Seen from Warsaw, something about Germany now feels ominous.
Not because Germany is becoming Nazi Germany again. That comparison is too easy, historically lazy and perhaps even reassuring, because it allows the present to be dismissed as repetition. History is rarely so obliging. What is happening seems more complicated. Germany appears to be arguing with a version of Europe that Germany itself did an extraordinary amount to create.
At the end of August 2026 the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is polling at close to 30% nationally. In Saxony-Anhalt, in the former East Germany, it is polling at around 45% before the state election on 6 September. Saxony-Anhalt contains Dessau. Dessau contains the Bauhaus. Sometimes history lays the metaphor on that thickly. A century ago the Bauhaus offered one particularly German answer to modernity: international, experimental, rational, technologically curious, impatient with inherited boundaries between art, architecture and ordinary life. The Nazis hated it, denounced it and ultimately helped drive it from Germany. Now the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt has again turned the Bauhaus into an object of cultural suspicion, attacking the rootlessness and internationalism it supposedly represents and promising a more patriotic cultural policy.
From Poland this matters in ways that are difficult to separate from history. For much of modern Polish history the fear was that Germany might become too German: too powerful, too national, too certain of its own destiny, too willing to turn the countries to its east into objects of geopolitical imagination. Perhaps the anxiety now is subtly different. Eastern Europe may have reason to worry about what happens if Germany ceases to be European enough.
It is not an entirely new Polish thought. In Berlin in November 2011, in the middle of the eurozone crisis, the then (and now, again) Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski said something that was startling precisely because a Polish foreign minister was saying it to Germans: “I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.” Germany, he said, had become “Europe’s indispensable nation”. It should lead, not dominate. The context was different, but the intuition seems worth recovering. There are moments when Poland has more to fear from a Germany unwilling or unable to sustain the European system around it than from German strength exercised within that system.
I should probably also say what kind of claim I am making here, and what kind I am not. I am not a Germanist, and I am certainly not an expert on German philosophy. I worked for Deutsche Welle for many years in Bonn and loved the place, but somehow managed, rather disgracefully, to leave without learning German to any meaningful extent. My Germany was partly an institutional Germany experienced in English: the systems, the coordination, the collegiality, the assumption that people should be trained properly, the belief in communication, a certain everyday decency in how work was organised. None of this made Germany perfect, and Deutsche Welle was hardly Germany in miniature. But I think I absorbed something of the Federal Republic institutionally before I started trying to understand it intellectually.
Bonn itself probably mattered. It was so spectacularly unlike the capitals great powers usually build for themselves: modest, provincial, competent, slightly dull and rather lovely. The old West German capital seemed almost to embody the political culture that had created it, a state suspicious of theatre, wary of too much grandeur, happier with procedure than performance. I liked that. Perhaps I romanticised it. But when I now read Hegel, Habermas or Adorno, or think about Bildung, institutions and the postwar European order, I recognise fragments of something I encountered much more mundanely in meeting rooms, editorial conferences, training sessions and the extraordinary German determination that everybody should know what everybody else was doing.
So this is not a history of German thought offered from a position of mastery. It is closer to an attempt, by a Brit in Warsaw, to understand something I once lived alongside without really knowing its language.
I do not mean European in the sentimental sense of flags, slogans, Erasmus programmes and speeches about our common values. Nor do I mean that Germany somehow invented Europe. Italy gave Europe the Renaissance. France gave it revolution, republicanism, rationalism and one of its great literary cultures. Britain gave it empiricism, liberalism, industrial capitalism, parliamentary government and political economy. Poland, sitting uneasily between German, Russian, Habsburg and its own republican traditions, absorbed and resisted all of them. Europe has never been one civilisation. It is a quarrelling accumulation of them.
But what strikes me about German-speaking Europe is a particularly persistent belief that ideas could form a civilisation, that freedom was not simply the absence of interference but something that had to be made real through law, education, institutions and relations between people; that a university could change what kind of human being entered it; that a museum, library, orchestra or public square was not decorative expenditure after the serious work of society had been completed but part of society’s serious work; that history itself could be thought about structurally; that reason had political consequences; that culture mattered.
