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Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on a trip
Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka / picture alliance / dpa
Imagine you are in a job interview.
Your potential future boss is holding your resume.
»Aha, so you did further training here, then two years abroad – and then…« she traces the table listing your professional positions with her finger, »…and then you had regular contact with a war criminal for a few years – So as we know today - as well as with some of his business partners at home and abroad.
Rosneft… Gazprom… Well, not that it's any of my business, but you have to know: Honesty is very important to us in our company.
So could you please explain briefly how this came about?”
Probably very few of us have ever been in this specific situation.
But should that ever happen to you, you really don't have many options: you can deny this annoying part of your career;
or else self-confidently confirm it;
or talk it up using all the rules of rhetorical art.
How is this supposed to work?
Well, for now, you should study the behavior of prominent SPD actors to learn how to quickly cook up the CV pitfalls and their contemporary consequences and adapt them to the assessment center of public criticism in order to keep the job.
No, this is not about inciting a similar cause as in the case of Annalena Baerbock's CV.
Because what the SPD is currently fabricating affects the lives of many people and political actors.
Surely you have noticed that our Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has admitted mistakes in his Russia/Ukraine policy.
After that, however, there was no further discussion and reappraisal of these unsuccessful foreign policy assessments, which is why the Ukrainian government could not be entirely blamed for its irritation.
What are the consequences of this policy?
How could this happen?
What have you learned from your own professional CV?
Sigmar Gabriel, on the other hand, tried to help his party colleague and, in a long speech in SPIEGEL, gave public diligence points for Steinmeier's curriculum, which according to him proves that he had done a great deal, if not almost everything, very correctly.
Gabriel explains that the current Federal President, Angela Merkel, "has done more than anyone else in Europe to support Ukraine."
In a grand historic gesture, he also blames Ukraine for some degree of complicity in the war, declaring that the Minsk agreements establishing a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine were never really upheld;
which is not just down to Steinmeier or the patron states of Germany and France:
"Political representatives of Ukraine never developed anything like 'ownership' for the Minsk agreements, which in turn the Russian leadership used to evade their responsibility for the implementation of the agreements."
At the moment when responsibility is also sought in Ukraine and it is established that everything would not have worked as well in 2014 as Gabriel now considers correct in retrospect, he also justifies Germany's current Ukraine policy.
This is also how you optimize your political self-narrative, you rearrange the goalposts in the past so that the own goal of the present looks like a missed penalty.
You retrospectively create a new continuity through which history flows from the future into the past.
The negative consequences of numerous such social-democratic decisions are currently becoming visible, which is why they have to be criticized all the more now.
Of course, up to a certain point it is understandable why decision-makers like Steinmeier and Gabriel, Manuela Schwesig or Gerhard Schröder retroactively narrate their actions so as not to appear incompetent.
At the same time, an old structural hesitancy of the SPD and the government is revealed, which those responsible in the flight forward are relabeling as collective determination.
Because everything was always done “in coordination with the partners” because you didn’t want to be accused of going it alone – which was simply not the case back then, keyword: Nord Stream 2.
The scenario conjured up by Olaf Scholz of a German »going it alone« is a perfect vehicle for retrospectively relating an omitted action as a strategically clever manoeuvre.
He repeatedly emphasizes this restraint, which is said to be a sign of statesmanlike leadership, not least in his speech last Tuesday.
It just doesn't make it any more true with repetition.
Like Steinmeier, who said, "I was wrong, like others," Scholz also likes to recall the idea of distributed responsibility in order to give himself moral absolution for his decisions.
Because if many people are doing or have done it, then the mistake can't be as drastic as claimed or a decision for or against something can't be that badly wrong:
“Right from the start of the war, we acted decisively, with unprecedented sanctions and a decision to start shipping weapons to this war zone on a large scale.
Many in Europe followed this step, ours.«
Well, how do you define many?
Great Britain, Belgium, Poland, Estonia had delivered arms before Germany.
So does this now claimed pioneering role, which is presented in a self-legitimating manner on the one hand and warning on the other, a particularly well-thought-out self-perception, a convinced action away from the public - or is it more of a rhetorical transfiguration?
