Instead of learning and applying the most obvious and indispensable lesson from its own history of committing genocides in Africa and Europe – never again to no one and by no one – Germany has stubbornly, aggressively sided with the Israeli perpetrators and betrayed the Palestinian victims. Think of modern, post-World War II Germany as the country that had one lesson to learn and failed spectacularly.

If there is one face representing the lumpen, gutter Gestalt of the vicious bullying of the persecuted, it is that of Kai Wegner, the oafish, overbearing mayor of Germany’s capital Berlin who has appointed himself as a one-man purge squad to extirpate the slightest sign of pro-Palestinian humanity, be it on the streets, in academia, or at film festivals.

De facto, already former chancellor Olaf Scholz as well as vice chancellor and minister of the economy Robert Habeck have stood for a slightly less hands-on form of arrogant callousness, engaging in genocide denialism and touting their country’s complicity as its “reason of state” (Staatsräson). Here is a variant of “reason” that – as has happened before in Germany – is combining absolute moral perversity with comprehensive intellectual failure, a “debility of evil” flagrantly epitomized by the soon to be former foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. And there is no hope, unfortunately, that Germany under new management will do any better soon. Things may well get even worse.

It is an especially bitter irony, but the long work of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the “past,” that is, with having committed genocide), to which Mitscherlich-Nielsen and her husband and co-author Alexander Mitscherlich dedicated much of their life, has not merely ended in total failure. Its real fruit is rotten: Many Germans have sought to justify their siding with Israel by invoking Germany’s own Holocaust of (mostly) Europe’s Jews, while, in a crass display of racism, treating their country’s earlier slaughter of the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia as, in effect, a second-rate memory.

This tactic of deflection (also) amounts to a desecration of the memory of the Jewish victims of one of Germany’s genocides, as they are being mustered as, in effect, human shields to protect the current German complicity with the Israeli perpetrators of another genocide. As if Germans could atone for their historical guilt by helping Israelis deepen their own, making it equally inexpungable.

The wartime Nazi regime loved to invoke a “Schicksalsgemeinschaft” (community of fate), a term rich in meaning and undertones. One of them was to imply a special aspect of the “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft”), namely bearing responsibility together for such severe transgressions that forgiveness cannot be expected and surrender – or honest self-reflection – not contemplated without horror.

To see a German-Israeli “Schicksalsgemeinschaft” emerging from a de facto co-perpetrated genocide against the Palestinians is the darkest turn German “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” and Zionist ethno-supremacist settler colonialism could have taken together.  And its effects are profound and will be persistent.

Clearly, genocide and economic decline are not commensurable phenomena. Yet both are part of Germany’s current state of failure, and thus the economy must be addressed as well. There is a broad consensus that it is not merely in a cyclical but in a deep structural crisis. Real GDP may be a very rough indicator, but if it hardly moves for more than half decade, it’s fair to suspect a country is in trouble. Indeed, Germany’s economy has now shrunk for two years in a row, is predicted to – at best – stagnate this year, and keep somnolescent after that as well. Such persistent “flatlining” – to quote Bloomberg – has many causes, including demography, bureaucracy, and systemic education deficiencies as well as neoliberal neglect of infrastructure and a general backwardness in digitalization and innovation: Germany has been caught napping.

The single most important factor, however, that has crashed the old German model is, of course, the decision to relinquish inexpensive energy from Russia. There’s a reason that “deindustrialization” has been chosen as Germany’s economic term of the year for 2024.

Economic flatlining, too, has consequences, and, as always, they are worst for those with the least to lose. Two months before the elections – and coinciding with the government collapse that triggered them – a major survey found that no less than a quarter of Germany’s 84 million citizens feel they are struggling to make ends meet. There is no reason to doubt these Germans’ sense of their own misery: Another study, drawing on government statistics, has found that 17.5 million Germans – a fifth – are living in poverty, as officially defined.

Capitalists are biased, and never in favor of humanity, but, in a world made according to their rules, they do tend to know a thing or two about when investments or whole economies turn sour: Bloomberg issuing warnings that Germany is unraveling and its economy reaching a point of no return are plausible enough.

No country – not even post-World War II Germany – thrives or fails by economics alone. There is politics as well. Yet in that domain, too, the German landscape is somber and the horizon even darker. For the single most consequential fact of domestic politics in Germany is, of course, the rise of a new far right.

