A nation that seems to love its defeats — why?

Excerpt (teaser)

Germany is a country that wears its neuroses like state decorations. A people of self-destroyers who cultivate their defeats and forget to live.

These provocative essays analyze the German soul with surgical precision — that strange mixture of perfectionism and self-hatred, of historical obsession and present-day paralysis. The guiding questions: Why do Germans sabotage their own successes? Why does “coming to terms with the past” become a philosophy of life?

"There are peoples who wear their history like a coat—dignified and taken for granted. And there are those who drag it like a millstone around their neck, groaning under the weight of bygone eras. The Germans undoubtedly belong to the second category, with the remarkable habit of chiseling additional stones out of that millstone to make life even heavier for themselves. One might call this a special kind of creativity, if it weren’t so tragically productive in its destructiveness. The present inquiry attempts to get to the bottom of this peculiar phenomenon. The author—himself part of this people—knows he is stepping onto terrain criss‑crossed by minefields of ideological and personal sensitivities. But what would the German soul be without its abysses, what would the German mind be without its self‑torment? It is as if Goethe wrote his Faust not as a warning, but as a user manual for an entire nation. The pact with evil was sealed long ago—only Mephistopheles has meanwhile taken the shape of the collective superego that whispers tirelessly: You are not good enough, you never were good enough, you never will be good enough
Indeed, it seems as though the Germans have developed a kind of national neurosis that expresses itself in periodic fits of self‑hatred and self‑destruction. What is striking is the thoroughness and system with which this people goes about dismantling itself. Other nations may have their dark chapters, but they know how to store them in the cellar vaults of memory and build a new floor on top. The Germans, by contrast, have turned their cellars into a shrine before which they kneel daily to atone for sins that have long since crumbled to dust—while at the same time committing new sins in the name of purification. "

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