Peter Sloterdijk has emerged as his country’s most controversial public intellectual.
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One
weekend last June, in an auditorium in the German city of Karlsruhe,
the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk celebrated his seventieth birthday by
listening to twenty lectures about himself. A cluster of Europe’s
leading intellectuals, academics, and artists, along with a smattering
of billionaires, were paying tribute to Germany’s most controversial
thinker, in the town where he was born and where he recently concluded a
two-decade tenure as the rector of the State Academy for Design. There
were lectures on Sloterdijk’s thoughts on Europe, democracy, religion,
love, war, anger, the family, and space. There were lectures on his
commentaries on Shakespeare and Clausewitz, and on his witty diaries,
and slides of buildings inspired by his insights. Between sessions,
Sloterdijk, who has long, straw-colored hair and a straggly mustache,
prowled among luminaries of the various disciplines he has strayed into,
like a Frankish king greeting lords of recently subdued fiefdoms. The
academy bookstore was selling most of his books—sixty-odd titles
produced over the past forty years. The latest, “After God,” was
displayed on a pedestal in a glass cube.
At a
dinner in his honor, Sloterdijk surveyed the scene with a Dutch friend,
Babs van den Bergh. “Do you think I should read out the letter?” he
asked. In his hand was a note from Chancellor Angela Merkel praising his
contributions to German culture.
“You really shouldn’t read it,” van den Bergh said.
“It’s not even a good letter, is it?” Sloterdijk said. “It’s so short. She probably didn’t even write it.”
“Of
course she didn’t write it,” van den Bergh said. “But you would never
get a letter like that in the Netherlands or anywhere else. Someone in her office worked very hard on it.”
Reverence
for intellectual culture is waning in much of the world, but it remains
strong in Germany. Sloterdijk’s books vie with soccer-star memoirs on
the German best-seller lists. A late-night TV talk show that he
co-hosted, “The Philosophical Quartet,” ran for a decade. He has written
an opera libretto, published a bawdy epistolary novel lampooning the
foundation that funds the country’s scientific research, and advised
some of Europe’s leading politicians.
Sloterdijk’s
colleagues offered encomiums. The architect Daniel Libeskind said that
his books have inspired a rethinking of European public space. Bruno
Latour, the sociologist and historian of science, apologized for not
knowing German, and recited in French a long, droll poem he had written,
describing Sloterdijk as a scribe of God. There was a video montage of
Sloterdijk’s television appearances across the decades, in which a young
blond mystic with arctic-blue eyes and torn sweaters gradually morphed
into the burgherly figure before us.
On the
second night of the symposium, Sloterdijk and his partner, the
journalist Beatrice Schmidt, invited some friends to their apartment, on
a stately street next door to a Buddhist meditation center. A picture
by Anselm Kiefer of a bomber plane hung in the hallway to the kitchen.
In the building’s untamed back garden, Sloterdijk began pouring bottles
of white Rhône wine for his guests. There were whispers about the
wonders of his cellar. On a small wooden porch, Sloterdijk spoke to two
young women about his recent travails while getting his driver’s license
renewed. “It’s a complete horror,” he said. “It takes nine hours in
Germany. Only your most maniacally loyal friends are willing to go with
you.” When Sloterdijk goes into one of his conversational riffs, there
is a feeling of liftoff. A rhythmic nasal hum develops momentum and
eventually breaks into more ethereal climes, creating the sense that you
have cleared the quotidian. “The car is like a uterus on wheels,” he
says. “It has the advantage over its biological model for being linked
to independent movement and a feeling of autonomy. The car also has
phallic and anal components—the primitive-aggressive competitive
behavior, and the revving up and overtaking which turns the other,
slower person into an expelled turd.”
In
Germany, where academic philosophers still equate dryness with
seriousness, Sloterdijk has a near-monopoly on irreverence. This is an
important element of his wide appeal, as is his eagerness to offer an
opinion on absolutely anything—from psychoanalysis to finance, Islam to
Soviet modernism, the ozone layer to Neanderthal sexuality. An essay on
anger can suddenly plunge into a history of smiling; a meditation on
America may veer into a history of frivolity. His magnum opus, the “Spheres”
trilogy, nearly three thousand pages long, includes a rhapsodic
excursus on rituals of human-placenta disposal. He is almost farcically
productive. As his editor told me, “The problem with Sloterdijk is that
you are always eight thousand pages behind.”
