The late Lady Thatcher was know as “nanny” in her days as despot… sorry prime minister. Which explained why her cabinet took so long to shake off her pernicious tyranny in the cabinet as well as elsewhere. As toffs, wets or posh Etonians, they had been brought up by Nannies who instilled the fear of hell in them. So went the legend.
In an extremely interesting article on Germany : Hanging on to Mutti” by Neal Ascherson in the London Review of Books, he points out a sort of “Mutti” or Mummy Syndrome playing in Merkel’s favour. This is less the fear of God or Nanny that Thatcher inspired but more a kind of comforting element. The Germans feel Mutti will hold their hand through this. And of course Mutti or Mummy always knows best. Till you grow up of course and realise she didn’t.
But this article is extremely interesting for all the insights it gives us into what Germany is today, how collective thinking goes, and possibly even why they do not seem to have a clue what is going on in Europe. A point made through the fact that in electioneering the Eurozone crisis seems to play no part.
But back to The Frau, as I have dubbed her, or Mutti as Ascherson describes her.
“Merkel, he thinks [Erhard Eppler veteran SPD politician], lacks sensitivity to the outside world because she comes from the old East Germany. ?No awareness of recent German history influences her behaviour.? Education in the German Democratic Republic taught the young that the crimes of the past happened in a different country, the fascist-imperialist Germany which had no connection to the ?first socialist state on German soil?. Although she has nothing but contempt for GDR ideology, an Ossi like Merkel must see the complexes of Wessis, conditioned to flinch at any reminder of the Nazi past, as increasingly irrelevant.”
Apart from recent German history, another thing The Frau appears to have no awareness of is banking, how capitalism works and everything she is the leader in Europe arranging. How could she? “The first socialist state on German soil” did not deal in such matters. So she can be forgive for being less than clueless.
So here we have a nice Lady her people think of as Mutti, grappling with problems she has no idea about. Neither how they work nor, still less the kind of reactions she arouses in the rest of Europe who DO have a very strong awareness of recent German history and relate her destructive heavy handedness to it.
In conclusion I would like to end with Achersone’s exquisite summing up:
“As for Merkel, sometimes she looks placid, sometimes she looks cross and disappointed, sometimes she smiles politely at foreigners over coffee and cakes. So she reminds people of Mum, and those who want to keep holding her hand think they know what she wants. Others, in despair, confess they have no idea what she wants. These days, she seems to have no policy of her own. Instead, after a suitable delay, she takes on opposition policies in a diluted form. Intellectual critics complain that she has no ?idea?, no ?concept?. And to describe what she does, or rather doesn?t, they have coined a frightful new German word: Entinhaltlichung. ?It means what it says,? a Berlin friend tells me: ?Decontentification.?”
And that is the guiding light of where Europe is going. It’s not so much Euroscpeticism we need to fear in ruining any idea of European Union that may be left, but the “decontentification” of the project and the sheer brutality with which it is being enforced that cannot but help to bring to mind Germany’s Nazi past. Of which The Frau, remains unaware.
A recipe for disaster.