Dear Ms. Mackenzie and Mr. McKay,
I am writing to you after hearing your podcast on JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. (LISTEN HERE: The Spectacle Ep. 193: The Future of U.S. Relations With Europe, Russia, and Ukraine)
Myself, I live in Germany, where I work as a writer, concert violinist, and broker of rare violin bows. I studied violin performance in Essen, Helsinki, and at the Juilliard School in New York. From 2013 to 2021, I was first concertmaster of the Northeast German Symphony Orchestra, and in 2023, I founded my own company, Seifert Rare Bows.
My short stories and essays have been published in the Antioch Review, the Cambridge Literary Review, the Chicago Review, the Image Journal, the London Magazine, the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, the Threepenny Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.
Same as you, I was struck by the penetrating clarity of Mr. Vance’s words. It was heartening, too, to see the real surprise on the faces of Markus Söder, the prime minister of Bavaria, and other German politicians seated in the auditorium. They clearly did not see this coming, having expected a speech about the need to raise defense spending. Instead, here was a young politician giving them the dressing-down of their lifetimes while staying polite, however, throughout.
It was something completely different from the speeches one hears in the Bundestag (the German parliament) where it has become the norm to only simulate politics. Even the more heated exchanges are minutely choreographed, staged for the public to give the impression of real discussions when in fact all are long agreed already. All except the AfD, that is — the new outsiders, the pariahs, the lepers.
Your conversation on Rumble was a breath of fresh air, too. For a long time, I had been wondering why on earth the foreign media wasn’t catching on to the situation in Germany. Fortunately, that seems to have changed. The “60 Minutes” report may have been conducted in bad faith, but at least it got the information to the American public who could then make up their own minds about what they were seeing. (RELATED: Margaret Brennan and the Good Germans at CBS News)
Believe me, it was only the tip of the iceberg. Yes, private homes are now routinely raided if you post a supposedly racist cartoon or comment online. The ensuing coverage in the media is meant to dissuade others. Even worse, however, the same happens if you post (or even like) a derogatory comment about the current government, especially about members of the Green Party. Robert Habeck, in particular, our minister of economy, is on a real crusade, suing hundreds of citizens a year for harmless slurs. Mind you, not threats, but everyday insults at most.
Very recently, a raid was conducted on someone who had dared call Mr. Habeck a Schwachkopf online; that translates to moron or dimwit. In another case, lawyer Markus Roscher of Braunschweig was sentenced to a hefty fine for calling the government a band of “malicious losers.” His gun license has been revoked because he has been deemed “unreliable,” and even his license to practice the law is in jeopardy. This is rapidly becoming the new normal in Germany. It may not yet be a dictatorship, but it isn’t a democracy, either. It is something else for which, so far, we lack a name. Mr. Vance was right to call it out, and it was high time someone did.
In addition, this past year so-called Meldeportale (reporting portals) have been established online to make it easier for citizens to tattle on each other, erected for the expressly stated purpose of reporting misdemeanors below the penalty limit, that is for misconduct so harmless that the law would not normally pursue the case. For many, especially in the Eastern parts of the country who lived through it, this use of a nationwide web of informants to crack down on dissent smacks of methods employed by the East German Staatssicherheit or Stasi in short. Together with the raiding of homes and the seizing of phones and laptop computers, intimidation is the name of the game.
Near the end of your podcast, you said that Europe, and the people of Europe, need to decide where our loyalties lie. Mr. Vance, of course, said something very similar when he spoke about the need for a positive vision, to make up our minds about what it is, exactly, that we wish to defend. This cuts right to the heart of the matter. We do need to decide, but as things stand, the citizens of this country are presented with a badly skewed picture of reality.
Unlike you, we do not currently have mainstream conservative media outlets. The ones we did have – once venerable newspapers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – have all been brought into line, gleichgeschaltet. These days, only a handful of courageous publications exist that dare publish opposing views; compared with the behemoth of state-sponsored media conglomerates they are tiny and inconsequential. You could almost call them an underground resistance.
We do not have a Fox News to counter the version of events touted by CNN. Just imagine your country with only the likes of CNN to rely on for information, an onslaught of media that relentlessly amplifies the government’s talking points. I believe it would be safe to say that under such conditions, Mr. Trump would not have won the election, and meaningful change, for the U.S., too, would have been a distant dream instead of the sweeping living reality that we are witnessing today.
That the American people were able to say no to the Biden administration and its politics and to vote into office its polar opposite, is also due to publications such as your own, and the fact that you are allowed to operate freely and relatively unmolested. That is simply not the case in this country.
