How so? Because she has saved her one true love: the West. The real, European West, that is, not the “West” of wild, freebooting Ayn Rand-style fantasies which burst out when Communism fell (remember those “Ulster Scots” values which Anglosphere scribes so adored in the early 1990s? Remember Steve Bannon and his “we are all Leninists” ravings?). She understood what the West really means.

How could she not, with her life story? Unlike almost everyone else in East Germany, she was there not because of bad luck and barbed wire. Her father, a pastor, moved of his own free will from Hamburg to the East shortly after her birth in 1954, becoming a senior figure in the Lutheran Church there. This is less surprising than it sounds because the Lutherans, with their strict demarcation of worldly and spiritual realms (meaning that in practice they never seriously criticise the state) have been welcome helpmeets to rulers in eastern Germany ever since the Teutonic Knights embraced Luther, broke with Rome and founded their very own new state: Prussia.

The Wall went up when she was seven. She must have grown up knowing that she could have been a West German. As a distinctly talented young scientist working within the insane ideological bounds of Marxism-Leninism, she must have felt every day, directly, the effects of Papa Merkel’s deluded utopianism. At 35, she lived the triumph of the West not only as simple, literal freedom but also as mental freedom, at last, from the structural mendacity into which millennial ideas inevitably descend.

She swiftly embraced the CDU, that quintessentially western German party, directly descended from the Catholic Centre Party which had been founded specifically to oppose Bismarck’s Prussianisation of the West. It understands, and she understood, that the historical uniqueness of “the West” is not untrammelled, individual “freedom” but the principle that deals are cut and power shared between great institutions, neither of which will ever yield total domination to the other. This paradigm — the ultimate guarantee of freedom — goes back to 754AD, when Europe was rebooted from the Dark Ages in the great bargain of St Denis: the Frankish dynasty got the sanction of Rome, while the Church got worldly lands and Germanic muscle to defend it. Ever since, call it what you will — Church and State, King and Parliament, Checks and Balances — the principle stands against every heady fantasy, Left or Right, of some perfect society.

This is the key to Merkel’s instinct for seeking out the centre ground. She realised fast and early what all sane people eventually learn: that noisy idealism is not a virtue, but a curse, and that quiet, deal-making realism is not the absence of conviction, but its pure expression. No political lesson could be more different from the dire mix of grandstanding in the moment and backstabbing in the dark which our own Big Beasts learn in the gilded testosterone snake-pits of Eton and the Oxford Union.

Yes, she has been very lucky. It is almost comical now to recall the way that under Helmut Kohl, Germany was regularly written off by triumphant Anglosphere pundits as a dead weight on the European economy and even (declared The Economist in June 1999), “the sick man of Europe”. All that was changed by the Social Democratic/Green governments of 1998-2005, who modernised things in a thoroughly Blairite way (they even called their new, and far less generous, social security offices “Job Centres”, in English, by way of blatant homage).

Suggested reading

British centrists' deluded worship of Germany

By Aris Roussinos

And yes, she made breathtaking mistakes. Her 2011 decision to close all of Germany’s nuclear power stations in the wake of Fukushima was either a kneejerk reaction, or a cunning plan to win over Germany’s Green voters. The need to replace nuclear led her to keep filthy brown coal power stations open and to support the Nordstrom gas pipeline which feeds German industry’s maw directly from Russia. As a result, Germany is incredibly vulnerable to energy blackmail from Moscow, Putin’s regime has been mightily succoured, and the average German citizen now produces getting on for twice as much atmospheric carbon as the average Frenchman or Brit.

When she unilaterally decided in autumn 2015 to open Germany (and thereby, in practice, Europe) to mass immigration from the Middle East and elsewhere, one can only imagine that she was trying to recapture the moral high ground from the likes of Yanis Varoufakis, who had been telling the world that in the wake of the financial crash she was acting like some kind of economic Nazi (images of Merkel sporting a Hitler moustache were seen all over southern Europe and even in Ireland).

