Germany is Broken

Last fall, the conservative German newspaper Die Welt ran an odd essay about Max von Baden, the last chancellor of the German Empire. In 1918, von Baden had unilaterally forced the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II, ushering in the Weimar Republic. The author of the essay framed the incident as a “lesson about timing in politics.” If Max von Baden hadn’t hesitated as long as he had before ending the monarchy, he argued, the revolution of November 1918 might have been averted, and the Weimar Republic might have stood on far more solid, more legitimate feet.

This centennial commemoration of a statesman’s inactivity and its far-reaching consequences was itself a lesson about timing: Die Welt published it to coincide with an election in the state of Hesse, in central Germany. Seemingly innocuous, the article was in fact intended as a message to another politician who has demonstrated a mastery of sitting out problems, hoping they’ll simply solve themselves. Angela Merkel and her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had been losing support in national and state elections, frequently to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Die Welt’s message would have been obvious to anyone paying close attention: step aside, or else reap the populist whirlwind.

The essay’s author, however, was not an upstart of a new post-Merkel party. It was Wolfgang Schäuble, the 76-year-old stalwart of the pre-Merkel CDU, someone who had been until recently her most visible minister. In the event, the CDU lost 11.3 percent of the vote share in Hesse, and the AfD and the Green Party once again overperformed. Merkel heeded the nudge. A few days after the election, she agreed to step aside as head of the CDU—step one of a slow-motion resignation.

For more than a decade, beginning with the crash of 2008 and on through the various monetary crises that followed, as well as the wave of right-wing populism that swept into office illiberal governments across Europe, Germany had functioned as an outlier—a beacon of stability in an uncertain world. It was widely regarded (and certainly regarded itself) as a buttress of the Eurozone’s economic health against irresponsible spending. The Brexit vote threw into relief Germany’s role as the main guarantor of the European Union’s political stability and bolstered its claim to being the center of Europe. After Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency the new German self-image seemed to find its ultimate embodiment in Merkel herself, the new “leader of the free world.”

Yet only two years later, as the German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey recently wrote in the New York Times, “the stability (and even monotony) associated with German politics under Ms. Merkel appears to be coming to an end.” That monotony has a name: Alternativlosigkeit, or alternativelessness. Although it was Merkel who would come to be associated with that word, Schäuble was the one who provided its affective and somatic underpinnings. Merkel was the prophet of alternativelessness; Schäuble was its embodiment.

 Though—like many commentators in Europe and the US—Nachtwey links that end to the pressures brought to bear on centrist Merkel from the populist left and right, one of the remarkable things about the Merkeldämmerung is that it is largely forces within Schäuble’s and Merkel’s party that are threatening to undo the German exception. Those forces throw a light on how the exception emerged in the first place.

Most Germans remember that Angela Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian “sister party” the CSU are separate entities only when there are state elections in Bavaria—the only state in which the CSU fields candidates and in which the CDU fields none. This has been the arrangement since 1949: the CSU provides the CDU with a massive trove of votes and members, along with an effective and populist right wing. And in exchange the CDU provides the CSU with a direct line from local politics into the national centers of power (the CSU is, for instance, guaranteed a certain number of posts in any CDU/CSU-led government), as well as respectability and a dose of cosmopolitan credibility.

The CSU has been central to the CDU juggernaut, and that juggernaut, in turn, has been central to the sometimes reassuring, often soul-killing, sameness of German politics. But in 2018 the dynamic shifted. In the lead-up to the Bavarian elections, which took place in July of that year, the CSU suddenly seemed ready to abandon the governing coalition in Berlin. At issue were the refugees arriving at the German border (albeit in smaller numbers than before). Perhaps emboldened by the rhetoric of the AfD, the head of the CSU, Horst Seehofer, demanded that some of the new arrivals be turned away. It was a largely symbolic demand: Seehofer wanted Merkel to show a little bit of cruelty to brown people, but the chancellor refused his pressure. All at once, Germany’s steadiness was under threat—and not only under threat from within, but from within the within. Here was the spectacle of a parliamentary democracy, conceived with an extraordinary degree of autoimmune response to authoritarian takeovers, turning on itself.

Recent European history suggests that the rise of far-right parties, and the mainstream’s response to it, plays out in one of two ways. The first we might call the French model: as the right wing makes more and more inroads, left and center-right band together to defend the liberal order, even if each has serious misgivings about that order. As a result the parties defending some version of the status quo become faceless and interchangeable, and the only “true” alternative becomes the far right. The other is the Austrian model: alarmed by the rise of the far right, the nominal center moves sharply to the right in hopes of “winning back” lost voters. Those voters unsurprisingly prefer the genuine article. So the old guard enters into an alliance with the far right, hoping either to demystify the fringe, or simply to be eaten last.

Merkel ended up winning in July, but her victory was mostly Pyrrhic: while the Bavarian election seemed to bear out her instincts over Seehofer’s, her party still lost votes. The disagreement between Merkel and Seehofer came down to the French model versus the Austrian one. More fundamentally, however, both politicians were in tacit agreement that Germany, which had made it its mission to be different from other countries—which had taken it as a point of pride to be the exception—was no longer unique. It was neither imbued with terrible historical memories that rendered it constitutively immune to the seductions of right-wing populism, nor blessed with institutions uniquely unsusceptible to a takeover. Germany was, in the end, either France or Austria—that was all.

Nachtwey and others have argued that the end of what he calls “social modernity”—which has resulted in the rise of precarious and ad hoc labor and the decline of unions—creates a downward pressure that allows for the rise of protest movements on the left and the right. In his book Germany’s Hidden Crisis, Nachtwey writes that the problems that have torn apart the social consensus in France and Austria, as well as Spain and Italy, have been smoldering underneath in Germany as well—the titular hidden crisis. “The conflicts in our country have largely remained latent,” he writes, “which is no doubt due to the present economic and institutional stability.” Between the book’s German publication in 2016 and the American release last fall, the latter began to give way. The former, however, did not, even though it is now looking more and more likely that Germany is sliding into recession.

Yet as Nachtwey puts it in his afterword, Germany likely would have remained “a bastion of political stability” had “the so-called refugee crisis not abruptly exposed the social tensions that had accumulated over decades.” This diagnosis seems immediately plausible. But in a way Nachtwey’s conditional formulation is in itself quite interesting—it isn’t immediately clear how a crisis that, as he correctly notes, was at best so-called, and one which at least initially unleashed a wave of solidarity with the new arrivals across the country, ultimately ended up containing this explosive potential.

