In March 2001 the general secretary of the CDU, Laurenz Meyer, kicked off a major public debate by stating that he was proud of being a German. When the Green Party minister for the environment Jürgen Trittin likened him to a “skinhead” in physique and mentality, Christian Democrats called for Trittin’s resignation. Even the president Johannes Rau was subsequently dragged into the heated “national pride debate” (Nationalstolzdebatte). He had voiced his own difficulties with feeling proud of Germany which made CDU politicians question his credentials for occupying the highest office in the state. Public opinion surveys were published which showed that 60 per cent of Germans were proud of their country. A staggering 94 per cent of Germans had positive connotations with the term Heimat, and 81 per cent thought that the government should insist more on pushing through German interests in multinational organisations such as the EU.^[1] For weeks the columns of the newspapers were full of arguments why Germans should or should not be proud of their nation, which aspects they had reason to be proud of and why national pride was a dangerous thing. On one level the whole debate was an exaggerated party political squabble. Politicians, finding it increasingly difficult to bring across to the voters highly complex and technical policy options, chose the emotive field of national identity to score points. The affair seemed to underline the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s satirical description of the nation as “stress community.” For Sloterdijk nations are communities of excitable people who keep themselves entertained through media-induced hysterics and panics surrounding the topic of national identity. By doing this they keep avoiding the real questions about the need for political and social change.^[2]
On another level, however, the “national pride debate” signified just how contested and emotional the issue of national identity was in the reunified Germany. After all, which French or British politician could kick off a major public debate by simply stating that they were proud of their nation? The years after 1990 have indeed seen a phenomenal number of (ongoing) debates on the meaning and position of national identity in the new Germany.^[3] Public intellectuals have fanned the flames of the debate and put forward diverse constructions of national identity and different readings of the German past.^[4] Several commentators, mainly on the left, preferred to use the term “unification” to “reunification” to indicate that what was in the making was not something that had existed previously, least of all a re-incarnation of Bismarckian Prussian Germany. Fears on the far left and among some foreign commentators of the emergence of a “Fourth Reich” soon proved unfounded. As the celebrations of East and West Germans on top of the Berlin wall gave way to feelings of estrangement and division between the “Ossis” and the “Wessis,” popular national sentiment evaporated. Subsequently politicians and intellectuals, mainly on the center-right, demanded measures which would foster a greater sense of national cohesion, a kind of official nationalism to overcome what many perceived as a “unification crisis.”^[5] In 1994 prominent public figures founded the association “We for Germany” which initiated a massive advertising campaign aimed at strengthening the national self-confidence of Germans. However, this campaign, as all other debates surrounding the issue of national identity, rather than unite Germans, caused more controversy and division. In this article I would like to explore some of these debates. First of all, I will trace the elusive search for national “normality” in the reunified Germany analysing very different attempts to recast Germanness after 1990 and discussing the renaissance of a politics of national symbols. Subsequently, I will look at German identity debates in the context of the changing position of Germany in international politics. Both the National Socialist and the Communist pasts have been central to identity discourses after 1990 and will be reviewed in a third section here. Finally I will comment on the rediscovery of a discourse of German victimhood in the early 2000s.

THE SEARCH FOR NATIONAL NORMALITY

In 1990 the influential publicist Karl Heinz Bohrer described the old FRG as the epitomy of provincialism and expressed his hope that the new Germany would abandon the alleged postnational Sonderweg of the FRG. The creation of a new metropolitan center, preferably in Berlin, and the return of the nation to power politics, he argued, would be an opportunity to build a different, less provincial republic.^[6] The rediscovery of national history played a major part in Bohrer’s plans for a recast German identity. In 2001, when giving the first Gadamer lectures at the University of Heidelberg, he castigated his fellow Germans for having a “non-relation to German history.” He attacked left-liberal historians for reducing German history to the twelve years of National Socialism and turning the entire nineteenth century into the pre-history of the Third Reich. Having annihilated German national history this left-wing juste milieu, according to Bohrer, championed a deeply unhistorical and bloodless constitutional patriotism. It would be impossible to build the nation anew, he predicted, if this fear of anchoring identity in history was to continue.^[7]
Bohrer was not alone in putting forward the idea that, somehow, the old Federal Republic was in need of re-invention. National self-deprecation, one could now read frequently, would only lead to self-paralysis and self-destruction. Positive national identity needed to be fostered if the nation state was to be sustained. The former editor of the influential FAZ, Joachim Fest, for example, criticised the country’s “curiously dreamlike existence, untragic, even a bit happy in the depth of consumerism and leisure time worlds.” And historian Christian Meier, writing in Bohrer’s monthly journal, found that “the FRG was worthy, successful and sometimes even endearing, and yet at the same time it was narrow, all too abstract in its public thought and last but not least also extremely tense… Is it fair to say that it had no authenticity and originality?”^[8]
Major public debates about history, which until the 1990s had been focused exclusively on the Nazi years, were now incorporating the Federal Republic. In 1998 the student revolt of 1968 took center stage. On the right some commentators argued that the legacy of 1968 and its impact on West German society needed to be overcome before the reunified Germany could return to national normality. The 1968ers excessive public breast beating about the Nazi past, they alleged, had produced a neurotic guilt complex which was preventing the new Germany from finding a more balanced relationship to its past. Throughout the 1990s calls for recasting the image of Germany involved criticism of the model set by the post-68 FRG.
