Is Germany Shrinking?

Although it is still fashionable, in certain segments of the social sciences and news media, to mention the earth’s “overpopulation” problem, it has become clear among environmental biologists that the planet’s carrying capacity is many billions more than its current level.

With renewable and sustainable methods, food, water, clean air, and a standard of living higher than world’s current average can be maintained for a population far exceeding current levels.

A new awareness has arisen that humanity may, in fact, be facing an underpopulation problem. Declining birthrates in developed “first-world” countries threaten our ability to sustain civilization.

A birthrate of somewhere between 2.3 and 2.5 children per couple is required to maintain a population. Shrinking populations wreak economic havoc. Populations which are growing at a slow but steady pace optimize economic growth. Reiner Klingholz, a researcher at Berlin’s Institute for Population and Development, Das Berlin-Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung, writes:

Working longer is one option to counter a shrinking workforce. But extending the retirement age can only partly solve the problem of an aging population, because it is the very old who are aging the fastest. Today, 20 percent of Germany’s population is older than 65, and 5 percent are older than 80. In 2050, the 65-plus age group will make up 32 percent and the 80-plus group 14 percent. In other words: By mid-century one out of seven Germans will be older than 80. The figures are similar in Spain and Italy. The Old World will then truly be the oldest.

Aside from the economic and environmental damage - shrinking populations produce more pollution - done by Germany’s stagnating population growth, there is global fallout, especially because other advanced nations are facing similar phenomena.

The ‘first-world’ nations are stewards of a type of human civilization; will they be able to continue to fill that role if they have ever older and ever fewer citizens?

A loose set of worldviews coalesce around these countries: beliefs that war is better than peace, that women have certain legal and social equalities with men, that every human being has dignity, that such human dignity is worthy of respect, that every human life is valuable, that human life should not be ended capriciously, that the individual is significant, that liberty is a central human value, etc.

If the nations of the developed world are in a population decline, will they still be able to represent these, their peculiar and characteristic notions, to the rest of the world? Or will this cultural heritage be endangered?

Ironically, some sociologists hypothesize that it was Western Civilization’s occasional departures from its own worldview which have triggered a pattern of low birthrate, a pattern which can be interpreted as a collective self-hatred or a collective suicide: the carnage of the two world wars may have left the cultures deflated and cynical - sometimes obviously so, as in postmodern art, sometimes in a hidden manner behind an optimistic facade.

Statistical population counts have hidden the fact that Germany has suffered from a low birthrate for a number of years. But the graying of civilization can no longer be camouflaged, as Patrick Buchanan writes:

What Klingholz is saying bears repeating: Germans have been dying out for forty years and this has been covered up by counting Turks, East Europeans, and Arabs as Germans. Now, not even immigrants from the Muslim lands, Eastern Europe, and the Third World can mask the reality.
Astonishing. Not long after World War II, West Germany boasted the world’s second largest economy. Now a united Germany is on schedule to become a retirement center, nursing home, and cemetery for the Germanic peoples, whose origins date back to before the birth of Christ.

If the first-world nations are weakened by low birthrate and stagnating, or even shrinking, populations, then the rest of the world will suffer the absence of this rich cultural heritage.

The problem of a handful of developed nations will become a global problem. The worldview which informed both technological progress and humanitarian compassion will leave a devastating void throughout the world.

It is in the interests of the entire global community to sustain the civilization which alone articulated the principles of individualism and liberty, while at the same time replacing both ethical and aesthetic barbarism with a cultural tradition which inspires both scientific exploration and philosophical reflection.

A Shrinking Deutschland?

Even as scientists find that the carrying capacity of planet earth, managed sustainably and renewably, is many billions more than the world’s current inhabitants, a different sort of population problem is emerging in developed or ‘first-world’ countries.

Germany is a clear example of a nation suffering from underpopulation. The birthrate is perilously low, and the society is measurably shrinking.

Because this is happening to other countries, and because these communities are custodians of important cultures and civilizations, this trend is not a national problem: it is a global problem.

The causes of this phenomenon are complex and mysterious. One hypothesis is that these traditions exhausted themselves in the carnage of the two world wars, as Patrick Buchanan writes:

For ten years, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, Britons and Germans fought. By 1945, Germany was finished as a military power and Britain was finished as a world power. Now the Germans have begun to disappear. “Since 1972, Germany has not seen a single year where the number of newborns exceeded the number of deaths,” writes Reiner Klingholz, of Berlin’s Institute for Population and Development.

Sociologists have speculated about a number of possible causes. Why would people choose to have fewer children? A birthrate of between 2.3 and 2.5 children per couple is sufficient to hold a population even.

Historically, children were a financial benefit, when societies were largely agricultural. Children helped to do farmwork, and provided care when aging parents eventually became unable to economically sustain themselves.

