The Beautiful Fairy Tale of the Great WE

I. A noteworthy observation

In the Welt series Kulturkampf, Franziska Zimmerer, a member of the editorial leadership, has published an article under the title: „Eene meene Zukunftsschreck" — Fighting Real Worries with Fairy Tales. She describes the reflex with which politicians, entrepreneurs and PR consultants currently respond to the state of the country — the call for a positive narrative. She names four voices: Maximilian Viessmann calls for a positive narrative. Dennis Radtke, head of the Union party's labour wing, would like his party to develop a positive Christian-democratic narrative of the future. The PR professional Jannis Johannmeier expects positive propaganda from the political centre. Friedrich Merz, speaking in November at an event of the finance industry, said the country needs a narrative that vividly demonstrates that investments in our country are worthwhile.

Zimmerer counters this reflex with a fine image: the parachute game of the Tiger-Duck kindergarten group. Children gather in a circle, hold a brightly coloured parachute, swing it on command, then run beneath it and crouch inside in a tidy ring. From the outside, it looks like a coloured mushroom. Everyone fulfils a task, no one breaks ranks, no one is left behind — the parachute fellowship. And she closes, in a nod to Bill Clinton, with the sentence that sharpens the matter: It is not the story! It is the economy, stupid!

It is a good article and its point is well taken. Whoever reads it nods. Whoever writes it has seen something that is not self-evident to see from the position of an editorial leadership: that the reflex of the apparatuses — to solve the problem through language — neither reaches nor eases the problem itself. It is at exactly this point that this follow-on text wishes to pick up what Zimmerer says, and to extend it by one step which she, for good reasons — she is writing a column, not a structural essay — does not herself take.

II. Who is it that calls for narrative

Zimmerer names four speakers: a family-business owner, a Union party labour man, a PR professional, a chancellor. She calls their reflex touching, helpless, not meant with ill intent. That is friendly, and it is not wrong. But it is the psychological explanation, and it misses the essential.

The four speakers are not ordinary citizens who would like to talk themselves into a better mood. They are owners of the means of narrative. Maximilian Viessmann runs a family business with thousands of employees. Dennis Radtke is a senior official of the Christian Democratic Union, one of the country's two former mass parties. Jannis Johannmeier sells communication strategies to companies and associations. Friedrich Merz is Federal Chancellor. These four have at their disposal, each in his sector, precisely those means by which narratives are produced, distributed and made to prevail. When they call for a better narrative, they are not doing so because they lack the means. They are calling because they possess the means and find that the means no longer work.

That is a different finding from touching, helpless. It is the apparatus's recognition of itself, that the language it produces no longer orders reality. This recognition has two possible answers. One would be to investigate the relationship between the language and reality — that is, to ask why the language no longer works, whether it might be due to the reality which the language is supposed to describe, and whether therefore something would have to be changed about this reality. The other would be to sharpen the language — to narrate more positively, more vividly, more powerfully. The four speakers choose the second answer. They cannot do otherwise. Whoever has narration as his trade can respond to the failure of narration only with the proposal of better narration. What they do not notice is that this prolongs the failure, instead of ending it.

III. Narrative as substitute commodity

It is worth stepping back for a moment. The call for the positive narrative does not come from nowhere. It has a history, and it is part of the history of the German apparatus of the last twenty years.

In 2005, the country said We are Pope, though it did not say so itself — a tabloid newspaper said it on behalf of the country. In 2015, the Federal Chancellor said We will manage this. In 2022, her successor said Turning point of the times. In 2023, a book by the Federal President appeared under the title Us. In 2025, the current Federal Chancellor called for a narrative with which investments could be justified. It is the sequence of a language that is always available when the substance is missing on which a We might form. It is not available because it is powerful. It is available because it substitutes for what could not be produced in the realm of facts.

This is the function of narrative within the apparatus: substitute commodity. When a reform does not succeed, it is narrated as a reform story. When a project fails, the failure is narrated into the success of a learning process. When the We does not arise, the We is invoked. Language closes, by a semantic operation, the gap that is open in the realm of facts. This works because language is faster than facts — it can formulate the promise long before it is known whether the promise will be redeemed. And if it is not redeemed, language can subsequently narrate that it has, after all, been redeemed, in another form, in another sense, in a next step.