The question, then, is what has been hiding Germany’s hidden crisis. Nachtwey was once an associate researcher at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School). No less a predecessor than Adorno proposed, when reflecting on the rise of neo-Nazi groups, that “even in the midst of prosperity . . . the majority of people probably feel secretly that they are potentially unemployed, recipients of charity, and hence really objects, not subjects of society: this is the fully legitimate and reasonable cause of their discomfort.” Adorno made this observation in 1959. It may have been as true then as it was when Nachtwey made it in 2016. But it seems for that very reason unlikely to fully explain what has happened over the last few years. As the political scientist Philip Manow has put it, the idea that right-wing populism succeeds mostly among those left behind by neoliberalism “is not wrong in general, but it does not suffice as a general explanation.” Between Adorno and Nachtwey we could ask: since their answer has long been the correct one, why did it take so long for that fact to reveal itself?

The state of Baden-Württemberg lies just west of Bavaria. Home to corporations like Mercedes Benz, the software company SAP, and Bosch, the state is immensely prosperous. Its population is about ten million, and the unemployment rate is 3.1 percent. If there’s a hidden crisis in Germany, it’s particularly hidden here. And yet in 2017 about 12 percent of the population voted for the AfD. (In 2017 the AfD’s national numbers were 12.6 percent.) Like the post-election coverage of the American rust belt, accounts of the AfD’s rise tend to talk about anomie in East Germany, Merkel’s home turf. But Baden-Württemberg doesn’t lend itself to those kinds of narratives. To understand why the far right might resonate in such a rich and successful state, it is instructive to look to Schäuble, Baden-Württemberg’s native son.

At the national level, the AfD’s success is without precedent. In Baden-Württemberg, however, it is not. In 1968, the neo-Nazi NPD won 9.8 percent of the vote there. In 1992 the far-right Republicans (REP) won 10.9 percent, and in 1996 they received 9.1 percent. In a 2014 interview Schäuble pointed out exactly this trend: “The Republicans were history rather quickly, I think it’ll be the same with the AfD.” Many commentators at the time were outraged at this business-as-usual response, but it represented a sound structural grasp of German politics. One of the features of the crises Germany faces is that they have always been with us. As the historian Reinhart Koselleck once pointed out, the concept of “crisis” has long been used to impose a demand. What is striking about the German crises of recent years—the one surrounding the refugees as much as the political one precipitated by it, the rise of the AfD as much as the wave of cruelty attending its rise—is that they are neither sudden nor truly disruptive. They have been built into the way Germany has functioned for the last thirty years.

The spike in refugees arriving in 2015 created administrative challenges across Europe, but the only crisis worthy of the name concerned the relentless politicization of the sudden influx, both among EU-member countries and by political parties within them. While Merkel focused on the logistical nature of the problem—“we can do this,” she said in a soundbite that has been thrown in her face ever since—others were intent on making the crisis something it was not: a clash of cultures. This tactical retreat from feasibility politics was a beat-by-beat replay of earlier confrontations. The angry protestors and politicians screaming about the danger posed by refugees were reading from an old script.

The so-called “asylum debate” that now buoys the fortunes of the AfD first entered German politics in the mid-1980s. It was conjured into existence by the CDU itself, as a convenient election strategy. In response to an uptick in the number of asylum seekers, CSU politicians like Edmund Stoiber and Franz Josef Strauß fantasized about the possibility of “one hundred million potential refugees.” Just like Seehofer in 2018, they threatened to leave the partnership with the CDU unless they were allowed to turn refugees away at the border. Lead articles in the German press blared about “waves” of Muslims coming to rape Germany’s daughters and election posters declared the boat full.

Schäuble, then Kohl’s secretary of the interior (the department responsible for security and immigration), took a sort of middle tack. A conservative himself, he nonetheless steered clear of the rhetorical excesses of Stoiber and the CSU. But at the same time he sought to signal that limiting the number of asylum seekers was of paramount importance. His reasoning was vintage Schäuble: fifty thousand refugees, he said, “wouldn’t be a problem,” but “one hundred thousand is the magic threshold which would activate certain political sensibilities.”

You might think Schäuble was talking about what numbers the state’s bureaucracy could deal with. But no, the number has to do with “certain political sensibilities.” Exceeding it would by some strange magic anger “the people”—the kinds of people who set fire to kebab stands, one supposes. At the time Germany was accepting between 120,000 and 200,000 asylum seekers, mostly from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. The economy was strong, the Deutschmark dominant in Europe. The convulsions brought about by unification were still in the future. What Schäuble was really saying was: unless there is some suffering inflicted on some of these new arrivals, the people will revolt.

Schäuble got his wish, but the people, or a subset of them, revolted anyway. The inevitable wave of racist violence started in West Germany well before the Iron Curtain came down, but it asserted itself most spectacularly in post-unification East Germany, a more homogeneous society undergoing rapid changes. In August 1992, for instance, residents of Rostock-Lichtenhagen laid siege to apartment buildings housing refugees and legal Vietnamese guest workers. For four days and nights neo-Nazis hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks into the buildings to the cheers of onlookers, who flashed Hitler salutes for the cameras. The police withdrew at first, but finally returned—to deport the residents of the besieged houses. (Their neighbors got a month of free rent.)

In the end, the first run-through of the “asylum debate” vindicated Schäuble’s instinct: the German state exacted its pound of flesh, sent back asylum seekers, and caused the newcomers untold suffering and frustration. The result represented a sort of compact between respectable conservatives and the crueler instincts of their base. Faced with an outpouring of cruelty and violence, political leaders moved to placate the victimizers and punish their victims. Live out your worst impulses, the compact says, and we will spend speech upon speech and talk show upon talk show telling you it isn’t really your fault. More importantly, we will take your verbal and physical violence to stand in for how “Germans” really feel. It is this reversal of thrust that Angela Merkel refused in the summer of 2015.