It also supplied the most terrifying demonstration that none of this guarantees decency.
That contradiction is why I keep finding myself wanting to understand Hegel.
I am not entirely sure why. Or rather, I was not sure. Hegel leads backwards to Kant, sideways towards Goethe, Schiller and German Romanticism, forwards to Marx and eventually into sociology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, critical theory and much of the intellectual furniture through which Europeans still understand themselves. Around him are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, Marx, Weber and Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer, eventually Jürgen Habermas. Around them again are Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Goethe, Hölderlin, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Brecht, Günter Grass, Bauhaus.
How did one relatively fragmented part of Europe produce this extraordinary density of philosophy, music, scholarship, literature and social theory?
Germany did not exist as a unified country until 1871. Mozart was Austrian. Kafka belonged to German-speaking Prague. Freud and Wittgenstein came from Vienna. Beethoven was born in Bonn and made his career in Vienna. Kant spent almost his entire life in Königsberg, now Kaliningrad. The intellectual geography was never identical to the borders of the modern Federal Republic. It was a German-speaking world spread across kingdoms, principalities, imperial cities, universities and competing capitals, and its political fragmentation may have been part of its strength. There was no London or Paris capable of monopolising cultural life.
Something accelerates dramatically in the late eighteenth century. Kant asks what sounds like a simple question: what can human beings actually know? Instead of philosophy merely describing a world that exists independently outside us, he turns attention back towards the conditions through which that world becomes available to consciousness. We are not passive spectators standing before reality. The structures through which we perceive, categorise and understand reality become part of the philosophical problem.
With Hegel, the world becomes historical in a new sense. Consciousness develops. Institutions develop. Forms of freedom develop. Contradiction is no longer merely evidence that somebody has made an error in reasoning, but becomes part of movement itself. A social form produces tensions it cannot contain, and through those tensions something else becomes possible. His question is therefore not simply: what is true? It is: how did what appears true become possible, and what contradiction inside it is already changing it?
At least, that is the Hegel I think I am beginning to understand. Anyone who has spent a lifetime studying him is entitled to tell me I have got it wrong.
But the idea travels. Marx turns Hegel towards production, ownership and class. Psychoanalysis, through a different genealogy, makes the human subject internally divided and opaque to itself. Critical theory asks how apparently rational institutions reproduce domination. Contemporary arguments over class, gender, race, nation and identity still repeatedly make recognisably Hegelian moves whether or not the people making them have read a page of Hegel: identities are relational, social positions depend upon one another, masters require slaves to be masters, the supposedly autonomous self discovers itself through the recognition of another, contradictions are not accidents occurring on the surface of social life but structures through which social life moves.
At almost the same moment German Romanticism refuses the proposition that reason alone can contain human existence. Feeling matters. Nature and beauty matter. Poetry matters. Imagination is itself a form of knowledge. Goethe is not merely writing novels. Schiller is not merely producing plays. Hölderlin is not merely composing poems. Philosophy, literature and music participate in the same argument about freedom, nature, individuality, order, emotion and what a human being might become.
Then there is another German word: Bildung. Education translates it badly. Formation is closer, cultivation perhaps closer still. The important point is that knowledge is not simply vocational equipment. Education changes what kind of person one is capable of becoming.
Perhaps this is partly why my memories of Deutsche Welle keep entering the argument. Training there was not something remedial that happened when an employee had failed. It seemed built into the idea of an institution. People were supposed to learn things. Colleagues were supposed to tell one another things. Procedures were not simply bureaucratic obstacles but ways of allowing hundreds of people from different countries and languages to work together without screaming continuously at one another. Again, I may be reading too much into one workplace. But there was an assumption behind it that I came to value enormously: institutions could make cooperation possible.
