Angel and Tiggs

The other day my mother was working on a book’s revision and found the following sentence (free translation): “It is known that the Germans have a great participation in the consolidation of the German democratic State after the collapse of the Nazi regime”. She asked me if I agreed with such statement. The answer was a sound “no until the 90s”. Historians and Germans, you’re invited to contribute. I’ll give you my point of view with everything I know about German’s history (not much, really).

Germans first organized themselves into tribes. These were not democratic. Well, not at least as I understand the word or even close to what the Greeks used to do at the apex of the Athenian society. Great. Let’s move on. Then came the German kingdoms during the Middle Age. Do you really call a kingdom democracy? If you do, contact me, we have similar ideas of democratic centralism and dictatorial aspirations. That situation lasted for a millennium until Bismarck “unified” the German states with Prussia in the centre of it. The German Empire (Reich) had just been born. Again, when has an empire become synonym with democracy? But wait, we’re just about to enter the period that really matters to answer the original question: the Nazism era and its aftermath. After WWI the Republic of Weimar was installed. As far as I know there were elections and the whole democratic apparatus. Elections were fraudulent in some cases or at least subject to a recount due to intimidation, political assassinations and whatnot. However, Hitler officially came to power as a people’s representative. Now if you dare to call the Nazi regime (1933-1945) as democratic I’ll definitely have to ask you to contact me.

So, we finally hit the day and years after the fall of the Nazis. Germany was divided into 4 zones of influence, one to each of the main allies, US, UK, USSR and France. In practice, the two big spheres of domain were the USSR and the US, the Cold War has just started. Honestly I’m not very familiar with West Germany’s political system and history, but I’m sure there was a strong feeling of US manipulation in different levels. Now if you try to convince me elections in East Germany (or the infamous DDR) I will definitely ask you to leave the room.

I told my mom that I wasn’t sure if Helmuth Köhl, the ruling German chancellor after the collapse of the USSR and reunification of Germany, had ascended to power democratically. Gerhard Schröder and most recently Angela Merkel have. Can you now understand my point of view?