Once more, the inexorable pendulum of Time tolls the hour of decline over the ancient land of poets and philosophers. The tapestry of Germany frays at its edges as the grand, postwar cohorts, once so vigorous, now recede into twilight, each departure another stitch undone from the economic robe that once swathed the nation in confidence. The vaunted promise of perpetual growth, the capitalist chimera, is now revealed as nothing more than a brief and transient summer—Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence mocked in the cyclical folly of a society failing to heed the warning of its own mortality.

The state, with trembling hand, seeks to delay the inevitable by bidding its weary elders to labor unto the grave, invoking forlorn schemes of delayed retirement, a dance of incentives and tax reprieves that promises respite only to those whose backs have never borne the weight of true work. Here is a spectacle worthy of Euripides, wherein the fate of the multitude is wagered on the convenience of the few—those strong in mind, if not in sinew. The old gods are dead, and in their place: market values and actuarial tables, the subtle tyranny of bureaucracy replacing the tragic majesty of Olympus.

The symposium of the Left raises its anguished Dionysian cry for redistribution and social solidarity. Let the self-employed and the exalted politicos be made captive to the pension fund, they say; let the State, now a pale shadow of the polis, finance its broken promises from the coffers of collective debt. Yet this too is but another mask in the farcical theatre of decline, for as the chorus in ancient drama knew, fate devours all; no mere policy can stem the tide of demographic entropy.

Those who remain—employers and the employed, weary spectres in the flickering lamplight of postmodernity—are entreated to reinvent themselves, to dance faster upon the treadmill as the crowd thins around them. In the tragic inversion, the young and able are too few, their vigour leeched by the comforts and distractions of an atomized, barren civilization. Immigration, part-time labor, and childcare: all are offered as palliatives, yet none address the abyss opening beneath the edifice of a forsaken Kultur.

Behold, then, the melancholy vision: a society haunted by its own senescence, groping blindly through the fog for remedies while the thread of prosperity unravels. O Goethe! O Schiller! Come witness the spectacle—the twilight of the Boomers, the eclipse of work, the enfeeblement of a once-mighty people turning, as all things must, towards the darkness that ever lies at the heart of human striving. The only verity left is that of suffering, the tragic wisdom of pessimism: that in the end, the hope of Western Man is not in overcoming, but in the noble bearing of decline.