Die Groß Chill
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
– Robert Frost
For me, as for many Americans who came of political age in the ‘90s, there has always been an almost existential tie between scandal and sex. The thing so fascinatingly wrong that it could topple a president wasn’t corruption or incompetence or the improper use of power. It was a blowjob. There’s something uncanny about following German politics for anyone raised in this climate of hypermoralistic sensationalism. There are rarely sex or drug scandals and when there are, they tend not to be career-ending. Television personality Michel Friedman, for example, was convicted for possession of cocaine and implicated in a prostitution scandal in 2003; he was given a new show in 2004. Green party leader Cem Özdemir was chased from political life for his involvement in two separate corruption scandals in 2002; in 2004 he was elected to the European Parliament. When Özdemir’s colleague Volker Beck lost his seat after being detained for possession of crystal meth in 2016, he was soon appointed head of the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft, a powerful lobbying group.
But the fact that Germans don’t moralize the way Americans do doesn’t imply that they don’t moralize at all. While sex is rarely grounds for a scandal, plagiarism accusations have vexed politicians since 2011, when defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was chased from office for plagiarizing large portions of his dissertation on constitutional law. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen faced a similar scandal, as have Alice Weidel of the AfD, former Green Party leaders Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, the CDU’s Armin Laschet, and the center-left SPD’s Franziska Giffey. And they are only among the more prominent victims of potentially career-ending accusations of improper citational practice.
For all their insistence on intellectual precision, these accusations move public conversations away from the actual stuff of political life. Indeed, plagiarism scandals have been most disruptive when they have targeted professionals whose expertise serves to help generate the working consensus needed for modern democracies to function. No one thinks of von der Leyen conducting (never mind botching) research in obstetrics, just as the strong reactions to Habeck’s leadership are generally unrelated to his professional rigor in his former life as a literary critic.
Accusations against the Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist Alexandra Föderl-Schmid, for example, were prominently leveled by NIUS, a news portal run by disgraced former Bild chief Julian Reichelt. He commissioned an Austrian communications researcher-turned-Plagiatsjäger (plagiarism hunter) named Stefan Weber to investigate Föderl-Schmid’s dissertation. Weber, who has been convicted of defamation on multiple occasions, openly admits that his work is politically motivated. He has claimed that “right-wing extremist should be a term of honor,” and routinely mixes his allegations of plagiarism with populist rants against immigrants, feminism, and public media. The accusations, despite their dubious nature, still generated vicious ad hominem attacks against the journalist online, which were accompanied by the very real threat of professional consequences. Föderl-Schmid was placed on leave from Süddeutsche Zeitung for much of 2024; when she briefly went missing that February, there was widespread fear that she had met a violent end.
Unsurprisingly, independent commissions appointed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the University of Salzburg found that while there were isolated instances where the scholar-cum-journalist should have reworded passages or attributed sources more carefully, she by no means systematically plagiarized the work of others. Still, Weber continues to level plagiarism allegations against major figures in Germany’s political, academic, and media worlds—allegations that continue to be taken as the basis for important political decisions. Most recently, he has set his sights on a medical ethicist named Alena Buyx, who helped shape Germany’s response to COVID-19.
Weber’s moment in the spotlight came in July 2025 when he leveled allegations of academic misconduct against Potsdam law professor Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf after she was nominated to the Bundesverfassungsgericht, Germany’s highest court. She faced a slander campaign conducted in part by members of the governing CDU, who distorted many of her positions. The attack was initially coordinated by extremist media outlets with direct ties to right-wing think tanks and foundations in the US and elsewhere. They painted her as the true extremist, accused her of plagiarism, and subjected her to a series of public and private threats. Her positions on abortion, especially, were repeatedly taken out of context. This campaign was such a flagrant violation of norms that over three hundred legal scholars signed an open letter warning that it would “damage the democratic order.” Brosius-Gersdorf ultimately renounced her candidacy.
The controversy is unlikely to affect the integrity of the German court directly. Still, because abortion was decriminalized rather than legalized, there is widespread fear that the American activists who campaigned so vigorously to overturn Roe v. Wade will now turn their attention to Germany. While such endeavors have little immediate chance of success, attacks on reproductive rights are rarely limited. And when attempts to restrict bodily autonomy converge with politicized attacks on the courts, the press, and universities—as they have in Germany’s plagiarism scandals—they should be seen as grave warnings about the health of the political body.