The historic breakthrough result of the AfD party (Alternative for Germany) at this February’s elections is one outcome and sign of this trend (which is, of course, also all-European and global). Make no mistake: even if some hopes may well have been even higher after Elon Musk’s and JD Vance’s clumsy, probably counter-productive campaign interventions on the AfD’s side, it has doubled its prior (2021) federal-election result.

Mightily helped by the abysmal failures of Germany’s variant of the “extreme center,” with almost 21 percent of the national vote, the AfD is now the biggest and most powerful opposition party. In an election with the highest voter turnout (82.5 percent) since German unification, it clearly beat all other parties in attracting former non-voters, in both absolute and relative terms. Its electorate is young and middle-aged: it did very well – and better than all other parties except one – with those aged 18-24 and even better with the 30-59 range. It underperforms only among those 60 and older.

The AfD dominates virtually all of the former East Germany, and is clearly making progress in what used to be West Germany as well: in the traditionally conservative-tilting southern German states Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, for instance, the AfD is in second place with almost 20 percent; further north, in largely still centrist North Rhine-Westphalia, it scored almost 17 percent; and even in the badly decaying and traditionally social-democratic Ruhr rustbelt it has made incumbents tremble.

No wonder, as it is the AfD which is now the party with the highest share of voters that are either workers or unemployed: it seems we are witnessing, among other things, the emergence of a (very) national workers’ party from the ruins of the German variant of neoliberal devastation. That, in reality, the thoroughly capitalist AfD has nothing to offer to these voters except anti-migrant resentment may feel painfully absurd. But it is clearly not diminishing its appeal.

Finally, recent polls are showing that the AfD is not a mere “protest party” anymore: its voters are voting for it, not just against the incumbents. In short, the AfD is not only there to stay; it is surging. That – not the traditional parties’ promises to “firewall” it out of the federal government in Berlin – is what matters. For those promises are bound to be broken, if (probably) not now, then in a few years.

Grim as this picture is, it is far from complete. In reality, things are worse. Once you zoom out, a great, tectonic shift comes into view, namely of the whole political spectrum to the right and even what used to be considered far right. Just before the elections, we caught merely a glimpse of this, when the leader of the so-called mainstream conservatives (CDU/CSU) and now chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz attempted to, in effect, team up with the AfD to ram a draconian and partly illegal revision of migration policy through parliament.

Yet the problem is bigger than Merz’s mix of tactics and genuine, if ugly, ideological self-revelation. As Mathew Rose has observed, if you pay attention to the actual policies offered by Germany’s parties, in reality, 60 percent of the electorate voted for positions so far to the right it is hard to distinguish them from the far right: For the CDU/CSU, the AfD, and the Greens are all “strongly anti-immigration, frenzied supporters of the Israeli genocide in Palestine, staunchly neo-liberal, willing to radically reduce citizens’ rights, while two, the Union and Greens, are fervent supporters of the proxy war in Ukraine.”

Finally, politics is not happening at home alone. Regarding foreign policy, Germany is, of course, part of a larger NATO-EU Europe that is struggling desperately to find firm footing in a world shaken by the second and even more aggressive US presidency of Donald Trump. Whereas during his first tenure, Trump talked more than he acted, he is now more powerful, more focused, better organized, and bolder.

Ironically perhaps, this has had one result that will make humanity safer: A principal rapprochement with the other top nuclear power has replaced the former policy of mute escalation and, after a second Cold War, a second détente with Russia is now likely. On the way, the war between Russia, on one side, and Ukraine and the West, on the other may end. America’s European clients, meanwhile, are being sidelined and are also doing their worst to marginalize themselves. Future historians may well remember our moment as the time of the historic American-European Split.

Before shedding tears over the impending demise of the great Atlantic “friendship,” let’s not forget that for the rest of the world – that is, most of it – that particular power constellation has not been benevolent or beneficial, to say the least. Not only may future historians research the American-European Split as an accomplished fact. They may do so in, say, New Delhi, Caracas, Kabul, or Tripoli and find nothing to bemoan and much to celebrate.

Today’s Berlin, in any case, is far from equanimity. The core of its response to Washington’s threats and apparent preparations to drop Ukraine as well as its European satellites – ironically, rather as Moscow dropped its own in 1989, just more brutally – is to try to out-US the US. Friedrich Merz has made two fast signature moves after his election victory: He has publicly extended a gratuitous as well as illegal and unconstitutional invitation to internationally wanted war criminal – and genocidaire, too – Benjamin Netanyahu. (So much for things not getting better regarding Germany’s eager complicity in Israeli crimes.)

