Die Getriebenen

"It’s a slightly tricky one to translate. It basically means ‘the driven ones’. What it implies is that the cast of characters in the book, the governments and the ministers who are making decisions during the refugee crisis of 2015-16, were driven by events rather than driving them. So ‘the driven ones’ is probably the best way to translate it. Robin Alexander is a correspondent for Die Welt . This is a pacy, journalistic account of the way that decisions were taken, or forced on the main players by the very fast-moving events in the refugee crisis of 2015/ 2016. The book was published in 2017. Before the election, it was a huge hit. Like Jana Hensel’s book, it was top of the bestseller charts for a long time. What’s interesting about it—and I think I broadly agree with this thesis—is that it doesn’t present Merkel and the people around as they’ve often been portrayed in the foreign press, as opening Germany’s borders to a million migrants and asylum seekers, in a grand act of charity that’s based on some kind of principle. The focus of the book is a moment in September 2015 when you have this column of migrants walking towards Germany from Austria. A decision has to be taken: are they going to be let in or not? Is the border going to be closed or not? Thomas de Maiziere, who was the interior minister at the time, is described as prevaricating, having no idea what the right thing to do is, trying to get hold of Merkel but unable to get hold of her. The police received no clear instructions. In the end, far from being a principled decision of Germany to open its arms and take in all of these people, it appears—at least the way it’s portrayed in this book—that what they wanted to do was to make sure that they didn’t have some awful pictures on TV, of hundreds of thousands of people trying to cross the border and being repelled by police with tear gas and water cannon and whatever else, so they decided they’d better let them in. Then, a retrospective justification was provided and Merkel started to say, ‘you know, we’re big, and we’re rich, and we’re successful, and we can handle it, and we should do it.’ And you have the famous pictures of the railway station in Munich with the Germans lining up to applaud the refugees as they get off the train. This narrative emerges of Germany as a humanitarian champion. But the picture painted in the book is rather different from that, it’s a very panicked and contingent response to a set of circumstances that nobody really was prepared for, as Merkel herself subsequently acknowledged. You see that also at the European level. I wasn’t in Germany at the time, I was in Brussels, but I was following the migrant crisis very closely. What was clear at the time was that for many European countries, they were very frustrated by Germany’s and Merkel’s lack of consultation with the decisions that she was making. The decisions that she was making obviously had big implications for countries across Europe, particularly those that were on the migrant trail, but also countries that could expect to receive a lot of the asylum seekers that might be making their way through Germany: the Netherlands, Sweden and other countries. There was very, very little consultation offered by Germany. It was the same thing when she finally did the deal with Erdogan in the spring of 2016 that ended that phase of the crisis. Formally, it was an EU-Turkey deal. In reality, it was a Germany-Turkey deal done, again, without any real consultation. This is a hallmark of the way that Merkel has tended to go about things. I talked a moment ago about the difficulties that she had in the 2017 election campaign around this issue, and I think one reason that many, many Germans really struggled at that time wasn’t so much that the decision had been taken to let in so many people, but that Merkel never stood up to explain, in a clear and comprehensive fashion, why this was the right thing to do. There was the famous ‘ Wir schaffen das’ ‘we can handle it’, or ‘we can deal with it’, speech. But that wasn’t really a justification or an explanation for why this was the right thing to do. This was something that Merkel was never really very good at. She could make decisions, for better or for worse, in the teeth of crisis at the German level, or at a European level. She was a very managerial politician. But she struggled to explain to people why she wanted to do this or that, or in this case, why it was the right thing for Germany to do this, and how it fitted into a foreign policy, or how Germany might hope to integrate all these people. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So I think for a lot of Germans it was doubly traumatic, because you had these extraordinary thing happening very, very quickly, refugee centres filling up all over the country, but no real plan about what to do. Of course, Germany’s a fairly well organized place. Ultimately, that stuff—housing, education, integration—for the most part, was handled fairly well. But that trauma was compounded in many people’s minds by the failure to explain why this had happened and why Germany had chosen to do this. I think that’s why Merkel found herself confronted—throughout the country, not only in the East—by a lot of people who were very unhappy about some of these decisions that were taken. Of course, a lot of people supported the policy. It’s rare to hear Greens or Social Democrats speak well of Christian Democrats. But lots of them regretted Merkel’s departure from office, and her actions during this crisis are the main reason why. The Robin Alexander book doesn’t deal in grand analysis or big theory. One of the interesting things about Merkel is that some of the most revealing pieces of writing about her have been done by journalists, rather than by analysts or political scientists or other big theorists. She’s the sort of politician whose work is small bore. She doesn’t deal in grand plans and grand strategy. Perhaps the sort of work that she does best is explained by people who can take you inside the room and explain exactly what happened at such-and-such a moment, and who spoke to whom, and what the lines of communication were. Robin Alexander is probably the best connected journalist in Germany, so he’s very good at that sort of thing."