The Art of Self-Surrender

When Botho Strauß premiered his play Ithaka in Munich in 1996, Germany’s political establishment preferred to chuckle. Directed by Dieter Dorn, the theatrical adaptation of Homer’s return of Odysseus was promptly defused by cultural commentators who treated its dark warnings about political decay as an eccentric tirade. Three decades later, the laughter has died down, replaced by the grim reality of a nation that has systematically dismantled its own capacity for self-preservation.

Long before the mass border openings of 2015 transformed German public life, Strauß had already diagnosed the psychological defect of the late Federal Republic in his seminal 1993 essay, Anschwellender Bocksgesang. He observed that a hyper-liberal society, intoxicated by post-Cold War consumerism and self-righteous welfare politics, had lost all comprehension of sovereign power and cultural self-assertion. Germany declared itself a moral superpower, substituting civilizational strength with bureaucratic condescension and an infinite willingness to capitulate.

The consequences of this collective delusion are now visible on every street corner. Facing unprecedented levels of migrant violence, gang warfare, knife crime, and group assaults, the political elite responds not with sovereign force, but with ritualized helplessness. Much like the narrative in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, the German establishment appears to have chosen preemptive surrender as its strategy for avoiding domestic conflict, willingly handing over public space to aggressive parallel societies.

This state-sanctioned passivity stands in stark contrast to how sovereign nations conduct themselves. While countries like Israel accept the brutal necessity of self-defense to guarantee their survival, Berlin’s political class hides behind abstract moralizing. German elites prefer to lecture foreign allies on human rights while enabling the erosion of their own domestic order, attacking political opposition like the AfD whenever it demands the protection of native citizens and integrated migrants alike.

By confusing weakness with virtue, Germany has transformed Strauß’s theatrical fiction into a permanent political reality. A state that refuses to enforce its own laws or defend its cultural identity against internal collapse eventually ceases to be a state at all.

Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com