Whoever has seen the mechanism once will recognise it everywhere. An army that is not operational has a turning point. An energy transition that becomes more expensive than planned has a pathway. A defence ministry that distributes consulting fees without procurement law has a modernisation. A commission whose award SMS messages are challenged in court has a geopolitics of strength. A party that loses the trust of its voters has a narrative that has not yet quite arrived. In each of these cases, narrative is the form in which failure is sold without having to appear as failure.

IV. The seven questions

Zimmerer closes her article with seven questions, which she does not quote from the apparatuses but from the realm of facts:

Can I afford the next rent increase? What do I do about an extra utility bill because the winter was so cold? How expensive is care for my children? Why can I no longer afford a holiday? Why do I pay so much in social-security contributions and still cannot get a dermatologist appointment when I urgently need one? Will I be fired in the next wave of layoffs?

These questions are the precise form in which the second world of the Pioneer glosse speaks. In the first world, the grass grows green, wealth accumulates by itself, the champagne stands ready in the morning. In the second world, these questions are the daily task. They are not hypothetical questions. They are questions that have to be decided each day, and which in the second world do not belong to mood but to existence.

To none of these questions does a narrative reply. To each of these questions, either a concrete operation answers — a rent increase that does not happen; a social system that makes a dermatologist appointment possible within a reasonable time; an economy that secures jobs — or nothing. Between the two worlds there is no bridge made of language. The bridge would be a politics that acts in the realm of facts. The bridge does not exist.

V. The „this way"

The title of this follow-on text reads: or why we will not do it this way. It is worth emphasising the this way. It is not asserted that we will not do it. It is asserted that we will not do it this way. The question is therefore: what does the this way mean?

The this way means the form in which we are trying. It means the party-shaped organisation of the nineteenth century, which recruits its political personnel according to criteria that are alien to the matters on which the personnel must decide — described in more detail in The Anachronistic Structures and Rules of the Parties. It means the selection of a top personnel that cannot work with the tools that would lie ready to solve the problems, because it has not been chosen for that work — described in With This Personnel — No Chance. It means the filter layer between citizen and mandate-holder, which dissolves concerns from the realm of facts in the silent fading-away — described in SPAM and The Cassandra Syndrome on gu18.eu. It means the management of territories between the parties, which causes the transversal matters — energy, demography, infrastructure — to vanish in the gaps between them.

These five components form the anatomy of the this way. They have not been placed next to each other by chance. Together they form an apparatus that denies the citizen access, hands him on to the mandate-holder who cannot answer him in substance, and finally lets the concern silently fade. In such an anatomy, it can be no surprise when the speakers of the apparatus call for better narrative. They are doing what the anatomy permits them. Whoever cannot answer the citizen can re-narrate him.

We will not do it this way — because the this way excludes precisely what would be needed to address the seven questions: a politics that acts in the realm of facts, with personnel chosen for that, in structures that do not smother action in the filter, in the territories, or at the boundary of the locality.

VI. What if not this way

The question of what could take the place of the this way does not belong in this essay. It is the subject of a series of texts that is being assembled on beyond-decay.org step by step. Three blueprints have so far been sketched: the People's Representative without Party, the Mandate without Place, the Transparency Council. They are set out in The Founding of a New Party and Robert Michels's Iron Law and in the linked concept papers. They are not finished solutions but working documents that stand up for discussion.

What they share is the insight that narrative is not the problem, and that even a better narrative is not the problem. The problem is the form. Whoever does not change the form will not do, this way, what would be there to be done, regardless of how powerfully he narrates.

VII. A last thought to Die Welt

We are pleased to receive feedback at postfach.kulturkampf@welt.de, writes Franziska Zimmerer at the end of her article. This is no standard sentence. It is an invitation that has become rare in today's media landscape, and this follow-on text is the reply to it — not by way of a mere email, but by way of an essay that builds on her observation and carries it further.

If politics is to come back from the realm of facts again, this begins with observations being formulated in the realm of speech which stand up to reality. Zimmerer's article does this. It does not say the great We, it does not say the powerful narrative, it says: It is not the story. That is the point at which the this way ends — if one takes it seriously — and something else can begin.

From that, no country will arise tomorrow. But from that, a beginning could arise.