Goethe described the situation in 1797. The sorcerer's apprentice uses the master's powers without understanding them — and can no longer stop them. The buckets keep coming, the water rises, the broom cannot be halted. "The spirits that I summoned, I now cannot get rid of." In the end the master comes and puts a stop to the commotion.
In April 2026 Germany's business leaders cry out loud. BASF chief executive Kamieth, Siemens Energy supervisory board chairman Kaeser, Bilfinger chief executive Schulz. They have used the powers of the Megamachine — deregulation, financial-market orientation, short-term returns, global supply chains, political influence. And now the buckets are running. The question they ask without formulating it: where is the master?
The answer is what is truly frightening: there is none.
I. Canetti's discharge
In "Crowds and Power" Elias Canetti described how human beings are built for distance: the house, the position, the rank — everything serves to create distances, to consolidate them and to enlarge them. Normally the rule is: the business elite keeps its distance from the masses. The political elite keeps its distance from the business elite. Everyone cultivates their distances — as long as the system delivers.
Canetti also describes the moment when these distances collapse: the discharge. "It is the moment when all get rid of their differences and feel equal." We are living in a time of such a discharge. The BASF chief and the insolvency administrator, the Siemens supervisory board chairman and the laid-off skilled worker: both against the same political class. The bond of loyalty between economic and political elite is overstretched.
80 per cent of Germans consider Merz the wrong man for the job. Most business leaders among them. The sorcerer's apprentices and their audience — equally helpless before the running buckets.
II. What the apprentices say
Kamieth: "Hiding behind commissions is not leadership." He is calling for the master — someone who has an overview of the situation, who decides, who stops the commotion. Kaeser: "At the moment we are on the way into a kind of dead end. When the tactical measures are exhausted, at some point things cannot go on." The apprentices recognise that their means no longer suffice — but they have no others. Schulz: "You can no longer call this stagnation. This is de-industrialisation." The water is rising. The broom is running. The call for the master will soon become a scream.
These are not opposition politicians. These are people who for years carried the system, shaped it, profited from it. Sorcerer's apprentices who knew and used the formulas — deregulation, flexibilisation, globalisation, financial-market logic — without understanding which spirits they were summoning. And now they stand in the rising water and call for the master.
III. The spirits summoned
Which spirits has the business elite summoned? First, the spirit of short-term returns: quarterly reports over preserving substance, shareholder value over investment in employees, dividends over research. Second, the spirit of relocation: production wherever it is cheap, responsibility nowhere, dependencies everywhere. Third, the spirit of deregulation: less state, less control, less negative feedback — and now too little state to help when the crisis comes. Fourth, the spirit of political influence: lobbying that writes the rules, a revolving door that hollows out oversight, a Klüngel — a cosy clique of mutual favours — that prevents competition.
These spirits have been running for decades. They have made the business elite rich. And they keep running — against the business elite too, when the wind turns. The Megamachine knows no loyalty. Not towards the people. Not towards those who fed it.
The spirits that I summoned, I now cannot get rid of. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, 1797
IV. The dead end as insight into the system
Kaeser's "dead end" is more precise than he himself knows. It is not a political dead end — Merz is wrong, Scholz was wrong, the next one will be wrong too. It is a structural dead end. The Megamachine has narrowed the room for manoeuvre so far that no government can deliver any more. Angela Merkel said it openly in 2011: parliamentary co-determination should be shaped so as to be "market-conforming" — so that the corresponding signals emerge on the markets. The markets are what the business elite regarded as its domain. The weak state it demanded is now too weak to help.
The complete irony: business leaders complain that politics does not act. Politics does not act because it does not want to disturb the markets — just as business demanded for decades. The system business built produces a politics too weak to rescue business. The apprentice set the broom running. Now the broom is running against him.
V. Where is the master?
In Goethe the master comes. "Into the corner, broom, broom! Be done with it. For as spirits you are called forth only for this purpose by the old master." He has the formulas. He knows the limits. He puts a stop to the commotion.
In the reality of the Megamachine there is no master. That is its nature — emergent, without a centre, without a switch, without a recall function. The business elite looks for the master in politics. Merz is supposed to fix it. The next chancellor is supposed to fix it. But the master does not exist. There are only structures. Only rules. Only negative feedback loops — which have been weakened for decades because they were inconvenient.
Kaeser says: "If you go through hell, don't stop." That is a slogan for holding out — not a structural programme. Kamieth demands leadership — but leadership in a system that makes leadership structurally impossible only produces new burnt-out figures. What would be needed is not better apprentices. What would be needed is the realisation that there is no master — and that the structures themselves must therefore take over the master's function. Negative feedback instead of leadership personalities. Rules instead of rescuers. Institutions instead of authorities.
That is the lesson of the sorcerer's apprentice that the business elite has not yet learned: the master is not coming. The formulas must be understood — not merely used.
VI. The waiting structure
But beware: the scream for the master will not go unheard. There is a structure that is waiting.
The AfD is not a party like other parties. It is an autocratic mobilisation structure that does not yet have a charismatic autocrat at its head. A base conditioned to follow. A language already developed. Enemy images already established. The autocrat who enters this structure does not have to create it — he only has to occupy it.
When the scream of the business elite and of the people grows loud enough — when the buckets keep running, when the institutions keep failing, when the call for the master turns to despair — then it will meet this waiting structure. And then the autocrat will be styled as the only possible master. Strong enough to stop the buckets. Determined where the apprentices hesitated. Untainted by the system that failed.
The complete irony of the sorcerer's apprentices: through their politics — deregulation, a weak state, hollowed-out institutions, a market-conforming parliament — they have created precisely the conditions under which autocratic structures grow. The Megamachine they fed is preparing the ground for whoever offers himself as master. The scream for leadership is the call the waiting structure hears.
The AfD structure is waiting for its autocrat. How long it waits depends on how long democracy takes to satisfy the need that made this structure big. And on how long the sorcerer's apprentices take to understand that they summoned the water themselves.