This
profligacy makes Sloterdijk hard to pin down. He is known not for a
single grand thesis but for a shrapnel-burst of impressionistic
coinages—“anthropotechnics,” “negative gynecology,” “co-immunism”—that
occasionally suggest the lurking presence of some larger system. Yet his
prominence as a public intellectual comes from a career-long rebellion
against the pieties of liberal democracy, which, now that liberal
democracy is in crisis worldwide, seems prophetic. A signature theme of
his work is the persistence of ancient urges in supposedly advanced
societies. In 2006, he published a book arguing that the contemporary
revolt against globalization can be seen as a misguided expression of
“noble” sentiments, which, rather than being curbed, should be
redirected in ways that left-liberals cannot imagine. He has described
the Presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as a
choice “between two helplessly gesticulating models of normality, one of
which appeared to be delegitimatized, the other unproven,” and is
unsurprised that so many people preferred the latter. Few philosophers
are as fixated on the current moment or as gleefully ready to explain
it.
Sloterdijk’s comfort with social rupture
has made him a contentious figure in Germany, where stability,
prosperity, and a robust welfare state are seen as central to the
country’s postwar achievement. Many Germans define themselves by their
moral rectitude, as exhibited by their reckoning with the Nazi past and,
more recently, by the government’s decision to accept more
refugees from the Syrian civil war than any other Western country.
Sloterdijk is determined to disabuse his countrymen of their polite
illusions. He calls Germany a “lethargocracy” and the welfare state a
“fiscal kleptocracy.” He has decried Merkel’s attitude toward refugees,
drawn on right-wing thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Arnold Gehlen,
and even speculated about genetic enhancement of the human race. As a
result, some progressives refuse to utter his name in public. In 2016,
the head of one centrist party denounced him as a stooge for the AfD, a
new far-right party that won thirteen per cent of the vote in last
year’s federal elections.
The rise of the
German right has made life more complicated for Sloterdijk. Positions
that, at another time, might have been forgiven as attempts to stir
debate now appear dangerous. A decade ago, Sloterdijk predicted a
nativist resurgence in Europe, a time when “we will look back
nostalgically to the days when we considered a dashing populist showman
like Jörg Haider”—the late Austrian far-right leader—“a menace.” Now
Sloterdijk has found himself in the predicament of a thinker whose
reality has caught up with his pronouncements.
The
rest of Germany thinks of Karlsruhe, when it thinks of it at all, as a
placid city where the Supreme Court is situated. Nestled in the far
southwest, where Germany begins to blend into France, Karlsruhe was one
of the first planned cities of Europe and an oasis of the Enlightenment.
When Thomas Jefferson passed through, in 1788, he sent a sketch of the
street plan back home, as a possible template for the layout of
Washington, D.C.
The town is also the
birthplace of the inventor of the bicycle, an entrepreneurial baron
named Karl von Drais—a fact that Sloterdijk, who loves cycling,
cherishes. When I met him a few weeks after his birthday celebrations,
he suggested riding into town to try a new steak restaurant. He talked
about advances in bicycle design, which got him onto one of his favorite
topics: inventors. “There are people who are all around us who have
invented something essential,” he said. “There’s a man in Germany who
invented the retractable dog leash. Can you imagine? Millions of people
have them now. Of course, these leashes present an existential threat to
me, since I’m an avid cyclist. Sometimes I’m riding fast and there’s an
owner over there, and the dog over there, and in between—!”
We
embarked. On his bike, Sloterdijk seemed massive. In the light wind,
his plaid short-sleeved shirt became a billowing tube. The fusion of man
and machine looked top-heavy and precarious, but his pedalling was
strikingly efficient, unstrenuous yet powerful. From the chest up, he
appeared no different from the way he does in a seminar room.
At
the restaurant, Sloterdijk ordered a glass of rosé. I asked him about
the German federal elections, which were a few months away. Sloterdijk
spoke disparagingly of all the major parties, except for the F.D.P.,
Germany’s closest equivalent to libertarians. “The most appealing
scenario would be for the F.D.P. to share a coalition with Merkel’s
Christian Democrats,” he said. “They could inject some sense into them.”