As the rest of Europe predictably failed to follow her high-minded, high-handed lead, Germany seemed for a while to be tottering on the edge of serious public discontent: just think back to 2016 and 2017, when gloomy liberals and delighted Trump-and-Brexit boosters were both intoning that the AfD was going to break out from its base in the old East Germany and tear into the CDU. Some in Merkel’s party itself were proclaiming that the only way to survive was to “close off the right flank” (die rechte Flanke schliessen) — i.e., adopt the AfD’s policies.

More from this author

How Germany came in from the cold

By James Hawes

History must have been in the mood to make things pretty obvious for once, since it has given us the most perfect mathematical example of how, and how not, to deal with loud-mouthed populism. In 2017, the AfD won 12.6% of the national vote. That is, of course, exactly the same as Ukip won here in 2015. And look now at the tale of these two conservative parties.

The spineless David Cameron felt besieged by the people who eminent Tory predecessors had called “bastards” (John Major) and like “some demented Marxist sect” (Douglas Hurd) — and who he himself allegedly called “swivel-eyed loons”. So he rolled over and gave them the referendum he didn’t want himself, and which was the only way they would ever be able to enact their anti-EU, Anglosphere fantasies. He was blithely sure he would win, and hence become unchallengeable.

The stout Angela Merkel thought otherwise: I have twice been told by a German insider (I can’t name him, but he is undoubtedly of the status to have been the eyewitness he says he was) that at the 2015 G7 meeting at Schloss Elmau, Merkel, Cameron’s best friend in Europe, personally begged him not to hold his utterly needless referendum and “throw away 800 years of parliamentary rule”. But what? Have patience? See things quietly through? Make a rational, cross-party deal for what the vast majority of MPs on both sides agreed was the good of the country? Not he. If Angela Merkel had been Germany’s David Cameron, God alone knows where we would now be.

Suggested reading

The German coronavirus mystery

By Tom Chivers

Instead, she stuck to her guns. She toughed it out. She refused point blank to trim her course in order to pick up AfD voters, or ever to countenance any form of coalition with the populist Right, even when siren voices urged it. The result is that the AfD, far from making any further advances into the old German West, is retreating even in its eastern fastnesses.

She may have made her mistakes, but when the healing sleep of time (as Goethe called it in Faust) has washed away her quotidian errors, she will be remembered as the leader who carried the CDU, not the other way around, and who saved the West in its hour of trial. And as she leaves the stage, irrespective of which coalition Germany ends up with, she will be able to say, like a German Mr Chips, “I thought I heard you — one of you — saying it was a pity Mutti never had any children … eh? … But I have, you know … I have … look, thousands of them – and all of them decent Western Centrists!”

Ave et vale, Angela Merkel, and thank God you were there when we needed you.

And over it all will preside Queen Angela the Great, soon to bow out, most likely replaced by her chosen successor Armin Laschet — she must, in some psychological sense, be its Queen, not its Chancellor, since it is impossible for any mere democratic leader to have approval ratings of 80% in the 15^th year of their tenure. She is, quite simply, there because the Germans feel they need her.

And indeed, under her beneficent rule, modern Germany provides Europe with its one world-class industrial economy, its most rock-solid democratic institutions — able, as almost no others have been, to shrug off the challenge of populism — and its bank of last resort. It is fast becoming functionally bi-lingual in English, and is in some ways more like the real Britain than modern Britain: an eyewitness has twice told me how, how at the 2015 G7 at Schloss Elmau, Queen Angela asked David Cameron why on earth he would even consider putting 800 years of unique parliamentary tradition aside in favour of his utterly needless referendum.

So let us celebrate modern Germany. But the reign of Queen Angela, prolonged by the Covid epidemic, will soon be over. Which makes 18 January 2021 the ideal time for us all, and especially the Germans themselves, to properly consider their history — which is to say, who they truly are.

The unification of 18 January 1871 is taught in most schools, here and in Germany, as just one of the great National Unifications of the mid-19^th century. The implication is that it was simply part of some natural, general and thus (according to the religion of Progress) virtually inevitable unfolding of history. In truth, it was the most fatal event in modern European history.