Conservatives viewed with scepticism the liberalisation, pluralisation and Westernisation of the Federal Republic since the 1960s. Where left liberals had come to view 1968 as the annus mirabilis signalling a major transformation of the FRG towards a more liberal, plural and Western society, liberal conservatives disliked what they referred to as the hedonism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, and “everything goes” mentality of the 1968ers. In 2001 allegations against the foreign minister and vice-chancellor Joschka Fischer that he had harboured sympathies for left wing terrorism in the 1970s renewed the debate. Fischer agreed to appear as a character witness for former terrorist Hans-Joachim Klein who was put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of three people in 1975. The press published photographs showing Fischer, disguised under a motorcycle helmet, beating a policeman during the “Kettenhof riots” against housing speculators in Frankfurt’s Westend in April 1973. During the trial Fischer insisted that he had always distanced himself from left-wing terrorism and that his own use of violence had always been in self-defence. However, he also gave an unapologetic account of his activities around 1968 claiming that what he and others like him had been doing was attempting to create a counterculture to the stifling bourgeois consensus culture at the time. Thereby, he insisted tha 1968 had contributed to a more pluralistic and ultimately more liberal society emerging in the FRG. The center right attacked him for not sufficiently distancing himself from his own militant past, but left liberal public opinion celebrated the career of Fischer from street fighter to vice chancellor as a living proof of the fundamental change of a liberalised West German state which had been capable of integrating the youth protest of the late 1960s.^[9]
Apart from 1968, which had been the wrong turn for many liberal conservatives, the other favourite topic with which to criticise what was frequently referred to as the left liberal establishment was Ostpolitik. Ignoring the fact that conservatives had continued Ostpolitik after 1982, the Social Democrats were accused of selling out the nation and accommodating themselves with the peaceful co-existence of two Germanies. They, according to conservative critics in the 1990s, struck up a close and cosy relationship with representatives of a vile Communist dictatorship. Ostpolitik and its advocates had pushed to the sidelines the national question and stabilised the GDR. In the name of peace and co-existence an inhumane dictatorship had been given legitimacy.^[10] In 2000 the CDU celebrated Helmut Kohl as “chancellor of unity” and contrasted this with the dubious national credentials of the SPD. However, like with the debate on 1968, conservatives faced considerable resistance. Several commentators pointed out that Ostpolitik, far from stabilising the GDR, softened up the Communist dictatorship, eroded its legitimacy and paved the way to the successful revolution of 1989.^[11] Overall, debates about 1968, Ostpolitik and the legacy of the old FRG ended inconclusively. If anything, left liberal positions seemed to defend themselves well against conservative attempts to push the national agenda further.
On the left the revival of a national discourse often brought fears about the future of what was perceived as the hard-won Western civility of the old FRG.^[12] On balance the West German left had been sceptical of reunification. Prominent critics included the leader of the SPD in 1990, Oskar Lafontaine, and one of the literary giants of the FRG, the novelist Günter Grass who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Lafontaine refused to play the national card throughout the election campaign of 1990. Instead he warned of dire economic consequences of an all-too rapid unification process. His stance was seen as representative of the postnational outlook on the left of his generation which had few emotional ties to East Germany. In the circumstances chancellor Kohl, who promised “flowering industrial landscapes” within four years, won the elections handsomely in the East. Lafontaine was widely perceived as the loser who had misread the political mood in the country.
Grass’ critique of reunification was even more fundamental. As a West German Social Democrat with close ties to former chancellor Willy Brandt he had no sympathy for the SED regime in the GDR. German history was one of the great themes of his literary oeuvre. His rejection of reunification was rooted in his interpretation of the past and his fears about the future. According to Grass, the division of Germany was the logical outcome of and atonement for the Holocaust: “Who currently thinks about Germany and looks for answers to the German question has to reflect on the meaning of Auschwitz. The place of terror, symbol for the lasting trauma, excludes a future united Germany. If, what stands to be feared, such a united state will nevertheless be enforced, its failure will be predetermined.”^[13] A reunified Germany, Grass feared, would be too powerful. Sooner or later it would fall back onto the path which had led to the disaster of 1933-1945. Germany, he argued, could only exist as a cultural nation, not as a state nation. His celebrated unification novel “Ein weites Feld,” published in 1995, carried a strong anti-unification subtext.
Having failed to halt the unification process, the sceptics on the left were adamant that any recasting of the West German identity post-1990 should be kept to the absolute minimum. What was needed, they argued, was the rapid modernisation of East Germany to bring the new Länder up to the level of the old ones, but otherwise they declared business as usual. The most prominent representative of such a position was the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. In 1990 he was fearful that the Westernisation of the FRG might not have gone deep enough. Germans, under the impact of unification, might reveal themselves as shallow Westerners and return to more traditional forms of German nationalism. “Deutschmark nationalism” seemed to threaten the constitutional patriotism championed by Habermas.^[14] East-Germans, blinded by the promises of the Deutschmark, had, he argued, abandoned the democratic potentials of their revolution and opted for national unity. But even the democratic revolution was seen by Habermas only in terms of a “catching up revolution,” i.e. East Germans catching up with the levels of modernisation and Westernisation already achieved by their West German cousins. Habermas’ standards were Western ones, and his scepticism derived from his fears that the rush towards unity endangered the Westernisation of Germany.