Most
Germans think of health care, education, and other basic services as
rights, not privileges, but the F.D.P. has argued that the country’s
welfare state has become hypertrophied, a view close to Sloterdijk’s
own. “It creates a double current of resentment,” he said. “You have the
people making money who feel no gratitude in return for all they give
in taxes. Then you have the people who receive the money. They also feel
resentment. They would like to trade places with the rich who give to
them. So both sides feel bitterly betrayed and angry.” Sloterdijk argues
that taxation should be replaced with a system in which the richest
members voluntarily fund great civic and artistic works. He believes
that this kind of social web of happy givers and receivers existed until
around the end of the Renaissance but was then obliterated by the rise
of the European state. He gets excited about the profusion of
philanthropic schemes emanating from Silicon Valley and sees in them an
attractive model for the future.
Compared with
many other countries in the West, Germany still has a relatively high
level of social equality. The Second World War decimated the German
aristocracy, and anti-élitist sentiment surged during the protests of
1968, as a generation of German students began to question the bourgeois
priorities of their parents. There is a widespread skepticism of
unbridled American-style capitalism and consumer culture. German bankers
earn a fraction of what their American counterparts do, and avoid
ostentation. It is not
uncommon for C.E.O.s and C.F.O.s to painstakingly sort through their
household recycling on the weekends. People are wary of credit—nearly
eighty per cent of German transactions are made in cash—and customers in
hardware shops and bakeries pay, with unfathomable diligence, in exact
change.
But even in Germany inequality is
growing. Sharp hikes in apartment-rental prices in major cities have
dissolved neighborhoods and pushed ordinary workers into long commutes.
Last year, the government put forward a plan to privatize the Autobahn.
Deutsche Bank, once a stolid provincial lender, has transformed itself
in the past two decades into a steroidal, Wall Street-style
multinational, a leader in the collateralization of debt, and a major
creditor of Donald Trump. Hippie beach enclaves on the Baltic Sea have
become resorts for trust-funders.
Germany’s
embrace of luxury delights Sloterdijk. He believes that it was a
historic mistake of the international left to “declare war on the
beautiful people,” and welcomes signs that Germans are allowing
themselves to take pleasure in extravagance. The proliferation of sleek
steak restaurants, such as the one we were in, is but one promising sign
among many.
The waiter stopped by our table,
and Sloterdijk handed him back his second glass of wine. “Was it not
cold?” the waiter asked. “Yes, but I want it colder,” Sloterdijk said.
Later, as we got up to leave, the waiter tentatively approached him and
asked, “Are you Herr Sloterdijk?” For a second, it seemed as if he was
going to kiss his hand.
As
we rode our bikes through Karlsruhe, I asked Sloterdijk what he
remembered of his childhood. “We lived in another part of town,” he said
over his shoulder. “I’ve gone back to visit it, looking for traces, but
nothing came back: there was no temps retrouvé! ”
Sloterdijk was born in 1947, part of the generation that Germans call
“rubble children”; he remembers playing in the ruins left behind by the
Allied bombing campaigns. His mother worked at a radar center during the
war, and met his father, a Dutch sailor, after the German collapse. The
marriage did not last long, and Sloterdijk lost contact with his father
in early youth. “I had to find my own father and mentors, which meant
that I had to look in the world around me,” he has said. “Somehow I
managed to divide myself into teacher and student.”
Part
of the “somehow” involved his mother, who taught him ancient Greek
sayings and harbored no doubts about her son’s genius. When Sloterdijk
was a teen-ager, they moved to Munich, where, outside school, he started
consuming large amounts of expressionist poetry. In the late
nineteen-sixties, he studied literature and philosophy as an
undergraduate at the University of Munich, where his friend Rachel
Salamander, now an editor and the owner of a Jewish-literature bookshop
in the city, remembers him as a dazzling presence. “He spoke faster than
everyone thought, and wrote faster than they spoke,” she told me. “I
was not surprised at all by what he became.”
Sloterdijk
pursued a doctorate at the University of Hamburg but received only a
middling grade on his dissertation, and, for a while, his academic
prospects were uncertain. In 1979, he moved to India, where he studied
with the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, near Pune. He says that the
greatest discussions of Adorno he ever heard were on the fringes of an
ashram there. His time in India led him to challenge many of his
intellectual assumptions. “In the German philosophical tradition, we
were told that we humans were poor devils,” he said to me. “But in India
the message was: we weren’t poor devils, we contained hidden gods!”
