Or: The German Disease
By Prof. em. Dr. Hans Joachim Scholl
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I was born and raised in Germany before emigrating to the United States and taking American citizenship. As a result, my growing sense of alienation from contemporary Germany is neither detached nor abstract; it is deeply personal. I still read the German press daily, correspond with others, and continue to debate with my family and old friends. Yet, the more I observe, the more clearly I perceive a profound chasm between Germany’s self-image and the realities of today's world.
What I see is not a mere political disagreement. It runs much deeper: an entire culture is mistaking the preconditions of its postwar success for permanent guarantees. Peace, freedom, prosperity, social stability, and external protection are treated as baseline givens rather than historical achievements requiring constant renewal.
The West German postwar order evolved into a “success democracy”—a democracy that legitimized itself primarily through its material output. But what happens when prosperity stagnates, technological leadership erodes, institutions petrify, and citizens lose faith in the system's ability to solve problems at all? Germany appears spectacularly ill-prepared for this question.
The country often seems bureaucratically paralyzed, technologically hesitant, and strategically naive—shackled to old industrial strengths, outdated administrative habits, and the moral reflexes of yesterday. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence, new defense technologies, energy crises, and geopolitical great-power rivalries demand above all speed, imagination, focus, and seriousness. Yet Germany seems far more comfortable managing inherited structures than building new ones.
When Virtues Become Vices
This is not an argument against the virtue of caution itself. After 1945, caution successfully drove the once-ubiquitous militarism from German daily life and helped build and consolidate a stable republic. But virtues can mutate into vices when circumstances change, and caution can morph into cowardice.
Under these changing conditions, consensus turns inexorably into conformism. Regulatory frameworks harden into systematic paralysis. Historical responsibility degrades into ritually staged self-absorption. Simultaneously, social protection breeds a pervasive entitlement mentality completely decoupled from actual productivity.
Work-life balance, valuable in itself, degenerates into an alibi for diminished ambition the moment it divorces itself from excellence and competitiveness.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany's culture of remembrance. I have absolutely nothing against memorializing the Nazi past; serious remembrance is indispensable. However, parts of contemporary remembrance culture have ossified into a moral substitute for identity. This finding is neither new nor external: more than forty years ago, Hermann Lübbe described West Germany's Sündenstolz (“pride in sin”)—the tendency to stand by one's own misdeeds the way others do their athletic achievements, thereby converting moral shame into moral status. Today, the philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller arrives at a strikingly similar diagnosis from a completely different school of thought, calling it “guilt pride”. Remembering then serves less as a compass for judgment in the present than as a badge of moral superiority.
The Merging of Moralism and Policy
This becomes dangerous precisely where moral self-presentation collides with foreign policy. A nation that rightfully remembers a genocide committed in its name should be exceptionally sensitive to the suffering of civilians elsewhere. Yet, German discourse on the Middle East often seems more preoccupied with managing the symbolic burden of its own past than with evaluating present actions clearly and objectively. When the human rights standards that a nation claims as the core of its identity are applied selectively, remembrance ceases to be a responsibility and becomes an escape from reality.
A similar timidity dominates the culture of debate. Coming from the United States, I find it astonishing how willingly Germans accept legal restrictions on freedom of speech. Human dignity—one of the most noble principles of the Basic Law—becomes hazardous when it is reinterpreted from protecting individuals from dehumanization to shielding public officials from sharp, personal criticism. Under a law tightened in 2021 targeting insults against public figures, a citizen's home was raided in 2024 simply because he had referred to a sitting federal minister as a “blockhead” (Schwachkopf). A democracy must be able to withstand mockery and contempt directed at its leaders; when it can no longer do so, the focus has subtly shifted from dignity to subservience.
The same conformist impulse drives the symbolic compliance with mandated gender-neutral language in the media and public institutions. The grammatical objections to this are real, but they miss the core problem. What matters is the symptom: a tendency to moralize language, enforce ritual consensus, and dismiss skepticism as backwardness—the quiet narrowing of the boundaries of expressible thought.
Germany squanders its moral energy on trivialities, lifestyle policing, and ritualized outrage, all while effortlessly ducking the truly critical questions. The nation must confront how it can regain the technological initiative, restore its competitiveness, and rebuild the state's capacity to act. It must grapple with how to defend freedom in a harsher world, how to remain democratic when its economic engine stalls, and how to speak credibly about human rights when it applies its own standards selectively.
My concern is not that Germans are inherently incapable. My concern is that Germany's postwar strengths have hardened into defensive patterns of self-protection. Initially, success bred stability, but stability has now led to complacency. The “German disease,” as I see it, is a state of permanently postponed, urgently needed renewal—a country living off the moral, institutional, and economic capital of its postwar achievements while losing the capacity to preserve that inheritance.
Germany still possesses immense talent and historical depth. But unless it finds its way back to realism, courage, technological ambition, competitiveness, an open arena for debate, and moral consistency, the old success-based democracy could prove far more fragile than Germans imagine in their worst nightmares.
Postscript, July 2026
Since offering this piece for publication in June, three things have occurred. They do not refute my argument; they illustrate it.
First, the CDU-SPD coalition pushed a health care reform through the Bundestag—a modest one—while simultaneously promising to deliver fundamental reforms in the autumn. This is the quintessential pattern: not rejection, but postponement. The minor reform is passed; the major one is merely promised. Autumn keeps receding.
Second, a new military service law requiring draft physicals for cohorts born in 2008 or later has been in effect since January 1. In the first half of 2026, the Federal Office for Family and Civil Society Affairs received 5,862 applications for conscientious objector status—more than in all of 2024, and more than in 2011, the year conscription was suspended. One might object that many of these applications were filed as a precaution; indeed, the number of those revoking previously declared objections is also rising. Yet the reflex remains revealing: as soon as the state inquires about the readiness to defend the country, a significant portion of a generation reaches for the form that exempts them.
Third, and most telling: in mid-July, ten nations established an anti-ballistic missile coalition in Paris. Germany is a participant. The core of the project, however, is not a European system, but a Ukrainian one—”Freyja,” developed by the Kyiv-based firm Fire Point as a cheaper alternative to the American Patriot. The joint declaration explicitly names Ukraine's unique combat experience as its foundation; Kyiv is a full member, not a mere recipient. Germany contributes capital, industry, and—via Diehl Defence—a seeker head. The war-tested expertise lies in Kyiv. A country that has boasted of its engineering prowess for generations is contributing just a single component to the continent's most urgent defense project.
Renewal is not being denied. It is being dawdled away.
Author's Note
This text was offered in June 2026 to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Cicero. The NZZ declined, stating they were “heavily overbooked”. Cicero did not acknowledge receipt. One can speculate about the reasons; I shall refrain.