Yet the sceptics, including Lafontaine, Grass, and Habermas, increasingly found themselves in a minority – even among the left. As far back as 1990 Brandt, generationally far more attuned to the issue of national unity than Lafontaine, had taken a markedly national position, famously pronouncing: “Now grows together what belongs together.” Subsequently, the refounded Hofgeismar circle in the SPD pleaded for a return of the party to the idea of the nation. Many left liberals now began to argue that the democratic revolution of 1989 should not be perceived primarily as a threat to the Westernisation of the FRG but rather an opportunity to recapture the national idea from the political right and fuse nationalism with liberty and democracy. For the first time since 1848 demands for freedom had coincided with demands for national unity. 1989 thus offered the opportunity to fuse the democratic and Westernised political culture with the national principle. An “enlightened German patriotism” would finally end all German Sonderwege and bring the country in line with the “normal” patriotism of other West European countries such as France and Britain.^[15]
Historian Heinrich August Winkler formulated the idea of the long journey of Germany towards Western values and ideas in a two-volume national history which was published to much acclaim in 2000.^[16] Sometime, and the exact time remained the object of much controversy, between 1949 and 1989 the FRG had finally arrived in the West, and the revolution of 1989, with its democratic practices and insistence on popular sovereignty strengthened the commitment of the newly reunified nation to the West. Germany was a nation-state again. The post-national Sonderweg of the old FRG had been abandoned. But the new Germany was presented as a “post-classical” nation-state which differed from the autonomous nation-state of the nineteenth century in several important ways, not the least through its commitment to Western ideals and its firm integration in supranational organisations.^[17] Winkler’s was a history culminating in the success story of the FRG which crowned a history of great potential in the nineteenth century and even greater disasters in the first half of the twentieth. A major exhibition entitled “50 Years of Unity, Rule of Law and Liberty: Paths of the Germans, 1949-1999” celebrated the democratic revolution in the GDR but hailed as the cornerstones of a happy national future the successes of West Germany, in particular its federal system, its social market economy, and its constitution.
Many commentators argued that the FRG had become less German and more European: “The normalisation and Westernisation of Germany shows not the least in a gradual and slow change of climate: the country has become more Mediterranean and more British at the same time, a little bit lighter and more full of life, but also more sober and less excited.”^[18] Fritz Stern, a renowned American historian of German-Jewish origin, argued that the renewed ascendancy of Germany, based on its economic, technological, and human capabilities, might mean a “second chance” for the nation to use its strengths, this time for the good of Europe and the wider world.^[19] The return to the nation would not automatically lead to a repeatition of the disastrous German history during the first half of the twentieth century. Ralf Dahrendorf, a renowned sociologist and himself a bridge builder between British and German political cultures, reminded Germans of the need for nation states. They were, after all, through their institutions and constitutions, the only reliable guarantors of civic liberties in Europe. Hence he pleaded for an alliance of self-confident nation-states in a co-operative Europe.^[20] Richard Schröder, pastor in the GDR, prominent SPD leader after 1990, and professor of theology and philosophy in Berlin, in a series of well-received essays argued for the need to be critical of the German past but also self-confident about the democratic achievements of Germany: “When I say: Germany is what I like best (not necessarily the most convenient), this is not nationalism which discriminates against anyone, because everyone should be able to love his country. After all, I do not discriminate against someone who says: My children are the children I love best… It is completely okay that it is this country and its problems which are more important, more serious and closer to me than those of other countries, and it is equally completely okay that I am not indifferent to the problems of the rest of the world.”^[21] For students of nationalism this was, of course, an all-too-familiar argument: once more the nation was imagined as family thus making it part of an alleged “natural” order of things. Former SPD chancellor Helmut Schmidt helped to launch a German national foundation in Weimar in April 1994 with the explicit aim of overcoming the alleged lack of national identity in the reunified Germany.
Such positive re-assessments of the nation and the national principle among wide sections of left-liberal intellectuals were, however, not enough for many among the liberal-conservative spectrum of the new Germany. The charge of anti-nationalism was too convenient a stick with which to beat the left. And reunification, thus voices on the center-right argued, needed a more wholehearted return to the nation and a more decisive break with the postnationalism of the old FRG. Thus, for example, in 1994 one of the leading politicians of the CDU, Wolfgang Schäuble, widely regarded as heir in waiting to Chancellor Kohl, spelt out the new focus on the nation in book-length form.^[22] Schäuble’s plea for a strengthening of national identity found an echo in the activities of the Germany Forum (Deutschlandforum) of the CDU, founded in 1992. When, in 1995, the conservative publicist Johannes Gross, in line with Schäuble’s argument one year earlier, put forward the idea that, after a brief interregnum between 1945 and 1990 Germany was returning to national normality, Habermas warned not to fall back on false continuities.^[23] Given that before 1945 Germans experienced National Socialism, an unstable and unloved republic and an authoritarian semi-constitutional system, one might indeed wonder which normality Gross was thinking of. But conservatives like Gross were intent on filling the new German identity with slightly different ingredients from the ones that had dominated West German identity discourses post-1968.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW RIGHT AND NEO-NAZISM

The self-styled new right sought to ally itself to more traditional liberal conservative forces in the new Germany in the first half of the 1990s, and there was considerable overlap between the new right and traditional conservative discourses on the nation. In June 2000 the Germany Foundation awarded the Konrad-Adenauer-Prize for Research Achievements to one of the doyens of the new right, Ernst Nolte. Nolte’s continued attempts to relativise the Holocaust had made him a pariah among wide sections of the historical community. Hence it came as a surprise when the conservative director of the prestigious Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, Horst Möller, agreed to give the encomium on Nolte. Other historians demanded Möller’s resignation because of his fraternisation with Nolte. The overwhelming reaction in the media to the award and Möller’s decision to back Nolte was negative. Even the CDU’s chairwoman Angela Merkel distanced herself from the Germany Foundation. Moderate conservatives were careful not to be associated with representatives of the new right. But who was the new right and what did their constructions of the nation amount to?
