia went almost unnoticed in the news cycle of the day. It was not ignored, strictly speaking (deputy head of Russia’s security council Medvedev called Baerbock “an utter fool”); it was deemed immaterial. It seems likely that an equivalent statement by the foreign minister of Portugal or Norway would have attracted greater attention.

The divorce of Germany’s ruling class from any form of political process that could be described as “democratic” is reflected in the fact that Baerbock’s party colleagues and coalition partners defended her contemptuous dismissal of “her” German voters in favor of “supporting Ukraine” as bold and principled.

Eight decades after the defeat of the Third Reich, Germany—the second most consequential European nation—has lost its sense of balance and purpose. The practice of politics as an ordered process based on the competition of legitimate domestic actors seemed to have been rediscovered by Konrad Adenauer, der Alte, when the Federal Republic was founded in 1949.

Under Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, West Germany even became a semi-autonomous actor in foreign affairs, forging an Ostpolitik that was no mere extension of the will of the United States. Both men wanted to create sustainable structures of cooperative security in East-West relations, but always conducted in the German interest. In the 1980s Schmidt established the strategic energy partnership between the Federal Republic and the Soviet Union. His economic détente was a Bismarckian masterstroke which outlasted the crisis of U.S.-Soviet relations in the final phase of the Cold War. It was the pillar of continued German prosperity after reunification.

Tragically, however, for the past quarter-century at least, the art of the possible has been replaced by the dictatorship of good feelings. De-Nazification of the early occupation years had morphed into de-Germanization. An integral part of the final package demanded subservience to the postmodern liberal orthodoxy in all its aspects, unlimited immigration first and foremost.

That much became dramatically evident in early 2016, when Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to keep Germany’s borders open to migrants even after the massive wave of the previous year. She rejected any set limit on the number of newcomers and insisted that letting millions of people into the country is good for Germany’s reputation, that “we can stand by our values.”

“Good for Germany’s reputation” really meant “good for our feelings about ourselves.” Merkel’s extraordinary claim was a clear sign that Germany’s ruling elite was in the throes of permanent atonement, unmoored from reality, immersed in the eternal present, and determined to fight anyone who disagrees.

Merkel was a major facilitator of the political-media-academic-cultural complex which had taken control of Germany around the turn of the millennium. It wantonly renounces reality in favor of an open-ended present devoted to feel-good atonement. For decades this powerful conglomerate has treated the rules of the society it controls as secondary to the “values” it generates on the go, and then duly proclaims inviolable. (One such “right” is the “right to sexual self-determination,” adopted by the Bundestag recently, in order for Germany to become a freer, more inclusive society.)

The erosion of democratic legitimacy and the normalization of de facto totalitarian control is this system’s inevitable consequence. Let us reiterate: In today’s Germany the suppression of illegal activity clearly directed against the state has been replaced by the brutal repression of all activity and expression of opinion which are opposed to the policies of the elite that controls the state.

That repression is selective: it is primarily directed not against the jihadists who slaughter and terrorize native Germans in the streets of their own cities, but against those same Germans who want to defend themselves, their homes, families and communities against the hostile aliens. Whenever a jihadist murders Germans—most recently in Solingen, in North Rhine-Westphalia—the first concern of the ruling class and its media cohorts is to warn against the outrage being “exploited” by those Germans who want to regain their country.

The replacement of legitimate, legally regulated defensive repression by totalitarian, arbitrary repression is different in form but not in substance from what happened in the Third Reich with the Enabling Act. On July 16, the German government banned the “right-wing extremist” magazine Compact, accusing it of whipping up “unspeakable” hatred and undermining the country’s “constitutional democracy.”

This was an administrative act. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser boasted her ban against a “key mouthpiece for the right-wing extremist scene” was proof that the government was “taking action against the intellectual arsonists who want to incite a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and defeat our democratic state.” “Our message is very clear,” Faeser added, “we will not allow ethnicity to define who belongs to Germany and who does not.”

This is the language of 20^th century totalitarianism wrapped in a rainbow banner. “We” decide who is a German and who is not, and “we” set the criteria (e.g. Nuremberg 1935). “We” decide what is “hatred,” and who hates whom, and how intensely/unspeakably, and what is “our” justified action against the enemy thus designated.

On Aug. 14, a German court overturned the ban pending a final decision on efforts to outlaw the publication. The administrative court in the eastern city of Leipzig said that it is “currently not possible to determine” whether the magazine meets the grounds for a ban based on the constitutional order. The court found that the publication “violated human dignity”—whatever that means—but that upholding the freedom of the press took precedence in its decision.

Compact’s editor-in-chief, Jürgen Elsaesser, hailed the court’s decision as a victory, but it may be too early for celebration. The interior ministry responded to the decision by saying there was “comprehensive justification for the ban, based on security intelligence,” and that it would continue to seek a permanent ban. The affair is far from over, but at least it is not yet over in the sense desired by the Ministry.

The moral absolutism invoked by the German ruling class as a substitute for rational argument and the rule of law can be sustained for a long time, but it can’t be sustained forever (whatever questions may be raised about the Nazi past ). The lure of moral self-gratification may still work, but only with those Germans who falsely believe they are morally responsible actors instead of the consumers of predigested choices.

Exactly like their ancestors under the Third Reich.