Schäuble’s suggestion that the AfD would go the way of all their far-right predecessors has come to be regarded as a serious misdiagnosis, yet this was how the system had worked for nearly a half-century. After neo-Nazis won almost 10 percent of the vote in the sixties, they threw their support for the next election, in 1972, behind the CDU’s candidate, a former Nazi with not entirely former-Nazi views. In the mid-1990s, Oskar Lafontaine, then head of the SPD, tried to score points by fulminating against immigrants and was seen as giving the REP an unexpected bounce. Today the voluble mayor of the university town of Tübingen, a member of the Green Party, worries aloud about refugees in tones that, while definitely miles away from the AfD, seem designed to resonate with its voters.

Schäuble’s interview is now five years old. In the interim it has become clear that the major parties can no longer swallow the politics of cruelty they have habitually seeded and then reabsorbed. German conservatism had long colonized a swamp on its right flank, a swamp consisting of things you couldn’t say or talk about, but to which you could point and be understood. Now their connection to that swamp has become tenuous. When mainstream politicians stray into it they either get lost or don’t find what they’re looking for. The CSU in particular understands the AfD’s codes, having deployed them themselves for decades. But by last summer the CSU’s populism was a knock-off, while voters had gotten a taste for the real thing.

Why have voters refused to be reabsorbed by parties like the CSU this time around? Many have proposed a generational explanation for this transformation: younger people, farther from Nazism and the Holocaust, have reclaimed territory onto which their elders dared not venture. But the AfD is not a youth movement—it is most popular among those 45 and older. Others have blamed the legitimating function of social media. There is certainly something to that idea, but the AfD seems less dependent on fake Facebook content and email forwards than, say, its Trumpist equivalents. The party’s evangelists publish books, give public readings, and organize foundations, boring hard boards like everyone else. 

Perhaps the answer is that it isn’t the right that has changed; it’s the mainstream that would have to reabsorb it. The “asylum debate” of the 1980s and ’90s was conducted among ethnic Germans over the heads of second- and third-generation immigrants: people who had German passports, spoke German, and considered themselves German, but were not admitted to be authentically so. When buildings were burned it was often their houses, not those of the asylum seekers the supposed debate was about.

This has changed, though not nearly quickly enough. Germans with immigrant backgrounds are present throughout the political party system (with the exception of the AfD), as well as in the media, and they are starting to make their influence felt electorally. In 2013, they made up nearly 10 percent of eligible voters. By the same token, the group of Germans that in the 1980s considered themselves simply “Germans” are now forced to understand themselves as one group of Germans: white Germans are now Biodeutsche (in the parlance of the right wing), Almans, or simply “potatoes” (a mocking term preferred by German youths of “migratory background”).

They are these things precisely because there are other Germans who call them these things and have the means to be heard calling them that. The self-evident sense that certain Germans retained of who is a voter and what a fellow citizen looks like has disappeared. An imagined space of impunity, of assumed homogeneity, is in the process of vanishing. There is a small town in Bavaria that dresses up in yellowface once a year for a “Chinese carnival”—in 2018 they had to do it with one visibly perplexed Asian-German reporter in their midst, who was covering their rituals for VICE Germany.

Now, when a politician or a public intellectual or a newspaper goes on a Rumspringa in the rightmost reaches of the political spectrum, or if the fine citizens of some small town decide to set fire to a house, there is less of a script by which they would be welcomed back into respectability. Certain ethnic Germans used to take it as their seigneurial right to shower cruelty on the vulnerable and return to the mainstream after a cooling-off period to be listened to and shaken hands with. They are beginning to feel deprived of that right.

For decades, purveyors of the rhetoric of technocratic stability have outsourced their and their voters’ most sadistic and unpalatable beliefs and impulses to the far right. But Schäuble’s career suggests that, while technocratic governance has countless mechanisms to repress its own inherent cruelty and outsource them to the fringes, there is a kind of cruelty that comes from, and is enjoyed at, the center rather than the fringes. To many of its subjects—refugees being told that persecution without torture isn’t enough to win them asylum, unemployed workers being forced to provide all their rejection letters to prove they’re actively looking for work, Greek politicians being told to cut loose the country’s pensioners in the order to reassure investors—this inherent cruelty is wholly self-evident.

Schäuble himself understood early on that technocracy has its sadistic side, and he has embraced it. Both major German parties have in the last thirty years occasionally lapsed into a politics of administered cruelty. The Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency) that privatized the state-owned companies in East Germany, the safety-net cuts of “Agenda 2010,” and the draconian austerity measures after the financial crisis of 2008—all of these were approached by serious old men in smart suits in boardrooms with a kind of resigned shrug. We don’t like it either, they seemed to say, but this is what needs to happen. Schäuble, however, didn’t shrug at all—he seemed to feel genuine glee at the dictates that everyone else pretended to accept only reluctantly. Politicians of his type have been adept at making sound quantitative and objective what ultimately boils down to a demand for suffering, for mortification.

The success of the AfD suggests that Schäuble shares the recognition that alternativelessness has its religious, sacrificial dimension with a growing segment of voters in Germany. These voters have long recognized the carefully sublimated cruelty of alternativelessness; in many cases they’ve been at the receiving end of it. They accepted some of that cruelty for themselves, although very little—nothing more than a light paddle and an available safe word. But above all they demanded that, whatever cruelty the system meted out to them or people like them, it visit ten times that onto the Other. The AfD began as a party of technocrats, and its founders frequently seem surprised by how it sleepwalked from deficits and Euroskepticism to overt racism and illiberalism. One of the movement’s forerunners was Thilo Sarrazin, once an economist at Germany’s central bank, who at some point went from prognosticating that runaway deficits would spell Germany’s doom to prognosticating that runaway procreation by “hijab-girls” would spell Germany’s doom.

It’s a trajectory that isn’t actually all that surprising. Thanks to politicians like Schäuble, for decades now these voters have become used to being applauded for this perspective. Their coldness was reconceptualized as maturity, realism, steeliness of resolve. As the refugees arrived in 2015, CSU’s Secretary General worried that society would “implode” and “the people” would rise up. “Anyone who doesn’t recognize this,” he added about his bit of apocalyptic fan fiction, “ignores reality.” Pragmatic positions were recast as “political correctness,” as “failed multiculturalism,” while bizarre fantasies about racial civil war could stake a claim to being the “realistic” or “serious” position. This is how documents like the German Basic Law, with its talk about “the dignity of man,” or international asylum conventions, could seem to them like softhearted hippie tracts. The only realistic way of looking at the world was looking to make it hurt.

