The Pleasure of the Pack
In January 2012, Germany’s Federal President left a voicemail. That’s essentially the origin of this story. Christian Wulff—the country’s head of state, a largely ceremonial role built around constitutional dignity and ribbon-cutting—called up editors at major newspapers and asked them, in language that moved somewhere between pleading and menace, not to run a story about a discounted private home loan he’d received from a business friend. The story ran anyway. Then the voicemails became the story. Then the mob found its target.
I watched it happen in real time and it genuinely unsettled me. Within days, every major outlet had declared open season. Der Spiegel branded it the "mailbox affair." Bild called for his immediate resignation. Die Welt compared him to Stromberg—Germany’s answer to David Brent—rattling around the halls of Schloss Bellevue. The broadsheets and the tabloids and the comment sections and Twitter all converged on the same verdict simultaneously, each amplifying the others, the volume rising with every share. At some point even the rapper Bushido weighed in with contempt, which people cited as if it carried some kind of final moral authority.
What Wulff did was stupid and small and genuinely unbecoming. I’m not disputing that. The man will land softly regardless—politicians at that altitude always do. What I keep coming back to is the mechanism. How a population that considers itself educated, ironic, and essentially immune to manipulation becomes, within a single news cycle, a synchronized hate-relay passing the same verdict down the line in slightly varied packaging. Bild—the paper everyone performs contempt toward at dinner parties—sets the temperature, and forty-eight hours later the exact same conclusion appears across every platform in more elevated language, with everyone certain they arrived at it independently.
There’s a new target every few weeks. The faces rotate; the architecture doesn’t. Someone gets designated the villain of the moment, and what follows isn’t really about justice—it’s about the pleasure of unanimity, the warmth of running in a pack. I’ve watched people I genuinely respect get swept up in it, people who would bristle at the comparison, who are nevertheless doing exactly what mobs do: adopting a verdict before examining it, calibrating their volume to the room’s volume, competing to express the most contempt in the fewest words.
Ask teenagers whether something like fascism could happen again and they say no without hesitation. They mean it completely. They believe the lesson has been absorbed. But these cycles—the media stoking, the crowd obliging, the synchronized destruction of whoever the machine has decided to destroy this week—don’t look like the behavior of a population that’s learned anything structural. They look like a population that’s simply waiting for a bigger target.
Wulff resigned a few weeks after this, drifted into post-presidential obscurity, and the mob moved on before the ink was dry. What stayed with me wasn’t him. It was the feeling—that specific warmth of knowing the right answer at the same time as everyone else, the ease of it, the way it required nothing from anyone except volume. That’s what I can’t stop thinking about.