© REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer

There’s an amusing German saying: “Success has many fathers, but failures are orphans.” You can see this saying in practice when there is a big disaster in Germany: a mass shooting, a plane crash, or, as last month, the biggest attack linked to the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Germany to date – on a Berlin Christmas market – that killed twelve.

The bigger the disaster, the more crowded the post-mortem press conference. For an hour, sometimes longer, two sets of state and federal authorities – police, criminal police, prosecutors, and sometimes even politicians – jostle for journalists’ attention and explain why the others – not them – were responsible for what has happened.

Germany is a big country of 80 million people but it also has over thirty, largely decentralized, bodies involved in keeping its citizens safe. This federal approach is the most lasting legacy of the Nazi era, a far-sighted response to a criminal dictatorship that held all power in one hand and dragged Germany into the abyss.

Thanks to the Nazis, central government has little power in preventing and fighting crime. In modern Germany state police do most of the police work while federal police – the Bundespolizei – are mostly preoccupied with securing train stations, airports, and border areas. The Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) is Germany’s FBI equivalent, but has comparatively few powers to take over an investigation. And the federal domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, is largely reliant on the goodwill of 16 state intelligence agencies to share information.

This is how Germany has worked for the last 70 years. But do things have to stay this way forever?

Germany’s division of labor – and all the egos, turf wars, and information withholding that result ­– mean that, if you are a criminal with big plans in Germany, the easiest way to escape detection is to live on the road. That’s what the three-member neo-Nazi NSU group did, killing ten and escaping detection for a decade because various state and federal investigators never pooled their knowledge.

The NSU revelations were a massive failure of the federal approach. And federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, fearing IS will exploit this decentralized structure, has proposed the most far-reaching overhaul of German law enforcement since the foundation of the state. “We are used to a normality and the absence of catastrophes. Our country is organized this way,” he wrote. “But times change and there many rules are lacking in Germany that are self-evident in other democracies.”

His proposals, made in a lengthy newspaper article last week, follow revelations that not all information about the main suspect in the Christmas market attack was shared among all authorities who should have known. This has to change, the federal minister says. He wants centralized bodies to deal with cyber-attacks and national emergencies, pointing out that, if disaster strikes, the population would have “no understanding” for the lack of such bodies.

His most radical proposals, though, were to lift domestic deployment ban on the army, another post-war safeguard, and to fold Germany’s 16 state intelligence agencies into one federal entity.

Shadows of the Past

Anticipating the kerfuffle his proposals would stir up, de Maizière said that restrictions devised in the shadow of Germany’s fascist past were no longer timely in the modern era of trans-national crime. “Debates in previous eras might have been understandable,” he said. “Now they are no longer so.”

But it wasn’t long before the status quo defenders – the state politicians who have the most to lose under these proposals – came out in force. Germany’s unique system has served the country well. And France, with its long series of terrorist attacks, suggests that centralization is not a guarantee of greater security. State leaders insist that improved information-sharing – not centralization – is the best answer to new threats.

De Maizière’s proposals are clearly partly electioneering, to reclaim the law and order agenda for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). But this is also an opening gambit, a test of strength between Berlin and Germans’ traditional suspicions of central government. In the face of a rising Islamist threat, old fears are dwindling and, with it, the most extreme elements of post-war German federalism.

No one expects radical change soon. After all, no bureaucracy abolishes itself, particularly not with German state grandees who know they cannot be forced to hand over competences to central government.

Weeks after the Berlin Christmas market attacks, however, Germany’s Minister of the Interior has thrown down the gauntlet to his state colleagues and posed citizens a challenging question: What are you more afraid of? A slip back to old Nazi terror or a slide into a new era of Islamist violence, potentially exacerbated – unwittingly – by German decentralized policing?

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© REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

Rule 1: Don’t complain, don’t explain. Rule 2: The lady is not for turning. After eleven years in power, Chancellor Angela Merkel has demonstrated just how well she has internalized the rules of Europe’s other long-serving women, Queen Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher. Those rules served Merkel well this week when, in an indication of just how serious the situation in Germany is, she broke her third rule, interrupting her holiday to go before the press.

