The self-reliant citizen is regarded as an enemy by the political elite. Yet he is the bearer of democracy and republican spirit. His principles of honor, sovereignty, and willingness to work and achieve carried Germany through its crises and made the country prosperous. In the statist pursuit of equality, these values are dissolving.
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Baltic vacationers will confirm this. When the inevitable persistent Baltic rain sets in during a long-awaited holiday, the beach agenda has to be abandoned. In its place comes a day trip to the old and beautiful Hanseatic city of Lübeck. Wandering through the narrow streets in the eternal drizzle and gray of the Baltic, the stone witnesses of the Hanseatic era gradually take shape. There is the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, one of the most important medieval social institutions in Europe. Added to it are other hospitals and ecclesiastical buildings, as well as numerous charitable foundations, all of which testify to the rich social life of Lübeck’s citizenry.
It is a long way from Hanseatic Lübeck to the present and to the hoped-for renewal in the spirit of civic culture.
It is this forgotten social foundation, rising from the wealth of its time, that inspires astonishment. A submerged order. Yet if one allows one’s imagination to wander, one can still hear in the streets the faint echo of an age that did not regard economic success exclusively as personal property, but derived from it a fundamental responsibility toward the community. It was a time when politics was genuinely a representation of the citizenry rather than a manic educational mission carried out in the name of half-baked ideologues.
It was regarded as an unspoken matter of honor to stand by the city and the citizenry on which one’s own success rested in times of need, and to assume responsibility wherever necessary. Those who had acquired wealth did not display it merely through their possessions, but also through visible engagement on behalf of the sick, the elderly, and the needy. This attitude was sustained by a profound sense of religious responsibility, by an awareness of one’s own position within the community, and, of course, also by the desire to preserve the good name of one’s family across generations.
The Greeks called it thymos: the deeply rooted human desire to earn honor in the eyes of one’s fellow men. Dignity is earned by standing up for the weak. That is true today, and it was true in the age of the Hanseatic League. No one at the time could have imagined that such assistance would one day degenerate into an entire welfare-management industry.
Much like the Italian city-states that were flourishing at the same time — from Florence and Venice to Milan — the various communities of the Hanseatic League were deeply permeated by this culture-creating spirit. A culture flourished in which free citizens were not merely economic actors, but the bearers of an order arising from individual initiative, responsibility, and mutual recognition. Here we also find one of the principal strands of German civic culture, which was later repeatedly pushed back by the forces of the authoritarian state. The Revolution of 1848 marked a particularly sad culmination of this development: The desire for greater civic self-determination remained unfulfilled, while the German faith in authority, which continues to resonate to this day, increasingly overwhelmed the forces of freedom in recurring statist waves — culminating in the catastrophes of the dictatorships of the twentieth century.
Fascinated by the old world, the stroller’s gaze inevitably falls upon the institutions of the modern one. City administration, tax office, the unavoidable job center, union offices — where a flourishing civil society, with its rich network of associations, foundations, and personal responsibility, once shaped the community, we now find the administrative structures of the managed zone we call the welfare state. A collectivist spirit permeates this modern social infrastructure, which radiates nothing of the greatness of the self-confident civic pride of the old Hanseatic era. The contrast is shocking: Our present loses itself in petty detail. Everything is regulated down to the smallest detail, permeated by bureaucracy. The individual’s room for maneuver is relentlessly restricted.
Amid the gabled houses of Mengstraße, in front of the Buddenbrook House, thoughts turn to chat control, digital surveillance, brazen government intervention, and an unrestrained fiscal policy. The soaring gables and the brick buildings that have stood unchanged for centuries bear witness to the robustness of an age deeply rooted in its homeland and determined to build structures for eternity. A glance at the present is sobering: Glassy, fragile, created for transience — that is how our architecture appears, and that is how our present and its omnipresent state confront us.
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They make no secret of it: Their goal is the transparent, powerless citizen, dependent and deprived of any ability to maneuver independently. Such a person can no longer be a citizen of the community, but is reduced to a servant of the new bureaucracy. The servility of our age is what is so disturbing. “The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too” — this was how Friedrich Nietzsche described the state as a social actor: laconic and frighteningly precise when we look at our own time.
Had today’s politicians not expanded so aggressively into our lives through increasing censorship and the surveillance of our private affairs, the assault on banking secrecy, and the growing, presumptuous dominance of the state over economic life, one might generously overlook the problem. After all, we are still free and sovereign individuals. But are we really still that free? Nietzsche once again: “He who does not have two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave.” Are we not now working almost half of our time for the taxman? We have fallen under the spell of the siren song of universal public provision.
If the traces of government domination in the future are found in permanently installed cameras in our cars, in the tax authorities’ ever more brazen access to the fruits of our labor, and in the tentacles of regulation reaching ever deeper into our everyday lives, the question arises: Was the human being of the late Middle Ages ultimately freer than we are today? The fact that we even have to raise this question reveals the depth of our present political dilemma. Great things flourish only where the present is willing to put down roots in its own past, to weave the traditions and cultural treasures of earlier eras into its own understanding of itself, and to recognize them as the substance necessary to meet the challenges of the future.
Tradition is not the opposite of renewal. It is, in fact, its very prerequisite, enabling us to turn toward the future. Black, red, and gold — the colors of the German civic freedom movement and of the Lützow Free Corps — remind us of this eminent cultural principle. These were the colors carried through the streets of Lübeck in 1848 as well — unrewarded, but not in vain. They do not stand for stagnation or obedience to authority, but for the struggle for self-determination and symbolize the rise of the German bourgeoisie.
All the more disgraceful, then, is the way German politics treats this symbol of its own history. Ridiculous are gestures of rejection such as the one recently displayed by a spokesman for the Green Youth, who expressed outrage at the presence of these “f**king flags,” as he called them, in public spaces. Stupid interventions such as these are emblematic of a political culture that has lost its connection to the country’s historical and cultural traditions and uses the political sphere primarily as a stage for ideological conflicts and self-promotion.
In Germany’s political circles, ignorance and ideological dumbing-down reign as supreme principles. Nothing about the development of recent decades has anything to do with civic culture, civilization, or individual dignity.
We must recognize this: It is a long way from Hanseatic Lübeck to the present and to the hoped-for renewal in the spirit of civic culture. Yet there is no alternative to a return to liberal values if the citizen is once again to become the bearer of our culture. Only then can we rediscover individual dignity.
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