Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
As social glue and as a bond tying the individual to a higher purpose of existence, patriotism has acquired a dubious reputation in Germany after decades of culture war. The United Left has succeeded in amalgamating this binding and integrating cultural ferment with the historical catastrophes of National Socialism, imperialism, and chauvinism, ultimately banishing it from the nation’s self-understanding.
Today, the patriot is regarded as a social outsider, a contrarian, an intolerant antagonist of humanistic values.
The mills of that socialist cultural revolution set in motion in the late 1960s have ground with care. A cartel of radical ideologues, opportunistic politicians, a proliferating academic establishment, and the media sector has managed to inject a sufficient dose of poison into the root system of tradition, religion, family, and the bourgeois order. The modern patriot renders himself deeply suspect if he rejects the blessings of cultural relativism and the woke nihilism of our age.
And yet conservatives are the true heroes of stability and continuity, who—like human breakwaters in today’s social storms—attempt to fend off the worst flowing toward us from the murky sources of cultural Marxism. It was not least the work of German politicians to carry out this civilizational turn: away from the Social Market Economy and a bourgeois-centered society toward a green climate socialism.
Nowhere does the anti-bourgeois reflex flourish more luxuriantly than in Germany’s NGO complex and in the shrill academic flank warfare surrounding Cancel Culture, Wokeism, and the cleansing of language—precisely targeting those terms that would open the door to a culture-affirming, tradition-confirming education.
How beautiful words like “fatherland,” “patriotism,” and “love of homeland” now sound.
Naturally, a significant portion of the political class would vehemently disagree. It has built a business model from the ingredients of contempt for the nation, globalist moralism, and climate-apocalyptic transformation logic—and founded its political existence upon it. Contempt for everything conservative is the linguistic soil in which this form of political power thrives, stabilizing and reinforcing itself within its own moral echo chamber.
That, in this self-inflicted crisis, German politicians now invoke the once-poisoned term of “location patriotism” in their defensive struggle against economic reality appears grotesque—and to those who have lost their livelihoods in the breakers of green bureaucratism, presumptuous and offensive.
Germany’s environment minister, Carsten Schneider, concluded his recent interview marathon with a talk at the Frankfurter Rundschau. The man has nerve. After a series of very public attacks by his camp against entrepreneurs, it now seems time to change tone. Moral minor key is on Berlin’s agenda. Automakers, Schneider suggests, should increasingly source raw materials from Germany. Raw materials—from Germany?
He calls for a “lead market” for green steel—stretching reality to its limits, as green steel currently vanishes from product lines because it is neither profitable nor marketable, despite heavy subsidies.
A little more location patriotism can surely be expected from German CEOs, Schneider argues—closely echoing the tone of his party leader and finance minister, Lars Klingbeil.
Klingbeil struck a similar chord at a union congress of IG BCE in Hanover last October. More location patriotism—more daring for Germany? After all, the state has provided tax relief and subsidies to strengthen the location and its companies. Is the state to play King Lear in this drama? The destroyer of capital, tax collector, and regulator par excellence?
It is a cynical media game the political class is playing with a population already in fragile spirits. When things deteriorate and policymakers hit a wall, strategies merge: patriotic appeals now oscillate with resentment and envy debates—emotional triggers designed to activate the image of the greedy, rootless entrepreneur, allowing politicians to step out of the line of fire. Outrage becomes a mobilization strategy; moral pressure, a media placebo.
The chancellor himself now regularly reaches for this blunt instrument, driven by poor poll numbers and looming political turbulence. “I am proud of our country,” declares Friedrich Merz, rebranding a culturally eroded and economically bleeding Germany into a communal experience infused with the rhetoric of renewal and freedom.
One can only speculate about the emotional stirrings of the chancellor as he strides through the opulent halls of the Federal Chancellery. Aware that Germany’s governing apparatus—its bureaucratized parliamentarianism and the self-representation of the executive—slowly but steadily approaches, at least in scale and architectural self-staging, dimensions reminiscent of Chinese conditions, the repeated echo of his own voice in endless corridors may well generate a certain well-tempered pride in career achievement.
In starkest contrast to the modest chancellery of the old Bonn Republic, today’s Federal Chancellery symbolizes statism, distance, and elevation.
Media maneuvers such as demanding corporate location patriotism are performative acts of ostentatious helplessness. They aim to channel public mood, deflect the question of responsibility away from policymakers, and stabilize the coalition ahead of crucial state elections.
Yet Berlin’s spin doctors may be mistaken. Friedrich Merz and his colleagues will learn that patriotism cannot be activated by chancellery decree. They may also discover that few Germans, without external pressure, will answer a call to defend a political system that—after years of mass migration, cultural erosion, and ideological restructuring—now asks its citizens to support further ideologically charged projects.
As for entrepreneurs, there seem to be few who still trust politics to resolve an ideologically distorted situation rationally. Patriotism, once the final convincing anchor tying companies to their homeland, has been driven out of Germans in a decades-long purgatory of progressive self-righteousness. Something better than a German insolvency death can now be found almost anywhere.
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About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.
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