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German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made the CDU a more socially-oriented party and has broken with the conservative dogma. Now there is increasing resistance to this approach.
The Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) is the country’s most successful political party. With a clear policy of Western alignment, a social market economy concept and its commitment to German reunification, it had a decisive bearing on the post-war order. It has provided the chancellor in 47 of the Federal Republic’s 67 years, and there was no sign of any imminent crisis during the 2013 elections to the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament. Winning more than 40 percent of the votes, the course of liberal modernization that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has pursued since taking up office in 2005 appeared to have been impressively endorsed, both in terms of its content and its power politics.
The situation changed dramatically in the spring of 2016, however: Merkel’s politics encountered resistance, not only from her political opposition but also within the CDU. On the right-wing fringes, a rival party by the name of Alternative for Germany (AfD) formed, and Merkel was openly criticized even by some in the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). In nationwide polls, the Union lost support, while the right-wing populist AfD had already mobilized 15 percent of the electorate by the spring of 2016.
Adapting to social reality
One might say that Angela Merkel is now paying the price for her successes. Ever since taking over as leader of the party in 2000, she has consistently adapted her party to the social reality. After 16 years of Helmut Kohl (CDU) as chancellor, who left behind him a tired and washed out party when he was defeated in 1998, Angela Merkel wanted to “build bridges to society” as CDU leader. She kept her word, right across her political agenda: under Merkel’s leadership, the CDU broke with the conservative dogma that states that Germany is not a country of immigration and opened itself up to a moderate migration policy; it reformed its conventional image of the family and promoted the reconcilability of family and work; it opened its policies to the concerns of same-sex civil partnerships and combined its traditionally economy-friendly attitudes with a significantly more ecological orientation.During Merkel’s chancellorship, there have been drastic course corrections such as the abolition of compulsory military service, the introduction of a minimum wage, the withdrawal from nuclear power and the rescue of the euro at a cost of billions. Each of these decisions brought Merkel approval from the opposition camp – and criticism from her own ranks. Yet the election successes appeared to prove her right.
Turning point in Merkel’s chancellorship
It was not ideology and a consciousness of tradition but rather solution-oriented pragmatism that shaped the Union’s policies during the Merkel era. Her sober approach, which no longer made any concessions to the traditionalists in the party, alienated some people at first. After winning three general elections and forming consecutive coalition governments with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), however, Merkel advanced to become the unchallenged leadership figure for her party and beyond.Merkel is an extremely cautious politician. But perhaps she was not after all cautious enough at the zenith of her power. The fact that the chancellor expected Germany to accept nearly a million victims of the Syrian civil war during the course of 2015 met with deep reservations both within her party and outside it. Merkel’s decision marked a turning point which cast her entire chancellorship in a different light.
Dangerous liberalization
Suddenly, the spectacular election successes of the right-wing populist AfD appear proof that it is not only Merkel’s refugee policy but the entire course of liberal modernization pursued in recent years that could pose a danger to the Union. Merkel’s CDU hardly offers any sort of political home to those scared and unsettled voters of a conservative bent who feel overwhelmed by the challenges of globalization. That is the niche into which the AfD is now advancing.Unlike the Social Democrats, Angela Merkel long succeeded in stabilizing the Union as a people’s party. To achieve this, it pursued policies consistent with the expectations of the German mainstream. Without establishing any formal coalition with the Alliance 90/The Greens party, Merkel increasingly often adopted policies which pleased right-of-centre, left-of-centre and green voters – on issues such as immigration, the family and the environment. In doing so, she disarmed the SPD and Green parties. And compared with other countries in Europe Germany has not fared at all badly during her chancellorship. Yet Merkel has disappointed the conservatives, who are now taking their revenge by harshly criticizing her successful model or turning in their droves to the AfD. Following the Social Democrats, the Union could now be facing a crisis that will cast doubt on its character as a people’s party.
“JournalTouch”, the display of electronic journals, transfers an analogue library service to the digital world. This is how the digital content presents itself “tangibly” in the reading room.
In addition to print editions of books and periodicals more and more digital editions have become available, often making printed works look obsolete. Because electronic services offer a range of advantages, they usually go down well with users. For digital content is available everywhere around the clock. It also allows a fast full-text search, unrestricted forwarding and copying, and the integration of multi-media elements. With all the benefits, largely ignored on the other hand is the loss brought about by digitalization of the social and physical added value of real environments. Because only libraries you can touch offer personal contact, tangible media objects and knowledge and research work that can be experienced with all the senses.
That libraries are becoming increasingly invisible because their holdings are moving more and more into digital space has also been felt by the library of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn: the conversion of part of the journal subscriptions to “e-only” emptied the shelves for new publications. Thus broke away not only a much-used library service, but also a meeting place for library users, which invited them to browse and offered them the opportunity to keep up with things. The discontinuation of this information path was the initial impetus for developing JournalTouch. This innovation “re-established both the sources of information and the meeting place at exactly the same place by means of a permanently installed, touch-sensitive monitor”, explains Regina Goldschmitt of the library team that jointly developed the tool, for which they were awarded the prize “Designers of the Future in Libraries, 2015”.
Analogue services in digital space
As usual with smartphones or tablets, the user navigates the offering on a touchscreen, which displays title pages, tables of content and abstracts. Available at present are about 300 current journals, book acquisitions and the latest publications of the Institute. JournalTouch, however, goes beyond pure display and integrates a variety of services such as printing, ordering, delivery per e-mail and the transfer of metadata to literature management programmes. Users praise the simple handling and the fast, convenient and targeted provision of information of the productive application, which has been available since July 2014.
