As of late, culture wars or Kulturkämpfe have emerged as a central concept that proves momentously meaningful to comprehending the nature and character of increasingly polarised and morally-charged social conflicts around the globe. Many of these disputes are driven by profound disagreement over the definition and social status of cultural heritage assets and the conflicting visions for the common good and societal identity they embody, inciting processes of vigorous contestation and fierce defence among those affected.

In order to grasp such dynamics and trace the ever-changing social status – from revered to condemned, from valuable or sacred to dark or toxic heritage – our tandem project introduces the analytical concept of darkening. The subsequent analysis applies this heuristic to the social conflicts surrounding the assertion of the German stability culture and its contestation in the Eurozone, thereby illustrating the value of the tool for future inquiry.

Triggered by external events, hitherto largely invisible and impalpable cultural bonds and boundaries among social groups or society can suddenly ignite over the clash of divergent interpretations regarding their cultural heritage.

As such, struggles over the definition of proclaimed ancestral legacies and the vision for the common good they represent emerge as an important social mechanism and driving force at the heart of today’s culture wars.

Per definition, the characterisation of a material artefact or immaterial construct as ‘heritage’ comes as a signifier of social value. Hence, heritage assets are traditionally considered sacred, inherently worthy of protection, accepted as fundamental cornerstones of the common identity by large parts of the respective society. As such, they are products of “heritage-making” (Weiss 2007, Harrison 2015) efforts – or, in theoretical terms, the social construction of a valued past in the present to anchor a person or group in a temporal space, spanning past, present and future.

For other social actors within or outside such society or social group, however, what is considered heritage by the majority may depict the exact opposite, something “difficult” (Macdonald 2008), “dark” (Thomas et al. 2019) or “toxic” (Wollentz 2020) – and hence an aspect of a past “that hurts” (Sather-Wagstaff 2011) that begs reappraisal and rethinking. For them, such heretofore long-cherished heritage assets symbolise, socially pernicious values, what society should move away from, what undermines their identity and what threatens their respective moral vision of the common good.  

When readings of heritage clash, this makes for an ominous composition: For one group of society, upholding the elevated status of what they perceive ancestral legacy and the normative social order that embodies constitutes a vital process of relating the historical to its contemporary and future self. Any alternative interpretation, hence, evokes an existential struggle that comes with a strong emotional and moral investment. For these ontological guardians, any doubt of their claim to heritage begs relentless and fierce defence of who they are and how things should be.

Conversely, opposing social actors or groups who reject these acclaimed values, norms and ideas epitomised by the claim of heritage engage in an vigorous, equally emotional and morally charged appeal. Rather than cultivating the treasured status of the glorious past, its merits and virtues, these actors engage in processes of heritage contestation, underscore its flawed characteristics and qualities and attempt to anchor or manifest such negative status within society (cf. e.g. Rodenberg & Wagenaar 2018).

As the contemporary product of continuous dissonant conversations between heritage-guardians and heritage-contesters, the status of material and immaterial heritage goods is always in flux.

Mirrored by numerous past and contemporary culture wars, the confrontation of both perspectives, however, may lead to more than mere debate. Heritage contestation can indeed lead to the aspired revaluation, a change of thinking resulting in the formerly sacred becoming disenchanted. However, it can produce larger ripples among society resulting in increasingly polarised debates over the common good, normative orders and the (dis-)continuity of social identity in time.

To grasp the dynamic of these fluid processes and to gauge the progression of this open-ended struggle over the emotional, social and temporal scope of cultural heritage, our project proposes the heuristic concept of darkening and its subtypes. Darkening may be broadly understood as the transition in social status from valuable and sacred to dark or toxic.

To allow for a differentiated examination, we distinguish two types: 

Type I describes a process of social re-valuation during which a cherished cultural heritage good or concept is ascribed toxic value on the basis of an alternative interpretation of its historical origin. In the course of this process, the historical point of reference that bestowed it with its sacred social status is superimposed on by a negatively valuated interpretation resulting in a morally charged and emotionally-driven contemporary rejection.

Type II conceptually differs from type I, as it does not question the historical point of reference or ancestral past and their preceding value for past society. Rather, this second dynamic conceives a process during which the negative contemporary ramifications that arise from maintaining or adhering to the normative imperatives posed by said cultural heritage are revaluated and increasingly rejected as toxic. Hence, the acclaimed heritage remains a historical artefact signifying special, identitarian value for the past society. For the present, however, such claim poses the opposite.

German Stability Culture and its contestation in the Eurozone

Beyond those conceptual notes, our project focusses on a case study pertaining to the field of monetary and fiscal policy in the Eurozone.

Here, a multitude of academic and journalistic observers have detected a "tough struggle for direction [...] over debts and credits, but also over ideologically charged fighting terms" (Bonse 2020), a “war of ideas” (Brunnermeier et al. 2016: 2), a “Kulturkampf” (Nixon 2014, James 2015) and a “clash of cultures” (Ertel 2010, Associated Press 2014) between various historically-rooted ideational traditions and cultural dispositions raging over the definition of policy direction and their underlying institutional framework. At the heart of these debates lies a struggle over the preservation and assertion of the German stability culture which, in our view, illustrates ongoing processes for both types of darkening.

To begin with, German stability culture or Stabilitätskultur constitutes the notion that German monetary history – especially the twofold experience of hyperinflation following both world wars, as well as the subsequent success of the Bundesbank in preserving the stability of the D-Mark – has resulted in a lasting imprint on the collective psyche, monetary and fiscal policy making, and its underlying institutional backbone (e.g. Issing 2008: 22-23; Brunnermeier & James 2018). In particular, stability culture is understood as a persistent, historically-rooted, deep-seated preference for stable prices and respective orthodox monetary and restrictive fiscal policies shared among society as a whole, policy-makers, and public institutions (Howarth & Rommerskirchen 2013, for comprehensive literature review see Haffert et al. 2021). With the Maastricht Treaty and the inception of the Eurozone, this foremost national culture of stability was transposed to the institutional architecture of the European Economic and Monetary Union. Today, it is embodied institutionally in the European Central Bank’s (ECB) independent, stability-oriented institutional mandate along with strict legal provisions for deficit, debt, and fiscal transfers and reified practically through respective policy decisions (Löffler 2010, Bibow 2013).

Ever since the Maastricht Treaty took effect, substantial reforms to the shared rulebook and groundbreaking policy measures mark instances of both departure and reification of the ideas and norms of German stability culture. In light of the ongoing Kulturkampf in the Eurozone, these were not only accompanied by an eager vindication of the old, but its strong discursive contestation. For suche debates, both types of darkening can be attested.

Type I darkening of German stability culture

As for the first, darkening emerged as a striking characteristic of the ongoing political and academic dispute on stability culture’s historical roots and hence its contemporary legitimacy.

In past as well as current debates, proponents of German stability culture and its foundational elements of stability-oriented independent central banking and fiscal austerity connect the experience of hyperinflation with the rise of National Socialism in Germany to underscore the need for fiscal restraint and monetary rigidity. According to this historical conjecture, which remains prevalent in both German media and the general public (e.g. Haffert et al. 2021), the experience of hyperinflation, of social uncertainty and moral decline, provided the social breeding ground for the Nazis to grasp power.[1] As hyperinflation is attributed to the political instrumentalisation of the German Reichsbank to finance public spending through debt monetisation, this experience – according to such popular knowledge – produced the lesson of “protect[ing] money against politics” (Eich & Tooze 2018: 192) and keeping prices stable at any cost, especially by curbing public expenditure (Blyth 2013: 193-196, Bibow 2017).

In the recent political controversies surrounding the “unconventional” (Ohler 2021) or “unorthodox” (Issing 2013) monetary policy on part of the ECB, as well as fiscal policy responses to both the Eurozone crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, proponents of stability culture invoked this historical reading to argue against a politicisation of monetary policy, sovereign bond purchases by the ECB, and fiscally expansionary measures.

For instance, during the Eurozone crisis, former German Federal Minister of Economic Affairs Rainer Brüderle repeatedly warned Germans should not forget their special relationship with money as hyperinflation had preceded “the most miserable period in German history” (Brüderle in Deutscher Bundestag 2012a: 22999, 2012b: 22811) when arguing to preserve price stability and fiscal rules against aspirations of monetary financing and stimulus policy.

In a similar vein, during and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, prominent conservative economist Hans-Werner Sinn time and time again quoted Austrian literate Stefan Zweig in that “nothing rendered the German people so embittered, so full of hatred, so ready for Hitler as inflation” (e.g. in Stahl 2022, in Tichy 2023, Sinn 2023), warning that decisive stability-oriented monetary policy and fiscal restraint were needed as policies “that prevent […] this from happening [again]” (in Ferber 2020, see also Sinn 2020, in ÖAW 2022).

However, in turn, the narrative linkage between hyperinflation, National Socialism and respective stability-oriented policy lessons was also object of intense contestation. Specifically, scholarly and journalist critics invoked the opposite interpretation of history that monetary deflation and fiscal austerity predestined the rise of the Nazi party. According to this alternative reading, stability culture’s recipies themself were the source of evil and hence needed to be averted.

During the Eurozone crisis, such critique against Germany’ insistence on spending cuts and fiscal reform was prominently spearheaded by economists Paul Krugman and Mark Blyth.

In his New York Times column series, Nobel laureate Krugman prominently remarked that “the 1923 hyperinflation didn’t bring Hitler to power; it was the Brüning deflation and depression” (Krugman 2013) when debating Eurozone policy (see also Krugman 2015ab). Accordingly, Germany had learned the “wrong lessons” (Krugman 2015b) from its history and would now push for an agenda that could endanger “the European project of peace and democracy” (ibid.). Likewise, Blyth in his eponymous full-length critique on “Austerity“ (2013) went even furhter claiming that rather than hyperinflation it was the subsequent deflationary spending cuts that “gave Europe […] genocidal fascism“ (Blyth 2013: 197), which “helped blow up the world” (ibid. 205) and thus begged repraisal.

Next to Krugman and Blyth, a plethora of authors both in Germany and abroad sought to counter the conservative assertion of the policy recipes of stabiliy culture and its narrative rooting in the past with alternative references to history. Likewise, they argued that fiscally restrictive hard-money policy based on austerity caused social hardship and that like in 1930s Weimar “such misery will act as oxygen for opportunistic politicians“ (Grice in Hume 2011); that the German finance ministry “misses the historical reality” (Sachs 2015) and will “like in Germany under Brüning” (ibid.) cause democratically-elected governments to fall; and that the German government should rather look to the lessons of stimulus-driven post-war reconstruction when “the allies recognised […] that Hitler’s rise had much to do with the unemployment (not the inflation)“ (Stiglitz 2015). Along this counter-perspective on history, they concluded that “[t]he greatest threat to our prosperity at the moment is not inflation - but the fear of it“ (Schieritz 2013: 9). and that Germany’s past showed exactly that fear “is not just stupid, it is dangerous“ (Coppola 2014).

Few years later, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, in a debate published by German business daily Handelsblatt, such alternative readings of stability culture’s historical roots and ramifications resurfaced. Then, Austrian economist Philipp Heimberger prominently countered Hans-Werner Sinn’s aforementioned line of argument linking monetary rigidity and fiscal restraint to the rise of Hitler. Pointing to a recent study of voting records between 1930 and 1933 (cf. Galofré Vilà et al. 2021), Heimberger warned of “a dangerous distortion, given that the negative effects of austerity policies were an essential factor in the early 1930s in the Nazi’s eventual rise to power” (2020). Hence, Heimberger concluded that “[m]isinterpretations of history can be momentous” (ibid.) suggesting that an overly restrictive course for monetary and fiscal policy in the face of crisis could produce the very outcomes they aim to prevent.

Summing up, Krugman, Blyth, Heimberger and other monetary cultural contestants decisively questioned the sacrally valued social status of fiscal and monetary restraint pursued and supported by German policy makers by reevaluting its acclaimed historical roots. Doing so, they strikingly counterbalanced its long-held cherished status with the detrimental effects such stability-oriented policies had in the past.

Though not all of the authors explicitly go as far, this reading of the history produces a converse interpretation of the policy ideas connected to German stability culture, which is: if austerity and deflationary measures lead to totalitarianism, following stability-oriented policy and ignoring the need for spending constitutes a pe rilous, morally reprehensible endeavour of historical amnesia.

Therefore, illustrative evidence of a type I darkening of the German stability culture can be identified for the debates described above. However, as such processes were and remain confined to elite circles among policy-makers and academia and stability-oriented policies still enjoy conspicuous acclaim and approval among German policy makers and the population at large (cf. e.g. Hayo & Neumeier 2016, 2017), darkening remains an ongoing, albeit limited process that is far from being completed.

Figure 1. Type I darkening of German stability culture

Type II darkening of German stability culture

Next to the debates of stability culture’s historical origin, its central policy ideas likewise underwent a process of darkening during the Eurozone crisis. This dynamic, however, was not driven by a critical look back in time but the contemporary ramifications adhering to said policy recipies of monetary and fiscal orthodoxy – the dismissal of monetary financing and the assertaion of fiscal austerity – produced.

Most strikingly, processes of type II darkening were a dominant feature in the debates on financial assistance for and spending cuts in Greece during the Eurozone crisis. Especially in light of the clash between German and Greek policy-makers over structural reforms and the third rescue package for Greece in 2015, there were conspicuous efforts by the latter to re-interpret the German insistence on fiscal austerity as toxic, while the former underscored its moral merits and identarian value.

For Germany, fiscal reforms generally presented the central ingredient of the common response to the Eurozone crisis. Particularly, the German government in its communicative discourse continuously linked the need for tighter fiscal rules and restricted public spending with the protection of German stability culture and its implementation as a guiding principle for a common “stability union” (e.g. Merkel 2011, 2012). In the course of this, fiscal restraint was positioned as an identitarian and moral necessity beyond the mere technical consideration of interest payments or budgetary sustainability. Accordingly, preventing public spending “on tick” (Merkel 2010) would not only preserve intergenerational justice, maintain fiscal scope for future generations and prevent fiscal “sins” (Schäuble in Schäfers & Steltzner 2010). Moreover, the German government argued, tight fiscal policy was essential to keeping the pledge that the Euro would be “as stable as the D-Mark” (Brüderle in Deutscher Bundestag 2011: 13216), to honour “inflationary fears, which have their roots in German history in the past century” (Schäuble 2010) and to protect the achievements of European integration and EMU “as a whole” (Merkel 2015) against the danger of becoming a transfer union.

In regard to Greece, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble emerged as the key public spokesman arguing for strict structural reforms as a prerequisite to receiving financial assistance. His demands, too, were guided not only by the functional argument of regaining market confidence for Greek sovereign bonds, but also moral claims (see also De Grauwe 2011, Matthijs & McNamara 2015). Particularly, in parallel with an ongoing portrayal of Greeks as lazy and profligate by German tabloid media (Mylonas 2012), Schäuble strikingly echoed such sentiments by suggesting morally questionable behaviour on the part of Greece. Repeatedly, he explained the main problem at the heart of crisis by employing the strongly negatively-connotated household analogy that Greece had lived “beyond its means” (e.g. in ARD Tagesthemen 2015, in Föderl-Schmidt & Schnauder 2015, in Heuer 2015). Furthermore, he underscored the morally charged demand that communal cohesion in the Eurozone needed to be reciprocal as “[s]olidarity also has something to do with reliability, solidity and mutual consideration” (Schäuble 2015), arguing that Greek reforms were a matter of communal responsibility for the stability of the common currency area.

Hence, rather than financing Greek budget in a manner of unhinged European solidarity, Schäuble argued, the Eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) should continue to deliver “help for self-help” (Schäuble in Heuer 2015). The main efforts to curb the crisis, however, needed to be mustered by Greece itself thereby making good for past debauchery and taking charge for the European community.

On the contrary, the Greek position within such debates was strongly guided by the converse interpretation of austerity imposed through strict fiscal rules and reforms. In general, the government accepted the need to cut spending in order to gain market confidence (cf. Tooze 2018: 340). However, the mode and manner of the austerity programs decided by Eurozone members, imposed by the EU Commission, the IMF and the ECB and strongly supported by the German government, led to vigorous contestation within Greek civil society and especially the left-wing SYRIZA government. Notably, the Greek demand for rescue transfers was informed by moral argumentation and emotional appeals that not only demanded “solidarity, democracy, social justice” (Tsipras in Reuters 2015a) in the face of worsening conditions in Greece. Moreover, Greek opposition to the austerity measures strikingly emphasised the toxic, i.e. life-threatening and morally-deprived character of the austere reform programs that undermined the Euoprean spirit within the Eurozone. In this regard, Greek rhetorical contestation was multifaceted:

First, the reform programs were portrayed as inhumane and deeply immoral. Prominently, former Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis continuously labelled the austerity measures as “fiscal waterboarding” (e.g. in Hüetlin & Neubacher 2015) and lamented a “permanent terror of asphyxiation” (ibid.), thereby comparing spending cuts in exchange for bailout payments with torture practices. Likewise, the Greek government claimed the European and international creditors were subjecting Greece to “terrorism” (Varoufakis in Johnston 2015) and imposing conditions “[t]o instil fear in people” (ibid.) while proceeding in an “unjust” (Varoufakis in Gatzke & Schieritz 2015) and “barbarous” (Tsipras quoted in The Economist 2015) manner as well as an “brutality never seen before” (Tsipras in Nicastro 2015). According, to their reading, the prolonged austerity did not solve but cause a “humanitarian crisis” (Tsipras 2015) due to which “hundreds of thousands of Greeks aren’t sleeping properly and are going to bed hungry” (Varoufakis in Reuters 2015b).

Secondly, SYRIZIA appealed to empathy on the part of Eurozone members and stressed national feelings of deprived social status that were being stirred by the continuous loss of fiscal sovereignty (see also Wolf 2020). For instance, the government frequently warned the Troika was treating Greece as a “debt colony” (Tsipras 2015) and ignoring domestic opinions on economic affairs. With specific regard to insistence on reforns, Prime Minister Tsipras lamented that German policy makers had “denigrated [us] as a nation of slackers” (in Albes et al. 2015). Hence, the Greek referendum in July 2015 on the bailout conditions for the third rescue package represented a “decision of dignity” (Tsipras in Papapostolou 2015) and the endpoint to “national humiliation” (Tsipras in Barkin & Rinke 2015) imposed by the reform programs.

And thirdly, within the Greek media but also the government’s communication, frequent complaints about German hubris were tied to historical analogies to German National Socialism and WWII. As most extreme examples, during the election campaign in early 2015, Tsipras warned that the Greeks would face a "social holocaust" (in Zeit Online 2015) if the austerity programs imposed by the Troika continued unabated. Furthermore, the daily newspaper I Avgi, widely considered the mouthpiece of SYRIZIA, portrayed German Finance Minister Schäuble as a Nazi dressed in a Wehrmacht uniform, labelling him as “Gauleiter” (ibid.) and comparing fiscal reforms to concentration camps. Lastly, the Greek government countered German calls for austerity with the demand of reparation payments as an equally pressing “historical obligation” (Tsipras in Albes et al. 2015) for past crimes that required reckoning.

Outside of Greece, similar protest and resentment against the German push for fiscal restraint was echoed in other Southern European countries, notably in Spain and Italy. Here, opposition politicians such as MS5’s Beppe Grillo claimed that “[w]e’re getting poorer and Germany is getting richer” (in Scherer 2012) and that “Italy sold its soul to the German devil” (in Handelsblatt 2013). Podemos’ Pablo Iglesias contended the IMF and Germany were “destroying the political project of Europe” (Iglesias in Reuters 2015c) and “attacking democracy” (ibid.). Interestingly, similar contestation emerged in Germany as well. Here, especially the left-wing DIE LINKE and the German trade union federation DGB opposed budgeting cuts as the cause of “social and economic catastrophe” (DGB 2015), a “technocratic lunacy” (Kipping et al. 2015), and a product of “neoliberal ideological delusions” (Gysi 2015) which go against the grain of European identity and undermine the European project as a whole.

In all those debates, however, the historical validity appreciation of German stability culture as the champion of hyperinflation and glorius legacy of the D-Mark continues to fuel the international reputation of German institutions such as the Bundesbank and remained untouched by such cultural revaluations. Instead, darkening referred to the contemporary ramifications of adhering to the assertion of stability culture in the Eurozone.

Hence, in a nutshell, the debates on financial assistance to Greece reflect a clearly visible process of type II darkening in which austere stability-oriented fiscal policies were ascribed a toxic status and rejected especially on moral grounds by large shares of an increasingly polarised debate. Such a darkened interpretation, however, remained limited in time and scope, and stability-oriented policies continue to enjoy widespread acclaim not only in Germany but in other Northern European States such as the self-proclaimed “frugal four” (Kurz 2020). It follows that Type II darkening of the German stability culture also remains incomplete.

Figure 2. Type II darkening of German stability culture

Conclusion

In sum, applying the concept of darkening and its two subtypes to the conflict over and contestation of German stability culture in the Eurozone proves the analytic value the heuristic. As such, the case study demonstrates the utility of our approach as a helpful analytical tool in comprehending, tracking or reconstructing the character and progress of societal struggles over cultural heritage.

Certainly, there are certainly limitations to what our concept brings to the table. For instance, darkening remains mostly descriptive and does not (yet) help to predict the outcomes of any debate over cultural heritage. Neither do we claim that darkening is the only or exclusive process at work that shapes cultural conflicts or culture wars.

However, as struggles over cultural heritage can be increasingly found across the globe in a multitude of different contexts and circumstance we suggest that our concept provides a substantial contribution to their understanding beyond the case at hand. Hence, it should continue to be applied, tested and refined.

[1] Overall, a direct connection between the Nazi rule and hyperinflation, which early on was proposed by literates such as Thomas Mann, Elias Canetti and Stefan Zweig (Widdig 2001), was strongly debated among historians. Especially, early accounts of the Weimar inflation by Bresciani-Turroni (2013 [1937]), Hill (1977) or Ferguson & Granville (2000) more or less directly connected inflation and the demise of democracy in the Weimar Republic. Today, it is widely discredited.Younger scholarly inquiry led by Feldman’s seminal study “The Great Disorder” (1993) and supported by recent examinations of voting records reject such notion and point to the Great Depression as the major benefactor for the Machtergreifung (Galofré-Vilà 2021 et al., Galofré-Vilà 2023, see also Taylor 2013, Roselli 2021).

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