Those who rallied to the banner of a “new right” included a motley crew of novelists, such as Botho StrauЯ, historians, such as Nolte, Rainer Zitelmann and Karlheinz WeiЯmann, publicists and journalists, such as Ansgar Graw, Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht, and nationalist politicians on the right wing of the CDU, such as the Germany Forum, and of the FDP, such as former general state attorney Alexander von Stahl and the members of the so-called Stresemann Club in Dresden. It was also heavily supported by the right wing weekly “Junge Freiheit” (circulation: about 35,000 copies). Two key texts, published by the new right, called for the creation of a more “self-confident nation” and an end to the allegedly totalitarian ideology of Westernisation.^[24] Many of the new right’s ideas harked back to the conservative revolution of the inter-war period: a tragic view of history combined with doses of xenophobia and a strong emphasis on traditional German values such as duty, asceticism, idealization of leadership, and the sacralisation of the nation. It presented itself as heir to the statist and anti-democratic political thought of Carl Schmidt. The old FRG was taken to account for its alleged anti-nationalism (especially among the left liberal mainstream), its shyness about power politics and its adoption of a Western political culture. The main stumbling block for the emergence of a more positive national identity, National Socialism, was re-interpreted as a modernising dictatorship. The new right’s attempts to portray the Nazis as conscious modernisers and revolutionaries producing an ‘economic miracle’ and a developed consumer society as well as planning a comprehensive welfare state was an attempt to make the National Socialist past more palatable to German historical memory. The horrific impact of “racial nationalism” was marginalised. As representatives of the new right were heavily anti-Communist they argued that a second “coming-to-terms with the past,” the Communist past of East Germany, was on the cards. It would shift the Holocaust and Nazism from its central place in German identity debates and demask those West German forces whose “anti-anti-Communism” allegedly blinded them to the realities of the Communist dictatorship.^[25]
The borderline between the new right and more mainstream liberal conservatism at times became blurred. After all, conservatives also wanted to move away from the post-68 self-definitions of the FRG. They equally subscribed to the notion of a new-found national normality, and they endorsed the idea of national revival. Finally, they had been concerned about an entirely negative historical consciousness focused on the history of the Holocaust, and they were heavily anti-Communist. However, where mainstream liberal conservatives tended to draw the line was the relativisation of the criminal energies of National Socialism and the return to ideas of the “conservative revolution” of the inter-war period. Mainstream conservatives, it turned out after 1990, had become Westernised to such a degree that they found it difficult to return to a deliberate anti-Western political culture championed by the new right.
On 8 May 1995, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, key representatives of the new right published a “call against forgetting” in the FAZ. Denouncing the view that May 8th should be celebrated primarily as liberation from Nazi tyranny, they put forward an alternative reading according to which May 8th should be remembered as the beginning of the division of Germany and the beginning of the “expulsion terror” against Germans in the “German East.” The initiative, however, turned out a complete failure and underlined the limited appeal of the new right in the new Germany. After 1995 key representatives of the new right returned to the margins of the intellectual debate. Its extremist views failed to enter the mainstream. In the second half of the 1990s these ideas returned to the neo-Nazi scene, where they always had their most ardent supporters.
For decades extremist right-wing parties, such as the DVU, the Republicans or the NPD occasionally mobilised enough support at regional elections to enter state parliaments – usually on a ticket of xenophobia and blatant nationalism. Support of political extremism cannot be dismissed as a protest vote, as most supporters of far right-wing parties have relatively consistent extremist world views.^[26] However, throughout the 1990s levels of xenophobic nationalism in Germany lay consistently between 10 and 15 per cent which is no higher than in other West European countries. The share of the vote of extremist parties in elections remained regularly below these figures.
The degree to which neo-Nazism established itself in the East German youth culture in the 1990s has been more worrying than the occasional electoral success of extreme right-wing parties.^[27] The new Nazis appealed especially to young males with little education. They have been responsible for the steep increase in the number of racially motivated crimes. It was only in 1992 that the category “crime against foreigners” had to be introduced in the German penal code. The pogroms of Hoyerswerda (1991) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (1992) brought images of hundreds of neo-Nazi skinhead youths burning down homes for asylum seekers, egged on by “ordinary” onlookers.^[28] The appeal of xenophobia in the East has been related to the GDR’s policies of ghettoising and isolating foreigners who were, in the minds of many East Germans, closely related to the interests of the hated SED-regime.^[29] However, attacks against foreigners, especially non-white and non-European foreigners, were by no means restricted to the East. Repeated surveys among East and West Germans did not reveal significantly higher levels of xenophobia in East Germany. The response against neo-Nazi violence was also overwhelming in both East and West Germany: anti-Nazi citizens’ initiatives sprang up across the country, and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens organised anti-Nazi vigils lighting rows of burning candles (Lichterketten) to declare their solidarity with foreigners living in Germany.