Plagiarism accusations are not simply evidence of Germany’s fetishistic commitment to scholarly probity, just as the spate of sex scandals that followed Clinton’s impeachment trial did not arise from an abiding interest in marital fidelity. Instead, scandals emerge around issues that feed into prevailing cultural dynamics. Political scandals are cultural events, which is why the epidemic of plagiarism scandals can’t be understood solely in political terms. We need culture, not politics, to understand why some allegations capture a nation’s imagination while others do not.
Germany is a cold culture. This observation seems so broad as to risk offense, but there’s more to descriptions of Teutonic iciness than empty clichés. The values that have produced both the best and the worst of modern Germany have often been frigid, as the scholar Helmut Lethen contended in his 1994 book Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany. German coldness, for Lethen, was a disposition that informed both the icy brutality of Carl Schmitt and the reserved, clarifying empathy of artists like Georg Grosz and Otto Dix. The discipline, inwardness, tact, and reserve that were characteristic of Germany’s military class also marked its most accomplished artists and distinguished scholars. The same dispassion that fueled the Nazis’ brutality is also crucial to some of the most encompassing visions of human welfare. Lethen’s book was a sensation in Germany—despite his reputation as a student activist and Maoist firebrand.
He was right that there was a cold streak to Weimar leftism, and it is difficult not to share his enthusiasm for some of its products. But while cold virtues serve to reinforce established political positions, it’s hard to imagine how they could generate new consensus. That is, the figures and societies that Lethen identifies as embodying these virtues were all trying to conserve something, whether it was the hegemony of the Catholic church, a certain German humanism, or Marxism as a political force in Western Europe.
Cold virtues can be leftist, but they’re not progressive. That isn’t only a bad thing—indeed, this left conservatism may explain why Germany’s social welfare state has survived the ravages of neoliberalism with less scarring than its counterparts in the Anglophone world. But a singular focus on cold virtues distorts a culture’s ability to adapt to changing social realities. Perhaps this is why the question of gender so clearly reveals the inadequacy of cold cultures. In government or economics, where the pace of change is glacial, cold virtues are often best. But reproductive labor rarely allows for this distanced, analytical approach; power structures forged through intimacy resist coldness. For example, while Bertolt Brecht’s commitment to distance and alienation made him one of the great observers of economic exploitation, it also rendered him insensitive (on a personal and creative level) to gendered exploitation.
The warmth demanded by intimate relationships tends to turn cold virtues into liabilities. Take Lethen’s own marriage to Caroline Sommerfeld, a far-right political commentator nearly 40 years his junior. The marriage between the eminent, aging leftist and the young reactionary was described in cool but enthusiastic terms in a spate of articles written during the height of #MeToo in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, andDie Welt, and The New York Times, which sawthe relationship as “a laboratory for tolerance and a rare window into how the other side thinks.” But when men go to bed with women whose life experience is separated from their own by nearly four decades and an enormous gap in prestige, we don’t praise their political perspicacity. And if someone stays married to a person who has made a career advocating for white ethnonationalism, it is reasonable to call their commitment to leftist virtues into question.
Lethen’s marriage isn’t the union of political opposites; it’s a love affair between two conservative thinkers, staged along an ostensible political divide to demonstrate the virtues of tolerance and reserve. In a recent interview with the staidly reactionary Neue Züricher Zeitung, Lethen blamed migration for Germany’s social problems, complained that Germany needed more robust defensive capabilities, and spoke positively of Heimat (homeland). The differences between his positions and his wife’s, he said, “are getting smaller and smaller…. Somehow, we’ve found a modus vivendi.”
These articles that misunderstand Lethen and Sommerfeld’s marriage are symptomatic of a media system that maintains rigorously cool but often superficial standards of professionalism. There’s no reason to assume any of the articles about Lethen and Sommerfeld were plagiarized, but they are so similar and derive from such superficial readings of their subjects’ work that they might as well be. It is in this sense that we should understand Germany’s spate of plagiarism accusations. They are neither evidence of actually existing academic impropriety nor, Brosius-Gersdorf notwithstanding, a threat to the stability of public life.
What they do reveal is a struggle in the soul of a nation that fetishizes its intellectual culture while despising the ambiguity, difficulty, and patience it requires. In this sense, plagiarism scandals mirror the selective outrage surrounding accusations of antisemitism that have come to undermine Germany’s political stability. Yet these dynamics are not particular to Germany. Both antisemitism and the heinous opportunism required to capitalize on it are lamentably common across the globe. Germany isn’t the only nation to curtail the speech of left-wing activists, especially among ethnic and religious minorities, nor was it unique in using the genocide in Gaza to justify sweeping interference into academic life, the rollback of civil liberties, and the expansion of the surveillance state.