There is a broader cultural assumption here that still fascinates me: civilisation can be constructed. A university matters. A library matters. A concert hall matters. A railway station matters. A public square matters. Institutions are material propositions about what society believes human beings are for.
By the nineteenth century the intellectual machinery becomes almost ridiculous in its productivity. Marx transforms Hegel by locating historical contradiction in material relations, production and class. Schopenhauer rejects Hegelian optimism and makes blind striving – will – fundamental. Nietzsche attacks herd morality and finally the innocent position from which philosophers imagine themselves speaking. Max Weber asks how capitalism, bureaucracy, rationalisation and authority reorganise modern existence. Georg Simmel examines money, cities, strangers, fashion and the micro encounters through which society actually happens. Ferdinand Tönnies gives us Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. German historical scholarship, philology, chemistry, physics and university science acquire immense international prestige.
Then comes the period I find perhaps most fascinating: roughly 1900 to 1933. Husserl develops phenomenology by returning philosophy to consciousness and lived experience. Heidegger asks what it means to be. Freud, in Vienna, makes the self radically opaque to itself. Weber reconstructs modernity around rationalisation and disenchantment. Walter Benjamin wanders through commodities, technology, architecture, memory and cities. The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research is founded in 1923. Bauhaus transforms architecture and design. Berlin becomes one of the great laboratories of modern urban culture.
And then comes 1933.
This is the fact through which every celebration of German intellectual civilisation has to pass.
How could one of the most educated societies in the world become barbaric? Education had not saved it. Universities had not saved it. Goethe had not saved it. Beethoven had not saved it. Philosophy had not saved it. Jewish scholars and political opponents were removed. Intellectuals fled. The Frankfurt Institute escaped, eventually continuing its work in the United States. Physicists, mathematicians, artists, directors, writers and academics left Germany and Austria in enormous numbers.
The frightening lesson is not that civilisation disappeared and barbarism replaced it. It is that they coexisted. Universities, orchestras, philosophers, libraries and scientists can inhabit the same society as racial law, camps and organised mass murder. Culture does not vaccinate a country against cruelty. Intelligence does not abolish desire, resentment, obedience or the pleasures of belonging. One can listen to Beethoven and behave monstrously afterwards.
Postwar German thought therefore inherits a question more difficult than the one Kant began with. It is no longer simply what can reason know, or how can freedom become historical. It is: what happens when reason itself becomes implicated in domination?
Adorno and Horkheimer return to a Germany that cannot simply resume the intellectual project interrupted in 1933. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Enlightenment reason is turned against itself. The ability to classify, administer, calculate and control – precisely the capacities modern societies celebrate as rational – can become instrumental and murderous. Reason therefore needs criticism from within reason. Adorno becomes suspicious of reconciliation and totality, suspicious of philosophical systems that too easily announce that contradictions have found their place within a meaningful whole. After Auschwitz, the idea that history necessarily resolves itself begins to look obscene.
Yet the postwar German answer was not simply pessimism. The Frankfurt Institute became involved in democratic education and research into authoritarianism. Germany slowly developed a culture in which memory itself became institutional practice. The Nazi past would not be allowed politely to become merely past. Trials, memorials, school curricula, historical research, literature and eventually public rituals returned repeatedly to the question of responsibility.
Then comes Habermas, perhaps the crucial figure for understanding the Germany now being contested. He refuses to abandon the Enlightenment simply because Enlightenment reason can be corrupted. Perhaps rationality does not consist in one philosopher constructing the correct system. Perhaps reason is something that emerges between people when claims can be made, contested, defended and revised. The public sphere matters. Communication matters. Democratic institutions matter. Legitimacy matters. Freedom is not something an individual possesses in isolation but something sustained through practices among citizens.
Hegel remains inside this. Freedom still has to become institutional rather than merely rhetorical. Recognition still matters. History remains a learning process without guaranteeing that anyone learns.
And after the catastrophe of German nationalism, Habermas offers another important idea: constitutional patriotism. A political community does not have to be held together by blood, ancestry or mystical soil. Citizens can identify with democratic procedures, rights and constitutional institutions. Belonging can be civic rather than ethnic.