Between 1990 and 2000 the Society for the German Language, which runs an annual competition for the “non-word” (Unwort) of the year, chose three terms, all of which have to do with xenophobia. In 1991 “free of foreigners” (ausländerfrei) was chosen. It had become famous through the demands of the neo-Nazi youth to keep their towns “ausländerfrei.” It was also strongly reminiscent of the Nazi term “free of Jews” (judenfrei). In 1993 “domination by foreign influences” (Überfremdung) made the running – a term already used by the Nazis and returning to the German language in connection with the debates about a reform of the country’s liberal asylum laws. Finally, in 2000 “nationally liberated zones” (national befreite Zonen) was picked up as a term used by right-wing extremists to indicate those areas where their terror led to the removal of all foreigners.
Politicians across the party-political spectrum denounced the far right-wing violence, but they were not completely irresponsible for its spread during the first half of the 1990s. Despite the fact that the vast majority of migrants came from within the EU, the CDU started a campaign to change the asylum laws in Germany which made use of crude xenophobic statements. They presented asylum seekers as swindlers and crooks intent on exploiting the social support and medical care available to them in Germany. The conservative print media assisted them in such negative stereotyping and stirred up hatred against asylum seekers. When, in December 1992, the SPD accepted the argument about restricting the numbers of asylum seekers by automatically sending back all those who had entered Germany via another safe country (Drittstaatenregelung), the numbers of asylum seekers dropped sharply. But foreigners remained the focus of a heated public debate, as the discussion turned to the need for a new immigration law. Faced with predictions of significant labour shortages in certain areas of the labour market, an increasing number of experts and politicians (mostly from the left) argued that Germany had long become a country of immigration. Like other traditional immigration countries, such as the USA, Germany therefore should adopt a more pro-active immigration policy.
These debates about immigration were closely connected to arguments which either favoured or rejected notions of a multi-cultural society. On the left the champions of multi-culturalism used the term largely to foster a greater acceptance of foreign cultures in Germany. On the right, the term raised anxieties about foreigners pushing to the sideline an indigenous German culture and making Germans a minority among others in their own country. Völkisch ideas of the nation raised their head again in the context of this debate, but proved to be not acceptable among the political and intellectual mainstream. The CDU argued to retain German culture as the “lead culture” (Leitkultur) in Germany. When, after 1998, the center-left government announced plans to change the 1913 citizenship law, its plans to allow dual citizenship were criticised by the center right. According to their arguments, one national identity had to take precedence over the other; any individual could not feel the same kind of loyalty to two different nation-states. On the left, by contrast, dual citizenship was seen as a pragmatic solution to the problem of how best to integrate the millions of “foreigners,” many of whom had been born in the country or lived in it for decades. An increasing number of people, the left argued, did not have clear-cut national identities. Hybrid or patchwork identities were becoming more common. In 1999 a populist xenophobic campaign of the CDU against dual citizenship in Hesse was highly successful in ensuring a crushing election defeat for the SPD in this former stronghold of Social Democracy. It forced the government to introduce a less generous reform of the citizenship law the same year, which only allowed dual citizenship up to the age of 23. But the reform itself was still a major watershed. It brought Germany away from its adherence to blood and descent as determining factors of citizenship and adopted the Western territorial principle: those born in the country would henceforth have an automatic right to obtain German citizenship. The law was widely accepted in Germany. Another xenophobic campaign of the CDU (focused on the slogan “More children rather than more people from India” (Kinder statt Inder)) which coincided with the Land elections in North-Rhine Westfalia in 2000, failed miserably to generate a rise in the party’s election ratings.^[30] The center-left, it would appear, has successfully reformed German citizenship in line with its staunchly pro-Western reconstruction of German national identity after 1990.