In
1983, a few years after his return, Sloterdijk published a
thousand-page book that has sold more copies than any other postwar book
of German philosophy. The title, “The Critique of Cynical Reason,”
seemed to promise a cheeky update of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,”
but the book instead delivered a wildly personal polemic about the
deterioration of the utopian spirit of 1968 and called for Sloterdijk’s
generation to take stock of itself. His peers, as they reached middle
age, were pragmatically adjusting to global capitalism and to the
nuclear stalemate of the Cold War. He issued a challenge to readers to
scour history and art for ways of overcoming social atomization. Punning
on Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself, he asked, “Have we not become
the isolated thing-for-yourself in the middle of similar beings?”
The
antidote to cynicism, he suggested, was a re-immersion in the heritage
of the Cynics of ancient Greece. He looked to the philosopher Diogenes,
who rejected the social conventions that governed human behavior and
said that people should live instinctively, like dogs. The word “cynic”
comes from the Greek kynikos, meaning
“doglike,” and Sloterdijk coined the term “kynicism” to differentiate
Diogenes’ active assault on prevailing norms from the passive
disengagement of the late twentieth century. He celebrated the direct
way that Diogenes made his points—masturbating in the marketplace,
defecating in the theatre—and suggested that the answer to his
generation’s malaise was to repurpose the spontaneous currents of
sixties counterculture.
The book caught a
moment and made philosophy seem both relevant and fun, beguiling readers
with arguments about the philosophical import of breasts and farts. But
although it made Sloterdijk’s name, he remained an academic outsider,
drifting from post to post for almost a
decade. His response was to dismiss those who dismissed him—“Their
codes and rituals are reliably antithetical to thought,” he told me—and
to forge his reputation instead with articles in magazines and
newspapers. He received job offers from America, but it was becoming
clear that he was by nature a gadfly—that he and Germany needed each
other because they agitated each other so much.
Sloterdijk
began picking fights with some of the most renowned members of the
German academic establishment, in particular the leftist theorists of
the Frankfurt School. “It’s not advisable to go up against Sloterdijk in
a public setting,” Axel Honneth, a leading figure of the school, told
me. “He wins on points of rhetoric that are in inverse proportion to the
irresponsibility of his ideas.” A French-Canadian academic recently
produced a diagram of Sloterdijk’s feuds with other German
intellectuals; it looks like a trick play in football.
The
most notorious episode occurred in 1999, after Sloterdijk published
“Rules for the Human Zoo,” an essay about the fate of humanism. Since
Roman times, he argued, humanism’s latent message had been that “reading
the right books calms the inner beast” and its function was to select a
“secret élite” of the literate. Now, in the age of media-saturated mass
culture, reading great books had lost its selective function. “What can
tame man, when the role of humanism as the school for humanity has
collapsed?” he wrote. Channelling Heidegger and Nietzsche, Sloterdijk
imagined an “Über-humanist” who might use “genetic reform” to insure
“that an élite is reared with certain characteristics.”
In
Germany, where the very word “selection” is enough to set off alarms,
Sloterdijk’s essay invited antagonism. Was he making a plea for
eugenics? Jürgen Habermas, the country’s most revered philosopher,
declared that Sloterdijk’s work had “fascist implications,” and
encouraged other writers to attack him. Sloterdijk responded by
proclaiming the death of the Frankfurt School, to which Habermas
belongs, writing that “the days of hyper-moral sons of
national-socialist fathers are coming to an end.” German intellectuals
mostly sided with Habermas, but Sloterdijk emerged from the scuffle with
his status considerably enhanced. He was now a national figure who
stood for everything that Habermas did not.
Sloterdijk’s
professional uncertainties resolved themselves in the early nineties,
when his appointment to a prime post at the academy in Karlsruhe gave
him the freedom to do whatever he liked. Since then, his newspaper
articles and TV appearances have gradually established him as a media
celebrity. Over the summer, ordinary Germans who spotted his books in my
hands engaged me in conversation on trains, in coffee shops, at
universities, and in bookshops. “Sloterdijk creates for his readers the
feeling that they are suddenly in possession of the solutions to the
greatest problems in philosophy,” the German literary critic Gustav
Seibt told me. He also has a strong following among wealthy élites, who
value the intellectual patina he provides for their world views. Nicolas
Berggruen, a billionaire investor who recently established an annual
million-dollar philosophy prize, told me, “Sloterdijk takes on the
biggest issues, but in the least conventional ways.”
In the academy, he is still regarded with suspicion. The English philosopher John Gray argued, in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books,
that, sentence by sentence, much of his output is simply
incomprehensible. It’s a common reaction among Anglophone readers, who
are often baffled by the scale of his reputation. This is in part
because his metaphorical, image-addicted style of philosophy has been in
short supply in English since Coleridge. But in Europe it finds a ready
audience. His writings, abstruse yet popularizing, have made him an
uplifting guru for some and a convenient devil for others—the crucial
fact being that he is never ignored. “The most interesting thing about
Sloterdijk may not be anything particular he has written,” the Berkeley
intellectual historian Martin Jay told me, “but simply the fact that he
exists.”
Shortly
after the German federal elections in September, I met Sloterdijk for
lunch, at a small Italian restaurant in the west of Berlin. “This is a
restaurant where Gerhard Schröder used to come,” Sloterdijk told me with
satisfaction. The former German Chancellor began inviting Sloterdijk to
gatherings of intellectuals in the nineties, when his broadsides
against left-leaning public moralists were first winning him a following
among conservative and centrist politicians. After our lunch,
Sloterdijk was going to see the country’s current President,
Frank-Walter Steinmeier. I asked if he ever saw Angela Merkel, and he
laughed, saying, “She’s got to this point where she exudes the persona
of a woman who no longer needs anyone’s advice.”
Since
I had last seen Sloterdijk, Merkel and her party, the C.D.U., had
pulled off a narrow victory in the federal elections, but major gains
achieved by previously marginal parties were making it hard for Merkel
to assemble a governing coalition. The leftist party Die Linke had made
inroads into the youth vote, recalling the successes of Bernie Sanders
and Jeremy Corbyn. The libertarian F.D.P., which Sloterdijk had praised
months before, had done well, too, but eventually turned down the
opportunity to join Merkel in a coalition government. Overshadowing
everything else in the headlines were the advances made by the
nationalist AfD.
When I brought up the AfD,
Sloterdijk sank his head in his hands, and his expansive manner gave way
to something more cautious. For years, the German media have been
making connections
between Sloterdijk’s thought and new right-wing groups, and he’s become
used to rebutting the charge of harboring far-right sympathies. In my
conversations with him, his political preoccupations seemed closer to
libertarianism than to anything more blood and soil, but he has a habit
of saying things that, depending on your view, seem either like dog
whistles to the far right or like the bomb-throwing reflexes of a born
controversialist. When Sloterdijk said, of Merkel’s refugee policy, that
“no society has the moral obligation to self-destruct,” his words
called to mind Thilo Sarrazin, a former board member of the Bundesbank,
who, in 2010, published an anti-Muslim tract with the title “Germany
Abolishes Itself,” which became a huge best-seller and made racial
purity a respectable concern of national discussion.
I
asked Sloterdijk about Marc Jongen, a former doctoral student of his
who became the AfD’s “party philosopher” and recently took up a seat in
the Bundestag. “In a perfect world, you are not responsible for your
students,” he said. “But we live in a half-perfect world, and so now
people try to pin Jongen to me.” I asked if there was any common ground
between him and Jongen, and he replied with an emphatic no, calling
Jongen “a complete impostor.” He went on, “He came to the university to
study Sanskrit classics like the Upanishads, but then he gave it all up.
A political career is the way out for him.” The response was
unequivocal, but couched less in terms of moral abhorrence than of
professional disdain.
Sloterdijk deplored the
rise of the right, but he couldn’t resist seeing something salutary in
the spectacle. “It’s been coming for a long time,” he said. “It’s also a
sign that Germans are more like the rest of humanity than they like to
believe.” He started talking about “rage banks,” his term for the way
that disparate grievances can be organized into larger reserves of
political capital.
He described this concept in his 2006 book “Rage and Time,”
an examination of the loathing of liberal democracy by nativist,
populist, anarchic, and terrorist movements. The book follows his usual
detour-giddy historical method, comparing political uses of anger, and
of related emotions such as pride and resentment, from Homer to the
present. In premodern societies, he argues, vengeance and blood feuds
provided ample outlet for these impulses. Later, loyalty to the
nation-state performed a similar function, and international Communism
managed to direct class rage into utopian projects. But modern
capitalism presents a particular problem. “Ever more irritated and
isolated individuals find themselves surrounded by impossible offers,”
he writes, and, out of this frustrated desire, “an impulse to hate
everything emerges.” It was this kind of rage, Sloterdijk believes, that
was on display in the riots in the banlieues of Paris in 2005.