It is difficult to overstate how much of postwar Europe seems to depend upon some version of that proposition.
The European Union, in its best interpretation, is constitutional patriotism enlarged beyond the nation. Germans remain German, Poles remain Polish, Italians Italian, but sovereignty becomes layered and shared. States bind themselves to institutions precisely because European history has demonstrated what unrestrained states can do. Borders remain but become less absolute. National interest remains but is forced into negotiation with the interests of others. The political achievement is not that Europeans begin loving one another. It is that they construct institutions in which they do not have to.
West Germany becomes one of the principal architects of this Europe not despite German history but because of it. German power is returned to Europe by embedding it in Europe.
After 1989, that proposition moves east. Germany reunifies. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and later the Baltic states enter NATO and the European Union. For countries trapped between Germany and Russia for much of their modern history, this is an extraordinary reversal. Germany is no longer primarily the danger from the west. It becomes part of the institutional architecture protecting the East.
Sikorski’s 2011 speech makes more sense to me in that context. His remark about fearing German inactivity more than German power was not a declaration of faith in Germany as inherently benign. Quite the opposite. It was an argument that German power had become tolerable, even indispensable, because it operated through a European system in which others had a voice. His qualification mattered: Germany should lead, not dominate, and Poland should be included in the decisions.
Which is why the argument inside Germany in 2026 feels different when viewed from Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga or Kyiv.
Russia is waging war against Ukraine. The Baltic states are rebuilding defence structures around the possibility that Russia may eventually test NATO directly. Poland is spending heavily on its military. Germany itself now acknowledges that the Russian threat is concrete, not hypothetical. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has described Baltic security as German security, while Germany is expanding its military contribution to NATO’s eastern flank and deepening cooperation with Poland, Denmark and Lithuania. This Germany remains recognisably the postwar European Germany: national security understood through alliance, sovereignty exercised through institutions, the eastern frontier treated as a common frontier.
But another Germany is becoming politically stronger.
The AfD says German policy should again be organised explicitly around German interests. It calls for a Europe of sovereign fatherlands rather than deeper European integration. Its 2025 federal programme opposed further eastward expansion of both NATO and the EU, envisaged Ukraine as a neutral state outside both organisations, called for the removal of sanctions against Russia and the restoration of economic relations including the Nord Stream pipelines. These positions can be defended as realism, national sovereignty or opposition to escalation; that is how the party presents them. Seen from countries lying between Germany and Russia, however, they carry another historical resonance. What appears from Berlin as strategic autonomy can look from Warsaw or Tallinn like decisions about the security of Eastern Europe being returned to great powers.
That is the ominous part.
Eastern Europe once feared a Germany that was too German. It may now have reason to fear a Germany that no longer wants to be European in the particular postwar sense Germany helped create.
But even that formulation is too simple, and perhaps too comfortable for an outsider looking west from Poland, because the AfD has not arrived from outside German history. This is where Hegel becomes useful again. The AfD is a contradiction produced inside contemporary Germany.
Its extraordinary strength in the former East cannot be explained simply by saying that millions of eastern Germans have become bad people. East Germany experienced not one but two collapsed political orders within half a century. Nazism ended in military destruction and Soviet occupation; communism ended with an apparent liberation that was also, for many people, an enormous dislocation. Institutions disappeared. Industries closed or were sold. Careers lost value. Qualifications became suspect. Young people moved west. Towns shrank. The language of reunification suggested that one Germany had joined another, but the institutional reality was largely that the structures of West Germany moved east.
The postwar intellectual story is itself overwhelmingly a West German story. The Germany I knew in Bonn was the Germany that had, in an obvious geographical sense, won.
The Federal Republic’s great reconciliation with liberal democracy, constitutional patriotism, European integration, NATO and the critical examination of Nazism occurred largely on one side of a divided country. East Germany had another official anti-fascism, another relationship to Russia, another economic system and another experience of the state. After 1990, western institutions did not negotiate with an equal eastern institutional tradition. They largely replaced it.