REPRESENTING THE NATION: DEBATES SURROUNDING NATIONAL SYMBOLS AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

The defeat of the new right’s re-invention of Germany took place against the background of a strong revival of political debates surrounding national symbols and national history. The history boom of the 1990s was reflected in the high ratings for television history, excellent sales figures for history books, and the many historical anniversaries which received considerable attention in the German media. The television history of Guido Knopp in particular attracted millions of viewers on primetime television.^[31] Many of his series focused on the Nazi period, with a particularly celebrated one on the “Holokaust.” Knopp insisted on the unusual spelling, which, he argued, put a greater emphasis on the German responsibility for the murder of European Jewry. Knopp’s television history has, however, been controversial. He has been accused of adopting National Socialist aesthetics in some of his series and of focusing too much on Hitler and the top brass of the Nazi elite. The “Knopp phenomenon” became part of a wider debate about national history and national symbols which was nowhere more intense than in the new capital of Germany, Berlin.^[32]
It was by no means a foregone conclusion that Berlin would become the new capital city. Considerable cross-party resistance to such a move was based on fear that it might send the wrong kind of signal to the world about Germany returning to its Bismarckian past. Ultimately, it was the successor party to the SED, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which, in a free vote, swayed the decision in favour of Berlin. Had it been up to the West German parties, a majority would have opted for Bonn. Undoubtedly, some on the center right opted for Berlin, because they deplored Bonn as the very symbol of the FRG’s provinciality and lack of national pride. But on the center left one could also hear the argument that Berlin was the best place where the new Germany would have to confront head on the demons of its past. The much-celebrated Jewish museum in Berlin, the planned “Topography of Terror” documentation center of those institutions which were at the very heart of the National Socialist terror regime, and, above all, the planned Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin, right between the Reichstag and the Potsdamer Platz, will be powerful reminders of National Socialism.^[33] Almost two decades of controversial debates surrounding these memorial places have anchored the memory of National Socialism more firmly in the collective consciousness. Predictably, there have been voices that argued that the new Germany could not build its national identity on the memory of Nazi terror and the Holocaust. Wolf-Jobst Siedler, conservative publisher and publicist, for example, accused his fellow countrymen of megalomania when it came to memorialising German shame and guilt.^[34] And, architecturally, the new Berlin will be a testimony to “the successful rehabilitation of once stigmatised traditions”.^[35] Architectural forms that were once taboo as fascist, have been successfully revived under the label of postmodernism across Germany.
Siedler, incidentally, has also been one of the foremost supporters of the idea to rebuild the old Hohenzollern palace in the middle of Berlin. Dynamited by the GDR in 1950 it was resurrected as a decorated scaffold in 1993/4. The then director of the Berlin Historical Museum and later minister for culture in Berlin, Christoph Stölzl, described the project as the most fitting symbol for the new-found national unity.^[36] Opposition to the project came from those on the left who feared a revival of Prussianism in the new Germany but, above all, from East Germans who did want to retain the GDR’s “Palace of the Republic,” home to the GDR’s Volkskammer, which stood on the site of the former Hohenzollern Palace. When the red-green government came to power in 1998, some commentators feared a “left-wing Wilhelminism” after chancellor Schröder declared his support for rebuilding the palace. It was indeed an important signal that the new center-left government was intent on using a politics of national symbols to its advantage. It wanted to signal a kind of “national normality” of its own in an eclectic mix of new and old: thus, the Hohenzollern palace could be restored, but at the same time the citizenship law had to be reformed and the Holocaust memorial had to be built.
Fears of a revival of Prussian sentiments had been fostered by some heavy political symbolism in the early 1990s. The coffins of Frederick Wilhelm and Frederick II were taken to Potsdam in 1991 with great pomp and reburied in a midnight ceremony attended by, among other dignitaries, chancellor Kohl. The Quadriga was restored on top of the Brandenburg gate the same year. Hence it was with some trepidation that commentators on the left looked toward the 300th anniversary of the crowning of the first Prussian king in 2001. Another Prussian year, right at the beginning of the new millenium, brought an outpouring of books on Prussia, several major exhibitions and hundreds of thousands of visitors to Berlin and Potsdam. In the media Prussian virtues and the positive legacies of Prussia were emphasised more than ever before. When historians and politicians praised Prussian commitment to achievement and duty, tolerance, reform, and modesty, and when they spoke of Prussia’s enlightened absolutism and adherence to the rule of law few people still protested as they had done back in 1982. The old Prussia, one could now hear more often, was dead and gone, and this allowed Germans a more balanced look at this state’s legacy. A brief debate following suggestions about resurrecting a kind of rump Prussia through a merger between Berlin and Brandenburg came to nothing. Overall, the Prussian, year of 2001 became more renown for its tourism than for its identity debates. But tourism has long been an important site of identity creation and should therefore not be underestimated.^[37] History, memory, and national identity have all become part and parcel of the entertainment industry, but commercialisation does not prevent or counter the political functionalization of the past. A documentary about Wilhelm II, portraying him in a very positive light, premiered late in 2000 with much media attention and the crиme de la crиme of the German aristocracy in attendance, but then again it hardly signalled the return of the German movie industry to the kind of nationalist staple diet which had characterised it in the inter-war period or even in the 1950s. The launching of a publicly financed Otto von Bismarck Foundation in the summer of 1997 raised fears of another Bismarck cult, but the foundation established itself as a sober research institute rather than a propagandistic instrument of official nationalism.^[38] There are few signs that the official Germany is intent on self-consciously returning to Prussian traditions.
More sinister were, however, private attempts to rebuild the Potsdam Garnisonskirche.^[39] The church was the military temple of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and the place where Hindenburg and Hitler shook hands in 1933. Frederick Wilhelm I had built the church for his soldiers and it boasted a wide collection of Prussian army standards. In the 1980s a conservative association headed by the retired army officer Max Klaar, collected enough money to restore the famous chimes of the church. They were placed in Iserlohn and were supposed to move back to Potsdam after reunification. In the 1980s this initiative seemed ludicrously anachronistic to many in West Germany. But when reunification came about, the chimes did move east and the association continued to collect money. They are now in a position to start the building work and restore what can only be construed as a memorial shrine to the old Prussia and its norms and values. However, the conservative association finds itself at loggerheads with the Protestant church which wants the church rebuilt only as a center for reconciliation – a kind of German equivalent of Coventry cathedral. In marked contrast to their positioning before 1945 the Protestant church has been careful to prevent any instrumentalisation of religion for national purposes. Thus, for example, they refused suggestions by the government to ring the church bells on the occasion of German reunification on October 3, 1990. They did organise special church services on the day, but the bells would only ring to call the community of believers and not to celebrate national unity.
