“Republic of fear” (WSJ, March 3, 2008) is the title of an article by Malte Lehming. Anybody wanting to know anything about the political situation in Germany has to read it. It is a brilliant analysis. Read the beginning here:
Your heart rate sinks, muscles stiffen, you lose control of bodily functions: You’re frozen with fear. This primal reflex to danger is a familiar phenomenon in nature but it’s less common for it to strike nearly all of a political class in a democracy.
Welcome to Germany.
Barely 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — an event that was celebrated at the time as a triumph of freedom and hope over despair — the united country today is frozen with fear. It’s as if the East Germans have exacted a delayed revenge on their brothers and sisters in the West: Your political model may have won, but we’ll infect your society by reviving militant antimilitarism, a yearning for security at all cost, and a craze for distributive justice — until the whole country is paralyzed. (…)