Adorno once spoke of the “categorical imperative of ‘never again’,” and the anxiety with which people watch unemployment figures in Germany is all about this “again”—about fascism as relapse, as repetition. It is against this background that the 12.6 percent of the vote the AfD won nationally in last year’s elections constitutes an incredible shock. Against the easy sociology and the old stories, what the result actually highlights is that Germany now specializes in a fascism in the midst of satiety. Perhaps even a fascism of satiety. And that this, rather than some vague revival of Nazism, is the shape that far-right populism has long taken in the country. As the historian Birte Förster put it on Twitter: “It’s not like Weimar, it’s not like 1933, it’s like Germany, 2018.”

After World War II, German nationalism became an impossibility. It survived largely by being refracted through economics, above all exports. Affluence at home gave people the feeling that “we are somebody again,” as the saying went. The wave of German cars, wares and weapons washing over Europe and the world took the place of German troops. Germans have long moralized economics (not for nothing did Max Weber write The Protestant Ethic in Heidelberg), but after World War II economics to some extent replaced politics: it reconciled Germany with its neighbors and former victims, it finally integrated Germany in an interconnected Europe, and eventually it dismantled the Iron Curtain and unified the country.

But in hindsight it is hard to miss the fact that this economic system, for all its technocratic mousiness, was suffused with displaced affective energy. And not just pride in one’s own wealth, but also a sadistic glee over the misery of others, which is interpreted in similarly moral or theological terms as Germany’s postwar economic success. This was true both between Germany and its neighbors and within Germany itself. Nachtwey probably underplays the ethnic dimension of what he calls “social modernity.” Unlike the New Deal in the United States, postwar affluence in Germany was not explicitly premised on racial stratification. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to sense a connection between the kind of solidarity that underpinned the postwar system of “social market capitalism” and the fact that the massive amounts of wealth created never went to the new arrivals in the country—the Turks, Italians, Greeks, and Yugoslavs who were at any rate still referred to as “guest workers,” even after decades in the country, sometimes even after obtaining German citizenship.

The righteous fury with which Germans have voiced their suspicion that most immigrants aren’t “really” refugees, but are, horror horrorum, motivated by hopes for a better life, is of a piece with this moralization. Germans have become good at denying others what they take to be their own birthright: they are terrified of foreigners taking their jobs, and then inundate Austrian medical schools and Swiss hospitals. They demanded that Greece put its pension system on a sustainable footing, but managed no such thing themselves during decades of affluence. In an infamous 2009 interview that prefigured the rhetoric of the AfD, Sarrazin claimed that “70 percent of Turkish and 90 percent of the Arab population of Berlin . . . live off the state but reject that state.” The irony is that, from retirees via the underemployed rural voters to professionals getting rich off subventions and the dividends of the social safety net, this describes pretty much the average AfD voter.

In his memoir of the Greek debt crisis, Yanis Varoufakis describes the existential vise in which German policymakers held his country. He thinks they’re playing “politics,” but the story he tells is rather of policymakers playing theology. Schäuble, Varoufakis’s bête noire, is a Protestant from the most Calvinist part of Germany. His view of debt and obligation is religious. To him, the Greeks had sinned and now had to do penance. And penance for him, Varoufakis suggests, would mean expelling the Greeks from the EU, forcing them into indigence.

Angela Merkel, child of unification, queen of the center, meanwhile had decided that Greece would remain in the EU. Varoufakis points out that either course of action would have been preferable to a combination of both. He is understandably more interested in the existential dilemma into which German conservatives’ moralization of economics has plunged his country than their reasons for doing so. But those reasons are fascinating: The tag team of Merkel and Schäuble treated countries as autonomous (good or bad) actors, when in fact German wealth had always been premised on greater and greater interconnections.

Neoliberalism has inured people to viewing the world in fundamentally sadomasochistic terms: realistic is that point of view that looks to inflict suffering. And politician-administrators like Wolfgang Schäuble have given them a sense of how to take pleasure in it. While the AfD still commands a minor share of the electorate, this poisonous optic has taken hold of large portions of the German public. Splenetic about any reminders of a global interconnectedness of which they are the massive beneficiaries, these voters applaud themselves for a toughness they largely visit upon people they never have to meet.

It is true that the gig economy, widespread precariousness, and self-employment have made the economic lives of especially younger Germans extremely insecure compared to their elders. And yet it is not them but their elders who channel an economic anxiety that isn’t theirs into votes for the AfD. Maybe Adorno had it half-right. The fear among some ethnic Germans is that the vicissitudes of the world market could do to them what they habitually do to people who do not look like them.

There Is No Alternativelessness :  What's been hiding Germany's hidden crisis? By Adrian Daub.

nplusonemag  , April 16, 2019

Talk of succession is in the air. After 18 years, Angela Merkel is stepping down as chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s main ruling party since 2005. The party’s conference meets this week in Hamburg to decide her replacement. But whoever follows Ms. Merkel — for many, Europe’s de facto leader — will inherit a fractious party and, if Ms. Merkel is unwilling or unable to see out her chancellorship through to 2021, a fragmented country.

The stability (and even monotony) associated with German politics under Ms. Merkel appears to be coming to an end. Her looming retirement marks a deepening crisis of the German political system that threatens not just the future of the country, but of the European Union.

Explanations for this shake-up often begin and end with Ms. Merkel. Her handling of the so-called refugee crisis and her downbeat, aloof style alienated large chunks of the electorate. The gradual weakening of the centrist parties has in turn fed polarization and the fragmentation of the electorate.

But Ms. Merkel, for all her power and influence, is just one politician. Germany’s new political crisis runs much deeper. It stems from an economic system that has resulted in stagnant wages and insecure jobs. The erosion of Germany’s postwar settlement — a strong welfare state, full-time employment, the opportunity to move up in the world — has created a populace open to messages and movements previously banished to the fringes.

As with its politics, on the surface Germany appears to be an economic success story. Its G.D.P. has grown consistently for nearly a decade; unemployment is at its lowest since reunification in 1989. In amassing trade surpluses, Germany has enjoyed several advantages: an advanced manufacturing sector; the ability to get primary products and services from other members of the European Union; and being in the eurozone, which effectively gives the country a devalued currency, making its exports more attractive.