Holidays in Germany are holy, and in the past, no matter the crisis she was facing, Angela Merkel always took her two weeks. But these are not normal times in Germany. In the space of ten days, a 17 year-old Afghan refugee attacked tourists on a train with an axe; an 18 year-old Munich native shot dead nine people before killing himself; and, within 24 hours of each other, one Syrian man killed a woman with a machete and another blew himself up with a rucksack bomb. In a final incident, an Afghan refugee escaped from a psychiatric facility and ran around Bremen shouting “I’ll blow you all up” before he was arrested and locked up again.

Four of the five incidents involved refugees or asylum seekers, two had links to the so-called Islamic State (IS) and, taken together, they ended a freak lucky streak that saw Germany spared the violence that has rocked its European neighbors. Though each case must be viewed individually, together they have rattled Germans’ confidence.

A defiant Merkel appeared before the press to declare that Germany is “at war” with IS, and that she would not allow Islamist terror to undermine German values or force a change to her refugee strategy. “The terrorists want us to lose sight of what is important to us,” she said.

Restoring Public Trust

Her challenge now: to shrug off growing domestic pressure to get tough on immigrants while restoring public trust and minimizing angst. It is important, she said, not to confuse cause and effect, to face down those whose terror campaign had contributed to the refugee crisis rather than turn on those fleeing the resulting terror.

It was a classic Merkel performance – a cool, considered refusal to appear rattled, or to take any emotional bait offered by the journalists present. No, she was not exhausted by this latest crisis, no, she wasn’t considering standing aside, and no, she didn’t doubt for a moment that she did the right thing last year.

Then, under the mantra “We can manage this” (“Wir schaffen das”), she urged Germans to welcome people fleeing terror in Syria and elsewhere. Over one million people came by year’s end. “I stand by the main decisions we made,” she said. “We have achieved a lot, even though these days it’s clear what we have yet to do.” Germany faces a new “challenge” since coming into the crosshairs of IS, she said. It was a typically Merkel understatement: the Süddeutsche Zeitung joked that if Merkel had been around in 1912, she probably would have called the Titanic sinking a “challenge”.

Not For Turning

But, like another iron-willed woman leader, Merkel is not for turning. She knows Germans’ willingness to welcome refugee has been cooling since New Year’s, when sexual assaults were committed by non-German men – including some asylum seekers – during celebrations in Cologne and other cities.

That welcome will have been cooled even further by news that the axe attack last week near Würzburg and the suicide bomb attack in Ansbach were, as she put it, “based on what we know, Islamist terror.” “That two men who came to us as refugees are responsible for the acts in Würzburg and Ansbach mocks the country that took them in,” she said. “We will do everything to investigate these barbaric acts, find the backers, and give them their just punishment.”

Amid pressure from her political allies in Bavaria – on the front lines of the refugee crisis and the recent terror wave – Merkel presented a nine-point plan to improve the fight against terrorist acts and structures. Among the measures: a new body to decrypt Internet communication; additional security staff; a national migration register; and an early warning system to catch radicalized refugees.

Again and again she refused to admit any failures in the last year; but, with an eye on limiting the damage, she also pointed out that all decisions she took were made in consensus with other political players, as well as the police and security services.

Her Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU), pushed ahead with their own post-attack plan on Thursday, promising tighter security measures and expedited deportations of failed asylum seekers, such as the Syrian man behind Sunday night’s bomb attack. “All our predictions have been proven right…Islamist terrorism has arrived in Germany,” said Horst Seehofer, the CSU leader and Bavarian premier, and a vocal critic of last year’s asylum measures.

“No Excuse for Xenophobia”

A year before Berlin enters election mode, as pressure grows on Germany’s left and right fringes, Merkel warned fearful Germans not to follow populists. A few isolated attacks by asylum seekers and refugees were “no excuse for xenophobia.” And though Germany was at war with Islamist violence, she insisted that this was not a war on Islam, distancing herself from far-right groups like the AfD and Pegida.

It was an impressive performance in its sheer unremarkability – in other words, classic, low-wattage Merkel pragmatism. But will that be enough to face down Islamist terror, the greatest challenge of her political career so far?

Germany’s chancellor refused to admit that Islamist terrorists are her greatest challengers yet, but this week she staked her political future on beating them – no matter how exhausting. “The role of the state is to restore trust, that is what we are working on,” she said. “But there are evenings when I’m glad to go to bed.”

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