I'm always amazed by my countrymen chest-pounding themselves about their alledged cultural resilience against the surveilance state.

Not only did none of us live during the Nazi-Era, but most of us that lived at least during the Stasi-Era (in the West) are routinely falling short of living up to their own moral standards.

They champion getting rid off tax-privacy, they champion getting rid off non-digital currency, they champion blocking social-networks because of "foreign desinformation" (i.e. domestic opposition), they take no offense that a think-tank owned for-profit media-conglomerate does the domestic deletion and blocking of social media accounts (Bertelsmann > Arvato -> FB/Twitter/…).

And most hilariously, progressive luminaries like Daniel Cohn-Bendit or Volker Beck – which during the 1980s gained political traction by "fighting" against having A NATIONAL CENSUS AT ALL – are nowadays championing throwing out medical-data privacy alltogether and having to hand out your unlocked phone to the police at their whim.

(Needless to say how cultural chest-pounding thouse luminaries were in the 1980s)

> And most hilariously, progressive luminaries like Daniel Cohn-Bendit or Volker Beck – which during the 1980s gained political traction by "fighting" against having A NATIONAL CENSUS AT ALL – are nowadays championing throwing out medical-data privacy alltogether and having to hand out your unlocked phone to the police at their whim.

Can you provide some sources for that, I haven't closely followed German politics in recent years (as I've been living overseas), but I'm quite surprised that DCB would champion police search powers like that.

I think the idea that germans are the victims of history (and that's why they're so sensitive about oppression) is actually older than the stasi, or the nazis. Hitler, for instance, uses the theme an awful lot in his speeches. It just got a big boost from the post-holocaust psychological judo where germans recast themselves as the victims of the nazi dictatorship, rather than the enthusiastic supporters.

It leads to some funny statements, to be sure. The woman who said she felt like Sophie Scholl because she had been in coronavirus lockdown was one example - but honestly, if you mess with somebody's parking place, they're about two sentences away from saying you're literally the NS-diktatur.

Still, if it leads to a sense of urgency over privacy, I'm all for it.