Kevinismus and the German PMC

English original of introduction to German translation of Virtue Hoarders on the occasion of the WEF 2026 in Davos. Enjoy!

Kevinismus and the German PMC

Catherine Liu

Introduction to the German translation of Virtue Hoarders

Traveling through the Rhineland during the mid-1990s, I saw a modest clothing shop for women of a certain age called “Ketch’up” [sic]. It was strange to see a clothing boutique featuring sensible shoes and drip and dry floral prints named after an American condiment known for leaving difficult to wash out stains on a pastel blouse. However, by adding the apostrophe and separating “Ketch” and “Up,” the owner of the store had made an American tomato sauce into a separable verb, German style. “Ketch’up” is a version of catchup, a game Germany felt that it had to play in order to compete with the most advanced capitalist economies. According to Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, German speaking people had been slow to embrace the Protestant Ethic, with its zealous rationalization of the forces of production. Horkheimer and Adorno thought that National Socialism and anti-semitism were German’s reactions to the rationalization of everyday life demanded by modernity and capitalism. It was during the turmoil of the Trump Presidency that I wrote Virtue Hoarders: a political drama was playing out in the United States involving a pitched battle between a technocratic class of alleged liberals pitted against an angry coalition of those who were revolting against all democratic norms. The American Right embraced irrationality as a form of political agitation and mobilization and has not let it go. For those of us who supported Bernie Sanders’ candidacy in 2016 and 2020, it was hard not to see that the carefully staged cultural liberalism of the technocrats and the Professional Managerial Class denied the economic transformations necessary to salvage American liberalism from its elitist identity-obsessed politics and Far Right rejection of democratic norms.

The hegemony of the American PMC disguises its ubiquity. The class exports its vision of the world through the American culture industry and is a vicious protector of its own material interests against the working class and non-college educated who do not accept its language of progress, its ‘help,’ or its empty empathy. Viewing the working class as hopelessly backward and reactionary, the liberal PMC elite then scratches its head when the masses do not want to play “catch up.” My analysis of this class owes a great deal to Siegfried Kracauer. In 1920s Berlin, Siegfried Kracauer set out to explore a new class of German people, salaried employees working for large firms: these new workers lived with aspirations and anxieties completely defined by the pressures of surviving within the capitalist firm, the seductions of the urban culture industry and the raw fear of unemployment. In The Salaried Masses, Kracauer described the workers’ struggles as flawed attempts to find happiness and dignity in an increasingly rationalized world. In his view, the salaried employees were desperately trying to distinguish themselves from the proletariat. They strained under the iron yoke of work discipline, formed by bureaucracy and standardization. Kracauer’s sociological analysis of workers in Berlin had a strong influence on the work of C. Wright Mills, his colleague at Columbia University. Mills, in turn had a strong influence on John and Barbara Ehrenreich’s formulation of the Professional Managerial Class, from which Virtue Hoarders inherits a critical concept in post-1968 class politics.

In The Salaried Masses, we find vividly drawn portraits of salesmen and clerks: Kracauer sympathizes with conversational tics of a “petite bourgeois secretary…who tries to feign a level of experience by always inserting an English ‘Well…’ into her conversation.” She has heard successful people use the English expression and she copies their conversation: her “modest job,” however, forces her to “exorcise her nature.”[1] In contrast to this woman, Kracauer describes an exceptionally charming cigarette salesman from the working class. He is a natural at his job. He is relaxed with people of all classes: when he has a had a few drinks, he treats everyone in the working class bar he frequents to his singing, from Lohengrin to La Traviata. At these moments, everyone who listens to him gets a glimpse of “a more beautiful life.” [2]

The new Berlin of a reunited Germany is quietly getting rid of working class bars. It is a global city, of startups, strivers and hipsters. In this new Germany, the white-collar classes are more or less at completely at home in an English speaking milieu. The billionaire Samwer Brothers, founders of Rocket Internet, Germany’s most successful and controversial startup incubator, have given shape to the newest phase of German Professional Managerial Class emulation of American capitalism. Despite the controversy and criticism of their copycat startup ventures (German companies Alando, Zalando and Windu modeled after Ebay, Zappos, Airbnb respectively), the brothers have made a fortune no amount of carping criticism about originality can touch.[3] They went to America in the 1990s, interned in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, and returned to Germany to found German versions of American companies. The American companies then bought the clone companies and the brothers became rich in the process. Unlike the German capitalists of the previous century who had built their wealth on heavy industry and mining, the Samwers fit the profile of information-based, cosmopolitan Professional Managerial Class elites. The hardware that their apps depend on is designed in the U.S. and manufactured in Asia. The software they have developed relies on American code. Their investors come from Japan, Singapore and China.

German elites may be more open to the world, but PMC Germans openly mock and look down on the German working class. Consider the fate of German Kevins (and their female counterparts, the Chantals). Working class Germans who gave their children “exotic” English and French names produced the cultural phenomenon of “Kevinismus.”[4] Expert linguists may disagree about the empirical effects of prejudice against German Kevins, but the name and their bearers evoke an uneasy class-based contempt. Kevin Bacon and Kevin Costner may have been the sources of working class Germans’ love affair with the name, but let us focus here just on Kevin Bacon because Footloose, his film from 1984, inspired generations of young Germans, trying to forge an identity in an increasingly globalized and confusing world .

