German Youth are Rejecting ‘National Shame’

Eoin Lenihan

I taught humanities to hundreds of students at two international schools in Germany over a period of several years. My primary subject was history and each time it came to covering World War II, British kids were excited; American kids were broadly well-informed; and the German kids dreaded it. Their heads dropped at the very mention of the unit. I vividly remember Laura, an 8th grader, say, “We’re the bad guys and everyone hates us. We did nothing—our parents weren’t even born.” That is quite a weight to carry before a single class had been taught. 

In Germany, students do not interact with WWII so much as they are subjected to it. It is compulsory for all high school students in Bavaria to visit a concentration camp as part of their studies and common practice in several other states for 9th graders. The intention is to bring children face-to-face with the horrors of Germany’s Nazi past so that it cannot be repeated. The Germans call it a “culture of remembrance.” But this culture of remembrance goes beyond pedagogy. It is an integral part of German national identity that German leaders from the Baby Boomer generation have long forced upon German children. In 2019, during her first visit to Auschwitz, Angela Merkel stated, “I feel a deep shame,” before continuing, “To be aware of this responsibility is a fixed part of our national identity.” But it is a psychologically dubious goal to force a sense of shame onto every generation of German 9th graders—15-year-olds. I recently visited Grafeneck, site of the Nazi T4 forced euthanasia programme, where at least 10,564 people with disabilities were exterminated. It is a moving experience. Much like what Merkel would have felt, I was overcome with impotent anger at what these people had suffered. Like Merkel, I am an adult, so I can better process these emotions. 15-year-olds cannot. The day I visited, a group of school students had been recently through the memorial. They had left notes of compassion at the site for people to read. The problem—and it is the same everywhere kids are forced to visit these sites—is that the kids’ thoughts are reduced to awkward stock phrases that their teachers have drummed into them in class: ”We feel horrible for what happened to you,” ”never forget,” ”rest in Peace.” Some were signed “best wishes,” like an awkward letter to a little-known relation.

When children are told that personal shame for the most heinous crimes of the Nazis is an integral part of their identity, it is natural that those children will wish to shed that identity or rebel against it. Until recently, Germans have chosen to disassociate from it. A national bout of soul searching arose in 2001, when then CDU General Secretary Laurenz Meyer said, “I’m proud to be German” in an interview. Jürgen Trittin, a Green Party politician and then minister for the environment, responded by saying that Meyer “had the mentality of a skinhead.” In 2004, when Horst Köhler gave his inaugural speech as German president, he said “I love Germany,” a statement that “sent a hush through the packed Reichstag chamber.” Even today, when Germany plays in major soccer championships, flying the German flag cannot be allowed without media and political dissection and requisite acknowledgements of shame. Essentially, German national identity is, at best, complicated; public expressions of pride in it are best avoided in respectable company, and the only clear and accepted emotion is shame.

For generations of German children, this caustic burden has been placed on their shoulders at a young age and the unfairness of it grows apparent to them when they compare their concentration camp visits to that of their peers with migration backgrounds. In 2009, I visited Dachau with my father. As we approached the architecturally stunning visitor’s centre, there were groups of students milling about. The German kids looked stunned and sat silently or tried to cheer one another up with small talk whispered as though in church. Many students of North African origin may well have been coming from a soccer game. They horsed about and even had time to mock my father’s beard. The demeanour of both groups could not have been more starkly different. This isn’t lost on German teens, who are increasingly feeling that they are getting the short end of the stick in the multiculturalism they have inherited from their parents and grandparents. As they grow older, they see that this double standard is leveraged for political purposes.

When Olaf Scholz took power at the head of a leftwing SPD/Greens/FDP coalition in 2021, his government prioritised expanding Germany’s culture of remembrance from focusing exclusively on the Holocaust to including Germany’s other historical sins. In May 2024, Claudia Roth, minister for culture and Green party member, introduced an expanded vision in a 43-page document. In this vision, the Holocaust would hold equal footing with German colonialism, the history of immigrant journeys to Germany, GDR history, and Germany’s “culture of democracy.” Rather than alleviating the burden of historical guilt, which Germans feel more acutely than any other nation, the government set about increasing it four-fold. And just as German children for generations have been confronted with memorials to the Holocaust, Roth has called for eye-watering sums of money to build new museums and memorials for her oppressive vision. An Exhibition Centre in Halle for the “life stories of the East Germans” would cost more than €200 million. A further €19.5 million would be spent on a “House of Democracy” in Frankfurt. Most controversial, however, was Roth’s collaboration with the “Initiative of Black People in Germany” (ISD), a non-profit organisation that provided feedback on her proposal. ISD, founded by radical leftist Bafta Sarbo, is a black rights group that has received €1.5 million in funding from the government, even though Sarbo has previously caused controversy by liking a tweet calling for the shooting of a Bild journalist, and for saying in an interview that, “as long as Capitalism prevails, there will be racism.”

Roth cynically attempted to tie hard-left political narratives—social justice, post-colonial discourse, and migrant politics—to Germany’s ‘national shame,’ the Holocaust. Rather than convince the public of the merits of her political positions, she attempted to subjugate every German by force of guilt. Thankfully, her plan was universally lambasted and quickly disappeared from public discussion.

