Today marks the 60th anniversary of the defeat of the Third Reich by allied forces and The New York Times has published a translation of a long essay by Günter Grass. The piece first appeared in Die Zeit with a much more provocative title: Freiheit nach Börsenmaß (loose translation: Freedom According to the Share Price) Grass surveys the current economic landscape in Germany with five million unemployed and a depopulated eastern region and asks whether Germany has made good use of the democracy it was given after the war:
THE question today, then, is have we dealt carefully with the freedom
that we did not win, but was given to us? Have the citizens of West
Germany properly compensated the citizens of the former Democratic
Republic, who, after all, had to bear the main burden of the war begun
and lost by all Germans? And a further question: is our parliamentary
democracy still sufficiently sovereign as a guarantor of freedom of
action to act on the problems facing us in the 21st century?Fifteen years after signing the treaty on unification, we can no longer
conceal that despite the financial achievements, German unity has
essentially been a failure. Petty calculation prevented the government
of the time from submitting to the citizens of both states a new
constitution relevant to the endeavors of Germany as a whole. It is
therefore hardly surprising that people in the former East Germany
should regard themselves as second-class Germans.
Democracy in Germany, Grass believes, is being threatened by a neo-liberal cult of the free market economy which is corrupting political process.
Neither the Kohl government nor the Schröder government succeeded in
correcting the initial errors. Lately, perhaps too late, we have come
to recognize that the threat to the state, or what should be regarded
as Public Enemy No. 1, comes not from right-wing radicalism but rather,
from the impotence of politics, which leaves citizens exposed and
unprotected from the dictates of the economy. What is being destroyed,
then, is not the state, which survives, but democracy.
(…)We can only
hope we will be able to cope with today’s risk of a new
totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world’s last remaining
ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of
capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which
consumes and produces. Those who treat their donated freedom as a stock
market profit have failed to understand what May 8 teaches us every
year.
The challenges in Germany are great: how to deal with massive unemployment and globalization? Grass limits his discussion to postwar Germany, but the threats to democracy are equally severe in the US. We are living in an era where the solution to every problem is a tax cut; where an unprecendented transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy has occurred with practically no opposition; where the Free Press has become timid and ineffective since it is now under the ownership of multinational corporations which are the beneficiaries of the economic programs impmented by the government. The assault on the middle class has resulted in a concentration of wealth not seen in the US since the end of the 19th century; and now the New Deal programs that preserved democracy are about to be phased out. Grass is correct: 60 years after the liberation from fascism we have sold democracy out for short-term profit of the markets.