In 1993 the problem of creating national memorials in Germany was highlighted by the decision of the Kohl government to transform Schinkel’s Neue Wache on the Berlin boulevard “Unter den Linden” into the new central national memorial in 1993. The location, the artistic and aesthetic arrangements and the inscription were all the subject of an extensive debate in the media. In particular the enlarged Pietа figure by Käthe Kollwitz of a mother bemoaning the death of her son as a soldier, has drawn strong criticism. Being in a Christian tradition it completely ignored anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and German responsibility for two world wars, and instead put a notion of universal suffering into the center.^[40]
It is difficult to see how former sites of Hohenzollern glory can become fitting national memorials for a democratic Germany today. Other architectural landmarks seem more suited to this purpose, perhaps none more so than the Reichstag. The new parliament building has received its fair share of public attention and debate. When Bulgarian-born artists Christo and Jean-Claude wrapped up the Reichstag for ten days in the summer of 1995, conservatives raised concerns that it might damage the dignity of the parliament building. But 5 million visitors ensured that the building was discussed and noticed by Germans like never before. Christo himself described his project in terms of fitting out the Germans with a “lighter” national identity. Some years later the British architect Sir Norman Foster refused to reconstruct a historical copy of the Reichstag cupola and insisted on building a glass cupola – a symbol for the openness and transparency of the democratic politics in the new Germany.^[41] The cupola has become one of the main tourist attractions in the new Berlin. Overall, the many debates about national symbols and symbolic politics have been far more important than the national symbols themselves. Attempts to steer the symbolical politics of the new Germany away from the National Socialist past and towards a more positive (and more traditional) national memory culture have not been too successful. Instead the reunified Germany has shown a remarkable capacity to encourage a (self-)critical rather than affirmative perspective on the national past. The many ghosts of German history will not easily be laid to rest – especially, not in Berlin.
When the decision had been taken to move the capital from Bonn to Berlin a lead editorial in the flagship of the liberal-conservative print media, the FAZ, argued: “the new Germany has signalled its readiness to shed its semi-sovereign past and take on a new role which will be more adequate to its changed position in the world. It is no longer possible to have the lowest possible profile internationally, only to whisper the word nation and to let others in this tension-ridden world pull the chestnuts out of the fire – as has happened most recently in the Gulf.”^[42] Many on the center right followed suit and proclaimed the German return to power politics. Some, like Hans-Peter Schwarz, a historian close to the CDU, had already lamented the German inability to return to power politics in the 1980s.^[43] After 1990 he returned to this theme with a vengeance. The new Germany, he argued, was best described as “Europe’s central power” (Zentralmacht Europas) which signalled both the recasting of Germany as a major European power and the revival of Mittellage ideology, i.e. the belief that Germany’s geographical position in the middle of Europe was Germany’s foreign policy destiny, past and present.^[44]
A more self-confident pursuit of national interests was now demanded with increasing regularity and frequency. Conservative historians blamed Germany’s Mittellage for all of the nation’s catastrophes, from the Thirty Years’ War to the First World War, and the nationalist hubris of Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich.” The Mittellage made Imperial Germany unsuitable for more democratic and participatory forms of government and it produced the restlessness and the demands for expansion and hegemony during the first half of the twentieth century. Mittellage also occasionally led to dreams of a renewed German hegemony over the countries of “Central Europe” (Mitteleuropa) and calls for a more important world political role in the light of Germany’s alleged superpower status.^[45] Most recently, Gregor Schöllgen, professor of history at Erlangen university, who also teaches future German diplomats at the foreign office, celebrated Germany’s return to the “world stage” and to power politics. He approves of chancellor Schröder’s words that Germany’s foreign policy would be made in Berlin and nowhere else, and he applauds Germany’s act of emancipation from its American ally over the second Gulf War. According to Schöllgen, the transatlantic age is drawing to a close and the “normal nation-state with the potential of becoming a European great power” would have to find its own “German way.”^[46]
Among left liberal intellectuals and politicians scepticism about any such German return to independent power politics and the “world stage” has remained strong. Instead they tended to advocate continuing partnership with all neighbouring states and as much European economic, political and intellectual links as possible. Continuity in domestic politics was to be combined with continuity in foreign policy. Chancellor Schröder himself emphasised those sentiments when he wrote in the magazine Stern about “My Berlin Republic:” “What matters now is to continue the democratic project in Berlin. To continue with a successful democracy, a stable federalism, a policy of good neighbourly relations, a strong commitment to Europe, and to the Atlantic alliance. All this is now part of our baggage which we take to Berlin”.^[47]