The so-called “German Unification” — more accurately the Reichsgruendungstag (“Day of the Founding of the Empire”) — saw the birth of a radically strange new state which, August Hayek argued, was the seed-bed of both Bolshevism and National Socialism. It represented the final, formal step in the complete takeover, by force, of wealthy, ancient, largely Catholic Germany by a far poorer and smaller Lutheran outlier whose sole but decisive advantage was that it was entirely organised for war. British readers might try to understand it by imagining that in the chaos of our own Civil Wars, the Calvinist Scots had beaten Cromwell at Dunbar and then, in alliance with their cousins, the Ulster Scots, installed Charles II as puppet king over far larger and wealthier, but hopelessly fractured England, annexing the whole of its wealth and power to their own project.

The division between the two Germanies was, until the 19th century, almost absolute. Cologne (Colonia Agrippinensis) was officially named in 50AD and designed to be the capital of Roman Germania. When the Empire fell, the baton of European civilisation and Christianity was passed, with no real break, to the Western Germanic dynasties of the Merovingians and then the Franks. Re-founded in 800AD under the greatest Frank of all, Charlemagne, the new Roman Empire (almost identical to the original EEC in geography) had its capital in Aachen. In various incarnations, that Empire remained the heart of European civilisation for a thousand years.

More from this author

England has always been two nations

By James Hawes

In the East, things were very different. Twelve hundred years after Augustus dedicated his first altar in Cologne, the Prussians were pagan Balts who had barely made First Contact with European civilisation. Then, in 1226, the Teutonic Knights arrived on the borders of modern day Lithuania and Russia, bearing fire and the sword. Eventually taking on the name of the tribe they had come to crush, they slowly expanded. Their spiritual heartland, East Prussia, remained a colonial realm, with a German elite lording it over Slav or Baltic helots, until within living memory (which is why Heinrich Himmler so loved the place, making it his blueprint for the Nazi New Order in the East).

My late father-in-law, born there in 1926, was taught to ride by a Russian stable-boy and listened as his parents spoke Lithuanian to their tenants. Any colonial elite like this has to be constantly on guard, and the Teutonic Knights eventually developed into Junker Prussia, that uniquely militarised realm of which Voltaire famously said: “All states have armies but in Prussia, the army has a state”.

This Prussia was the first place to embrace Lutheranism and fracture the unity of mediaeval Europe. Though it rose to prominence as the robber-state villain of the War of the Austrian Succession, then as the extremely lucky survivor of the Seven Years War (when it was saved from destruction only by the death of Catherine the Great), it remained an outlier of real Germany: “What did we care about Prussia, back then?” (Was ging uns Preussen damals an?) wrote Germany’s greatest author, Goethe, looking back on his youth in mid-18th-century Frankfurt. Yet within a century, this distant, dirt-poor, only semi-German colonial realm based in what’s now Russia and Poland ended up completely taking over the great lands which had been the heart of Western Europe for the best part of two millennia.

How did it happen? We are the villains. In 1814, determined to exit troublesome Europe, Britain unilaterally gifted Prussia a vast chunk of the most developed territory in Western Europe. This so-called Rhenish Prussia, overwhelmingly Catholic, provided the state-worshipping militarists of Königsberg and Berlin with a gigantic increase in revenues, and industries like Krupp’s of Essen. Panglossian British liberals assumed (as their descendants in the 1990s assumed of China) that Prosperity and Reform must inevitably go hand-in-hand.

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

After all, the Prussians were Protestants and surely, as Lord Macauley taught, Protestants were progressives? Instead, Otto von Bismarck toughed it out, Tiananmen Square-like, with the Rhineland parliamentarians: at the height of the constitutional struggle, in June 1865, the centre of Cologne was cleared at bayonet-point by troops who even enlisted an elephant from the zoo to help drive the reformists from the streets. Meanwhile, armies of state-funded Prussian university professors, their works consciously modelled on our own Whig History, embarked on a campaign to prove that Royal and Lutheran Prussia had a manifest destiny to lead all Germany. Then, in 1866, Bismarck declared long-planned war on Western Germany.