The bingo sentence with the keyword "going it alone" - which Secretary General Kevin Kühnert also took up these days to justify the government's backwards role in the matter of weapons - is simply not correct in terms of content: "All this is happening in close coordination with the partners here in Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic.
Going it alone would be wrong.«
So.
NATO was ready for long-term arms deliveries to Ukraine. On April 8, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told BBC 4: "The Allies are ready to deliver more and more modern and heavier weapons."
So where does the dominant public (wrong?) perception come from that the SPD either does not act or communicates poorly – or both?
Political retcon
In the field of fictional storytelling, there is the term »retcon« or »retroactive continuity« in English.
As a literary means, this means a conscious subsequent change in narrative continuity so that it fits better into an overall narrative and so that seemingly contradictory events can be meaningfully, coherently and logically connected again.
Authors may undertake such a revision of past storylines for various reasons: to enable the continuation of their own literary work;
to absorb and iron out negative criticism;
to allow a reinterpretation of one's own narrative cosmos;
to eliminate wrong assumptions of the past;
or to adapt to the current zeitgeist.
They recognize how helpful literary stylistic devices can be in understanding the behavior of political heroes, who of course have mastered such rhetorical tricks only too well and have also internalized them as party reasons.
What leading representatives of the SPD are currently doing is political »retconning«;
a subsequent narrative clearing up of contradictions, one could say: a retelling.
Not historical revisionism, but an own historiography in which the events around one's own person and party are said to have taken place from a more favorable perspective.
In this historiography with the courage to leave gaps, Sigmar Gabriel sometimes forgets that he met Gazprom boss Alexej Miller again in 2017 - contrary to his own statement to the »New York Times«.
A trifle?
A human memory gap?
Perhaps?
But how can Gerhard Schröder be so sure that Putin really didn't order all the war crimes he's accused of?
In the retrospective narratives by Schröder and Gabriel in particular, this party sees itself as a self-image that seems to me to be structural and that, despite the »turning point« has fallen out of time.
It conveys the image of politicians who apparently take it for granted that world politics is made in small VIP lounges in football stadiums for the supposed economic benefit of this country, and that their own livelihood after their political career is always negotiated as well;
the elephantine leadership style of MPs, for whom the fairy tales of "change through trade" and "sport as an opportunity for international understanding" always mean luxurious exploits for their own clique.
It surprises me that the new generation of the SPD does not criticize this mode more vigorously and just seems to continue.
When asked by journalist Catherine Vogel why the SPD is now changing course and, contrary to previous intentions, is supplying heavy weapons, where this change of heart came from, Kevin Kühnert answered in "ARD Focus: War Against Ukraine":
“I have to disagree with you there.
You said it correctly in the first remark: we don't want to go it alone.
And with today's decision that Germany should deliver anti-aircraft tanks to Ukraine, that's exactly what didn't happen."
Mr. Kühnert, if you are being blackmailed, blink twice or come running into a Habeck Instagram video with a white sign.
Or Lars Klingbeil, for example, emphasized that the choice of the FDP for the delivery of heavy weapons to the Ukraine "actually supports the government's course one-to-one" and the FDP only underlined the course: "We are already indirectly delivering heavy equipment by For example, we support our alliance partners in the exchange of rings by making the whole thing possible through the industry.«
This means political »retconning«, to explain after criticism: »We have always done everything that we have been criticized for not having done«.
It is not properly communicated, but acts as if silence or the alleged lack of action are part of a clever strategy to the exclusion of the annoying public and opposition;
the "boys and girls" who just don't know any better and are guided by emotions.
What would those in government lose if they (yes, yes, he has already been praised enough, I know) follow Robert Habeck's example and finally communicate beyond party politics like those who take responsibility proactively and not in the most smug mode of retroactive damage limitation?
The SPD needs politicians who can credibly tell the future and who - with all their love for mistakes and second chances - ostracize and hold accountable those who, in a selfish way and with fatal consequences for this country, only want to live and tell backwards.