Germany’s democracy is 75 years old this month. The anniversary is pregnant with meaning, as the country debates with ever greater anxiety the principles that have underpinned its postwar identity and sense of self-worth.
Pomp is not something modern Germans do, but on 23 May the Basic Law will be celebrated with a state ceremony. That will be followed by a “Festival of Democracy” in Berlin and in the former capital, Bonn, where it came into being in 1949. Commemorative events and discussion groups are taking place in universities and civic halls. If only other countries, not least Britain, with its politics-as-entertainment culture, could interrogate their democratic credentials as earnestly.
