What does the German soul want – and does it even exist? In this book, Bernd Stegemann, one of the most controversial voices in the political debates of our time, reveals his personal wounds for the first time. As a grandchild of the war, he carries within him the traumas of the bombed-out Germans. The demons of the past haunt his life, weighing heavily not only on his soul. In his analysis, he links the defining debates of recent decades with fragments of his own life story, piecing them together to form an insightful picture of our desolate situation. To this day, the German soul displays an inability to empathise, a fixation on the question of guilt, and a democratic paralysis when dealing with differing opinions and people. We Germans have become a source of unease to ourselves.
My German Demons is a radically sober assessment of the wounds that Germany has inflicted on the world and that Germans themselves have experienced. For Bernd Stegemann, the current politics of a belated anti-fascism – which seeks to purify the world with firewalls and cancel culture – is not a solution, but part of the problem, the roots of which lie deep in Germany’s past.
Non-fiction
Bernd Stegemann, born in Münster in 1967, is a professor of dramaturgy and cultural sociology at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin and has published, amongst other works, Die Öffentlichkeit und ihre Feinde and Was vom Glauben bleibt. His most recent publications with Matthes & Seitz Berlin are Die Moralfalle (2018) and Identitätspolitik (2023).