This pattern continued during the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

As economies shifted to the later phases of the Industrial Revolution, and then into more technology- and information-oriented patterns, children became less of a financial advantage, and in some cases could even be viewed as burden.

Reiner Klingholz earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology, but his career has taken him into the field of population statistics. Noting that the population problem was disguised by immigration, he writes:

Since 1972, Germany has not seen a single year where the number of newborns exceeded the number of deaths. The creeping population-shrinking process was only masked by high immigration figures that could camouflage the natural losses — at least until 2003. Since then, the overall population of Germany has declined; the Federal Statistical Office expects that the nation will have around eight million fewer inhabitants by mid-century — a loss that is the equivalent of losing the populations of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt combined. Germany, along with Ukraine and Romania, presently lead the league of European countries with populations set to contract.

What does this situation mean for the world as a whole? Because some other countries are experiencing similar underpopulation problems, concerns arise that some aspects of civilization may be at risk.

These nations have been the caretakers of a set of worldviews, including notions that human life is valuable, that every human being has dignity and should be respected, that women have certain fundamental legal and social equalities with men, that war is better than peace, that rational dialogue is salutary, that human life should not be capriciously taken, etc.

Ironically, the psychology causing this depopulation may be triggered in part by those instances in which this civilization violated its own principles.

If these populations shrink, will they be able to sustain these cultural heritages and share them with the world? Will these social notions continue to have an impact on the globe?

A shrinking population means not only fewer people in some regions of the planet, but a poorer legacy for the world’s civilization.

Adenauer Emerges

1933 was a grim year in the history of central Europe. In January, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party found a way to circumvent constitutional procedures and seize power, even though they never had a majority in a free election.

As soon as they had power, the Nazis took steps to silence any opposition. They murdered most vocal and influential political opponents of Hitler. Lesser opponents were silenced in other ways.

Over the next several months, the Nazis implemented their Gleichschaltung, their plan to ensure that every aspect of public and private life was controlled by the government. The ordinary citizen would have no more private life.

The Nazis believed that the government should know everything and supervise everything - that’s the meaning of the word ‘Nazi’ - it’s short for “national socialism.”

When the government “nationalizes,” it takes over businesses, schools, hospitals, and anything else it can get its hands on. It owns them and controls them. It uses them to influence what people do and how people think.

When the government “socializes,” it taxes and regulates, taking away a person’s freedom to do what she or he wants with his or her own property.

The name ‘Nazi’ refers to a government which nationalized industries and businesses, and a government which socialized the basic functions of life: education, healthcare, transportation, etc.

In the midst of this horrifying takeover of society, there were brave people who resisted. The children of the Scholl family founded a resistance group among the university students in München (Munich). People like Oskar Schindler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer smuggled Jews out of Germany to freedom, and organized assassination attempts on Hitler.

The number of those who resisted was large; some of them may never be identified as anti-Hitler subversives, because they worked in secret, and perhaps died in secret.

One such man was Konrad Adenauer.

Adenauer had been the mayor of Köln (the German city Cologne) for a number of years prior to Hitler’s seizure of power. As soon as the Nazis had a hold on the national government, they began to pressure Adenauer to leave office.

Adenauer was known as someone who’d clearly opposed the plans of the Nazis. When Adenauer refused to leave, he was forced out of office, as historian Horst Osterheld recounts:

Efforts were made to force him to resign, to entice him with pension offers, but Adenauer stayed. He held out until the local government elections which took place a week later, on 12 March. On the very eve of the elections the Chief of Police had given him his word and that of his officers “to defend him to the last man.” When Adenauer asked barely twenty-four hours later for protection, because he had reason to believe that there was a plan to imprison him in his office next morning or even to push him out of the window, he was told - the request was made in Berlin - that “unfortunately nothing could be done.” On Monday, 13 March, Adenauer stole out of his house in the early morning, past the sleeping SA guard, and went to Berlin. He first tried to take the bull by the horns by going to see Hermann Göring a few days after his arrival to protest against his dismissal and expulsion, which had already been pronounced. He asked in vain.

No longer mayor, Adenauer would spend the Nazi years as a private citizen, working behind the scenes to undermine Hitler’s government. The Nazis arrested him several times, and at one point arranged for him to be deported to the East - which would have meant either his death in a concentration camp or his death on the eastern front.

When order was given to ship Adenauer eastward, an old acquaintance, Eugen Zander, who’d work for the Cologne city government years earlier, rescued Adenauer by having him sent to the hospital.

At war’s end, Adenauer quickly emerged as an individual who’d not only resisted Hitler’s Nazis, but who also had political skills and experience in government.

Although it might seem inevitable that Adenauer would be the leader of Germany’s first free government in fifteen years, it was only by a thin margin that he became chancellor in 1949.