All the four other fully-fledged kingdoms of Germany backed Austria. Hanover defeated a Prussian army in the first major engagement. But the tax-take and hardware from the Rhineland gave Prussia an unbeatable edge. On 3 July 1866 at Koenniggratz the Austrians, who still used Waterloo-style muzzle-loaders, were routed at the greatest battle in Europe between 1815 and 1914. Without any real hope, the west of Germany fought on for another three weeks. Frankfurt, the ancient imperial capital, was surrounded by General von Manteuffel, who informed its citizenry that if they didn’t provide a vast ransom in bullion within 24 hours, he would give them over to plunder by his East Prussian farm-boys. This wasn’t unification, it was conquest. Bismarck waited until 1871 to dragoon the remaining kingdoms into his “German Empire” simply because he was, until then, still unsure that Prussia could digest them. Not for nothing did Disraeli call the new Empire “Prussia-Germany” or simply “Prussia” to the end of his days.

Now, Prussia-Germany was able to deploy all Germany’s industry and manhood eastwards, in pursuit of what had always really mattered to it. By late 1887, the future Chancellor von Buelow was already describing a plan which sounds like Ludendorff’s vision in 1917-18 and Hitler’s in 1941-2: the Prussian-German armies would  “devastate Russia’s black earth region”, destroy its ports and industries and set up a vassal-state in the Ukraine. This was nothing to do with German thinking and everything to do with Prussian thinking: 1871-1945 was the great aberration in German history.

It is incredibly tempting to dream about how different things might have been had Napoleon simply abolished Prussia, as he actively considered doing after trouncing it in 1806.  Imagine: after Napoleon’s fall, we would have had a wealthy, voluntarily but loosely united, largely Catholic Germany, its capital Frankfurt, at the heart of a golden European century which had no need to copy the Prussians and turn the Continent into an armed camp… the Good Russians, with this example before them, finally consigning Absolutism to the rubbish-dump of history…  Alas! Alternative History is even more absurd than Whig History. But if the past can’t be changed, it can be learned from.

Suggested reading

For Germans and Jews, the past is never over

By Paul Morland

The first lesson is that Germany is not naturally some megalomaniac power bent on domination. That was Prussia. Prussia is gone. If the western Germans keep their nerve, they can safely ignore the last undead hauntings from the East. Germany’s future is where it’s past always truly was: in the West.

The greater, and more worrying lesson is that the most ancient, civilised and wealthy lands can, if disunited and unprepared to defend themselves, end up powerless against brute force wielded by a leader prepared to play va banque, backed by a bloated military who positively long to prove themselves irreplaceable. One of the many tragedies of Brexit is that an EU Army would inevitably have had English as its language of command. We, with the only major battle-hardened force in Europe, would surely have led it. No wonder Putin longed for Brexit.

So let’s not deny the excellent modern Germans our attendance at their celebration. But once the Beethoven and the fireworks and the black-red-gold lights (which would have infuriated Bismarck) on the Brandenburg Gate have faded, let us — above all, the Germans themselves — learn from the their real history. For time, as the man said,  is short.

But she wasn’t, of course — she merely expressed it. It was especially bitter in her day because a century of political warfare came to a head. For a hundred years, ever since the dawn of democracy with the Third Reform Act, British politics had been all about whether the industrial North (Liberal, then Labour) could forge alliances with the Celts to outgun the almost impregnable Tory bloc of the English South.

On the surface, Thatcher was defeating the miners of Northern England, Wales and Scotland in the name of modernity: what she was really doing was re-establishing the absolute dominance of the English South within England — restoring the way things had always been until the Industrial Revolution muscled up the North. The North-South divide within England wasn’t caused by Thatcher, nor even by the Industrial Revolution itself. It has existed since before England was England.

When the legions of the Emperor Claudius invaded in 43 AD, the limit of the tribes in Britannia who already made their own coins closely follow the line of the Jurassic Divide (marked by the purple line), where the fertile lime and chalk soils of the south-eastern quadrant of Britannia give way to far, far older igneous rocks and shales. At the height of Roman Britannia in around 300 AD, the limits of their villa civilisation also correspond almost exactly to this line.

The fact is that geology (better soils) climate (warmer weather) and location (being closer to the new ideas and great markets of the continent) conspire uniquely in favour of the South. If geography is fate, then it is nowhere more so than in England. And so, when the English themselves conquered and re-named England, they inherited this timeless divide along with everything else.

