Why I Have Canceled My SPIEGEL Subscription
By Prof. em. Hans Joachim Scholl, PhD
A Farewell with Symbolic Weight
Normally, canceling a magazine subscription is nothing more than a routine administrative chore. In this case, however, the step weighs heavier on me—it carries a distinct symbolic charge. For decades, DER SPIEGEL was not merely a magazine I consumed. It was a fixed piece of the intellectual furniture of the old West German Republic, shaping the very airspace where one first learned to breathe a little more freely.
Growing up in West Germany during the 1950s and ’60s, the old authoritarian mindset of the wartime generation was still very much alive. Many high school teachers of my era were not just conservative or strict—their attitudes and convictions were unmistakably rooted in the toxic spirit of the Nazi regime. As a schoolboy, I repeatedly ran afoul of this leaden world. The outcome of such conflicts for a young guy bucking individual and institutional authority—without any power of his own to lean on—was, to put it mildly, negative.
In that environment, DER SPIEGEL was a lighthouse: it was secular, combative, anti-authoritarian, and burst with linguistic vitality. The magazine took on the establishment of the Adenauer era, exposed scandals, unmasked hypocrisy, and met power with healthy skepticism rather than Rhenish reverence. It faced accusations of sensationalism and vindictiveness, and was criticized for its structural blind spots—but however one weighs those charges today, its style was no accident; it was deliberate editorial policy. DER SPIEGEL wrote with a sharp tongue, a fluid pen, and a mix of irreverence and elegance; it was occasionally unfair, but almost without exception, it was fresh. I remember a German teacher once barking at me that my essays were slipping into that “SPIEGEL style”—too fluid, too journalistic, too “flippant,” as he begrudgingly chided—it was meant as a reprimand. In hindsight, I gladly take it as a compliment.
The Shrinking Scope of the Sayable
The original SPIEGEL palpably expanded the boundaries of what could be said. Today’s magazine, by contrast, narrows them all too often. My issue here is not the lazy, boilerplate complaint that the magazine has gone “left”—such labels are as inaccurate as they are intellectually lazy. My own political views defy neat categorization. As an American citizen of German origin, I now view German debate culture from a critical distance: on some issues I lean center-right, on others I am a classical liberal, and often I am institutionally conservative in the sense of genuinely worrying about the preservation of a free republic. But such pigeonholes aren't particularly useful.
My critique is not that DER SPIEGEL fails to mirror my personal views. A critical reader and an editorial team cannot—and should not—march in lockstep. Rather, my critique is that DER SPIEGEL has grown stale and morally predictable. It has traded a combative liberalism for a “responsibly caregiving” one.
The difference is fundamental:
- Combative liberalism is inherently distrustful of concentrated power—even when that power is wielded in the name of virtue. It asks uncomfortable questions, shatters consensus, and uses language as a scalpel for precision, style, irony, and exposure.
- “Responsibly caregiving” liberalism, on the other hand, patrols the borders of the sayable. It prefers moral certainty, ducks intellectual risk, defends institutions, and forgets to ask whether those institutions still deserve the trust they demand.
This shift is glaringly obvious in the magazine's linguistic culture. The creeping adoption of gender-neutral language forms is routinely spun as inclusion or pluralism. In reality, it is the symptom of a deeper shift: language is being weaponized as a badge of moral virtue. Grammar, orthography, elegance, and general readability are sacrificed on the altar of symbolic posturing. This is no trivial matter of style. The moment an editorial team treats language as a tool for moral policing, the arena for permissible argument shrinks. Certain questions become taboo; specific phrasings trigger suspicion. Sensitive topics are no longer approached with curiosity, but with pre-installed caution and an obsession with artificial balance.
Cultivating a Pride in Guilt
A particularly tedious example of this has been the recent handling of the digitized NSDAP membership archive. After the US National Archives opened wider access to these files, first DIE ZEIT and then DER SPIEGEL launched user-friendly search tools online. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that—historical sources belong in the public eye. Without those American releases, German archives wouldn't have been accessible until years later, and likely not online right away. Serious family research, historical reckoning, and self-examination absolutely have their place.
Yet out of nowhere, this was blown up into a moral campaign under the banner, “Was Grandpa a Nazi?”. Week after week—for twelve or fifteen weeks now—DER SPIEGEL has aggressively promoted this material in a prominent online spot, wrapped in a martial, steel-helmet, Wehrmacht aesthetic. Real historical gravity looks different. Instead, it feels like an invitation to a ritual tribunal: find out what “Grandpa” did wrong and never told you.
There are several glaring issues with this staging:
Generationally speaking, for many families this is no longer about a grandfather at all, but at most a great-grandfather.
Unearthing an NSDAP membership card rarely answers the question people think they are asking. A positive hit might point to conformity, opportunism, fear, calculation, or something far more complex—but without context, it says next to nothing about actual behavior, courage, cowardice, guilt, or resistance.
The people who could actually answer the real questions are almost entirely dead.
The core issue: Germany is once again gambling away its future while obsessively rehearsing scripted gestures toward its past.