But the system has come at a cost. To maintain their competitive advantage in the global market, companies held down wages. Though for skilled workers in the export-oriented manufacturing sector pay remained stable, or even rose, less-skilled and low-wage workers suffered. This was made possible by decentralizing collective bargaining in the 1990s, which greatly weakened the power of unions.

The other, more alarming reason underlying the country’s political crisis — connected to, but distinct from, the economy — is the erosion of the German social model in recent decades. Though never as socially inclusive as the Scandinavian countries, postwar Germany had a comprehensive welfare state and robust labor unions, ensuring that citizens from the lower strata could achieve a decent living standard and a bit of wealth through full-time employment.

In West Germany, where a secure job was the norm, full-time employment served as the foundation of social integration. The classic metaphor to describe this arrangement was coined by the sociologist Ulrich Beck in the 1980s: the “elevator effect.” It implied that though social inequality still existed, everyone was rising in the same social “elevator,” meaning that the gap between rich and poor wouldn’t widen.

Thirty years later, this society has vanished. Average real incomes declined for nearly 20 years beginning in 1993. Germany not only grew more unequal, but the standard of living for the lower strata stagnated or even fell. The lowest 40 percent of households have faced annual net income losses for around 25 years now, while the kinds of jobs that promised long-term stability dwindled.

The number of precarious jobs like temp positions has exploded. At the height of postwar prosperity, almost 90 percent of jobs offered permanent employment with protections. By 2014, the figure had fallen to 68.3 percent. In other words, nearly one-third of all workers have insecure or short-term jobs. Moreover, a low-wage sector emerged employing millions of workers who can barely afford basic necessities and often need two jobs to get by.

The German middle class is shrinking and no longer functions as a cohesive bloc. Though the upper-middle class still enjoys a high level of security, the lower middle contends with a very real risk of downward mobility. The relatively new phenomenon of a contracting — and internally divided — middle class has set off widespread anxiety.

Instead of a single elevator, Germany today now resembles a bank of escalators in a department store: one escalator has already taken some well-to-do customers to the upper floor, while for those below them, the direction of travel begins to reverse. The daily experience of many is characterized by constant running up a downward escalator. Even when people work hard and stick to the rules, they often make little progress. 

These fears of social decline also accelerate xenophobia. There can be no doubt that a majority of Germans welcomed the new immigrants, just over two million in number, who arrived in 2015. But significant sections of the lower middle and the working class disapproved. When ascent no longer seems possible and collective social protest is almost nonexistent or ineffective, people tend to grow resentful. This has led to accumulated dissatisfaction with the old major parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

West Germany’s three-party system of the postwar era is now a six-party system, making the formation of stable coalitions much more difficult, a condition exacerbated by the declining vote shares for the major parties. (It took almost six months to form the current government, which faces periodic threats of collapse.) The right-populist Alternative for Germany, whose leading figures flirt with racist language and tolerate fascists among their ranks, has entered every state parliament. Formed in 2013, it is now one of the loudest voices in national politics, effectively the opposition.

The Greens too appear to be profiting from disenchantment with the main parties, attracting voters who prefer centrist politics but no longer trust the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats to stand up to the far right, or to improve living standards. Traditional loyalties no longer hold. A nervous, agitated mood has settled across political life.

As Ms. Merkel’s political career nears its end, and her possible replacements vie in Hamburg, it seems clear that the economic and social regime over which she presided is breaking down. Rising inequality has contributed to fragmentation in German society, fueling right-wing populism and fundamentally reordering the country’s politics. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

It Doesn’t Matter Who Replaces Merkel. Germany Is Broken. Oliver Nachtwey. The New YorkTimes , December  7  , 2018. 

Rammstein - Deutschland (Official Video)

Gender Bending Fashion

For 100 years, women have embraced fashion that was once only considered appropriate for men, like suits, military jackets, blue jeans, and brogues. Why hasn’t it become the norm for men to take on traditionally feminine clothing? Will it ever be socially acceptable for more men to wear skirts and dresses?

These are some of the questions that Michelle Finamore asked as she curated the Gender Bending Fashion exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is a psychedelic experience. The space is moody and dark, with green, yellow, and red neon lights illuminating faceless mannequins, crafted by the MFA’s in-house designer Chelsea Garunay. Finamore chose to take an ahistorical approach to fashion: Outfits from different moments over the past century sit beside each other, with ’90s men’s kilts next to a women’s bicycling ensemble from 1900. Interspersed among everyday looks are clothes by designers that have played around with gender norms, including Christian Siriano, Yves Saint Laurent, Rick Owens, Rei Kawakubo for Commes Les Garcons, and Alessandro Michele for Gucci.

This allows the viewer to see the outfits out of their context — and better identify patterns. And it quickly becomes clear that there are recurring motifs. The dark suit, with its boxy shoulders and sharp angles, comes to represent masculine dress. Meanwhile, colorful patterns and flowing robes embody the feminine. But these two forms of dress are slowly colliding in our current moment. The future of fashion appears to be neither masculine, nor feminine, but an intriguing hybrid of the two.

The dark business suit is a relatively recent phenomenon. Finamore, who studies clothing in the 20th and 21st century, believes that our culture has transformed the suit into a symbol of patriarchal power. Before the 19th century, European aristocratic men tended to wear colorful, frilly outfits, along with wigs that gave the appearance of long hair. But then, in the early 1800s, wealthy men began wearing well-cut tailored suits in somber colors, like black, gray, and blue. This is still true today, particularly in male-dominated industries like finance, consulting, and law. The shift occurred during the period after the industrial revolution, when middle-class women were increasingly relegated to the home, while men were out in public spaces working. “There was this idea that colors and patterns were frivolous, and something that women cared about,” Finamore points out. “So these things came to be characterized as feminine.”

As I’ve written in the past, women have tried to access patriarchal power by wearing the suit, particularly in workplaces where women are in the minority. Startups like Argent and Dai specialize in creating suits for women. Even Savile Row, which emerged in the 19th century as the go-to place for wealthy British men to have suits made, is now reinventing itself to cater to women.

While women have gladly taken on the iconic male garment of our time, men, for their part, have not been as adventurous. In fact, men seem to be clinging onto the suit — and offshoots of it, like the blazer and the chino—as their standard form of dress. Not only are these clothes carefully designed to facilitate movement, they also project power and authority toward others. “The business suit has become so entrenched in Western culture and now in non-Western cultures, too,” says Finamore. “Men are loathe to give that up.”

