The international court of public opinion seems to have a soft spot for Germany these days. Outside observers are hailing us for our stable democracy, our acceptance of female politicians and our economic success.
In an age when much of the world seems to have gone crazy, I can understand why some commentators might see Germany as a bastion of reasonableness and good sense. Yet the reality is not quite as reassuring.
Take conspiracy theories. In Germany, they are no longer the prerogative of a handful of unhinged individuals. According to a recent study, nearly a third of Germans give credibility to them. A hard core of 10 percent fully subscribes to at least one.
The notorious American group QAnon, which claims to be fighting a pedophiliac conspiracy among the U.S. power elite, has been growing rapidly; its German following may now be the largest outside the anglosphere. Their online channels on messaging apps such as Telegram boast tens of thousands of followers. You might think that the group’s focus on Donald Trump would give it less of a hold beyond U.S. borders. Yet its German followers, who see parallels to their own situation, have seized on the former president as a savior figure.
German QAnon followers observed the U.S. elections last year with the same sense of outrage as their American counterparts. After the Capitol riot in January, one of their apparent leaders — who seems to work in Berlin-area real estate as his day job — called Joe Biden’s victory the “biggest electoral theft in the history of humanity” and expressed his hope that Donald Trump would lead a successful coup together with “other patriots” and the military.
The ideological ground for conspiracy theories was already fertile in Germany long before QAnon came along. For years, the most prominent purveyor of mass paranoia was a distinctly local group known as the Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich). Domestic intelligence services estimate its membership at around 20,000. The Citizens of the Reich deny the legal existence of the current Federal Republic of Germany, arguing that it never signed a legally binding peace treaty to restore its sovereignty following postwar occupation by the Allies. In their eyes, their country is therefore still occupied by U.S. and Russian troops. They see in Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin hero figures who are trying to help the German people break their supposed shackles and become an independent state.
Despite the bizarre nature of these assertions, QAnon and the Reichsbürger have found influential celebrity supporters. Last year, the singer Xavier Naidoo published a video in which he claimed that the chemical adrenochrome was used as a rejuvenation serum sourced from the blood of children abducted by international pedophile rings — a belief straight out of the QAnon repertoire.
The consequences of such thought experiments are very real. Tobias Rathjen, a far-right extremist who frequently spoke of secret U.S. bases in Germany where children were allegedly abused, murdered 11 people and injured another five near Frankfurt in February 2020. Similarly, protesters angry about Germany’s response to the coronavirus pandemic tried to storm the parliament building in late August 2020, just over four months before the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Many conspiracy theorists indulge in their fantasies in private rather than in organized groups. I have friends in Germany who think that vaccines were designed to alter their DNA. My former neighbors now refer to their family doctors as “agents of government propaganda.”
My own family is now confronting the problem. My uncle — until recently a perfectly normal middle-aged man with a wife, kids and a steady job in IT — has embraced Germany’s anti-vaccine scene. He has not only refused to get vaccinated—he has also started arguing that covid is a fiction, that statistics are fakes and that the government response is cover for an attempt to control people. It has become increasingly difficult for those of us who don’t share his views to have conversations with him.
So what’s the solution? Ridicule and condemnation usually seem to confirm the views held by radicalized individuals. As families, friends and wider society distance themselves, the camaraderie offered by the groups becomes even more appealing.
A 2016 study conducted by Princeton University found a clear link between social isolation and tendencies to believe in conspiracy theories. This explains why socially deprived areas in East Germany appear to be far more likely to become breeding grounds for conspiracy theories compared with places where people enjoy more stable social networks. Polls have found similar results for the United States, identifying White working-class people as feeling excluded by society, and therefore highly susceptible.
It is high time that governments and the media in democracies worldwide engaged with the roots of conspiracy theories and addressed them constructively. We need discussion, not ridicule, if we want to tackle the problem effectively — especially if we want to live up to those democratic values we hold so dear.
Katja Hoyer, an Anglo-German historian and journalist, is the author of “Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918.”