Ai Weiwei is right to be angry and lashes out in this barrage of scathing statements. That Zeit would not publish this is curious given the garbage that they’ve been wont to put out over the past year. However undirected, criticism of Germany is not appreciated by the Germans.

Here, at a deserted street, people stop dutifully at a red light. Not a car in sight. This, I once thought, is the mark of a highly evolved society. At the heart of bureaucracy lies a collective endorsement of power’s legitimacy, and therefore, individuals surrender their moral judgment — or perhaps never developed one. They abandon challenge. They relinquish dispute.

That is the anecdote also with which “Two Cheers for Anarchism” (read in 2012) opens: A German village in the 80s without any traffic but with a traffic light where the people dutifully wait for the green signal even though everybody knows there is no point.

It’s hard to come up with a better illustration of the working of the German mind and its major malfunction.