And he has highlighted the need to find hundreds of billions of additional euros for the German military, while signaling that he feels ready to lead “the free world” (maybe with a sidekick role for France), that is, in reality, whatever would be left of NATO once Washington removes itself in deed or word. And the enemy is, of course, still supposed to be big bad Russia. Instead of an urgently needed dose of Gaullism, what Germany’s elite has to offer in this deep crisis is a new Atlanticism, this time ready to do without an Atlantic.

Hubris? Obviously. Astonishingly shortsighted? No doubt. Therefore doomed to pass quickly and without catastrophic consequences? Don’t underestimate the consistency with which Germany can pursue very bad – and very obviously bad – ideas.

Yet Merz’s inadequate response to the challenge of abandonment by America has its uses. We can read it as a symptom of the radically misaligned condition that is Germany’s underlying problem, its matrix of failure. For Merz, a physically fit, yet narrow-minded and intellectually immobile 69-year-old who was shaped in the last decades of the original Cold War and the following period of Western triumphalism, personifies his country’s inability to adjust.

Ironically, Merz is much more like his nemesis, former uber-chancellor Angela Merkel than he may realize: Like her, he epitomizes paralyzing fear of genuine change. Even his rhetoric about what he considers fundamental reform for a national business model he recognizes as obsolete is a throwback to, at best, the 1990s: warmed-up neoliberalism from a peripheral Blackrock manager’s time capsule.

There clearly is a pattern here: A Merkel may be a Merkel, and a Merz may be more of another Merkel than he understands, but both can only become leaders in a society that may really need something very different but prefers to want them. This is where we have to return to asking not how Germany is failing but what Germany actually is now.

Let’s start with a basic fact so self-evident its importance may be hidden in plain sight: Constitutionally and in terms of political and cultural hegemony, in terms of its source code, this Germany was made twice, at the beginning of the Cold War – as, then, West Germany – and, again, after the end of the Cold War – as united Germany. Yet crucially, the second postwar founding of Germany in 1990 did not follow the famous di Lampedusa strategy of everything having to change, so that everything can stay the same. Instead, everything was supposed to stay the same, so everything would really stay the same: When German unification offered a once-in-a-national-lifetime opportunity to create an updated model improving on both the old West and East Germany, that chance was missed. Instead, East Germany was, in essence, annexed and assimilated.

The reasons for this fateful pseudo-turn in German history are complex. They certainly included the raw distribution of power and wealth between a rich West on the (seemingly) winning side of the Cold War and a decrepit East on the (definitely) losing side; generic Cold War triumphalism and a specific West German arrogance toward the poor cousins in the East; and, last but not least, the weakness of the late Soviet Union and the unusual generosity of Soviet foreign policy after the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Why Germany missed its chance to renew itself at this juncture is less important than the consequences of this failure. Once a whole school of historians used to ponder the question of Germany’s belatedness: Somehow not having made it in time to fully developed nation-state capitalist modernity – with either a liberal or a social-democratic flavor (in good Centrist fashion, that detail did not really matter) – was supposed to explain starting and losing two World Wars and committing a genocide not outside Europe – de facto, the colonial “normal” of the West – but inside it, the ontologically vexing “Zivilisationsbruch” (rupture of civilization).

The clunky but useful paradigm – those too late can catch up, if they are tutored well and try hard – of a belated nation (“die verspätete Nation”) is now out of fashion among those below 70 years of age. And yet, even crude ideas can contain genuine intuition. There is something about Germany and historical time.

Consider Germany’s 1990 non-remaking in global context. This new old Germany, West Germany but bigger, is designed as an end, not a beginning. It is a polity that has in its DNA the West German fantasy of triumph in the local Cold War, one fought quietly but with intimate bitterness, obstinacy, and frustration, as is appropriate for a family quarrel.

At its end, the world had finally been made right: The good Germany that had been assigned to the side of “freedom,” “individualism,” “democracy,” and the US had prevailed over its bad Doppelgänger, by now reduced to an irreducible shadow country failing to show appropriate contrition about having been handed over to the side of “totalitarianism,” “communism,” “authoritarianism,” and the Soviet Union and still haunting the electoral map, currently in the blue color of the AfD.