Boris Reitschuster, for instance, who runs one of the small online journals I mentioned earlier (reitschuster.de), has to publish out of Montenegro, because no bank in Germany would allow him to even open an account. Roland Tichy, who publishes Tichy’s Einblick (tichyseinblick.de) online and in print, has so far escaped similar persecution but is never invited on any panels in mainstream media, and thus is marginalized.
These two outlets are the last safe havens for anyone seeking an alternative to the government’s own view. Consequently, they are known only to “insiders,” to those willing to put in the time and effort to dig for information themselves. Most people do not have that time. They go to work and the rest of the time they spend with their families. For the vast majority of the country — just as in an authoritarian regime — only the company line exists. Please bear this in mind when demanding a quick change of heart. It is coming, but it will take time, and it is being hampered every step of the way by entrenched interests.
In Germany, we usually follow the American lead, only with a few years of lag time. Events and developments — cultural, social, political — on your side ripple outward but are not adapted in Germany overnight. Please remember that the movement that caused the current crisis — the one known as wokism, with its many off-shoots — was one of those ripples, too, that crossed the Atlantic and ignited a spark here. Contrary to the U.S., we have not begun to extract ourselves from the claws of that beast yet.
“Old Europe” is always slow to react, prone to tortuous deliberations and inner monologues before finally, groaningly, heaving into motion. For no other country in Europe is this truer than Germany with its vast, ever-expanding bureaucratic kraken, its labyrinthine institutions, and its deep-seated aversion to change of any kind.
The pace Mr. Trump has set was never one that could have been replicated here. But it is important, now that the attention is squarely on the more outrageous and authoritarian impulses in Germany, to keep up outside pressure. It should be done in the spirit of helping an old friend and ally overcome a crisis of values, of identity. That means directly calling out the government for its transgressions, but also reaching out a hand to the public who, to a large extent, has not yet realized the extent of its suffering.
We are getting there — a deepening recession; rising unemployment; crumbling infrastructure; almost daily attacks by migrants, often on children; and a deeply felt, bone-crushing pessimism about the future — all contribute to a growing sense of unease, even in those who are still firmly on the side of the government and its coalition of the self-proclaimed “democratic center.” It can be glimpsed in a “great irritability” (a term Thomas Mann once used in his novel The Magic Mountain to describe the mood in the years before the outbreak of World War I), and a sharp increase in psychological disorders, such as depression and burn-out.
This Sunday, Germany votes. If you look at the likely results, just over 50 percent are already voting conservative, which, given the massive propaganda effort, is almost a miracle in itself: 30 percent for the CDU of Friedrich Merz, plus 22 percent for the AFD. The only reason change is not coming is that those 22 percent for the AFD are, so to speak, thrown in the rubbish bin.
Not a day goes by that Friedrich Merz does not invoke the so-called “firewall,” a deeply undemocratic concept designed to prolong the rule of leftist parties into perpetuity. The CDU — the party of Helmut Kohl — was once a conservative bulwark, but then reimagined by Angela Merkel over 16 years into something unrecognizable, a natural soulmate for the leftist Green Party. Friedrich Merz now has the unenviable mission of turning the party around again, bringing it back to its conservative roots. It does not look like he might be strong enough to pull it off, or he would have recognized that his only chance lies in a coalition with the AFD, which, however, he continues to demonize at every turn.
Mr. Merz has said that he wants to end illegal immigration. For that, he has been called a fascist and a Nazi. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the streets in state-sponsored rallies (another sign of an authoritarian regime). As a result, Friedrich Merz quickly folded, and his resolve collapsed.
Everybody now expects him to enter a coalition with the SPD of Olaf Scholz, or the Green Party, or both. In such a coalition, nothing will be accomplished. And so most likely another four years will go by until another election can bring down the firewall and usher in a true conservative coalition. Hopefully, it will not be too late to save the country from ruin. Then, when the time is ripe, the people of Germany will again turn to the United States — where else? — for guidance and inspiration.
For many here, JD Vance’s speech has already turned into an iconic moment, a glimmer of hope after dark years. Please do not give up on us just yet.
Sincerely,
Mika Seifert
Hilchenbach, Germany
READ MORE:
JD Vance Is the Bull. Niall Ferguson Got the Horns.
The Lies Are No Longer Uttered with Impunity: Vance’s Speech and Poland’s Crucial Election
Europe’s Deep State Election Meddling Threatens NATO
Vance in Munich and Foreign Policy Realism for the Modern World