But Germany’s regulation of antisemitism does reflect its peculiarly cold culture. The country relies more on technocratic expertise to diagnose antisemitism than other nations, and the bureaucratic apparatus that supports such accusations is especially robust. And there’s a more subtle level of discursive restrictions: The accusation that various public figures have failed to condemn Hamas or publicly mourn the victims of October 7th has been used to indict both Arab and Jewish critics of Netanyahu’s war. Such accusations have had real consequences, particularly among marginalized groups whose personal and economic security depends on the right to free expression on this issue. Plagiarism and antisemitism both speak to a society in which cold virtues like discipline, honor, privacy, honesty, and analytical rigor are venerated, but applied so selectively that they threaten the foundation of public life.
The philosopher Henrike Kohpieß recently adopted the term “bourgeois coldness” (in a widely celebrated book of the same name) to describe tactics deployed by a complacent European middle class to inure itself to the suffering inflicted by its political regime. Chief among them is the hyperfocus on specific suffering that occludes the enormity of other pain. For Kohpieß, the best example is the EU’s brutal measures to prevent migration across the Mediterranean. This kind of moral shielding isn’t exclusively a German phenomenon, as anyone who has been berated, from the window of a two-ton SUV, about the environmental consequences of plastic straws can all too easily testify.
But German political discourse is especially characterized by this kind of bourgeois coldness. To discuss the loss of Palestinian life without discussing the loss of Jewish life is widely understood to be an antisemitic act, just as isolated academic missteps are identified or fabricated to manufacture scandals. Only something as terrible as the massacre of thousands of innocent people can shield us from the overwhelming emotional trauma of witnessing the carnage in Gaza; only through an obsessive performance of guilt over the Holocaust can one shield oneself from the guilt that arises from ongoing complicity in global injustices. This emotional insulation comes at both an epistemic and institutional price. The problem isn’t merely that facts are ignored or distorted; it’s that the cold affective logic described by Kohpieß is fundamentally toxic to the subtle, contextually-bound arguments that are essential to intellectual life.
The problem isn’t merely that people say things about Israel and Palestine or about abortion that are untrue; the very structure of arguments that rely on imperfect data or the specific conventions that allow for expertise in different fields are called repeatedly into question in the name of some kind of chimerical intellectual rigor. The accusations against both Föderl-Schmid and Brosius-Gersdorf were plausible not despite the fact that they were working at the forefront of their fields, but because of it. In this sense, plagiarism accusations mirror the broader problems that have plagued public life in Germany since the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD): Formerly crucial distinctions have largely been erased in the attempt to keep the party from power. While the far-right party has been effectively prevented from holding power, they have succeeded in forcing other parties into increasingly uncomfortable compromises in order to retain their hold on power—nuanced political positions become impossible in an environment that disallows complexity. The cost of freezing out the AfD has frequently been to erase the kinds of differences that had once drawn voters to other parties.
The apparatus that regulates antisemitism constitutes an especially potent example of the ways in which an imaginary discipline has come to replace the difficulty and nuance that come with lived experience as well as with intellectual expertise. The apparatus that purports to regulate antisemitism in Germany was developed at the suggestion of the AfD in 2018 and has never relied on either Jews or on people with any particular academic expertise in Jewish history or culture. Instead, predominantly Christian bureaucrats have sought increasingly broad restrictions on speech surrounding the issue of Israel. The result has not merely been the silencing of both Jews and Muslims; it has been the effective end of the political debate on the Middle East. Germans might be able to choose between four or five mainstream political parties at the polls, but there is no functional difference between them when it comes to this important issue: the CDU, SPD, FDP, and Greens have all held essentially the same pro-Israeli line since the establishment of the system of antisemitism commissioners.
This dynamic has been clearest in terms of antisemitism, but it can be observed in discussions of any of the most important issues facing Germany today. It is difficult to distinguish between Germany’s major political parties when they discuss the instability of American trade and security guarantees, for example, or the threatened collapse of the EU, Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, or Germany’s energy insecurity. Even topics foundational to the political identity of Germany’s major parties are now so frequently contested as to be nearly meaningless: the Green party has hawks willing to compromise on fossil fuels, while the CDU cheerfully ignores the debt brake that it constitutionalized.
