Gauck settles accounts with Merkel’s Russia policy

On the other hand, there is the former Federal President, who is not subject to such constraints as to later glorify executive acts. Where Merkel – not without personal tragedy – fights her battle for the sovereignty of interpretation, he is concerned with the truth of the interpretation.

The difference lies in their roles: the pastor’s daughter – once part of Helmut Kohl’s power machine – shaped the world, while Pastor Gauck – in the meantime head of the authorities responsible for investigating Stasi crimes – explained them. In his new book, this constellation frees Joachim Gauck to write openly about democracy and political failure – shockingly open. Accordingly, the title is simply “Shocks”.

He can find words on the tiresome subject of Russia that Merkel will not even look for. One thing is clear: The “turning point” that Olaf Scholz only complained about at the end of February 2022 came for the ex-Federal President as early as 2014, with the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Putin’s “little green men”.

Marvel at economic relations

History teaches us that “territorial concessions only increase the appetite of aggressors,” Gauck said during a state visit to Poland at the time. The author recalls that left-wing and left-liberal journalists (“presidential blunder of the first order”) vilified him at the time: one should not let the thread of conversation with Putin break, a president had to be a “reconciler”.

History, however, proved Gauck right, who preferred to listen to the warning Poles: Germany should not become dependent on Russian gas and thus become open to blackmail: “You saw it – we didn’t see it.”

When it comes to economics, Gauck refrains from analyzing how the corporations Eon and BASF actually stimulated gas policy in a political-industrial complex and benefited from it. He is amazed at how even after the Crimean year 2014, economic relations with Moscow have been expanded.

He goes into more detail about the good aspects of Willy Brandt’s policy of détente, the ignoring of civil rights movements such as in Poland, the alleged “soul affinity” between Germans and Russians or the growth of the Putin autocracy with America as an enemy, as well as all the failed attempts at German Realpolitik, Case in point: the 2015 Minsk Agreement.

Again, Angela Merkel – indirectly, lucidly – ​​becomes the topic. Where she currently claims that “Minsk” arose from an effort to “give Ukraine time”, Gauck acts as a morally incorruptible fact-checker: “What looks like a targeted tactic in favor of Ukraine was in reality the opposite. .. The federal government let Ukraine down on several occasions.”

This includes the Nord Stream Baltic Sea pipelines as well as efforts to prevent the United States from delivering arms to Kiev. “Berlin and Paris tried to avoid everything that would have labeled Russia as an enemy.” But the question is: How long will one remain passive if the agreed ceasefire is permanently broken, as in eastern Ukraine? Apparently, some would have “the same hard-heartedness and the same political blindness” that prevailed 30 years ago towards the opposition in Eastern Europe.

Gauck has the necessary authority for such judgments. You read it and think: finally someone is writing it down. At last someone with a calling delivers the self-criticism that the political class is hardly capable of.

It’s true: Western politics only woke up on February 24, 2022. “Neither with Christian Democrats nor with Social Democrats did scenarios exist for situations in which diplomacy would come to an end,” criticizes Gauck. red lines? A “worst case”? Nothing existed. One sleepwalked into a war: “We were too often shaped by wishful thinking.”

Wishful thinker number one was Angela Merkel, with the SPD as a willing partner. There, according to the author, a “completely gutted Brandtian detente policy” had become an “empty formula” – the Nobel Peace Prize winner had only been successful in this regard because, like his successor Helmut Schmidt, he did not forego deterrence. For the relationship between Gerhard Schröder and Putin, Gauck only has the term “conspiratorial cronyism” left.

All German governments have underestimated Putin and suppressed the fact that politics is ultimately power politics, the conclusion is: “You have weakened Germany politically, economically, militarily and mentally and made it partially dependent.” Strong stuff. And yet, unsolved mysteries remain.

According to Gauck, why Merkel recognized Putin’s lies and his hatred of the West, but still stuck to soft methods and Nord Stream 2, is “difficult to decipher and may never be fully explained”. They didn’t want to admit “that Putin was hiding his own aggressive ambitions behind his victim narrative” – ​​the story that the USA and NATO had surrounded Russia.

A certain disappointment is unmistakable for the critical time observer Gauck. He wrote the book together with the publicist Helga Hirsch out of concern for democracy, as a warning against their enemies from outside (Putin) and from inside (extremism, disinformation), but also as encouragement and an appeal for activation.

It is “the self-assurance of a citizen who is looking for the causes of current turmoil,” he explains himself. But it is also the self-affirmation of someone who is not unpretentious, who knocks out mnemonics for the Sahra-Wagenknecht community: “Who wants peace, must war can also prevent it.” Europe needs the “determination of the free”.

Fight with each other instead of against each other

Gauck’s book has its strengths in the first part when it comes to Putin, when John Stuart Mill or Winston Churchill also appear in a broad historical reappraisal: plain language instead of appeasement PR. In the second part – domestic policy – the analysis is sometimes cloudy and over-presidential.

People’s fears, the flight from reality and progressive radicalization, especially in East Germany, make him cautious. He registers how populists everywhere are becoming the beneficiaries of a spreading dissatisfaction, how “illiberal democracies” are threatening, how the old is dying and the new has not yet been born. “Signs of aging” in liberal democracy cannot be overlooked.

Again and again Gauck warns against too much furor, for example with allegations that others are racist or xenophobic: “Be careful of the stranger is not racism, people are strangers to the stranger.” He rejects immigration that is too fast, uncontrolled, “inconsistent action”. in domestic politics, dissatisfaction grew. One chapter is devoted to criticism of the “Critical Race Theory”. Ethical or racial issues should not be placed above human rights.