The Inverted Nibelungen Test: How Germany Pre-Edits Its Democracy

What looks like local procedure sketches a template for post-democratic rule.

Filip Gašpar is a political advisor and publicist with Croatian roots from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He specializes in strategic communication, international positioning, and conservative networks. He regularly writes for German and international outlets such as JUNGE FREIHEIT, The European Conservative, and various media across the former Yugoslavia.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.

This autumn, in the industrial city of Ludwigshafen, one actor will be missing before the curtain even rises. Joachim Paul – 55, member of the state parliament in Rhineland-Palatinate for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), high school teacher from Koblenz, writer, and long-standing figure in the party – had prepared to stand before the voters. He will not. The audience will take their seats, the play will go on, but one of its central roles has been erased from the script.

His exclusion did not come through a court ruling or an electoral defeat. It came through the vote of a municipal election committee acting on a dossier from the state’s domestic intelligence service. The justification was framed as “doubts about constitutional loyalty,” a phrase that in German political practice has become a gatekeeper’s key; unlocking the power to disqualify without the burden of proving illegality.

In German electoral law, the removal of the passive right to stand for election is meant to be rare and judicial. Only a proper court may impose it, and only in the most serious cases. In Ludwigshafen, that threshold was bypassed. The decision rested on a compilation of internet searches and associative reasoning, openly acknowledged as incomplete. No indictment, no trial – simply an administrative closure of the door before the contest could begin.

The mechanics of this are not novel. In recent years, security officials have openly suggested that, instead of attempting the uncertain and protracted process of banning an entire party, it might be more effective to disable it piecemeal; excluding state branches or individual politicians by revoking their active and passive voting rights. In some states, notably North-Rhine Westphalia, the method has already been tested. Ludwigshafen has now provided a high-profile example.

The shift is subtle but decisive: from contest to curation. A democracy that once defined itself by the openness of its electoral field now reserves the right to preselect not just policies, but the people permitted to advocate them. The criteria are not criminal records or unlawful platforms, but atmospheres – the tone of a sentence, the cultural associations of a reference, the perceived company one keeps.

Paul’s writings became his liability. Among them were essays on the Nibelungenlied – a 13th-century German epic that tells of Siegfried the dragon-slayer, his murder by treachery, and the bloody revenge of his widow Kriemhild. It is a work without reconciliation or happy ending, a song of loyalty unto death, and of oaths kept even when ruin is the price. In its world, there is no irony, no middle ground – only the tragic weight of consequence.

For pre-modern Europe, such loyalty was not an eccentric virtue but the foundation of political order: fealty bound ruler and ruled, friend and ally, to a shared fate. To violate this was to dissolve the world one inhabited.

The modern state replaced this personal bond with the abstraction of law, a system designed to function without virtue. Yet when someone invokes the older code of loyalty, and means it, the bureaucratic order senses a rival conception of legitimacy. That rivalry may explain why a literary essay can trigger the machinery of exclusion.

Paul also drew on Tolkien. He did so not from the Hollywood simplification, but the original moral architecture of The Lord of the Rings. Here, too, the quiet and the underestimated bear the weight of the world.

Tolkien’s Middle-earth, shaped by his study of Norse and Anglo-Saxon myth, treats evil not merely as a political adversary but as a corruption of being, and treats loyalty as the refusal to abandon one’s appointed role even when no victory is assured. In this framework, the Ring is not only a weapon but a test: it tempts the wielder to remake the world through domination, yet destroys any polity that succumbs to that temptation.

By placing the AfD in the role of “the Hobbit who stumbled upon the Ring” and Paul as “the one who refused to wield it but studied it,” the analogy becomes sharper. In Tolkien’s moral universe, such restraint is a form of wisdom. In the political universe of contemporary Germany, it is enough to make one suspect. The Ring may be worn, but its meaning must remain unspoken.

To take such narratives seriously – whether drawn from medieval epic or modern mythopoeia – is, in the present climate, to fail an unspoken test. Literature may be read, but not applied. Memory may be acknowledged, but not acted upon. In a system that survives by constant relativization, consequence is the true subversion.

The choice of Ludwigshafen is telling. A post-industrial city on the Rhine, it stands at the seam between integration and erosion. Ethnic tensions are part of its daily rhythm. Parallel structures – family clans, unregistered mosques – operate alongside the official order.

In the last federal election, the AfD became the city’s second-largest party; in Oggersheim, once home to Helmut Kohl, it took the majority. That a candidate from such a party might win here was a possibility worth forestalling.

Thus, the act was preventative. This was not a reaction to unlawful behavior, but a calculated removal of a potential victor. It is a pattern in which the forms of democracy remain – ballots, committees, public statements – but the substance shifts. The ballot is cleansed before the voter sees it. The contest is settled not through persuasion, but by prior elimination.

One might call it the Nibelungen test inverted: in the old epic, the hero dies for his loyalty; in the modern version, he is never allowed on stage. The performance proceeds, but the script has already decided its outcome.

This is not simply a German curiosity. Political theorists from Carl Schmitt to Sheldon Wolin have warned that systems which define themselves by consensus eventually begin to police the boundaries of permissible opposition, until the category of “enemy” is administratively erased. In such a climate, elections become less an arena for decision than a ritual affirming what has already been decided. The act in Ludwigshafen is a local episode, but it sketches a template that any democracy could adopt – a template in which the easiest way to win is to ensure the wrong players never take the field.

In the United States, a candidate can run while under indictment on ninety-one felony counts. In Israel, a prime minister can stand in the midst of war. In Germany, a man can be barred for reading an epic too literally. The comparison is not about moral equivalence, but about the thresholds each system is willing to cross before it risks being contradicted.

What happened in Ludwigshafen is not an aberration. It is a rehearsal for an order that appoints itself both judge and competitor, bypassing the slow constraints of law in favor of the efficiency of exclusion. It is not the failure of democracy. It is the function of a democracy that has redefined itself as a system without opponents – a consensus maintained by filters, not arguments.

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