The German Decline in a Czech Mirror

In the contrast between Prague’s civility and Berlin’s malaise lies the tale of two post-totalitarian nations and the leaders who shaped them.

It has been thirty-four years since I last visited Prague. I returned recently to honour a Czech exile who died in Hamburg. I was amazed. The city is strikingly clean, orderly and self-possessed, almost absurdly so when compared to German cities of comparable size. Even the residential neighbourhoods beyond the historic centre seem lovingly maintained. Sidewalks are wide, often beautifully paved in vibrant colours, and notably unblemished by the scourge of dog dirt, despite the many dogs. Public bins are few, yet there is no rubbish. Graffiti, minimal. Trams and metros glide through the day without incident, even at peak hours. The atmosphere is one of understated grace and shared ease - something Germany, once familiar with, seems to have lost.

And yet, as you stroll through the old town, Prague makes you wince. You sense, in its buildings and bookshelves, the imprint of its German-Jewish past - Kafka, Brod, Kisch, Werfel. Until the Nazi invasion in 1939, Prague pulsed with German-language publishing houses, a refuge for writers exiled by Hitler’s regime. Here, before the Iron Curtain fell, free literature found sanctuary.

Today’s Prague is a city that remembers. Its youth wear ironic T-shirts mocking communism. Its culture lionizes dissidents like Václav Havel. In Germany, meanwhile, Angela Merkel is the icon - praised not for defiance, but for discretion. The difference is more than symbolic.

Havel was denied access to secondary school because of his bourgeois background. He endured Nazi occupation, the 1948 communist putsch, and the Slánský show trials. He was jailed for his activism, spent five years behind bars, and emerged not as a broken man but as the moral voice of Czechoslovakia. His courage, articulated in Charter 77 for which he was arrested, was of the stubborn, impractical kind that once gave Europe its conscience.

Merkel’s path was smoother. As the daughter of a socialist pastor in East Germany, she was allowed to study, to rise quietly, inconspicuously, through the GDR’s institutions. By the 1980s, she was active in the party’s youth agitprop apparatus, still doing PR work for a regime built on silence and compliance. When the Wall fell in 1989, she was in a sauna. Her subsequent political ascent was aided by two men, Wolfgang Schnur and Lothar de Maizière, both later unmasked as long-standing Stasi collaborators.

Both Merkel and Havel are, in a sense, children of 1989. But where Havel fought for civil liberties, Merkel inherited them. Where he defied the system, she mastered it. That difference, the defiant versus the deferential, echoes in their respective capitals.

Prague is calm, elegant, proud. There are no visible tensions over religion or identity. Jewish men can wear kippot or peyot without fear of attack. While pro-Hamas protests do occur, they are fringe, even mocked. Unlike in Berlin or Hamburg, where imported hatreds now roil the streets and tolerance has become a double-edged sword, Prague remains cosmopolitan but also secure in its cultural heritage. It embraces its Czech, Jewish and German past, not as burdens but as legacies.

I once thought Germany might head in that direction too. I remember traveling through Poland in 2005, passing the haunting remnants of Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz. My English-Canadian companion gently mocked me for having made peace with my Germanness. He was right to challenge me. And yet, back then, I did feel a flicker of pride - not for the past, but for what post-war Germany had become: sober, principled, liberal.

That same year, Merkel was elected chancellor.

Now, more than a quarter of a million Germans emigrate annually. Most are young, well-educated, and no longer see a future at home. High taxes, bloated bureaucracy, a declining quality of life: these are the surface symptoms. The deeper malaise stems from something else, a kind of moral self-annihilation disguised as virtue.

The eco-socialist moralism of Germany’s political class demands that its citizens atone endlessly. To save the climate, they must sacrifice their prosperity. To atone for past sins, they must embrace unlimited migration. Culture must become a blank slate. Empathy, boundless and unthinking, is now a policy. State-funded and ideological NGOs smuggle in migrants who overwhelm a fraying welfare system. Those who protest are slurred as ‘racists,’ ‘Nazis,’ or worse.

Germany’s cultural elite seems determined to erase its own identity. Claudia Roth, the Green Party’s cultural commissioner, once marched behind a banner that read, “Germany, you lousy piece of shit.” On another: “Germany, perish!” The line between irony and pathology is no longer visible.

Meanwhile, the sidewalks of Prague are clean. Its façades are not yet defaced. Its citizens walk upright. Its dissident legacy - Havel’s legacy - lives on, not as nostalgia, but as political instinct. Czechs know what foreign domination feels like. They understand the value of freedom. They defend their culture not with chauvinism, but with care.

The Germans, by contrast, have become captives of a new orthodoxy, one less violent than the old ones, but no less totalizing. Democracy, once lived, is now stage-managed. Public discourse is filtered through ‘firewalls’ against wrongthink. The suspicion of patriotism has become a national dogma.

This is the difference between Havel and Merkel. Between a dissident and a functionary. Between memory and forgetting. As I walked Prague’s streets and breathed its air, admired its ornate rooftops, listened to its gentle quiet, I felt not envy, but grief. Grief for what my own country once was. Grief for what it might still have been.

(The author is a German historian and novelist. Views are personal)