I don't say this as someone indifferent to the Nazi era. On the contrary: during my formative early years, I was deeply influenced by my grandparents, with whom I grew up. In their convictions, they were opponents of the regime who rejected its totalitarian grip on their children—even if they couldn't ultimately prevent it—and they held onto their principles. I am proud of that. My parents weren't Nazis either, but they had the misfortune of being exposed to the regime as teenagers. Like millions of their generation, they were swallowed up by the youth organizations, the Hitler Youth and the BDM. By the end of the war, my father was twenty-four and my mother twenty; from 1940 on, he had served as a Wehrmacht soldier on various fronts. There is nothing inherently shameful about such a family history, provided one is willing to view the situation through the lens of that era.
This is why the current fascination with unearthing ancestral guilt troubles me. It threatens to devolve into a retroactive witch hunt without defendants. More than forty years ago, the philosopher Hermann Lübbe described a West German phenomenon he called “Sündenstolz” (pride in sin): the tendency to flaunt one's own misdeeds the way others flaunt athletic achievements, effectively turning moral shame into a badge of moral superiority. Coming from an entirely different intellectual universe, contemporary philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller arrives at a strikingly similar diagnosis, calling it “guilt pride”—using guilt as a tool for collective identity-building, pulling social prestige from the public performance of inherited sins. The fact that two such disparate observers hit upon the exact same mechanism shows that this is a very real trait of modern German public life. Status is no longer earned through one's own actions, but through the permanent re-enactment of what one's ancestors broke.
To me, there is something morbid, even hypocritical, about this. A country does not secure its future as a free republic by endlessly curating its inherited guilt while ducking the harder, immediate questions of contemporary competence, responsibility, and strategic gravity.
Fleeing from the Present
This same narrowing of perspective shapes the magazine's thematic priorities. Germany is facing profound, structural crises: cratering competitiveness, bureaucratic paralysis, a decaying education system, crumbling infrastructure, investment backlogs, technological hesitation, a glaring inability to finish major projects on time and on budget, a strategic pacifism, energy policy illusions, and a political culture that routinely mistakes moral self-soothing for hard-nosed analysis. These are not fringe issues ; they are existential questions for Germany's future as an economic and strategic player—and as a republic.
A genuinely combative SPIEGEL would make these failures the target of relentless, deep-dive investigations. It would critically question whether Germany's postwar success bred a culture of sheer complacency. It would examine whether our culture of remembrance has progressively become a substitute for strategic thinking. It would aggressively look at whether pacifism has morphed into a form of moral vanity, or whether parts of the climate and energy consensus were recklessly untethered from industrial reality. The SPIEGEL of the 1960s would mercilessly expose the country’s bureaucratic and political systems, demanding to know if they are still capable of reforming at the speed the moment requires. Instead, too much of the German debate takes place within a narrow corridor of cautious, pulled punches. DER SPIEGEL, once a force that pushed those walls outward, now seems content to merely occupy and guard the corridor.
This is uniquely dangerous when it comes to the AfD. I have zero sympathy for authoritarian nationalism, ethnic politics, or contempt for the Basic Law. But the rise of the AfD cannot be explained away simply by lecturing its voters on their moral deficiencies. This rise must be understood as the accumulated fallout of institutional failure: from elite evasion and migration policy chaos to cultural condescension, economic anxiety, and a widespread feeling that vital topics can no longer be discussed honestly in polite society. Because established institutions have spent years refusing to openly debate structural problems, those problems haven't vanished—they have simply been outsourced to radical actors. The AfD is merely cashing the dividends of these avoided conversations.
Bottom Line: An Organ of the Establishment
This is where DER SPIEGEL’s transformation into an establishment institution matters. A magazine founded in the spirit of Rudolf Augstein should be uniquely equipped to say: the official narrative isn't good enough. It shouldn't just profile the enemies of the liberal order; it should be exposing the complacency, the failures, and the excuses of the German establishment's own institutions. Yet today's SPIEGEL seems far more inclined to shield the establishment from challengers and challenges than to investigate how that establishment helped create those challengers in the first place.
The loss is not just political; it’s stylistic:
- The old SPIEGEL possessed heft, wit, youthful arrogance, and literary suspense. It knew how to make the powerful look ridiculous and could slice through the fog with a single sentence.
- Today’s paper is frequently competent, professional, well-produced—and boring. Its prose reads too much like institutions talking to other institutions. The old insolence has been replaced by managed responsibility.
Granted, the old SPIEGEL was by no means perfect. It could be brutal, vain, unfair, cocky, and self-absorbed. But its flaws never obscured its true virtue: it was dangerous to those in power. Of course, today’s SPIEGEL still produces serious journalism, and many of its writers are highly capable professionals. But the magazine as a whole no longer feels existentially independent. It has become a cog in the moral and linguistic administrative machinery of the German establishment; it has lost its bite.
And that is why I am canceling my subscription. This isn't out of some nostalgic yearning for a lost and romanticized youth—as unavoidable as those memories may be—it is out of genuine concern for the present and the future. Germany needs a brand of journalism that clears out the stale, musty air once again. It needs a journalism that dares to ask whether the respectable consensus itself has become part of the problem. It needs reporting and essays that are not just factually accurate, but intellectually alive and deeply uncomfortable. DER SPIEGEL taught postwar Germany to look at state power and authority with a watchful, skeptical eye. Today, by contrast, the magazine tends to back narrow mainstream thinking and radiates suspicion toward defiance and dissent. It is a sad about-face.