Merkel’s Cultural Revolution Made Patriotism a Sin to Purge

Gunnar Beck, writing in Brussels Signal, traces the origins of Germany’s present troubles to the postwar period when what began as understandable caution toward nationalism metastasized into a pathological rejection of German identity itself.

West Germany achieved remarkable stability and prosperity in the decades following World War II, establishing what Beck describes as a successful managerial semi-democratic state. Even after reunification, Germany remained a largely homogeneous nation-state for another two decades, with cultural divisions between East and West rather than between ethnic groups.

Yet despite these favorable conditions, as Brussels Signal reports, the German political and intellectual class failed to rebuild a healthy patriotic identity. Instead, they created what Beck calls a negative identity fetishized by elites.

From Prudence to Pathology

While skepticism toward nationalism immediately after 1945 represented a rational moral response to catastrophic policies and crimes, Beck argues that German preoccupation with Nazism paradoxically grew stronger over time rather than weaker.

Cultural Marxist theories took root in universities following the 1968 movement, transforming historical reckoning into an assault on the very concept of national identity. Guilt ceased to be historical and became transgenerational and metaphysical. Patriotism was no longer a risk to be managed, but a sin to be purged, Beck writes.

Any positive reference to German culture or historical achievement came to be viewed not as policy disagreement but as moral pathology threatening the narrative justifying the Federal Republic.

A Secular Religion Emerges

From the 1960s onward, German elites in media, academia, and education progressively internalized a worldview equating nationhood with latent fascism and internationalism with moral virtue. This ideology was not imposed by force but adopted as a badge of moral superiority, according to Brussels Signal.

Questioning this orthodoxy became career-limiting. Moral signaling replaced analytical judgment, and emotional escalation became proof of virtue.

With Christianity weakened and nationalism discredited, Germany developed what Beck describes as a secular ersatz religion with Auschwitz as original sin. Dissidents against Germanness and sexual minorities became saints, while references to nation, traditional family values, or historical continuity were treated as heresies.

The German Green Party became the political outlet for this internationalist, multicultural, and radically feminist ideology, giving parliamentary politics in Germany a hysterical dimension.

Merkel’s Cultural Revolution

The catalyst for Germany’s Kulturrevolution came with Angela Merkel’s long Chancellorship from 2005 to 2021, Beck contends.

Merkel’s electoral strategy of “asymmetric demobilization” involved moving her center-right CDU party to the center-left on social issues to win voters from the SPD and Greens. She adopted left-wing policies including abolishing compulsory military service, the sudden exit from nuclear power, and allowing marriage for all.

This strategy left traditional conservatives without political representation and forced the German Left to move even further into identity politics territory to distinguish themselves from a government already implementing their agenda.

From 2015, Merkel devoted her remaining six years in office to introducing wide-ranging legislation entrenching multiculturalism and completing her cultural revolution with climate change-related measures and radical sexual equality policies, Brussels Signal reports.

Her policy of supporting open borders for refugee intake became synonymous with being progressive and awake to global injustices, backed by virtually unanimous establishment support.

Beck’s analysis suggests that Germany’s current predicament represents not a sudden crisis but the culmination of decades of elite-driven cultural warfare against German national identity itself.

With information from Brussels Signal