The second Gulf War has not changed this basic longing for continuity. In line with the French political class and supported by much of European public opinion, the German government decided to disagree with its American ally, but it has always insisted that it was a disagreement among friends. Continuity has, of course, already been the overwhelming message of German foreign policy under the center-right government of Helmut Kohl. It has, after all, accepted the existing state borders of Germany, foregoing all claims of territories belonging to neighbouring states since 1945. Whilst some refugees’ and expellees’ organisations still uphold their right to return to what they regard as their Heimat, the majority of Germans today has no problem with their nation’s borders. The question of compensation payments to the Sudeten Germans continue to sour German-Czech relations, and there have been attempts of the shadowy Association for Germandom Abroad (VDA) to “re-Germanize” Kaliningrad (the former Königsberg).^[48] Some maverick historians such as Arnulf Baring may have speculated about a new “Eastern settlement movement” (Ostsiedlung) of the Germans. He called on his countrymen to think more about their “lost territories” in the East.^[49] But the overwhelming emphasis both of official policies and intellectual discourse was on reconciliation and partnership with Germany’s Eastern European neighbours to complement the excellent relations the FRG already enjoyed alongside its Western borders. One symbol of such reconciliation and dialogue was the newly created university of Frankfurt/Oder – a city divided by the German-Polish border. The university has sites on both sides of the border, and it attracts students from both countries with courses being held in German and Polish.^[50]
The foreign policy of pre- and post-reunification German governments has been grounded in the willingness to forge good neighbourly relations within an increasingly integrated and united European Union. Reunification, many politicians argued, made the success of Europe even more urgent. The political elite of the country views further European integration as central to the long-term success of German reunification. Europe has become a widely accepted symbol for overcoming the nationalist conflicts and wars which characterised the first half of the twentieth century. Europe has come to stand for common prosperity, welfare, and democracy. The mass tourism of Germans in Europe has strengthened the feeling of a common cultural space. Despite the success of the Deutschmark and the currency’s importance for German identity, the political elite was united in favouring the introduction of the euro in 2002. Of course, there have been problems with the European identity of Germany as well. The introduction of the euro showed clearly the danger of Europe becoming an elite project without majority support of the broader population. If there had been a referendum, the majority of Germans would have voted against the introduction of the euro. Europe lacks the powerful myths of origin and the historical mythologies in a more general sense that have been so characteristic of European nation-states.^[51] Notions of a Christian Europe may exclude countries, like Turkey, from the EU and strengthen an already vibrant anti-Islamic discourse across Europe. Federalism is pushed not least by the German governments as a model for the future organisation of Europe, but a “Europe of the regions” is greeted with considerable scepticism in those nation states which have a strong tradition of central government. Last but not least, divisions within Europe can be subtly exploited by non-European powers, as recently demonstrated by the US foreign policy in the second Iraq war, when the US foreign secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, made a pointed distinction between “new” and “old Europe.” However many difficulties and problems there are with Europe and European identity, it still remains the case that German foreign policy today is no longer seeking the creation of a “Germanic Europe,” but rather pursuing the notion of a “Europeanised Germany” – sometimes against the wishes of a majority within its own population.^[52]
One crucial difference to the pre-1990 West-German Europeanism, however, is the greater involvement of the reunified Germany in the management of international crises. This includes a greater military role for Germany. In 1991 the debates about the first Gulf War saw almost the entire left opposed to German military participation in the war. Over the past forty years the Bundeswehr has become more a social than a military institution. German citizens got used to seeing German soldiers on TV when they helped to defend the German coastline against the raging sea, or when they sought to prevent German rivers from flooding towns and villages. But seeing German soldiers fight wars abroad was something that most Germans were not used to any more. In the 1990s this changed, and once again it was the Red-Green government which contributed vitally to this change. For the first time after 1945 it sent German troops to participate in the NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999.^[53] Many Yugoslavs still remembered the terror rule of the Wehrmacht after 1941. Hence the past should problematized any German military involvement in the Balkans. But, in fact, the Green foreign minister Fischer and the entire government utlized history to argue for German military interventionism. The Yugoslav leadership under President Milosevic was depicted as a fascist regime. Comparisons between Milosevic and Hitler abounded in the media. The Serbian acts of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo were compared to Auschwitz. It was, therefore, precisely because of the lessons that Germany had learnt from its own National Socialist past that it participated in the war to stop acts of genocide elsewhere in Europe.
When a German judge was appointed to the international Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal in the Hague, it was a powerful gesture indicating that Germany stopped being the accused – a role it had occupied so prominently in Nuremberg in 1946. Fifty years later the international community finally allowed Germany to change sides. It was now among the judges. In a similar vein, Germany for the first time was allowed a non-permanent seat on the UN security council in January 2003. However, with the exception of right-wing fringe parties and their supporters, hardly anyone would dream of Germany flexing its military muscle outside international organisations, such as the UN or NATO. The new military role of Germany was not accompanied by a resurgence of militarism. The German army does not comprise more than 350,000 soldiers and is suffering from budget cuts. Among young men, conscientious objection and the alternative “civic service” is as popular as military service. Even among those 50 per cent of young males, who opt for the military service, the army is rarely seen as a school of manliness. As gender roles have become increasingly fuzzy over the last thirty years, fewer and fewer people continue to cling to the ideal of the army as the school of the nation (or at least the male part of the nation). The 1990s saw a debate about whether military service was to be retained at all. Many voices in Germany today argue for a small and highly professional army. Militarism is no longer a significant part of German national identity in the twenty-first century.