None of this requires romanticising the GDR or pretending that the AfD is simply a misunderstood cry of pain. It means recognising the more difficult Hegelian point: resentment also has a history. Political identities do not fall from the sky. If millions of citizens experience the institutions that claim universality as somebody else’s institutions, constitutional patriotism has a problem.
The same difficulty now extends far beyond eastern Germany. Migration tests the universalist promise. Economic stagnation tests it. Climate policy tests it when its costs are felt unequally. War tests it. Islam tests it. The fragmentation of the public sphere tests it. Gaza tests Germany’s memory culture by forcing historical responsibilities into collision with other moral claims. America tests European dependence. Russia tests European security. China tests the relationship between commercial interest and political values. Artificial intelligence and social media test the possibility of a shared public sphere itself.
And the AfD offers answers that are powerful partly because they are old.
The nation. The border. The people. The outsider. Sovereignty. Order. Home.
These words work because they transform complexity into location. Anxiety acquires an object. If wages stagnate, if neighbourhoods change, if Brussels appears distant, if refugees arrive, if a factory closes, if the language of educated metropolitan Germany feels like a permanent accusation, the nationalist answer possesses enormous psychological economy: here is us; there is them; politics means protecting the former from the latter.
Germany knows where that logic can lead. That does not mean it leads mechanically to 1933. It means German history provides unusually good reasons to recognise the structure.
The AfD’s rise therefore asks a question much larger than whether Friedrich Merz can construct a coalition or whether other parties should maintain their Brandmauer. It asks whether the civic conception of Germany remains capable of generating enough solidarity to survive sustained pressure from the ethnic conception of Germany.
The same question is spreading across Europe.
Perhaps this is why German intellectual history suddenly feels less like history to me.
The AfD does not invalidate that tradition, but activates it.
A Hegelian response, at least as far as I understand Hegel, would therefore be not to treat the AfD as an alien object attacking an otherwise healthy system from outside, but to ask which contradictions within that system helped produce it. A society promising universal belonging has produced millions of citizens who believe they have been dispossessed. A European Union created partly to overcome destructive nationalism has produced movements demanding the return of national sovereignty. A reunited Germany has developed its strongest anti-establishment political movement in the territory supposedly liberated by reunification.
Contradictions do not tell us which side wins.
That is often forgotten when people casually describe history as Hegelian, as though the dialectic were a cosmic machine guaranteeing progress. There is no guarantee. Germany itself demonstrated that modernity can move backwards, sideways and downwards with astonishing technical sophistication.
Civilisation is not a possession.
Things have to be reproduced. Argued about. Protected. Criticised. Changed. Taught. Practised. Made credible to people who did not experience the historical moment that created them.
That may be the uncomfortable lesson of Germany in 2026. The postwar settlement was so successful that later generations inherited its institutions without necessarily inheriting the experiences that made those institutions seem necessary. The European Union became ordinary. NATO became ordinary. Open borders became ordinary. Constitutional democracy became ordinary. German restraint became ordinary.
Perhaps success itself produces forgetfulness.
From the East, however, history has recently become considerably less ordinary. Ukraine has discovered what borders mean when somebody crosses them with tanks. Poland and the Baltic states have rediscovered what geography means. Russia has reminded Europe that imperial politics was not abolished by the invention of the European Union.
That is why Germany’s argument with itself matters so much beyond Germany.
I knew a tiny, everyday corner of that Germany in Bonn. I liked it enormously. I liked its modesty, its procedures, its seriousness about training people properly, its slightly obsessive coordination, its assumption that communication was work rather than decoration. I did not know Germany well enough to claim that this represented the country, and I certainly did not learn its language well enough to pretend that I ever fully entered it. Perhaps this entire essay is partly an attempt, years later and from Warsaw, to understand what it was that I liked.
It was never a perfect answer.
But it was an answer.
The AfD is offering another.
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