But even as men have stubbornly stuck to traditionally masculine clothing, women have been eager to adopt the clothes of their male counterparts. As the exhibit shows, women often adopted male garments because they were more practical and allowed women to move more freely. For instance, women first gave up their skirts and petticoats because they wanted to take part in outdoor activities, like bicycling or fox hunting by horseback. Under neon lights, there is a painting of a young woman from the late 1800s wearing a man’s horseback riding getup, including trousers and boots. Her long hair is in a ponytail, and her face is delicate and feminine. The message seems to be that it is not particularly transgressive for a woman to wear men’s garments. It is just a matter of functionality.

World War II fast-tracked women’s adoption of men’s clothing. When men went off to fight, women took up the work they left behind, like joining the police force and becoming mechanics. Suddenly, it was normal to see women wearing men’s uniforms, which included suits and jumpsuits.

All of this has paved the way for women of our time to pick from any part of fashion history they like. This is perhaps why women’s fashion weeks around the world are a far more colorful, exciting, and creative experience, with designers mixing traditionally masculine and feminine silhouettes from different eras.

Consider the women’s fall 2019 ready-to-wear shows at New York Fashion Week. The dark business suit was very much in vogue. Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and Balenciaga all played around with suits, sending women onto the runway with boxy blazers. One Rick Owens ensemble featured a blazer on top of a bodysuit and no trousers. But other designers created highly feminine outfits. Paco Rabane sent models out in flowing floral dresses. Rodarte created frilly white gowns full of lace, as well as headbands that looked like halos and shoulder pads that looked like angel’s wings.

The men’s shows, on the other hand, were largely variations of the suit. Alyx created a suit out of leather. Berluti created a suit with a bronze polished exterior. Alexander McQueen created a suit out of layers of houndstooth fabrics. There were only a couple of outliers. Palomo Spain sent a male model out in a floral bohemian gown, and Thom Browne created long white futuristic gowns. But these were exceptions that proved the rule: Men’s fashion is more reluctant to bend gender norms.

What does it take to get men to abandon their loyalty to the suit, and become more adventurous with their clothing? Finamore says that the last century offers a couple of clues.

What does it take to get men to abandon their loyalty to the suit, and become more adventurous with their clothing? Finamore says that the last century offers a couple of clues.

In her analysis, she has observed only a few moments when men have been willing to embrace color, patterns, and flowing silhouettes. The most obvious example is during the 1960s and 1970s, which is sometimes known as the Peacock Revolution in menswear. Men began growing out their hair and wearing colorful, often sexualized clothes that were unlike anything men had worn over the previous century.

The exhibit features pictures of young men wearing floral patterns and trousers with bell bottoms that added curves to an otherwise very staid garment. The most extreme version of this trend can be seen in the 1970 David Bowie album cover for The Man Who Sold the World, which features Bowie in a long floral dress, boots, and long, curly hair. “Ideas about masculine clothing were challenged,” says Finamore.

As Finamore tells it, these moments are related to larger cultural developments. During this era, the rejection of traditional masculine clothing was a way for young men to express their opposition to the establishment, particularly suit-wearing politicians and corporate leaders. Again, the suit was symbolic of patriarchal power, but young men at the time were uneasy with what their patriarchs were doing.

By the 1980s, this challenge to traditional menswear had faded away. In fact, Finamore sees a kind of overcorrection to these more flamboyant styles, as menswear brands reverted to much more traditionally masculine looks. For instance, the high-end Italian suiting company Brioni created colorful floral suits in the 1960s and 1970s, but from the 1980s onward, Brioni suits have rarely strayed from dark colors and angular cuts.

Finamore proposes that we are currently in a moment when young, politically active people are pushing back against the authority, fighting for things like stricter gun laws, women’s rights, and marriage equality. And yet, strangely, we’re not seeing the same kind of radical rejection of traditionally masculine clothing. “We haven’t seen men adopting more colorful attire on a wide scale,” she says. “We haven’t seen them wearing skirts, for instance.”

But we are slowly moving toward a more gender-neutral aesthetic in culture as a whole. This is partly because our culture is slowly beginning to reject the suit, and the male power it represents. Workplaces have become increasingly casual, with tech and creative industries ditching suits, chinos, and blazers. In its place, activewear and jeans have become the norm, and in both cases, the looks are fairly similar for men and women. “Today, there is nothing more androgynous than jeans and a T-shirt,” says Finamore.

The future of fashion, then, is a more subtle blending of masculine and feminine looks. Men and women are already wearing very similar clothes, and every so often, traditionally feminine colors and silhouettes have a way of sneaking into menswear in almost imperceptible ways. Take, for instance, the work of Jordanian-Canadian designer Rad Hourani, whose work is on display in the exhibit. He describes his clothes as genderless, which means creating an aesthetic that doesn’t look particularly masculine or feminine. He’s known for his coats, which have a flowing drape and seem both reminiscent of a military trench coat and a gown. It’s neither here nor there.

The message is telegraphed from birth. Infant girls are swaddled in pink. Boys in blue. Girls wear skirts. Boys pants. The clichés fall easily from our lips. “Clothes make the man,” we say; “who wears the pants,” signals dominance. “A basic purpose of costume is to distinguish men from women,” Alison Lurie writes in “The Language of Clothes.” Dress, traditionally, is the membership card of gender.

In an era of gender fluidity, all bets are off. As the binary of male/female falls by the wayside, fashion follows suit—and has done so periodically since 1507-1458 BCE, when the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as pharaoh wearing male regalia and a false beard. More recently, the Italian designer Alessandro Trincone created an elegant ruffled dress that so captivated rapper Young Thug, he wore it on the cover of his 2016 album: No, My Name is Jeffery. The subject of gender and fashion takes on particular immediacy in the current setting of LGBTQIA+ rights and the impact of social media in community building and self-identification.

In “Gender Bending Fashion,” which runs from March 21 through August 25, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston explores the relationship between fashion and gender—the first time a major museum has addressed the subject (the Trincone dress is one of the costumes on display). Cathy Newman spoke with the show’s curator, Michelle Finamore, of the Museum’s Department of Textiles and Fashion Arts. (Read: A photographer explores the link between color and gender.)