Our first historian, the Venerable Bede, repeatedly notes that the English are split into northerners and southerners. In 735 AD, the Papacy signed off on the division of the English Church into York and Canterbury. Athelstan briefly united the land in 927AD — but by now much of the North was firmly settled by Scandinavians and unity was only skin-deep: when the Vikings came back at the end of the 10^th century, they found (as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle laments) a ready welcome in the North, crippling English resistance and finally enabling the total annexation of England by Cnut in 1016.

And then came the Normans. Harold was ready to hit William the moment he landed, but when Harald of Norway landed in the North, there was nothing for it but to race up to confront him: the Northerners would (and some did) rise up for a Viking pretender at the drop of a hat, feeling more kinship with Scandinavians than with the Godwins of Wessex. Harold beat Harald, but then had to face William with a hastily-gathered new army. The North-South divide doomed England to centuries of French-speaking rule.

So long as the new elite stayed a French-speaking caste, they gave England its first real cultural and political unity. But as they became Anglicised, so the old divide reappeared. By 1276, chivalric heralds were treating England North by Trent (citra aquam de Trente ex parte boriali) as a separate division, with its own King at Arms. The medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge divided their student bodies into Australes and Boreales,  with the Trent again the border.

More from this author

It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

By the late 14^th century, the elite were all speaking English and acting like good old-fashioned English warlords again: in 1398, at Nottingham, Richard II threatened the men of Londoun, and of xvii shires lyying aboute (in other words, Southern England) that if they didn’t pay him a vast sum, he wolde gadre a greet [h]ost forto destroie thaym.

In 1405 the Percys and the Mortimers seriously proposed dividing England permanently into northern and southern realms. Fifty years later, their descendants were central players in the Wars of the Roses, in which the rules of Anglo-Norman chivalry were permanently abandoned, and whose line-up quickly focussed into Northerners and Welshmen vs Southerners and  Westerners.  At the battle of Towton in 1461, 20,000 Englishmen out of a population of under three million were hacked to death at close quarters on a single afternoon because both Northerners and Southerners (who could barely understand one another’s English) gave battle determined to offer no quarter.

The new Tudor dynasty seemed to settle things because they were able to join the muscle of their native Wales with the power of the South: the North had no chance against this alliance. The Reformation nailed down the political and religious hegemony of the South by brute force against the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) and the Northern Rebellion (1569), when Elizabeth’s Privy Council warned her: “North of Trent men know no other Prince but only a Percy or a Neville”.

But the question was reopened with the accession of James I and the attempt to annex Ireland: now, the North could hope for alliances with the Celts against the overweening Southerners. This was the central motor of the Civil War, the fundamental issue which drove Britons to kill other Britons in greater numbers, proportionately, than the Germans did in the First World War: was the South to rule the British Isles, or would a Royal league of Celts and Northerners be able to defy it? Only by playing the ultimate high-risk game — radicalising ordinary Southerners by announcing that they were God’s agents — was Cromwell able to win the day.

Suggested reading

Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

After the Glorious Revolution, Englishmen gratefully abandoned ideology as, once again, the issue seemed settled. First Great Britain, then the United Kingdom, were formed by a united British Isles elite whose cultural identity was centred on the South — or rather, on the right bits of it, i.e. central London, Bath and Brighton, and the rural Home Counties. Then the Industrial Revolution, during which geology for once favoured the North, revived its fortunes: previously the fortress of Catholicism, the North now expressed its non-Southern-ness by embracing the stripped-down Rites and flattened hierarchies of Non-Conformism. At the peak of the United Kingdom’s industrial pre-eminence, the Chartist movement tried one last time to revive Northern political resistance, even attempting to create an alternative Parliament in Manchester. They failed.

But then, in 1884, the masses (who had never been asked about the creation of the United Kingdom) got votes. The Celts immediately began to vote either openly (the Irish) or implicitly (the Scots and Welsh) for nationalist agendas; but so, in their own way did the English. Immediately, the Southern English formed a virtually impregnable Tory bloc, while the Northerners voted otherwise, and looked for alliances (often blatantly tactical or even downright cynical) with the Celts, to outgun them. That is the entire story of our politics in the democratic era, and it merely replicates the sides, and the tactics, of the Civil War itself.

