Wow! One comment about the problems of immigration and you go straight for the Nazi line. I thought we were bad in Britain.....

I don't like it either but it's no worse than what's coming out of Arizona at the moment.

I think Ms. Merkel meant that multiculturalism specifically is a failed concept, rather than immigration as a part of German society. Ethnic enclaves of Turks, Moroccans, et al. who fail to adapt to German cultural norms cause instability and conflict. That's not too controversial. I hope she isn't suggesting they all start enjoying pork-laden brauts, but learning the language and interacting with others outside their ethnic group isn't particularly 'right-wing'.

Let's not overgeneralize. And whatever you do, don't mention the war!

German concern about recent immigrants not assimilating is not baseless. On the other hand, an earlier generation of immigrants did all the things Chancellor Merkel is now calling for -- learning the language, accepting German cultural norms -- and still weren't always accepted as "echt" Germans. I recall from my time in Germany some resentful comments about how I (an American whose German at that time was pretty good) could pass more easily for a German than people who had lived in the country all their lives, but who were ethnically Greek or Turkish.

It's probably not much help to point out that assimilating immigrants now would be easier if Germany had been more accepting of them years ago, even if it's true. And I can't comment about the value of "multiculturalism" because I don't know what the phrase is supposed to mean in the German context. It just seems to me that Chancellor Merkel's comments sound a little too like those of someone just discovering an issue that has been around for a really long time.

Is a somewhat glossed over appraisal of the Morgenthau plan - which Henry Stimson called "Carthaginian".

The plan was also partially implemented until wiser heads later prevailed.

Not your finest post

Q: How do you tell a Turk from a Bavarian?
A: The Turk speaks better German!

All joking aside, problems of immigration, assimilation, multi-culturalism, and the north-south divide are difficult everywhere. Simply put, nations of the north are the destination of choice for people from the south (and east, sort of). The liberal and capitalistic traditions of many northern nations makes dealing with the positive and negative aspects of it this pressure a challenge for democratic nations.

Because of these fairly simple facts, name-calling and "negative history brandishing" are sad substitutes for real solutions. I am surprised that Tom would so quickly bring up the specter of "brown' Germany. No nation in history has worked harder to both erase and simultaneously remember its own worst history. Are there skinheads in Germany? Of course. But I would bet there are more in Russia, or perhaps even in the UK. Liberal democracies know how to deal with the kind of fringe problems that these groups represent... and the voters in liberal democracies know to ignore their sad solutions (um... except maybe in Austria). The real challenge is finding mainstream solutions to the real challenges of immigration and assimilation before people are pulled towards more fringe solutions.

Somewhere between allowing Sharia law and banning headscarves there has to be a solution. That is the real challenge.

The Walloons and Flemish people of Belgium are talking of separate states. Basques and Kurds have been struggling for independent states for a long while.

On Oct. 10, the Israeli Knesset voted to require all non-Jewish immigrants to swear loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.”

Multi-Culti is Dead. Nationalism never died, it was just swept under the carpet for a few years in an attempt to try the new Utopian experiment of Diversity.

Reality is a bitch. Proximity + Diversity = Conflict.

The Germans, Winston Churchill said, "are either at your throat or at your feet."

Walt

"Poll says 10 percent of Germans want a new 'Führer'"

Polls also say Germans reportedly want leader to "send foreigners home"; over 58% say "religious practice for Muslims in Germany should be seriously limited"

"I remember someone once telling me that the history of Europe is essentially 2,000 years of "the German problem," with its tribes constantly getting frisky and invading westward, southward and, eventually, eastward."

How, over the last 2,000 years plus, were Germanic invasions different from those of the Celts, Romans, Slavs, Turks (Huns, Bulgars, Avars, Mongols, Seljuks, Ottomans) and Arabs? Or did you just see Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky" recently and get carried away?

"Alas, it is too late to implement the Morgenthau plan."

You must not understand what the Morgenthau Plan was or what devastation it would have wreaked on the supine German population, since going back to agriculture and light industry--as it mandated--could only have supported a much smaller population. Or are we to understand that you feel such a fate was their just desert?

