German leaders
Wherever you go in Washington there are statues of politicians. At one end of the Mall a giant Abraham Lincoln gazes at George Washington down the other end, Jefferson and F. D. Roosevelt hang around too. Very few young Germans know how Ludwig Erhard looked; every American schoolkid though can describe Jefferson .
Would it not be good if Berlin lost its fear of presenting its leaders in concrete, in bronze and in wood? Is it not embarrassing that the best that can be done for Konrad Adenauer is the briskly walking bronze figure, hat in hand, in Charlottenburg. What a place to put a Catholic – an LSD sex shop and a gay gym behind him, the Erdbeermund sex shop to his right and to his left a sushi bar where I once got food poisoning. (Schreckgespenst der Zukunft, said Stanislaw Lec, “Denkmäler die reden”.) As for Willy Brandt he has been reduced to the dimensions of a gnome and hidden in the SPD headquarters, a place where sane men no longer go. Bismarck is also incognito, in Grunewald. A teenage acquaintance who lives nearby calls it the “dog statue” because his Reichshund seems to be given equal prominence with the founder of a unified German state. Sure Bismarck was a war leader; but so was Abe Lincoln. As for the modern Einheitskanzler, the best that can be done for him is a bust in a shopping mall. You can argue that living people should not be honoured with statues, but where is the sense in that? That’s just voodoo logic. Helmut kohl’s role in history is already pretty clear, why wait for another 20 years?
The fact is Germany needs political models more than ever, before the profession falls completely into disrepute. The new government has been in power less than 100 days and already one coalition partner is being dragged through the mud in the trial of Karl-Heinz Scheiber and the other is being characterized as the political filiale of the gastronomic trade. Little wonder that politicians are less popular than dentists; less respected than window cleaners. The old political masters live on in the popular culture of other countries; just not in Germany . The French say they’re flying to Charles de Gaulle, the Americans to JFK , to Dulles. Passengers to Munich never say they’re landing in Franz Josef Strauss. Now Willy Brandt’s name will be attached to Berlin ’s new airport but I can’t imagine anyone calling it anything but Schönefeld.
The German failure to mythologize the political process, to seek out heroes, is of course (of course) a Hitler thing. But it also reflects the post-war cult of anti-heroic leadership which has been brought to such a numbingly boring apotheosis by the Valiumpolitik Angela Merkel. Typically, she was absent on holiday at the beginning of the election campaign and has been remarkably absent ever since. Not because she is lazy, or because she is a brilliant behind-the–scenes strategist but because she has calculated that the new government, nominally under her captainship, benefits more from her absence than her presence.
Angela Merkel is master of what sociologists call situational leadership; she waits for events and tribal disputes to accumulate. Then she intervenes to set priorities. She does this effectively, but in so doing loses time for the new government at a moment when it should be accelerating. When she is not leading in this way, she is on automatic pilot. Not so much leadership as follower-ship. More precisely, she carefully observes any threat to German national interests and then acts to protect them. It is leadership-on-demand; no-one else in Europe leads in this sheepish way and it was only possible for Merkel because over the past four years she had no real opposition and a terminally weak coalition partner.
Now this passive governing style has to change. The absurdity of the Merkelian position became clear in the second half of last year. Germany has no policy on Afghanistan even though Barack Obama sees it as the central challenge to western foreign policy. For six months Germany has avoided a debate on Afghanistan because Obama had not made up his mind what to do there. Then after a long learning process Obama emerged as a Diplom-Afghanologe and is about to tell everybody (at the Afghanistan conference next week) what he expects them to do. Germany will be unhappy with Obama’s demands but cannot supply a counter argument because it has not developed its own ideas.
So, Angela Merkel is not going to get a statue any time soon. True leadership – the kind that restores trust in the political process –means the willingness and ability to persuade your citizens to do something they do not want to do. Merkel is going to have to learn to talk to the Germans in a different way. Tell them what is happening, what is required, stir enthusiasm for the Bundeswehr, lead a change in social attitudes. Just because she helped topple Helmut Kohl, doesn’t mean that Merkel has his talent. He talked Germans into making serious sacrifices for unification, and he even persuaded them to drop the deutsche Mark for the Euro. Angela Merkel remains top of the German popularity polls because she has never taken the kinds of personal risks that Kohl did. She will have to do a lot better if she is going to rank much higher than say, Kurt Kiesinger, in the pantheon of modern German leaders. I am not even sure she will have an airport named after her. If she does in my lifetime then I look forward to the future newspaper headline: “Fog grounds jets, spreads confusion in Angela Merkel International Airport , Templin”