CN : The scribed line separating gendered clothing has blurred. Target, the Wall Street Journal reports, has removed gender labels from in-store signage. Boyfriends and girlfriends raid each other’s closets. Let’s talk about the social zeitgeist that led to the exhibition.

MF :  Originally I was looking at what was going on in contemporary menswear, but then I realized something revolutionary was happening; there was a bigger picture. Designers are responsive to the moment. They respond to the street, to the Millennials and Generation Z ...so they are responding to the new energy of rethinking gender expression through clothing and the idea of not wanting to be boxed into a particular gender. You see this melding and blurring often in moments of youthful rebellion, like in the 20s, 60s, 70s and now.

CN : Let’s start with the proverbial question: “Who wears the pants?”

MF :  There have been blips in history when women have tried to wear pants and failed or were unable to shift the paradigm. In 1851, women’s rights activist Amelia Bloomer [who promoted pants for women inspired by Turkish attire, hence “bloomers.”] tries to offer a more rationale dress for women and failed. As women took up bicycling, tennis and golf, clothing for those sports affected the acceptability of pants. Civil War surgeon Dr. Mary Edwards Walker wore pants despite eight arrests for “inappropriate attire.” In 1993, Carol Moseley-Braun [also Barbara Mikulski] wore pants on the Senate floor. “Until I walked in the door I had no idea there was this unwritten rule,” Moseley-Braun said. Now we have Hillary Clinton’s white pantsuit as a political symbol.

CN : That unwritten rule persisted. In 1968, New York socialite Nan Kempner famously turned up at Le Cirque in pants. When refused entry, she shed the pants and wore her long jacket as a mini-dress. In the early 1980s, when I started at National Geographic, skirt and stockings were de rigueur.

MF :  A woman came up to me recently and said: “I worked on Wall Street in the 1990s and it was dresses and skirts only.” There are still judges who do not permit female attorneys to wear pants in the courtroom. (Discover the world's oldest dress.)

CN :  The show focuses on contemporary 20th and 21st century fashion—designers like Rei Kawakubo, Ikiré Jones and Freddie Burretti, who dressed David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust era—but includes historical context. For example, you display the top hat and tails Marlene Dietrich wore in the 1930 film Morocco.

MF :  The director Josef von Sternberg had to fight the studio for Dietrich to wear that. The studio thought it too radical. She wasn’t the first to do that on film. There are many silent film stars wearing the same thing in the teens and twenties, when the standard female body takes on a more boyish silhouette and bobbed hair. It was driven by a younger generation challenging convention, and women moving into the workplace achieving the right to vote. It’s related to social and cultural change.

CN : There’s an erotic charge to the Dietrich outfit. Didn’t Calvin Klein say: “There’s something incredibly sexy about a woman wearing her boyfriend’s t-shirt and underwear?”

MF :  It’s slightly transgressive—suiting yourself as a man. But it follows her curves and she still has the hair and make up. It mixed it up in a way that was uniquely sexy.

CN : Men wore heels in the 18th century. Not so much now. Elizabeth Semmelhack, a shoe historian, suggests that one might ask because of the implications of dominance, why men don’t wear heels more often?

MF :  It’s true. But then designer Rad Hourani makes the same high-heeled boot for men and women. Many years ago I saw comedian Eddie Izzard perform. He comes to the stage in jeans, make-up and heels. One of my favorite quotes is from him. An interviewer asked: Eddie why are you wearing a woman’s dress? “It’s not a woman’s dress,” he replied. “It’s my dress.” I think at the opening you’ll see a lot of men in heels.

CN :  Joan of Arc appears in the show’s timeline. Her male attire was contentious and factored in her conviction for heresy and execution in 1431.

MF :  “In women’s clothing many transgressions were done to me,” she said at her trial. When I saw that, it put her clothes in a different perspective. Of course men’s clothes would be more protective for her.

CN : Fast forward to February 2019 and Billy Porter in his tuxedo-gown on the red carpet at the Academy Awards. “His torso looked like it was smoking a cigar with a brandy...the skirt, ready for a gothic Victoria-era coronation,” the New Yorker reported.

MF :  That’s designed by Christian Siriano, who did the Janelle Monáe outfit we feature in the show. Porter is an actor who’s been pushing the envelope through dress. “My goal is to be a walking piece of political art every time I show up,” he wrote in Vogue. “To challenge expectations. What is masculinity? What does that mean.” It’s fascinating to me that it’s considered so newsworthy. You’d think we would be beyond that...yet we aren’t because there is something so deeply entrenched about a man in a skirt. There’s a longer history of women in pants than men in skirts. It will be interesting to see where we’ll be in ten years.

CN : What gender-bending clothes hang in your closet?

MF :  I have plenty of tailored suits. We will have a pop-up shop in the museum with Phluid Project, one of the first brick and mortar stores marketing clothes as gender neutral. When I went to talk to them in New York I bought a t-shirt that says gender bender and a long sequined unisex skirt. I’m trying to get my husband to wear a skirt to the opening.

CN : Adam Tessier, the MFA’s head of interpretation, says that most shows represent the end of a conversation. He suggests this will be the start of one. Are there indications that will happen?

MF :  I have a colleague who brought in a young member of the LBGTQ community for a sneak peak in the exhibit’s early stages. “You know,” they said. “I feel like I’ve finally been seen.”

Gender-bending fashion rewrites the rules of who wears what. By Cathy Newman. National Geographic , March 20, 2019. 

The show, titled Gender Bending Fashion, presents clothing over the past century that has "challenged rigid, binary definitions of dress" in Western society. Over 60 garments are on view, from haute couture to ready-to-wear pieces. Curated by Michelle Tolini Finamore, the exhibition also includes paintings, postcards, photographs and video footage.

The show is divided into three sections – Disrupt, Blur and Transcend. Each section features a mix of historical and contemporary pieces, underscoring how gender-bending fashion is not a new phenomena. "Boundary-pushing contemporary designs appear in dialogue with historical garments, exploring moments when people have disrupted, blurred and sought to transcend concepts gendered clothing over the last century," said the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) in a project description.