When I first perused this post, I kept looking for the "read more" button, thinking that these few ill-conceived lines couldn't be the totality of the effort, but I guess I was wrong. Oh well, good enough for government work, as they say. But one final question: What, exactly, IS our German problem? You used it as a title but did'nt quite get around to specifying its meaning.

Mr. Ricks,

I am an avid reader of this blog and thought "Fiasco" was great. But in writing this post it seems that you gave both your judgement and intellect a rest.

Making learning German a pre-requisite for German citizenship seems not to be a very extreme standpoint. The U.S. has, correct me if I am wrong, the requirement of passing a civics test in order to become citizen. Should I, as a European (Swede), mock this and speak darkly of the American history of slavery, Jim Crow (tests if you want to vote! see the connection?) and the massacres of American Indians?
I won't, because that would be deeply unfair and based in profound misunderstanding of the issue.

Furthermore, "I remember someone once telling me that the history of Europe is essentially 2,000 years of "the German problem," with its tribes constantly getting frisky and invading westward, southward and, eventually, eastward."

I hope that you include Anglo-Saxons and Normans in this "German problem" as they are also Germanic tribes. And then both Britain and the U.S. of course have to be included as parts of this "problem" of 2,000 years of "constant friskiness".
I am sure that the Irish and the Mexicans would agree with you on that at least.
Some clever Iraqi can probably pen an essay on the "essential Anglo-Saxon tribal aggressiveness" of Britain and the U.S., replete with examples from the last 100 years.
(Sweden would, of course, also have to be included. And, yes, we were quite "frisky" from 1,000 to 400 years ago. In the last 200 years, though, not so much. We lost our "Germanicness"?)

The great irony here is of course that your dark warnings about a Germany shifting rightward probably comes from a fear of a resurgence of aggressive nationalism in that country. But most of your fear seems in turn to be derived from the crudest of national stereotypes...

Do you start to see the absurdity of what you are saying here?

You can surely do must better than this. Indeed, all other days you do.

Now I will go and read the other recent posts in this blog. They seem much, much better.

Quite a reaction, a bit ham handed, certainly not prudent and apparently uninformed. It seems to come as a reaction to what Boston.com said that the BBC said that Fr. Merkel said. It's embarrassing for me as an an American Political Scientist living in Germany that my countrymen and then even the British can't speak German well enough to keep an eye on them.

What Merkel said was that laissez-faire multi-kulti has failed. This was prefaced in the speech by her saying that the Germans had failed to anticipate the guest workers would stay on, and and had been sticking their heads in the sand ever since the begining of the obvious lack of integration. - And these two peoples do not integrate well, intermarriage rates (which are one of the only solid indicators that aren't qualitative) between Turkish guest workers and their heirs and the Germans are very very low.- She then went on to say that the Germans have to actually deal with the problem head on and find solutions, because she doesn't want labor immigrants (skilled and unskilled) to think they are unwelcome, but that they must learn the language if they are to stay permanently.

If such a reaction, and that is what this post was, came about from having heard or understood Merkel's speech, that would be one thing. But you clearly didn't actually listen, or read the original and making such statements based on inaccurate information given about a speech which occured in a language you don't speak, is somewhat indicative of either a lack of professionalism or simply a capricious bias.

And if you do speak German then you missed the point entirely and that would call other factors into question and not favorably.

I think its rather ironic to write about the threats of Germany's historic expansion to the east from a country that is actively occupying two countries to the east of it.
Poorly played indeed.

On an otherwise fine blog, this was an ugly, very disappointing post. Robbie Johnson got it right, this is not some kind of neofascist lurch to the right. Merkel was just admitting that the model of integration of the last generation had failed - It can't be that no German can ever talk tough about immigration without being tarred as neo-fascist or worse.

You're basically viewing Germany exclusively through the lens of the first half of the 20th century. That is not "paying attention to history" The history of the German nation extends a bit further than that. It's like lloking at American history exclusively through the lens of ethnic cleansing and genocide of Native Americans.

All these phrases seem to me signals that what I said was aesthetically unacceptable--but not necessarily wrong.

I just don't trust the German right. Sorry if that makes me unacceptable in the finer Euro-social circles.

Cheers,
Tom

"I just don't trust the German right. Sorry if that makes me unacceptable in the finer Euro-social circles."