Suggested reading

How Birmingham changed the world

By Paul Lay

In 2019, Boris Johnson finally embraced the destiny manifest since 1885 by admitting that the UK was a political impossibility in the democratic era and transforming the Conservative and Unionist Party into the English National Party in all but name. It was, by general agreement, his oft-repeated promise to “level up” the North — to treat it, at last, as a genuinely equal part of England — that won him his election. The appeal did what nationalism does: it persuaded people whose lives are actually very different that they somehow share a common interest.

It won’t last. The way in which the Covid-19 epidemic has so swiftly and easily fitted into the age-old language of the North-South divide reveals, once again, that whatever kings may want, or would-be Prime Ministers may promise, England remains as split as in Bede’s day, by forces which, in one way or another, have always seemed beyond anybody’s control.

Die Linke, Germany’s equivalent of Corbynite Labour but (happily for Germany) its very own party, also did well in Thuringia — spectacularly so, hitting 31% and becoming the strongest single party in a state administration for the first time.

So, judging from those results, is German liberal democracy caught in a fatal pincer-movement of the populists, who claim to be mortal enemies but are both anti-EU, anti-NATO and pro-Putin?

Recent election posters from the populist “left” and “right”, accusing the establishment of NATO warmongering.

Well, yes and no. It depends on how you look at it; or rather, where you look at it. For talking about German politics nationally is becoming almost as meaningless as talking about the UK as if it were, in our days, a single political unit.

A map of the 2017 Bundestag election shows this division with extraordinary clarity.

But why do Easterners vote so differently from Westerners, thereby upsetting the political applecart of Europe’s most important economy? Right across the respectable political spectrum, Germans seek desperately for easy, modern explanations.

Conservatives tell themselves that the East Germans did, after all, unfairly pay the final bill for 1933-45, being traumatised by half a century of occupation by the Red Army, so that it’s no surprise they feel hard done-by; free-marketeers in the German ordoliberal tradition, which assigns the state a more active role in enabling and regulating than Anglo-Saxon classical liberals do, argue that more should be done to attract — effectively, to bribe — private enterprise into the old East.

Suggested reading

The far-Right's appeal to resentful Germans

By James Bloodworth

And then leftists claim that former East Germans are simply driven by righteous if misdirected anger at having been de-industrialised by predatory western capitalists, who asset-stripped perfectly viable ex-GDR State businesses (although they’d struggle to find any actual viable examples). Because of this they thus deserve massive, ongoing state help.

Meanwhile, the old West just keeps on footing the bill, and since 1990, well over €2 trillion has been pumped from Western taxpayers to the East. The so-called Reunification has dragged West Germany back into the role which Bismarck assigned it: to subsidise the economically moribund East because it is their patriotic duty.

Western German voters, rather sick of this, are more and more wary of keeping up this settlement, on top of their traditional role as paymasters of the stable Europe from which German industry benefits so greatly. Yet the Prussian myth of “reunification” has trumped economic reality, which goes to show something we in Britain should know all too well: that there is nothing worse for a country than to misunderstand its own history.

Southerners in the USA dwell on the Civil War as if it were yesterday, but who in western Germany now recalls that Germany was never “united” in the first place? It was militarily defeated by Bismarck’s Prussia in 1866, after which Austria was kicked out, some of the beaten states simply annexed by Prussia, and some allowed a sort of half-life until 1871. Who, today, dares to say that the only definition by which East Germany was more German than Austria is Bismarck’s definition?

Suggested reading

Will Brexit leave us dining on rat poo?

By Tom Chivers

The founder of West Germany, Conrad Adenauer, knew his history. After the First World War he begged the French and British to help him split Prussia off from Germany. When he had to visit Berlin, he would always draw the curtains of his train compartment as he crossed the fatal River Elbe, muttering “Here we go, Asia again!” (“Schon wieder Asien!”) After the second war, though obliged in public to support re-unification, he told the British most secretly that he was determined it should never happen.

