Loan words are nothing new in Germany. Take a stroll through a city or leaf through a magazine and you’ll see a wealth of English words and phrases to promote everything from cars to baby clothes. It’s not clear exactly how Germans feel about the spread of English into their language. Listening to people speak, the proclivity of English in everyday speech suggests that the majority are relaxed about it. Occasionally, groups such as the Verein Deutsche Sprache (German Language Association) will make a fuss when influential companies overuse English, but the fact that there are so many German firms using English language slogans, I sense they are fighting an uphill battle. Whether someone says ‘Learning by doing’ or not is hardly a major crime, despite the protests of the VDS, but increasingly there are new loan words being injected into German that are far more pernicious than beamer, handy or photoshooting.

Reading German news over the last few months, I’ve become increasingly aware of several new loan words, chief among them is ‘Cancel-Culture’. As an Anglo-German, I’m usually open to a few more language shortcuts, however the arrival of these particular loan words heralds not better communication, but worse. These terms are the signal that the vanguard of the culture war is coming to Germany, just in time for the election.

Germany is no stranger to the culture war, after all, the term originates from the German ‘Kulturkampf’. Moreover, Germany has been in the sways of a domestic culture war for a number of years. The right-wing Alternative Für Deutschland has been at the forefront of this “war”, not just on culture, but seemingly on the progress of time and reality itself. Since it’s putrid inception, the AfD has been a case study in the Kulturkampf, with members of the party going after pillars of the collective German psyche such as the “bird shit in history” of National Socialism or describing the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a “memorial of shame”. This has been a moderately successful strategy electorally but has seen them roundly (and rightly) condemned for stoking division, anti-Semitism and racial tensions. Admittedly, the AfD’s success is somewhat surprising to me, not because Germany is immune to the rise of right-wing parties, but they seem to have gained electoral success despite filling their top positions with men and women who look unnervingly similar to the protagonists in every war film I’ve ever seen.

There seems to be something of the Pizza effect with the term ‘Culture War’. Exporting the term to the US made it well-known and its re-import into Germany ensured it’s success. It’s return has been apparently welcomed with vigour by journalists, comedians and media personalities. However, the problem is this: Cancel-Culture doesn’t exist. It really doesn’t. The idea that across the US, normal people are being “cancelled” is frankly ridiculous. Looking for examples of people actually being “cancelled” generally leads to screaming headlines about students protesting or examples of people losing their jobs, only to have them reinstated. More often than not, when someone has been “cancelled” it’s an edge case, an extreme example of someone losing their position due to overzealous management. If a celebrity is “cancelled”, it rarely has much of an impact given their established wealth and privilege. The rise of the term in the US was pinned to the increase in abuse that Trump surrogates received in public, and was used enthusiastically by Trump supporters in the media. Some may have forgotten quickly, but the Trump era wasn’t renowned for it’s honest arguments. This isn’t an excuse, far from it, but the idea cancel culture is at epidemic proportions is pure fantasy.

However, if you were to believe some sections of the German media, the cancel-culture barbarians are at the gates. A number of major German news outlets have run stories about negative Twitter responses to articles, claiming that journalists and celebrities have become victims of cancel-culture due to negative reactions on social media, namely Twitter, despite no one losing their jobs or actually being “cancelled”. It seems that often the reaction stems from bruised egos.

At the forefront of the cancel-culture narrative is the Axel Springer media group. A quick search for the term on Welt.de brings up reams of results, all with depressingly familiar headlines about universities and free speech, twitter ‘Shitstorms’ and threats on the very integrity of journalism. The fact that Axel Springer media group would be fighting against cancel-culture seems incongruous given that “cancelling” people has been the media groups business model for decades. Moreover, the newspaper itself seems more than happy to generate its own share of ‘shitstorms’ when it benefits them.

However, it’s not just Axel Springer. A recent Tagesspiegel article, motivated by Twitter storms over race and racism in Germany, made claims that the anti-racist activist of Germany had actually created an outrage business model, a lucrative system whereby German minorities and POC were raking in lucrative book deals and speaking tours by being loudly anti-racist. The claim itself would be laughable, if it wasn’t printed in a major national newspaper. A follow up piece by the author attempted to defend the article and claimed that the Twitter reaction to it was a threat to the freedom of the press, despite pointing out that the vast majority of Germans aren’t actually on Twitter. Interestingly, given the claims of the article, the author now has over 5,000 followers on twitter from a modest 300 when the article was published at the end of January.  

As if to underline the tone-deaf nature of sections of German media, celebrities such as Dieter Nuhr will appear to defend those who are “cancelled”. His support for Austrian performer Lisa Eckhart for valid accusations of racist and anti-semetic jokes, is only one example. Despite Eckhart being “cancelled” she still finds a place on national television thanks to the support of Nuhr and despite claims of being under siege by cancel culture, she has a higher profile than ever. If there is a business model to be made from outrage, it seems it works more for those “cancelled” than for those doing the “cancelling”. Of course, Nuhr himself is no stranger to controversy, only a few months ago he was “cancelled” after literally judging a book by its cover, simply because the author was a black woman and the topic of race seemingly not one Germany had to deal with. Apparently, he saw no irony in his assumption that the author in question, Alice Hasters, was a left-wing American bringing over her American left wing racial ideas to the colour blind shores of Germany while also complaining, with borrowed ideas from the US, of cancel culture. That Hasters is a German, addressing a German audience could have been discovered with a simple google search. The fact that neither Nuhr nor any of his researchers bothered to check speaks volumes.

Germany is not the only European country importing the language of the US culture war, Britain’s own culture-war is heating up, motivated by a disingenuous politicians and a rabid right-wing media addicted to divisive tactics, especially since the fragmentation of British society over the Brexit referendum. Culture-war has been shown to have lucrative results for the unethical politicians and media personalities willing to use it, after all it was Trumps most powerful weapon from his campaign in 2016, through to the storming of the Capitol in January. If recent polling in the UK is to be believed, culture-war strategies are also bolstering the Tory party too. The fact that the German media do not see the danger of the culture-war narrative in an election year seems mindboggling. That they spent so long forensically watching the US through Trump’s tenure as President and the UK though Brexit and have learned nothing is almost impressive. The problem ultimately is that there is money to be made stoking division and power to be attained or at least retained. German proponents of cancel-culture should be careful about going down this path, as Faust learned, deals with the devil rarely end happily.

Photo Credits

Photo by Laura Lee Moreau on Unsplash

Photo by Fran Jacquier on Unsplash

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash