Germany's Illiterate, Post-Civilizational Future. A Case Study in Western Demise

By Sebastian Edinger

Recently, a book titled Demokratiedämmerung (Twilight of Democracy) by Veith Selk has been published in Germany. This book has sparked an uproar in the academic establishment because it presents data on illiteracy in German society that should not have surprised anyone, but caught academia—which is largely intellectually walled off from normal societal reality—off guard. It speaks volumes about this milieu that shock and surprise were even possible. The joy about the fact that, due to Selk’s book, central topoi from Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve are finding their way into the German academic mainstream discourse through the back door in a mode of deep disturbance, must also be kept within limits, since the diffusion of such insights presupposed transitioning from a societal crisis with suicidal course-setting into a civilizational free fall.

In particular, Selk has alarmed large parts of the academic establishment by spreading the fact that "of the 51.5 million German-speaking adults aged between 18 and 64, a full 16.8 million people do not reach the elementary school level of written German." There is no reason to rejoice that many have now been awakened from their deep sleep, because the situation is even more dire than Selk's book portrays it. 54% of all adult Americans read at the level of a sixth-grader or below, and in Germany it will hardly look any different by now; at least this would be the assumption if one took the sixth grade of the "old" Germany of the 1990s as the standard.

Selk leaves out the diachronic perspective that comes to mind when one asks how bad it must have been in the past, if illiteracy is raging to such an extent in the "best Germany of all time"—as some prominent and intellectually irrelevant politician (irrelevant to such a degree that I refuse to acknowledge the fact that he even has a name) would call the mess we are living in. According to the Global Universal Basic Skills report presented in 2022, 23.8% of pupils in Germany did not even possess the skills necessary to master the transition from elementary school to lower secondary level; the standard is defined by the lowest competency level captured in the PISA test. For comparison: in Japan, only 12.7% fell below the threshold in this disaster, while in leading China only 6.5%, whereas in Kenya 77.2% and in Afghanistan 90.5% lacked all basic skills.

But if it looks so bad in 2022, how bad must it have been in the 1990s then? In the Moser Report of 1997, we find data comparing Germany, Canada, and Great Britain regarding numerical understanding and reading competency. The percentage of adults in the respective countries was as follows concerning low competency levels:

In Germany, reading competency was weak in 12% of adults, while numerical understanding was weak in only 7%. In Canada, the proportion was 17% in each case, and in the UK, 23% each. So, about 30 years ago, German adults fared somewhat better in reading competency than Japanese elementary school pupils do today, while in terms of numerical understanding, adults scored almost as well as the children of today’s world leader, China. The binding character of a cultural level of refinement expresses itself precisely in the fact that, over the course of generations, either the arduously established standard is maintained or improvement is actually sought or achieved. One might be inclined to object that these are two different kinds of tests whose results are cited here, so that there is no exact compatibility between the results. That, in turn, is only relevant if the Moser Report fundamentally contains inaccurate results—that is, if a significant portion of those to whom solid competencies are conceded do not in fact possess them. Otherwise, the difference between the tests is not particularly important.

The picture is even worse when we look at the 2021 IGLU study: Reading Competency of Primary School Children in International Comparison and Trends over 20 Years. Here, five competency levels are distinguished. The lowest two competency levels correspond to “rudimentary reading skills”; at level 4, children can read solidly, and at level 5, they can read well. Level 5 contains the pool of potential high school graduates (Abitur), assuming there are educational standards rather than just talk about them. In Germany, 8.3% of pupils reach competency level 5, while in Singapore 35.4% do, in Russia 20.8%, in Bulgaria 15.9%, and in Poland 13.8%. For competency level 4, the study records a significant decline: –8.8% in Sweden, –7.1% in Germany, but only –3.7% in Bulgaria. In 2001 in Germany, “only” 16.9% did not reach competency level 3 (which is at least moderate reading skills—the decline compared to the Moser Report data is striking), but what is even worse: the proportion of children who do not reach competency level 3 “jumped significantly to 25.4% in 2021.” In other words: a quarter of the children who attend German schools have no prospect of participating in a modern labor market.

Back to the educational tests: Examining the available data, free from any sentimentality, we see that Germany is in free fall. In a PDF document on IGLU 2021 that bears the note “Handout for the Press Conference,” it states: “The development of declining reading competency has been apparent since 2011. Between 2016 and 2021, average reading competency declined particularly sharply.” If we go back 10 years, since these are the results of primary school pupils: since around 2000, very little is right in German homes, and among other things, this includes the fact that the number of traditional households is massively decreasing, because since 2000 the rate of out-of-wedlock births has steadily been above 20 percent, and since 2010, steadily above 30 percent. What is reflected in the quality of the behavior of the parents is mirrored more or less exactly in the educational results; the “quality of people” is not an ideological illusion but an elementary category of social and cultural politics; abandon it, and you abandon—at least in the long run, and maybe without even understanding it—everything that is worth anything. One does not even need to look at migration for this, it is enough to look at the civilizational (or non-civilizational) standards (or lack thereof) according to which sexual “selection” (or non-selection) takes place.

But let us briefly turn to migration, because the above-mentioned document contains the following sentence on this topic: ‘The substantial social and migration-related disparities in Germany have not been reduced since 2001.’ The linguistic and logical competencies of those who formulate such sentences leave no less to be desired than the recent achievements of pupils. The disparities are not “migration-related,” because migration means immigration to a host country, not the parental undermining of learning processes and school engagement. Migration per se therefore does not create disparity, and if one were to collect the data, there would certainly be no significant impairment in the performance of Southeast Asians in such tests; moreover, it is quite possible and not implausible to assume that they would perform above average in such tests. I will leave it at a hint here: complementary IQ tests, applied across the board, would be more helpful here than empty phrases that make the teaching profession the next legitimate subject of cognitive investigation.