However, leveraging German guilt for cash is a growing industry. Successive Polish governments have demanded wartime reparations in the region of €1.3 trillion from Germany. In 2021, Germany apologised to Namibia for its colonial past and offered a €1.2 billion reparations package. This was challenged in the Namibian court system to stall it so that more money could be extracted, with Al Jazeera pointing out that, as of 2024, Israel had received €82 billion in reparations from Germany with an extra €1.44 billion paid annually in upkeep to Holocaust survivors. Therein lies the issue with Roth’s updated “culture of remembrance.” If all historical grievances are to be given equal footing with the Holocaust, Germany won’t be long going broke. More importantly, young Germans who feel disconnected from the self-flagellation of their elders are tired of being emotionally abused and forced to cough up cash for the crimes of their ancestors.

They have more pressing matters to address, like navigating life in a multicultural nation—something their parents and grandparents never had to do. In 2015, Angela Merkel opened up Germany’s borders to a record 2.14 million immigrants, and defiantly stated, “Wir schaffen das” (we can do it). It was a great line, but since then Germany has become less and less safe. Crime statistics released by the German Department for Justice show that, in 2023, although Germany has a migrant population of only 18.4%, migrants committed 41% of all crime. Strikingly, migrants are responsible for 43.1% of murder, 74.5% of robbery including murder, 46% of aggravated rape, 41.1% of sexual harassment, and 48.6% of public brawls. These figures do not include criminal acts by Germans with an immigrant background. German youth are growing up in a Germany that is unimaginably different from their parents’ and grandparents’ experience. They do not feel safe, and yet their elders brutally enforce the old rules of ‘grin and bear it’ out of a sense of ever expanding ‘national shame.’ It has reached a breaking point.

In April of 2024, a large study found that 22% of German 14–29-year-olds would vote for the AfD in a general election. The numbers had doubled compared to when the same study was taken two years previously. Rather than engage in a bout of soul-searching to understand why young Germans are increasingly attracted to the AfD, the response was predictable. Establishment German politicians brutally clamped down on this dissenting generation with the full authority invested in them as custodians and official dispensers of ‘national shame.’

Since January, all parties have supported mass public demonstrations against the AfD and there have been increased efforts to ban the party entirely. After the April study revealed that the mainstream parties were losing the youth vote, they seized on an opportunity to scare the kids straight. In May, a group of upper-middle class youths were caught on camera in a 14-second video singing a viral meme song “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus” (Germany for the Germans, foreigners out). The song, sung to the tune of Gigi D’Agostino’s L’amour Toujours, has become a taboo song in recent months, the meekest of pushbacks among young Germans otherwise unable to express their concerns about their daily reality. The youths in the video sang it with the cheeky smiles of kids giggling in the back of church knowing they are risking their parent’s ire. But the political and media blowback was devastating. Germany’s biggest daily newspaper, Bild, led the charge, branding the video a “Nazi scandal” and following up with several articles that hounded those involved, all of whom were later dismissed from their various jobs and studies. What was clearly a group of edgy drunken youths was portrayed as a hardcore Nazi cell at the very heart of German upper society, with several national news outlets, including Welt, firmly laying down the ‘national shame card’ by linking the lyrics of the song to speeches given by Hitler during his extermination of the German Jews. Following universal condemnation from the political establishment, SPD politician and Bundestag president Bärbel Bas called for “perhaps the maximum” legal penalty for the youths, of between 3 and 5 years in prison.

The media and political backlash to the Sylt “Nazis” couldn’t have been more different from the reaction when actual antisemitic extremist Islamists took to the streets to celebrate Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel. In the days after the attack, Muslim youths in Berlin’s Neukölln district clashed with police and rioted in the streets. Güner Balci, an integration officer for the area, said that ‘large swathes’ of Muslim youth support Hamas and Hezbollah and are members of local Islamist groups. A month before the Sylt incident, approximately 1,000 Islamists called for the establishment of a German caliphate on the streets of Hamburg. Both stories—stories of real and present danger to German democracy and stability—quickly disappeared from headlines without leaving any mark on the collective public consciousness. The message from the media and the political class was clear: German youths face different expectations and punishments because of their history, and those expectations will be savagely enforced.

The cracking of the establishment whip in Sylt had little effect. In the June European elections, the AfD scored 16% of the 16-24 year old vote, a return second only to the CDU/CSU. When state broadcaster Tagesschau polled voters on their chief election priorities, leading concerns were crime, fears about the influence of Islam, too much migration, and a loss of German identity. They would of course have known all of this ahead of time had they just taken a break from flogging the kids to actually listen to them. Unfortunately, it seems the lesson will be hard learned.

In June, German youths were again reminded that they are required to shoulder the negatives of life in multicultural Germany without ever complaining, when a 20-year-old woman was sentenced to prison for insulting a member of the largely migrant group who gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in Hamburg in 2020. The case caused international outcry when nine of the ten defendants received suspended sentences. Psychiatrist Nahlah Saimeh, who reportedly appeared as an expert witness in the case, stated in a 2023 interview with Spiegel that the gang rape could be a means for the rapists to vent their frustration at the social and cultural isolation they felt as immigrants. To add insult to already unforgivable injury, in addition to the 20-year-old girl who will now serve prison time for insulting one of the gang members, Hamburg police are also investigating 140 other threats made against the rapists. Absurdly, dozens of German youths could spend time in prison for insulting migrant rapists who themselves walked free following their heinous crimes. No wonder the kids are turning to the AfD.

Germany has finally arrived in the era of multicultural realism. Young Germans, frightened and uncertain about the future, are demanding that their elders—who only ever lived with abstract ideals of multiculturalism—listen to their very real concerns. Those elders, in turn, are arguing with one another about whether to continue to beat those youths into silence with the old rod of national shame or whether to add four more rods for a more robust beating. Meanwhile, the AfD prospers.

Original Article