Opinion

Germans are done with guilt

Berlin will not let Athens have fun at its expense.

Guilt is something Germans are good at. After World War II, they struck a deal with the Allies. In return for expressing guilt (and paying reparations), they were admitted back into the club of Western democracies. It’s a deal that worked well for Germany. Feeling guilty has become part of our cultural fabric. We’re a good people now. We don’t like to go to war. We care about the planet. We donate money to tsunami victims in Asia and to aid organizations in Africa. But when angry Greeks take to the streets, blaming us for their misery, we don’t feel all that guilty. Why not?

We do know, in theory, what’s going on in Greece. The country’s GDP has shrunk by more than a quarter since 2008, youth unemployment stands at 50 percent, suicide rates have risen sharply. A couple of years ago, the major German media outlets all sent journalists to Athens to report on the Greek equivalent of the Greek depression. No longer. Now, the papers just focus on detailing how much more money Greece needs from Europe and what that means for the German taxpayer. But Germans are tired even of the monetary stories. We don’t want to read any more gobbledygook about €240 billion-credit-lines being extended for another six months. We want the whole thing to end.

Greek mess/German success

Some economists argue that the Germans are partly to blame for what’s happening in Greece. The argument turns on the fact that Greek mess and German success are two sides of the same coin. Germany, with its large manufacturing sector, benefited from a weak common currency while Greek businesses suffered. Seduced by a euro-induced credit boom, the Greeks spent too much money on Siemens machines, Mercedes cars and Müller yoghurt, boosting German exports. Now that they can no longer afford to buy our products, we look down on them and say, “But they could have used that money to build up a proper manufacturing sector. Instead they chose the good life, riding our cars, eating our yogurt!”

Some of the money the Greeks spent on German products was German, too. Our banks were major lenders during the boom years. Those very same banks invested billions in the US housing market. When New York bankers needed someone to buy phony financial products, they made a call to Munich or Düsseldorf. “Dumb German money,” they called it. After Lehman Brothers collapsed, the German government had to bail out its banks. Still, when we’re looking to blame someone for squandering our money, we’re not talking about Florida homeowners or California loan sharks or Wall Street investment bankers. We’re talking about Greeks.

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The argument that Germany is responsible for the Greek malaise is a controversial one, of course. Germans don’t need to agree with it. We can point to Greek tax evasion, corrupt elites and inefficient governments. We can tell the Greeks to take their cues from the Irish and the Portuguese, role models of austerity who underwent painful reforms and never complained. They didn’t run around, carrying posters of Chancellor Merkel with a Hitler moustache.

And yet, the question remains: Why do we not feel for the Greeks at all? Why do we refuse to see things from their perspective? Everyone outside Germany knows that the Greeks can never pay back what they owe. Why then are we still so hell-bent on teaching them a lesson, regardless of the consequences? It’s because deep down, beneath the talk about the pros and cons of a Grexit, there’s something else that bothers us: We’re afraid that the Greeks will make us feel stupid and have fun at our expense.

That’s too bad because there was a time, not too long ago, when the Germans liked the Greeks. The Philhellenic movement of the 19th century was especially strong in Germany, and the best German schools still teach ancient Greek as a foreign language. More recently, the Germans came to love Greek wine and food. Practically every German city has a couple of restaurants named after “Zorba the Greek,” the title of Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1946 novel, which sold more than a million copies in Germany. The movie was even more popular.

“Zorba the Greek” is the story of Basil, an uptight Englishman of Greek descent, who moves to Crete to open a coal mine. Zorba, an outgoing local, offers his assistance and ends up squandering Basil’s money. Basil doesn’t mind because Zorba teaches him how to live life to the fullest. Put simply, the story pits the Protestant lifestyle of delayed gratification against a Carpe Diem approach, and the latter wins out in the end.

For a long time, the Greek-German relationship followed a similar pattern. German tourists visiting Greece after the war (during which the Germans wreaked havoc on the Greeks) idealized the country and its people. Sometimes they spent more than they wanted to and felt cheated out of their hard-earned money by someone who looked just like Zorba. But the Germans didn’t mind so much. They had a good time anyway.

That relationship went sour after the Greeks were admitted to the eurozone. First, they fudged the numbers. Then they piled up debt like there was no tomorrow. Now, the Syriza people are making fun of us, giving us the finger. Worst of all, they’re trying to make us feel guilty, demanding war reparations worth almost as much as they owe. Germans use the same word, Schuld, to mean both “guilt” and “debt.” In this case, however, we feel that the two are not related. We won’t allow the question of German guilt to interfere with Greek debt negotiations.

Most of us would like the Greeks to leave the EU now. We have to keep them in check, because otherwise they are going to rise again, partying and enjoying the good life at our expense. Some German politicians are already calculating what it would cost us to provide emergency relief to Greece after a Grexit. In the case of a major humanitarian crisis, we would be willing to lend a helping hand, of course. We’d feel a little guilty, then, and we’d send blankets, medical supplies and hygiene packs. Maybe that’s when we’ll discover that we can like the Greeks again.

Konstantin Richter is a regular contributor to Die Welt and the author of “Bettermann” and “Kafka was Young and He Needed the Money.”