What does all this mean from a diagnostic perspective for the state of a democracy in which illiteracy is spreading as a pandemic for which there will definitely be no vaccine—not even a deficient one? And what does it mean prognostically?

A democratic-theoretical and critical answer has been formulated by Jason Brennan in his book Against Democracy (2016). The book demands a double re-reading: once in light of the recent educational studies, and then also in light of Covid policies. Brennan does not simply want to get rid of democracy, but formulates an alternative concept which he calls epistocracy. At the heart of this concept is the competence principle, which Brennan defines as follows: “It is unjust to violate a citizen’s rights through decisions made by an incompetent deliberative body, or through decisions made incompetently or with bad intentions, and to forcibly deprive him of his life, liberty, or property or to significantly impair his life chances.” In this formulation, the competence principle is not an elitist exclusion principle, but an elementary protection principle—and during Covid, we saw what could be justified under the state’s duty to protect. Epistocracy thus interweaves the competence principle with a protection of citizens that, even if in a hysterical and concretistic exaggeration (lockdown or death), justified the shutdown of social and economic life. At the same time, it attempts to erect a barrier against incompetence and inability on the part of voters at the procedural level. What in 2016 might have seemed to some as an overreaction should gradually present itself to even the last holdout as an urgently needed alternative.

Do the competency developments in the acquisition of basic cultural techniques such as reading, mentioned above, indicate that, on a societal scale, a cognitive decline is emerging that must be addressed at the level of basic government formation procedures? I would like to answer as follows: if one—for the first time in German history—has arrived at news in “simple German,” this is an admission that large parts of the electorate are cognitively only just above the state for which guardianship courts would be responsible; nicely decorated LinkedIn profiles can’t mask that anymore. Then, the possibilities for cognitive participation are so severely curtailed that one must respond at the procedural level before the usual democratic self-correction (simply voting again and better) can take effect. Perhaps one must secure elections here like Christmas markets—only against the terror of illiterate worldlessness instead of against terrorist car drivers.

What one might object to epistocracy on the side of the establishment is its expansion of skepticism: not only are voters supposed to have sufficient capability in the field of political judgment, but Brennan has also brought into play the establishment of an epistocratic council with the power to revise incompetent decisions. In other words: epistocracy assumes that incompetence goes much further than those who like to suggest otherwise, who elevate themselves above the electorate but want to be regarded as being beyond any doubt regarding even the most elementary abilities. According to The Guardian, in a comparative test in mathematics and language, parliamentarians on average performed worse than 10-year-olds (44% met the minimum requirements in mathematics, 50% in basic English), so an expansion of epistocratic suspicion is inevitable. When it comes to the most basic “math” questions (basically questions you have to be able to answer before you can even begin with statistics 101), more than 50% of MPs failed miserably; 45% answered that the probability of getting two heads when spinning a coin twice is 50%; 7% said they didn’t know if 50% or 25% is the correct answer which, ironically, in this case was a better answer than the hilarious 50% response. Now we are getting to the core of what the cognitive ability of the so-called elites that promote multiculturalism is really about. Odo Marquard’s Inkompetenzkompensationskompetenz (yes, German for “competence to compensate incompetence”) undergoes its resurrection here in the area of political quality control endowed with limited but marked veto powers.

All of this has serious social and economic consequences, one of which will be addressed here in concrete terms: the great publishing collapse to come. The book trade has already lost a significant portion of its customer base: “In 2023, there were 25 million book buyers, whereas the infamous ‘Buchkäufer – quo vadis’ survey determined ten years earlier (2013) that there were still 36 million people who spent money on books.” Readers are not simply stopping reading—they are dying out. Now, a massive economic decline is being added, which is only just gaining momentum and will persist for quite some time, while at the same time several million more readers will die out over the next 10 years. The book trade is compensating for the disappearance of readers in the same way that Germany is compensating for demographic decline—namely, in an artificial, unsustainable, and untenable manner, as Die ZEIT reports: “Book market revenue in the first months of 2025 is at the same level as the previous year, said Kraus vom Cleff. However, already in 2024, fewer books were sold than in the year before. Despite this decline of 1.7 percent, total revenue increased by 0.8 percent according to the Börsenverein. This was simply because books became more expensive.” The patient is 110 years old; this cannot go on for much longer, and the end result will be the undoing of the proto-civilizational work of alphabetizing children.

If one looks at the development of basic cognitive abilities, the baseline of cultural training, one is faced with a trail of competence wreckage in pseudo-national formats. Reading does not merely train the deciphering of a sequence of letters, but a relationship to the world of distancing and simultaneously opening up through ideal representation by means of objectification. Where communication is in “simple German,” one need not even begin to talk about matters such as “deliberative self-legislation and self-government in parliamentary mediation and representation.” Brennan has raised important procedural questions that we must now consider anew in a holistic way: what could a re-transformation look like into a society that no longer needs “simple German”? If the question of democracy is posed at this level, questions such as whether we will be able to remain in modernity are already on the line. Sticking to “business as usual” inevitably means falling out of modernity, and the question of democracy will then no longer even arise. Not the end of history, but the end of the history of modernity in the West is the abyss we are staring into. And what is unfolding here is not a crisis. A crisis befalls only those who want to avoid it. What I’ve been talking about here can reasonably only be interpreted as the realization of a spiritual, psychological, societal and, ultimately, civilizational Morgenthau Plan.