The show looks at historical movements such as the garçonne styles of the 1920s, in which womenswear took on a boyish look, and the 1960s peacock revolution, in which the traditional men's suit became more flamboyant. French couture designer Jean Paul Gaultier, Commes des Garçon's Rei Kawakubo and British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood are among well-known contemporary designers represented in the show. Others include Canada's Rad Hourani, who is known for gender neutral designs.

The museum's in-house architect, Chelsea Garunay, oversaw the exhibition's design, which makes use of sharp angles, black walls and streaks of colour. Mannequins donning a range of attire are dispersed throughout the show, with some standing atop pedestals and platforms and others set within prismatic, triangular cutouts. Elements such as coloured acrylic glass and vivid light projections onto fabric curtains give the show a dynamic feel.

As visitors move through the galleries, delineated colours and structures begin to break down and merge, just like the blurring of men and women's fashion. The show culminates in a space with flowing patterns and moving light, which are meant to embody "fashion beyond the gender binary".

The show, which runs through 25 August, does more than document styles and trends, according to the museum. "The garments on view speak broadly to societal shifts across the past century," the museum said. "Together, they open conversations on changing gender roles, ongoing efforts towards LGBTQIA+ rights and racial equality, the rise of social media as a powerful tool for self-expression, and much more."

Other recent fashion exhibitions include The Met's Heavenly Bodies show, which explored ties between fashion and the Catholic church, and a show at San Francisco's de Young Museum that surveyed contemporary Muslim attire, from luxury evening wear to the controversial Nike hijab.

Gender Bending Fashion exhibition in Boston challenges notions about clothing. By Jenna McKnight,  Dezeen ,  April 3, 2019

Gender Bending Fashion.  March 21, 2019 – August 25, 2019. Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Philip Larkin : 17 poems

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.  

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.  

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.  

Till then I see what’s really always there:  

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,  

Making all thought impossible but how  

And where and when I shall myself die.  

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse  

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because  

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;  

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,  

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,  

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,  

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,  

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill  

That slows each impulse down to indecision.  

Most things may never happen: this one will,  

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without  

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave  

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.  

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,  

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,  

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring  

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Water

If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too,

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Places, Loved Ones

                          

No, I have never found

The place where I could say

This is my proper ground,

Here I shall stay;

Nor met that special one

Who has an instant claim

On everything I own

Down to my name

To find such seems to prove

You want no choice in where

To build, or whom to love;

You ask them to bear

You off irrevocably,

So that it’s not your fault

Should the town turn dreary,

The girl, a dolt.

Yet, having missed them, you’re

Bound, none the less, to act

As if what you settled for

Mashed you, in fact;

And wiser to keep away

From thinking you still might trace

Uncalled-for to this day

Your person, your place.

The Large Cool Store

The large cool store selling cheap clothes

Set out in simple sizes plainly

(Knitwear, Summer Casuals, Hose,

In Browns and greys, maroons and navy)

Conjures the weekday world of those

Who leave at dawn low terraced houses

Timed for factory, yard and site.

But past the heaps of shirts and trousers

Spread the stands of Modes For Night:

Machine-embroidered, thin as blouses,

Lemon, sapphire, moss-green, rose

Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls and Shorties

Flounce in clusters. To suppose

They share that world, to think their sort is

Matched by something in it, shows

How separate and unearthly love is,

Or women are, or what they do,

Or in our young unreal wishes

Seem to be: synthetic, new

And natureless in ecstasies.

Modesties

Words as plain as hen-birds' wings

 Do not lie,

 Do not over-broider things -

 Are too shy.

 Thoughts that shuffle round like pence

 Through each reign,

 Wear down to their simplest sense

 Yet remain.

 Weeds are not supposed to grow

 But by degrees

 Some achieve a flower, although

 No one sees.

Wants

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:

However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex

However the family is photographed under the flag-staff -
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away from death -
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.

Sad Steps

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by  

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie  

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.  

There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow  

Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart  

(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—  

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain  

Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain  

Of being young; that it can’t come again,  

But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Ignorance

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.

Maiden Name

Marrying left your maiden name disused.

Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it,scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laden.

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s  

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,  

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—  

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if  

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,  

And thought, That’ll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide  

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide  

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:  

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Here

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows

And traffic all night north; swerving through fields

Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,

And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields

Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude

Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,

And the widening river’s slow presence,

The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster

Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,

And residents from raw estates, brought down

The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –

Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,

Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

A cut-priced crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come

Within a terminate and fishy-smelling

Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,

Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;

And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges

Fast-shadowed wheat fields, running high as hedges,

Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands

Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,

Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,

Luminously-peopled air ascends;

And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:

Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Here. Directed by David Lee, poem read by Tom Courtenay

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found  

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,  

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.  

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world  

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence  

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind  

While there is still time.

The Whitsun Weddings

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

    Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence   

The river’s level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept   

    For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.   

Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and   

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;   

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped   

And rose: and now and then a smell of grass   

Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth   

Until the next town, new and nondescript,   

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise

    The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys   

The interest of what’s happening in the shade,

And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls   

I took for porters larking with the mails,   

And went on reading. Once we started, though,   

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls   

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

    Waving goodbye

To something that survived it. Struck, I leant   

More promptly out next time, more curiously,   

And saw it all again in different terms:   

The fathers with broad belts under their suits   

And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;   

An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,   

The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,   

The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.   

    Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed   

Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days   

Were coming to an end. All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;

The last confetti and advice were thrown,

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define   

Just what it saw departing: children frowned   

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

    The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared   

At a religious wounding. Free at last,

And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.   

Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast   

Long shadows over major roads, and for

Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say

    I nearly died,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   

And someone running up to bowl—and none   

Thought of the others they would never meet   

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.   

I thought of London spread out in the sun,   

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across   

    Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss   

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail   

Travelling coincidence; and what it held   

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Philip Larkin reads 'The Whitsun Weddings'

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest

Lying together there goes back so far

An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside the wind’s incomplete unrest

builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind

Or not untrue and not unkind.

Poetry of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,

As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detect my room,
It's specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

Days 

What are days for?

Days are where we live.  

They come, they wake us  

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:  

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor  

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin reads 'Days'

On the poet :

Poetry In Motion: Philip Larkin. Alan Bennett reads the poetry of Philip Larkin and talks about it.  Broadcast on Channel 4 in the summer of 1990.

Poetry Foundation