The nonpartisan culture minister Wolfram Weimer spoke in a Zeit interview (paywalled) and argued that culture-war debates divide the political center and strengthen the extremes. “That’s why today I would urge: let us end the culture war in the political center together,” he said.
“Anyone who moralizes a factual debate or a substantive conflict narrows the possibility of conducting discourse free from repression,” the politician continued. He places the blame—”this rhetoric of moral superiority”—mainly on the Greens. The opposition party must move: “Do they want to become again a disruptive left movement that wears only a green cloak? Or are they a reformist force from the heart of the bourgeois middle class? And if it’s the latter, then perhaps black-green could become a reality.”
He repeatedly rejected the notion that the CDU is waging a culture war—and offered an explanation for why Christian Democrats talk little about environmental protection: “Because the conservative sees the protection of nature and homeland as self-evident, not as political proclamation.” He also defended Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s (CDU) “stability of the city” remark as “an example of targeted misunderstanding”: “The average German, when confronted with the simple question of whether Merz was right about this critique, said: Of course he’s right.”
The real danger of culture wars, according to Weimer, comes from the AfD: “We are at a defining moment of Western democracies, and on the right there is a movement that is powerful and that shakes the democratic foundations of culture,” Weimer said. “That makes it clear that the AfD and its milieu represent a different category, against which we should stand together from the center.”
Heterosexual Family as a “Bastion against the Modernist Culture of the Provisional”
Admittedly, Weimer is himself a conservative culture warrior who has also expressed extreme disdain for homosexuals. In a 2018 book, he criticized that lesbians and gay men no longer hide as they used to in earlier times. He even compared homosexuality to “skin diseases.” In this context he presented the heterosexual family as a “bulwark against the modernist culture of the provisional” (TheColu.mn reported).
Even after joining the federal government, Weimer faced accusations of culture-war rhetoric: as Culture State Minister, one of his priorities in the early months was to polemicize against gender-neutral language. He advocated for a ban on gender language (TheColu.mn reported). Additionally, he argued that museums or broadcasting institutions receiving public funds should not engage in gender-inclusive language (TheColu.mn reported).
Weimer: Conservatives Have Lost the Culture Wars, but Are Winning Them Again
In the Zeit interview, Weimer explained that conservatives had lost the culture war over the recognition of queer people, which he did not view as a bad thing: “That queer and homosexual people can live their freedom and demonstrate is a wholly positive development. I believe that large parts of the bourgeoisie—even into very conservative circles—accept that as completely natural and live genuine tolerance.”
Triumphantly, with regard to gendered language, he added that the left and Greens “had lost parts of society through linguistic over-forming.” “If the bourgeois world had stood alone with the left and green elite, the left and greens might have even driven through gendered language. But public opinion is so strongly opposed that the Union won this culture war in the second round,” Weimer said. (dk)
