Apocalypse Now

I recently spoke to one of Germany’s largest booksellers. His success, including with dissident literature, is based in part on the fact that he listens to his customers without interference from program directors, editors, or sales representatives. He has observed a growing interest in the apocalypse, one that he believes is also linked to a lack of knowledge about what the term implies. People are afraid again, but they’re not entirely sure what they are afraid of, and are even less sure how to place their concerns about the future within the Christian tradition.

In my estimation, both anxiety and unawareness are part of the current situation in Germany. Many have dark premonitions about violence, hardship, and chaos. And they fear that they are neither physically nor spiritually equipped to deal with the future. Moral indifference, relativism, a loss of touch with reality, and an implicit nihilism characterize the media and political establishment. The churches, including the Catholic Church in most circumstances, float in this surreal atmosphere and hardly convey their own teachings anymore. Where is someone who senses that things are off-kilter to turn? What can he rely on? Who can help him understand what to wish and hope for?

The eminent energy and environmental historian Rolf Peter Sieferle (1949–2016) warned in his posthumously published book Das Migrationsproblem (The Migration Problem) of the incompatibility of the welfare state and mass immigration. His collection of short essays, Finis Germania, also published after his death, touched on taboo topics in Germany and became a bestseller. He put words to the dark premonitions of many people. The essays also sparked public condemnation because his reflections ran counter to the establishment’s determined efforts to project an image of stability—“Don’t worry!”

In one of these essays, under the heading “Sozialdemokratismus” (Social Democracy), Sieferle described the strong need among Germans for “equalization of living conditions.” The desire for social stability is powerful. For decades, the economic success of the Federal Republic of Germany has allowed a common fiction to be accepted as fact. Solidarity became a “game” in which “everyone can win, but no one has to lose unless they deserve it.” It was a fiction convenient for the high earners, the big corporations, or the state, which usually knows no other way to help itself than by spending money.

The privileged ideological status of social democracy turned the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) into social democratic parties that operated within the broad consensus that characterized various coalition governments. All this, Sieferle argued, worked for better or worse, until mass immigration strained the German consensus. One event after another brought it to a breaking point: Angela Merkel’s opening of the borders in 2015, her ruthless coronavirus policy, and finally a climate policy that drives German energy prices to ever new heights.

In an untenable situation, it is easy to lose sight of what is still possible, and perhaps even good. Our imaginations are dominated by what’s unsustainable and seems ready to collapse. In this situation, two extreme states often arise, exacerbating the problem: an extreme sense of power and an extreme sense of powerlessness. 

On the one hand, there is an expectation that “politics” will turn the bad reality into something better, if we just push harder and power through. This impulse to double down and increase political efforts permeates not only the German left, but also the conservative or right-wing opposition. Despite the disappointments of the last three hundred years, parts of the German Catholic Church still believe that politics has revolutionary power. In my view, politics is best understood as the exercise of power aimed at preventing the worst, moderating excesses, and ameliorating conditions where possible. But this is rejected by the German mainstream. Without big promises, there can be no electoral success.

We find the other extreme, that of powerlessness, described in a radical claim by Sieferle: “The truly decisive processes of reality cannot be decided, but take place autonomously.” As an example, he cites the disintegration of the family, which, with a few exceptions, no one wanted but which, in his eyes, can no longer be reversed. Sieferle viewed the future of civil society with despair. Drawing on Nietzsche’s “last man,” he envisioned a pure dystopia: “The completion of civilization is the cultural animal kingdom: the realm of base needs and their immediate satisfaction. Here, no one dies for an ideal anymore, but kills himself through robbery or gang warfare. . . . The state of nature is at the end, not at the beginning, of civil society.” On September 17, 2016, Sieferle took his own life in his home in Heidelberg.

In his 1977 book Eschatology, Joseph Ratzinger warned against both extremes, both the “sting of utopia,” as he calls the dream of limitless power, and dystopia, the “consciousness of the decline of European civilization.” In Eric Voegelin’s view, both utopian and dystopian ideologies are among the Gnostic temptations of our time. Neither occur without ideological exaggeration. Sadly, we live in a time of ideological exaggeration; we are bewitched by theoretical constructs rather than attentive to reality.

As G. K. Chesterton wrote, there is a dose of heresy in the social reformer’s assumption that there can never be any joy in a slum bar. He was right. From a Christian perspective, there is no absolute evil in this world, no evil in which there is not some perverted but real good. We are neither poised to “solve” our civic problems, nor are we doomed. It could hardly be said more simply than by future Pope Benedict XVI. In Eschatology, Ratzinger provides what amounts to Christology with a practical purpose, a message of faith made for this world. From a Christian perspective, “end times” can refer to the entire period between the first coming and the second coming of Christ (Matt. 13:31–35). In other words, we are already living in the end times. And in this view, each day becomes a salvific gift—an opportunity for grace and clarity.

If we consider the apocalypse as an everyday problem rather than a great catastrophe at the end of time, we still do not have to close our eyes to the—seemingly inevitable—massive social, economic, and financial problems facing Germany. But they lose their hopelessness when we focus on the present and the near future, and on the areas of life that are within our power to shape. There is comfort in knowing that our time is limited; all we can do is make the choice between what is good and what is evil, no more and no less. The rest is up to God.