In
“Rage and Time,” Sloterdijk writes that the discontents of capitalism
leave societies susceptible to “rage entrepreneurs”—a phrase that
uncannily foreshadows the advent of Donald Trump. When we spoke about
Trump, Sloterdijk explained him as part of a shift in Western history.
“This is a moment that won’t come again,” he told me. “Both of the old
Anglophone empires have within a short period withdrawn from the
universal perspective.” Sloterdijk went so far as to claim that Trump
uses fears of ecological devastation in his favor. “The moment for me
was when I first heard him say ‘America First,’ ” he said. “That means:
America to the front of the line! But it’s not the line for
globalization anymore, but the line for resources. Trump channels this
global feeling of ecological doom.”
I asked
Sloterdijk if there was something specifically American about Trumpism.
“You can’t go looking for Trump in Europe,” he told me. “You know, Hegel
in his time was convinced that the state in the form of the rule of law
had not yet arrived in the new world. He thought that the
individual—private, virtuous—had to anticipate the state. You see this
in American Westerns, where the good sheriff has to imagine the
not-yet-existent state in his own private morality. But Trump is a
degenerate sheriff. He acts as if he doesn’t care if the state comes
into being or not, and mocks the upright townsfolk. What makes Trump
dangerous is that he exposes parts of liberal democracies that were only
shadowily visible up until now. In democracies, there is always an
oligarchic element, but Trump makes it extremely, comically visible.”
For Sloterdijk, Trump’s true significance lies in the way that he
instinctively subverts the norms of modern governance. “He’s an
innovator when it comes to fear,” Sloterdijk told me. “Instead of
waiting for the crisis to impose his decree, his decrees get him the
emergencies he needs. The playground for madness is vast.”
The
day after our lunch was the five-hundredth anniversary of the beginning
of the Reformation. The city of Wittenberg, half an hour outside
Berlin, where Luther had—allegedly—nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the
door of the Castle Church, had suddenly been transformed into something
like an American Christian-college campus. Midwesterners and
Californians mixed with fellow-pilgrims in squares and outside churches,
discussing the doings of St. Paul and debating whether Luther was a
monk or a friar. Faux-medieval stalls were selling Reformation
souvenirs, including T-shirts that said “Viva la Reformation!” and
Luther socks that read “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
Sloterdijk had come to speak at
a local Protestant academy about the meaning of the Reformation.
“Luther had the great fortune to be followed by Bach,” Sloterdijk told
his audience. “His form of individualism was illuminated by the most
beautiful music.”
“But he was also followed by Hitler!” a young man in the audience said.
“Hitler was a degraded Papist,” Sloterdijk shot back.
Little
by little, the discussion gravitated to assaults on Sloterdijk’s
positions. “You sound like the right-wingers when you speak of the
refugees,” an elderly doctor stood up and declared. “We cared about
refugees after the war and we can do it again.”
Sloterdijk
replied impatiently. “The Americans gave us this idea of
multiculturalism that suited their society fine, but which, as software,
is not compatible with our German hardware of the welfare state,” he
said. “There’s this family metaphor spreading everywhere: the idea that
all of humanity is our family. That idea helped destroy the Roman
Empire. Now we’re in danger of letting that metaphor get out of control
all over again. People are not ready to feel the full pressure of
coexistence with billions of their contemporaries.” He went on, “In the
past, geography created discretionary boundaries between nations and
cultures. Distances that were difficult to overcome allowed for mental
and political space.” Space and distance, he argued, had allowed for a
kind of liberality and generosity that was now under siege—by refugees,
by social media, by everything.
At the end of
the talk, the faithful of all ages lined up to buy copies of “After
God.” The polite chatter momentarily gave way to the brisk ritual of
book-signing. Sloterdijk scrawled on the open books offered to him.
Bearing a freshly signed copy, a pastor visiting from the Rhineland
sympathized with Sloterdijk’s predicament as a salesman. “We become more
like America every day,” he told him. “Isn’t it a pity?” ♦
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