Greece and Germany

source : Philosophie Magazine, 61 - Été 2012

author: Heinz wismann, philosopher, specialist in hemeneutics

translation form French: doxa-louise
Greece and Germany. A Mimetic conflict

"Why is Germany so intransigent? In what do they find a Greek bankruptcy so fearful?


Behind the problem of this debt, there is a political question: the absence of a State. The Greeks, with whom Germans identify culturally, mirror their own history back to them: that of a people pushed to hell for not having, during a very long time, created a stable territorial State...Greeks represent today what history has taught Germans not to be. Thus, what Germany is reproaching them is not so much having run up considerable debt in a thoughtless manner, but not having created the only tool capable of offering salvation.


Berlin, Athens' heir
During the 1800s, two models are dominant in Europe, Athens and Rome. The Franks have taken the way of Rome: it is on the model of the centralized state and Roman law that kings construct an absolute monarchy. It is on the model of Roman rationality that the French think: the word 'réel'(real) comes from the Roman res which means 'thing', conceptualized as a static reality, delimited, geometric. According to Descartes, thought must apprehend things and itself 'clearly and distinctly'. Heirs to this Roman obsession with delimitating the real, the French found very early - as soon as 1648 with the Westphalie treaties (concluded between the Habsbourg emperor Ferdinand III, France and their respective allies to end the Thirty Years War) - the way to establish themselves as a Nation-State within the confines of natural barriers. In reaction, Germany which is still a patchwork of principalities identifies with the other great cultural model, Greece, scattered in a myriad of City-States. From the point of view of geography alone, the Greek islands are sending back to Germany an image of its institutional fragmentation. but above the Greeks appear to the Germans as that cultured people that has no State, that lets itself be assimilated by Rome...but which nonetheless ends up colonizing the Romans. With Schiller, Goethe and the art theoretician Winckelmann, Germans identify with the Hellenes: they recognize themselves in the language and Greek rationality, the self-affirmation of the City-States reminds them of their own dispersion; they recognize the relationship to nature, to becoming, to self, which were those of the Greeks. The German word to designate reality, Wirklichkeit, comes from the verb wirken which means "to act or produce an effect". Reality is not something which lets itself be circumscribed, but rather that which produces an action. Only that which manifests itself as force or energy exists. It is a dynamic conception of the real. Philosophers well understood this: Hegel opposes the taxonomic rationality of the French, which orders everything into pre-existing categories, to the dialectic rationality of the Germans, interested in their coming-to-be. Heidegger will go so far as to assert that one cannot do philosophy in French or Latin, but only in Greek or German. Literature as well testifies to this cleavage: the German novel, from Goethe's Wilhem Meister to Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain, is a novel of becoming (Entwicklungsroman), of development of the personality, while the French novel is centered on the social ascent of the hero, who must find his place in an already constituted world. Within this Entwicklungsroman, the individual is called upon to reject all that which hinders him from the exterior, in order to become himself by letting emerge his deeper self, according to the logic of the Greek physis ('nature', a fundamental concept of Greek philosophy). In all areas, then, the Germans have seen themselves as heirs to the Greeks.

Between 1914 and 1945, the Germans who had thought they could develop their particular genius outside of a State framework met with the consequences of this illusion. The Bismarkian enterprise resulted in military defeat, in the political weakness of the Weimar Republic and above all in the economic crisis of the 1920s. Germans lived through one of the most traumatic experiences of their history, inflation. The fruits of their labour would go up in smoke. My father gone to pick up his pay with a wheelbarrow could not, having reached the baker, buy a loaf of bread... This dizzying experience will be linked for a long time, in the mind of Germans, with the fragility of the State. They then become conscious that it is not enough to be an influential cultural power, on the model of the Ancient Greeks. And adventuring as totalitarian, based on the idea of imperial expansion, will have been but another way of not confronting this task.


The Broken Mirror and the curse of the 'Danaides'
Between 1945 and reunification, Germany, for the first time in its history, managed to land itself in a delimited territory. The Germans have received, in defeat, this roman and French territorial comfort, even if they adapted it by operating a synthesis between Greek dispersal and a unitary Roman State: this is the meaning of the federal State. since then, all their energies have been directed within this framework. The Wirk-lichkeit, the free flowering of German reality, cannot expand territorially, but has to operate henceforth through the economy. The Germans today are somewhat appeased: they are more democratic than some of their neighbours, even those more accustomed to the exercise of democracy. This is because they are within legitimate borders, recognized, that will no longer change.

One thus better understands the position of Germany with respect to Greece. The latter is at the moment an indebted nation, without a proper State apparatus; the government is incapable of collection income tax, the very principle of a public Thing to which all are subject is not established, there is clientism and corruption at all levels, public services are either missing or bankrupt, society is dominated by networks of dependencies and opaque solidarity. They are left with but the pride of having been the first Europeans of History. Yet the Germans have battled so mightily to go beyond being a people of culture that they do not wish to contribute to letting this go on. and they are the more touchy to the situation of the Greeks that a long history incites them to recognize themselves in the hellenistic world. They do not want to give Greeks the ability to continues as they have been doing, because Greece appears to them as the deformed mirror to what they have finally achieved in not being. We are in a process of broken identification. In the construction of reality, it is often that one is afraid of what one  has been oneself, because of the menace which this represents. The relationship of Germany to Greece is no longer that of a positive and happy complicity, but more like an obsessive fear. At once, the pressure that the Germans are putting on the Greeks has no purpose but to order them to give themselves a State. But can one from the outside force a people to become a State? Where Germany would be plenty happy with a few positive gestures in this direction, Greece is showing no signs of a willingness to change. All indicates that they are attached to their powerless pluralism.

The Eurozone can live without Greece. It is within the logic and structure of this institution, which does not include all European countries. Only it would be a catastrophe for Europe. In fact, if Greece is forced to forsake the euro, it is as if the entire European ideal were being rejected. Conversely, if one continues to come in aid of the Greeks without their taking institutional measures, one risks seeing the common currency disappear in the curse of the 'Danaides'. From which we can see that the historical depth which lends force to the European project is as well what makes it fragile.