Updating is also very simple: content is fetched automatically over interfaces at JournalTOCs and CrossRef while title images are provided by a bookshop partner. “Manual updates during operation are unnecessary”, says Goldschmitt, emphasizing the ease of maintenance. But it is clear that “a tool such as JournalTouch can only be as good as its sources”. Because bibliographic data, tables of contents and title images are not always freely accessible and available in machine-readable form. Here Goldschmitt sees a need to catch up, because the said contents are “nothing more than the equivalent of a dust jacket in the real world: a promotional tool, which leads to the actual product”.
Playing field for collaboration and development
Interested libraries can acquire JournalTouch with little effort. To provide individually tailored services for every case of application, the development team decided in favour of issuing as “open source”, which allows the free, non-commercial use by third parties. In a handful of other libraries JournalTouch is already in use. More than a dozen requests for it in its still young history are proof that the application clearly fills a gap. Although there were already monitors for the pure display of contents, the interactive elements of JournalTouch, which allows users to transfer contents to their own terminals, is so far unique.
By deployment under the open source license the development team also hopes for the diverse development of the tool through a lively exchange with an interested community. By realizing further ideas and features, JournalTouch has taken a big step towards realizing the concept of the “blended library”. This vision of the future takes into account the requirements of digital systems that demand new types of user interfaces which integrate the physical and social skills of the user in the research process and so integrate them into interaction with library. Thus the expansion plans of the JournalTouch development team range from porting to mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets and the display of other contents (for example, e-books) to further personalization such as the selection of favourite journals. The development potential of JournalTouch has been by no means exhausted and opens numerous possibilities.
Nils Oskamp and David Schraven engage with the subject of right-wing extremism in their graphic novels. The illustrators offer a profound insight into this world of violence and hatred.
A young man is being beaten up by neo-Nazis in a dark alleyway; they only leave him alone once his body is motionless. “Daddy, get up!” – a little boy wakes his father. The thugs are merely a nightmare. “Phew, everything is okay”, thinks the father, but his memories of the past are still vivid. This is the opening scene to Nils Oskamp’s autobiographical graphic novel Drei Steine (i.e. Three Stones).Born in Bochum in 1969, Oskamp learnt how to fight. As a schoolboy, he used his fists to fight against neo-Nazis at his school. These days he uses his pencil to combat and draw attention to the evils in society. In Drei Steine he depicts his experiences of racism and ostracism and uses flashbacks to describe his time at Wilhelm Busch School in Dortmund-Dorstfeld.
Everyone looks the other way
His memories are anything but sentimental. A new boy at school broadcasts his right-wing extremist and fascist ideology. Oskamp resists – and is beaten up and humiliated. The teachers look the other way, the parents are unable to cope. The spiral of violence escalates. One day, Oskamp is attacked so brutally that he only regains consciousness in hospital. At this point he reports the crime to the police. There is a court case. The thugs are sentenced to 20 hours of community service for attempted murder. Oskamp leaves the city.The journalist David Schraven also focuses on the neo-Nazi scene. His graphic novel Weiße Wölfe (i.e. White Wolves) is about Albert S., a neo-Nazi member of a cell in Dortmund known as Combat 18 – the name the militant arm of the neo-Nazi “Blood & Honour” network gives itself. The book is based on work conducted by Correctiv, an investigative newsroom run by David Schraven. Through investigative research, Schraven has reconstructed the life of Albert S. in a story illustrated by Jan Feindt.
David Schraven made a conscious decision to publish the results of his research in the form of a graphic report and to make them available free of charge online so as to reach young readers. “It makes no sense to bury one’s head in the sand and to believe that the evil will disappear provided one ignores it for long enough. We have to face up to the horror in order to combat it”, he writes on the Correctiv website.
Breaking through the spiral of violence
Nils Oskamp took a different approach. Unlike the investigative journalist David Schraven, he chose not to penetrate ever deeper into the far-right scene, preferring instead to pursue his work in private. He resists, fights – and then realizes that he must break through the spiral of violence. A central role in the story is played by the three eponymous stones which he noticed during a visit to a Jewish cemetery in Dortmund-Dorstfeld. As he explains, working on the comic also had a therapeutic effect for him: “I banished the demons and the rage of my past into the pages of the comic.”Oskamp learnt the skills of his trade early on: after leaving school, he studied illustration at the art academy in Bochum, worked as a graphic designer and art director and then set up in business as a commercial artist. Every two years he attends Franco-German comic seminars in Erlangen. His tutors encouraged him to pursue his career as an illustrator, so he enrolled at Hamburg Animation School. His graduate thesis film Voodee, a parable about captivity and marginalization, won him the 2003 Hamburg “Animation Award”. Nowadays Oskamp illustrates medical instructions and storyboards, designs icons and logos and illustrates magazine texts and advertising brochures.
In 2002, he joined forces with colleagues and founded “Illustratoren Organisation e.V.”, the German Association of Illustrators, which now has more than 1,200 members. In 2003 he launched an international art campaign for the European Parliament in Brussels, entitled “Art Against Female Genital Mutilation”. He also established “Atelier sans Frontières”, a Franco-German artists’ collective. Oskamp has been working on the Drei Steine project since 2007. He presented initial designs and preparatory work at the 2008 Comic Salon in Erlangen, the leading comic festival in the German-speaking world. His book was published by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in 2015 in an abridged version for schools, and in 2016 will be published in its entirety by Panini Verlag. In the illustrator’s opinion, comics are a good way to encourage “kids of the computer-game generation” to read.