The most obvious sign that there are two countries is the confessional divide between Catholics and Lutherans. Anyone who doubts how significant that division is should just look at a map of the Nazi vote in 1932 superimposed onto a map of the Catholic population according to the 1934 census. They are, to all intents and purposes, mirror-images.

Religion in Germany is really just a sign of the Germany you come from: the one which partook centrally of western European civilisation right from the start — or the one which has a completely different trajectory. The classic line between these two Germanies is the River Elbe, which the Romans thought the natural limit of Germania. Charlemagne’s restored “Roman” Empire ended there, too.

While early medieval western Europe was developing its unique signature, the power-sharing of international Church and national-state, the lands beyond the river Elbe were still populated by pagan, illiterate tribes. No real attempt was made to exert German control and settlement beyond that point until 1147; Cologne had already been a flourishing western European city for 1,200 years when the first German conqueror-farmers reached Berlin.

If there’s one thing worse for everyone than a successful mass-colonisation, it’s a half-successful mass-colonisation — ask anyone in Ulster. East of the Elbe, the Germans never entirely supplanted the Slavs (some, the Sorbs, remain even in the truncated eastern Germany of today, just north of Dresden).

Suggested reading

Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

For 800 years, generation upon generation experienced this same colonial reality. Within living memory, whether you called your hometown Posen or Poznan, Danzig or Gdansk, could be a matter of life and death, on both sides.

So while no one ever disputed that the western Germans belonged where they were, the eastern Germans always knew that the helots might rise up one day. Like the poor whites of the American South, the settlers of Rhodesia, the Protestants of Ulster or the Pieds-Noir of Algeria, the eastern Germans came to believe that they must, above all, have a political elite of their very own tribe, ready to respond instantly and ruthlessly if their supremacy was ever challenged.

Social psychologists call this “social dominance orientation”, the cultural belief that “we” have to at all costs lord it over “them”. The Germans of the east came to accept rule by a caste of warlords — the famous Prussian Junkers — and, later, the new Lutheran paradigm of a state which controlled its very own Church and against which there was hence no appeal.

Not for nothing did Friedrich Hayek see Prussia as the template for all modern totalitarian states, whether of the Left or of the Right. Max Weber constantly referred to a place he called Ostelbien, East Elbia, palpably different, for all its local variation, to ciselbian, western Germany

Of course, psychologists, philosophers and sociologists can all be wrong and often are. Electoral maps, however, do not lie. They show that ever since Germans have had votes, eastern Germans have voted very differently from western Germans.

Under the German Empire (1871-1918), the Prussian Conservatives — conservative in this context meaning supporters of royal and militarist rule under an agrarian Junker elite — depended almost completely on votes from the East, having scarcely any traction at all in the West.

The First World War changed nothing. In the first normal elections of the Weimar Republic, the extreme Prussian conservatives of the DNVP (officially anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, violently antidemocratic, their members implicated in several high-profile political murders) were the second largest party nationally but — exactly as with the AfD today — that position was entirely dependent on votes from the East.

And when the deluge finally came in 1933 it was, again, only thanks to heavy votes in the East that Hitler got 43.9% nationally, enabling him (with support from the rump DNVP) to seize power by semi-constitutional means. If the whole country had voted like the Rhineland or Munich, he could only have attempted an armed coup, which the Army would have crushed.

In short, wondering how voters in the East of Germany would go for antidemocratic, authoritarian and anti-EU politics, while the West of Germany sticks with the CDU and goes Green, is like asking how it can be that a Democrat should win New York at the same time as Arkansas and Alabama vote Republican. It’s all about cultural history, and Germany has its very own version of the Mason-Dixon line, but far older and deeper.

This is bad news, of course, for Germans wedded to the notion of a united and more or less culturally homogenous state. On the other hand, it is very good news for Germans who fear that the politics of eastern Germany might spread. They won’t, any more than New York is ever going to be an Open Carry state.

If the West holds its nerve — that means, on a practical level, no preferential financial treatment and never entering coalitions with the AfD or Die Linke, however awkward that may make things — the “spirit of the East”, as Adenauer called it, is no longer strong enough to pull Germany away from its natural place at the heart of Western Europe.