In Herbert Ross’ 1984 film Footloose, Bacon plays a Chicago teenager transplanted to a rural town where books are burned and dancing and rock and roll are outlawed. Bacon reads Slaughterhouse Five and also does hard physical labor at the local mill. He is full of feral energy, yet also embodies a tender masculinity and courageous physicality. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Bacon teaches his new best friend (played by Christopher Penn) how to keep the beat and eventually how to dance. The lesson takes place to Deneice Williams’ rousing track, “Let’s Hear it for the Boy.” To Germans worried about keeping up with Americans, Bacon’s lessons in foot tapping and finger snapping must have been reassuring. The film offers a reassuring conclusion: the fire and brimstone Pastor, played by John Lithgow, is reconciled to his wild daughter, played by Lori Singer. Small-town religious values and the sexual promise of rock and roll are harmonized in stirring and tightly choreographed dance numbers set to Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose.” The bullies and book burning fanatics are both defeated. Kevin Bacon leads the reconciliation of cultural opposites, showing the way to a better world. To Germans, he was a working-class hero. When East and West Germany were reunited in the 1990s, people could be both Bacon and Penn, the teacher and the student, the dancer and the fighter, the poet and the worker. Bacon showed Germans how to take a backward place, from housing project to tiny towns into the modern world. Footloose offers a well packaged, escapist entertainment that promised both freedom from economic and sexual constraint: the pleasure of choreography shows a beautiful form of coordinated activity, Kracauer’s “mass ornament.” Naming a child “Kevin” is a hopeful act, one that tries to capture some of Bacon’s magic: in a world where there was no alternative to capitalism, the parents of a German Kevin sought an escape from a future in which the working class would be increasingly consigned to backwardness.

In a revealing scene in the hit German series 4 Blocks about the Berlin neighborhood, Neukoelln, Abbas Hamady, a member of the Hamady organized crime family, loses his temper when confronted with an English-speaking barista in a new neighborhood café. Dramatizing the tensions of gentrification in Berlin, Hamady, played by the rapper Veysel Geylin, attacks an American café owner who greets him casually in English. “Sprich Deutsch!!!” Abbas screams. The Hamadys may rule the four blocks of Neukoelln as Kings, but once they leave their enclave, they are vulnerable to the police, other gangs and German racism. They have money but no passports. They cannot participate in the easy movement of people guaranteed by globalization. In 4 Blocks, it is the immigrant who defends the German language and protests most loudly against the transformation of his working-class neighborhood into a comfortable, satellite campus of an American study abroad program.

Germany’s unemployment rate is low, but a growing number of German workers are involved in “atypical employment” or hold jobs that are part-time, freelance, low paid and without any benefits. In 2019, the wealthiest 10% of German households controlled 65% of German wealth, up from 44% in 1970.[5] Growing inequality is another area where Germany is copying the United States. However, Germany’s rate of university attendance is one of the highest among OECD countries.[6] With its robust vocational education track, German technical universities were supposed to supply industry with well-trained workers. Increasingly, however, in the Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts, we see German universities taking on American and Anglophone preoccupations. In the offices of a university research institute in the former East, I saw a pair of bathrooms marked by unicorns pooping glorious rainbows, advertising the gender neutrality of the facilities. The Samwers and their ilk are also on the lookout for unicorns, ones that produce streams of gold, not rainbows. It was surprising to see these bathroom labels in an area where salt production and tourism barely keep depopulation at bay.

From an outsider’s point of view, German Humanities and Social Science university research suffers from a semi-feudal system of rewards that endows a few powerful professors with the ability to make or break the research careers of graduate students. Trying to imitate American ranking systems has provided the government with an excuse to cut the permanent budgets of institutions that struggle to keep up with the new standards of excellence. Higher levels of competition do not lead to better employment possibilities for young scholars who have to put together a living through series of temporary jobs until well into their forties and fifties. If German universities simply copy the cultural and political strategies of their American counterparts by offering themselves as boutique training grounds in startup culture and/or American Professional Managerial Class identity pluralism, then Germany will really have succeeded in transforming itself into a compliant 51^st state of the USA, divided by a politics of pseudo-progress that masks brutal economic and social realities. Parties like the AfD could not prosper without an out of touch German Professional Managerial Class, watching US streaming media, dreaming of the next Unicorn, ready to support US Imperialism at home and abroad, and ignorant or even contemptuous of working class domestic concerns. Kevinismus is a relatively innocent and socially stigmatized form of cultural emulation: the PMC love of the United States is much more dangerous to Germans and to the world.

August 2022

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[1]Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. Trans. Quentin Hoare. (London, New York: Verso, 1998). P. 69.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Matt Cowan, “Inside the clone factory: the story of Germany’s Sanwer Brothers.” Wired. February 3, 2012. https://www.wired.co.uk/gallery/inside-the-clone-factory-gallery

[4]Katrin Pribyl, ”Wie Namen die Zukunft von Kindern beeinflussen“ Die Welt. Feb 26, 2008.

https://www.welt.de/politik/article1727650/Wie-Namen-die-Zukunft-von-Kindern-beeinflussen.html

[5]https://www.sdgwatcheurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/3.3.a-report-DE.pdf

[6] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Education-Research-Culture/Educational-Level/_node.html