Who Defines Culture?
Since May 2025, Germany has a new government coalition led by the Christian Democrats. There are those among the Christian Democrats whom I respect, even if I might not agree with them. But Chancellor Friedrich Merz is not among them. He is a BlackRock creature through and through, extruded to serve American business interests before those of German citizens, and infused with the soul of Diederich Hessling, the protagonist of Heinrich Mann’s “Der Untertan”. I don’t think he is capable of seeing anyone who isn’t a multi-millionaire as a person deserving of dignity and respect – instead, they are resources to be exploited, or alternatively admonished if they do not work themselves to an early grave for the glory of the all-holy Gross Domestic Product.With Merz in charge, my expectations for the members of his cabinet were exceedingly low, and indeed they are every bit the grotesque parodies that Merz himself is. My primary attention – and ire – has been focused on the Minister for the Economy and Energy Katherina Reiche, who has waged a one-woman war against renewable energy, favoring outdated fossil fuel business models that harm Germany just as much as they fill the treasuries of autocrats. The recent Iran War and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz shows the folly of such policies, but I doubt that the Merz cabinet is capable of learning this lesson (or, indeed, any lessons).But another lackey of Merz has recently come to my unwelcome attention – Wolfram Weimer, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. He banned three left-leaning bookstores from participating in an award for independent bookstores, and, after receiving pushback, he canceled the award ceremony altogether. This prompted me to take a closer look at this man, and I did not like what I found.Beyond founding or working for a number of fascist-adjacent conservative magazines and newspapers – Cicero, Die Welt, and so forth – he also seems to hold a number of truly loathsome beliefs. He seems to view cultural identity as something static, inherent in “blood and soil”, rather than something that each generation creates anew. He identifies with the concept of the “Abendland” – “Occident” in English, although this concept is more commonly referred to as “Western Civilization”. And he blames “Decolonization” for the “decline of European supremacy”.There is a lot to unpack here. First of all, we need to recognize that the concepts of “Abendland”, “Occident”, or “Western Civilization” are, at their core, a code for White Supremacy. They reduce the USA and Canada (and other English-language former colonies, for that matter) to nothing more than a cultural appendix of Europe – and thus erase the cultural contributions of the First Nations, Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and others in favor of white people who want to remain on top of the social heap.Americans should feel insulted to have their culture reduced to that of “Europe Lite”. Europeans should think twice before invoking such a racist concept.And by arguing against Decolonization, Weimer makes clear what kind of system he favors – a rich white elite class who alone get to decide what “culture” is, and who gets to impose their vision on everyone else while exploiting them and turning them into serfs.This is not only insulting to non-white people, but to everyone who isn’t rich. And here is where this intersects with my folklore research.For all their faults, the Brothers Grimm understood something about culture that Weimer, Merz, and indeed the entire Epstein Class do not and never will: Culture starts at the bottom, not at the top. The Brothers Grimm were passionate about figuring out what made German culture unique, and their approach was to learn about the tales and customs of the peasant population. This was new and revolutionary in Germany – in previous centuries, scholars paid the poor little heed, or else held them in contempt. But to the Brothers Grimm, and the many other folklore researchers who followed in their footsteps, the thoughts of people who were poor mattered.It wasn’t the peasants sitting around the communal hearth fires who plundered the world and erected monuments to their own vainglory. Instead, they invented stories, developed customs, celebrated festivals, and in general tried to inject a little happiness into their lives which otherwise were full of hard labor and more than a little misery. These people weren’t perfect – plenty of folk tales display more than a little moral myopia. But tried to get by despite all the obstacles in their paths, and the stories they left behind remind us that they existed, and that their lives mattered.And this is an affront to the sensibilities of Weimer, Merz, and all those who have sold their souls to the oligarchs or even joined their ranks. For all their talk about preserving German or European culture, they hold any culture that they don’t control in utter contempt. They favor fascist aesthetics over anything created, shared and enjoyed by a large number of non-rich people.As a German patriot, this stance offends me deeply. But we don’t have to buy the stories they are telling. We don’t have to submit to the Mighty Whities and permit them to define what “culture” is and is not. We can tell our own tales, whether old or new. We can create our own customs and traditions, with each generation adding their own threads – no matter where their ancestors came from.Culture is what we make of it.
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