Yet that is, of course, the curse of happy ends: What comes next can only be worse and disappointing. History is not Hollywood; it doesn’t know a good end when a liberal vulgar-Hegelian sees one. Slowly – or rapidly, in historical time – Germany’s post-unification story went sour, and in a more fundamental way than the well-known and very real persisting inequities and tensions between East and West. It went sour because united Germany stayed what West Germany was, while the world moved on.

A country that had finally achieved redemption, it seemed, in the form of a long-coveted national normalcy, failed to notice that what is normal depends on your environment. And that environment was changing. Indeed, one of the ironies of Germany’s recent history is that its unification itself was the result of a massive and, for most, sudden geopolitical shift. Imagine Germany after 1990 as built on the assumption that it was the felicitous result of a last big quake, when it really was born from a first tremor. This Germany was ready for a world of Western post-Cold War triumph. What it was not ready for was a post-Cold War world in which the West would decline and the “rest” continue to rise, that is, the world of multipolarity that has actually been emerging, even if, initially, the literally superficial delusion of an American “unilateral moment” obscured this longer and deeper process.

Put differently, the German tragedy – if that is the word – is provincial in a very European yet especially acute way: Preoccupied with a self-centered history of fascinatingly extreme national catastrophe and reassuringly full recovery – an inversion, actually, of earlier, nineteenth fantasies of  a national “Sonderweg” (a special path of manifest destiny) – the German imagination learned to make room for a legend of the West, since that offered a chance of salvation by finishing “the long way to the West” that the postwar country’s pontifex maximus of history, Heinrich August Winkler, came to conjure by the volume.

This failure to adjust to the world beyond these apparently widened, yet narrow, mental confines helps explain not Berlin’s abject moral failure over the Gaza Genocide (which is a deeper issue) but the darkly fascinating, self-damaging German obtuseness in antagonizing almost everyone outside Europe and the US, and especially in the Global South, with its open and proud siding with what is also a giant colonial massacre of Palestinians by settlers from the West.

It is true that never having really thought much about its genocidal history in Africa during its own colonial period has not made things any better, of course. But if a display of intensive “thinking” about genocide were a key factor in shaping German outcomes, then Germany should have learned to do and be better from, at least, the Holocaust. Yet it has not.

And then there is – as always in German history – Russia. The Ukraine War is a bloody catastrophe with not a single innocent participant far and wide. But if we dare take a step back for a moment, there is no doubt that, in one way or the other, one of this specific catastrophe’s components is the mismanagement of the resurgence of Russia after its historically anomalous decline in the 1990s. Let’s set aside for a moment who is to blame the most for this mismanagement, the West or Russia. What matters in this context is that the damage, indeed enormous damage has been done, which does not mean more misery cannot be added in the future. The current situation is both terrible and threatening.

Yet, here as well, Germany is not capable of anything better than a reversion to patterns that have proved vastly dysfunctional in the past, namely a one-sided reliance on military power over diplomacy. What makes this recidivism especially absurd is that this Germany does not have much of a military now and will only be able to rebuild one at the price of great economic sacrifice and social instability.

But, while inadequate, the new old German consensus on putting force first, is not the outcome of some militaristic national essence, a national character that just cannot find peace except in preparing for great wars. Instead, it is more fruitful to understand this aspect of contemporary Germany as another product of its specific post-Cold War misalignment: If the Germany that failed to genuinely re-found itself in 1990 was built for a world of triumphal Western hegemony that was already on the wane, it does have a default identity option, for a rainy day as it were. After all, that is what West Germany was, with its army of tank divisions and roughly half a million soldiers, an anti-Russian (and anti-East German) bastion. And since united post-Cold War Germany has never ceased being a bigger Cold War West Germany, that is what it is almost instinctively now reverting, too. In that respect as well, chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz, made and shaped in the old West and returning to his roots with gusto now, is emblematic. And he is by no means alone.

Yet concerning here as well, Germany is trying to return to a world that no longer exists. The old Cold War order has finally fully imploded, now that Washington is tearing down its Western half. And a capitalist Russia linked to China as never before in history – think of Putin what you will – is not the Soviet Union. It is hard to predict where Germany is going. But it is easy to see that its map is dated. The result is likely to be worse than disappointing.

Tarik Cyril Amar (@TarikCyrilAmar), is an historian from Germany currently at Koç University, Istanbul, and author of The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists.