The Origins of the Wirecard Scandal

After the Second World War, German national pride was in tatters. It improved through the power of German industry and the mighty Deutschmark.

That’s because the Standort has become a stand-in for a national pride that dare not speak its name. The phrase “made in Germany” was first established in 1887 in the United Kingdom to make visible shoddy German knock-offs of British wares. German manufacturers, like the British legislators, treated it as a mark of shame, with German companies placing the label in areas where it would be unlikely or impossible to spot. But even before the First World War, the stigma had become a badge of pride, and after the end of the Second World War, it became something even more important: the only possible vehicle for German power politics.

After the Second World War, German national pride was in tatters. It improved through the power of German industry and the mighty Deutschmark. The German economy became a seductive stand-in for explicit nationalism. Before long, Germans could show their face again as heralds of Bosch dishwashers and Volkswagen beetles, rather than spiked helmets and jackboots.

One result, the sociologist Oliver Decker has proposed, was a “secondary authoritarianism,” less focused on leaders or national greatness than on the economy and representative businesses. “This secondary authority,” Decker and his co-authors write, “can, like the primary kind, demand that the individual sacrifice their own wishes and life projects, and as compensation it offers the promise of a proximate participation in its power.” During the economic miracle of the postwar years, many Germans identified with “the economy” and its visible icons: its profitable corporations, its immense trade surpluses, its powerful currency.

During this transfer, German politics retained an old paranoid thinking about the economy. Just as German nationalism after World War I had its “stab in the back” myth to explain how the German army had lost the Great War, so postwar Germans tend to see secret plots to stymie their obviously superior economic power whenever their companies are found to have violated international norms. Nachtwey, who briefly worked with Volkswagen in the wake of the company’s notorious emissions scandals, says that even as managers were going to jail and the lawsuits piled up, higher-ups “talked privately about how all of this was just an element to weaken V.W. in the U.S., because we’re too strong.”

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/32xn6Vg