This has been the most important political accomplishment of the AfD to date: There are now no political alternatives in Germany, though there is plenty of bickering and infighting among the political elite. Regardless of one’s views of the ideologies that once drove Germany’s major political parties, their instability threatens the administration of public life. The security of the welfare state, the restraint of the justice system, and the generally high quality of social services all depend on their professionalism, as does the country’s international reputation.
Instead of debates on policy, German politics has devolved into a series of factional battles. Perhaps the most serious fight arose when the government proposed generous reforms to the country’s pension program. The CDU’s youth wing—a crucial barometer of the party’s direction—publicly revolted by withholding its 18 parliamentary votes, dooming the bill to failure. Similar revolts erupted in the youth programs of the Greens and the SPD, while the AfD has struggled to rein in its youth organization, which has drawn both public criticism and the ire of intelligence services by calling for the “Remigration” of Germany’s immigrant population. This infighting suggests the revolt of a political generation that fears they will bear the burden of supporting their elders financially while facing down a noxious combination of impending ecological collapse, a faltering economy, and an increasingly bellicose world.
While scandals reveal the contours of Germany’s cold culture, they distract from the most severe consequence: the erosion of civil liberties. German courts have always taken aggressive action against defamation, but a 2021 law makes slandering a political figure a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Concerns that the law has been misused are widespread. One man’s house was raided by police after he called Habeck “weak in the head professionally” in an online discussion; Alice Weidel of the AfD has brought hundreds of suits against her detractors. Indeed, plagiarism scandals matter because they are a safe way to wreak havoc on the lives of political opponents in a culture that has committed itself to overlooking even the most heinous faults of its leaders.
It is hard to know how such prosecutions are affecting public life in Germany today, though they are becoming more common: in 2022, prosecutors opened 1,400 investigations; in 2024 that number grew to nearly 4,500. But it is the younger generation whose free expression has been most curtailed by the law. One Berlin high school student is facing criminal charges for a sign—held at a protest against planned compulsory military service—that announced Chancellor Merz should “go suck an egg” (Merz leck Ei). A student in Munich was arrested for carrying a sign suggesting that Merz should “go die on the Eastern Front himself.” These signs may have been tasteless, but they neither endorsed violence against Merz directly nor did they amount to an ad hominem attack. Another high school student in Freiburg was recently prosecuted for sharing memes drawing parallels between a recruiter for the Bundeswehr and members of the SS.
These students, like those wrongly accused of plagiarism or antisemitism, are victims of a culture that fetishizes “cold” virtues like honor, discipline, and accuracy over “warmer” values like empathy, spontaneity, and creativity. Those cold values have served Germany in good stead, maintaining a high standard of living despite global political and economic instability. But they come with dangers. Prosecution of critics of rearmament or of German foreign policy not only infringes upon the rights of individuals, but forestalls crucial conversations, substantially degrading the quality of the public sphere.
These are the tragic consequences of a culture that overestimates the importance of cold virtues. They are currently taking especially ominous form in widespread but lackluster discussions of rearmament. Germany long tried to blame a small cadre of Nazi elites, symbolized by the SS, for the crimes of the Second World War. Germany’s culture of atonement for its past is often dated to a 1995 traveling exhibition entitled “Crimes of the Wehrmacht,” which sparked a fiery public debate by demonstrating the German Army’s complicity in Nazi war crimes. The Bundeswehr continues to insist that it has no meaningful institutional continuities with the Wehrmacht, but journalists and historians have repeatedly shown that to be untrue. The Freiburg student who made a satirical comparison between a Bundeswehr recruiting officer and a member of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel may have overreached, but as Europe’s embattled industrial powerhouse rearms, the historical continuities between the contemporary German army and the forces that ravaged Europe 80 years ago should be urgently debated.
Defenders of such prosecutions might rightly point out that they have not prevented such a discussion—indeed, the very wealth of articles and books investigating the Bundeswehr’s relationship to right-wing extremism is compelling evidence that Germany is willing to tolerate and even sponsor dissent. But this is incorrect. Scholarly accounts of the continuities between the Nazis and the German state today are crucially important, but anti-war movements from Dada to Vietnam have relied on hot blood more than cool heads to produce both moral clarity and great art. The expectation that a protest sign or a cartoon should express its criticism with the restraint and modesty of a scholarly argument is fundamentally repressive. Anger and fear are part of public life. They must be part of our public discussion as well. Analytically rigorous historical comparisons are important, but anyone who suggests that prison is an appropriate response for botching one should go suck an egg.