Wow. That's one of the weaker and more mendacious ripostes I've read recently. "...the finer Euro-social circles"?? You've got to be kidding.

I strongly recommend that in future you stay with your strengths: operational and tactical analysis, military organizational structure and leadership, and relevant questions of general military history . (This is a great blog in general--especially when it focuses on its "core competencies.")

I read this article and comments and wonder what exactly is going on. I suggest you compare the number of wars that Germany has been involved in 1776 - 1939 to the number of wars the U.S. has fought and you might be surprised at where the weight of the numbers lie.

As for the Morgenthau plan, this was already tried for a few years and subsequently judged a failure. It was discovered that the German economy was vital to that of the rest of Europe, shutting Germany down meant shutting Europe down. Let me too quote a Time article, this time from mid 1947:

"Coal was the central issue at Paris. And coal meant the Ruhr and Germany. Without Ruhr coal, and without the German industrial output which depends on Ruhr coal, the rest of Europe cannot recover." "It is the fact that Germany is not there which paralyzes our calculations"

"To help remedy that paralysis, the U.S. last week issued a new directive to Germany's occupation chief, General Lucius D. Clay, superseding Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 (which had directed the U.S. commander to take "no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany . . .")."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,887417-1,00.html

Old former President Herbert Hoover was one of the few people that early saw sense, starving large numbers of German children to death made many of their parents good candidates for communism, and a whole western Europe without an economic engine would lead to starvation and soviet communism also in France and elsewhere. Hoover noted in an official report in early 1947:

"there is the illusion that the new Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a "Pastoral State." It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it."
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/History/History-idx?type=turn&entity=History.omg1947n087.p0030&id=History.omg1947n087&isize=M

Things had started to soften a little bit already late in 1946 though.

"The Morgenthau Plan ... ideas permeated much of American thinking, especially in the War Department, right up to the time of Secretary [James F.] Byrnes' important Stuttgart speech in 1946. They were reflected in the basic directive for the occupation of Germany, which was a kind of Bible for all that was done during the early days of the occupation, the paper known as JSC-1067."
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/lightner.htm#46

Americans with the type of approach evident in the article I'm commenting on did pretty much everything possible wrong in their occupation of Germany. Germany is a democracy today not thanks to the U.S., it is rather despite the U.S.
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=47&articleID=599

Before judging others, think also on how others may judge you. I think Edgar L. Jones phrased it best.

"WE Americans have the dangerous tendency in our international thinking to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward other nations. We consider ourselves to be more noble and decent than other peoples, and consequently in a better position to decide what is right and wrong in the world. What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers. We topped off our saturation bombing and burning of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on two nearly defenseless cities, thereby setting an all-time record for instantaneous mass slaughter. "
http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/nonatlserv.shtml

Just came across this tunnel-vision-impaired posting, an extreme example of Nazi war stereotyping by commentators whose knowledge of German history seems not to go much farther back than 1929 (or who’ve been watching too many reruns of “Hogan’s Heroes”). Zathras, Robbie, and Mike make many good points, which I won't rehash.

I would just take exception to the hidden racial assumption in Zathras's comment that s/he *as an American* "could pass more easily for a German than people who had lived in the country all their lives, but who were ethnically Greek or Turkish." I'm at least as American as anyone posting here, but virtually no European, East or West, will see an East-Asian-looking person that way. (In fact, the only place I've been to in all Europe where I felt truly, anonymously “local” was...Moscow.)

Then again, that stuff still happens in the States too. My sister-in-law has been in the USA for just 6 years, yet has already adopted plenty of all-American prejudices and been welcomed by her neighbors in a way my fluent-English-speaking parents never will. So who am I to point the finger??

I read over Merkel’s comments carefully and found them far less problematic than anything coming out of Geert Wilders and the PVV in the Netherlands, or H.-C. Strache and the FPÖ in Austria, or Sarkozy and his followers in France…or plenty of right-wing populist politicians in the UK, Denmark, Spain, and just about every other West European country. We in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe have enough problems, but fortunately this kind of open targeting of the few visible non-Roma minorities hasn’t yet risen to the level of mainstream political discourse. Let's see if it stays that way...