Kartoffeln
Where else to begin one of these fragments but in Berlin. On the radio, experts are debating whether the current protests by farmers for more subsidies, riding through cities on their tractors, some equipped with large bags of potatoes, are authoritarian. Is blocking a highway entrance, as they have been doing, not a violation of the sanctity of the German state, that is, the autobahn? One expert cites a prevalence of prejudice among farmers as evidence of their purported authoritarian dimension. No one talks about poverty nor the state of agricultural production, but somewhere, in the studio of a public radio station, the fantasy of a protest that would be pure guards the righteous sentiment of the status quo.
Austere affects
In Germany, the political mentality of the 1990s lives longer than elsewhere. Government budgets are compared with a family wallet. Public investment is constitutionally forbidden to lead to new debt, irrespective of the conditions of said debt. Hence, budget cuts abound, remaining public shares are privatized to save, for a year or two, whichever public institution is currently failing – and no investment takes place. Rage is stifled, presumably sublimated into resentment, muteness, or violently denied in the injunction that all must go on, for all is well on its way, reforms, competitivity – we now know the drill. The very logic practiced abroad in the past decades of European economic policy, returns, now, after the beginning of the Ukraine war, after the pandemic, as one of the many ghosts of contemporary Germany. And yet, it would be foolish to claim this haunting merely exists in Germany. It is merely readable as a figure, here, in one of the waning hegemonies, because it was priorly exported.
Beyond the middle-class retreat into private life, there is a muteness to austerity. Budget cuts are subtle, slow, impersonal. Its effects are cumulative, its melancholy, today is private, deafened. While nostalgia creeps in every cultural production, its weaponization by the right leads to the discarding of its grasp, on all of us, robbed of imaginaries in which change is not synonymous with privation.