German Politics and Society

This open issue of German Politics and Society features three papers

that address matters of change in contemporary Germany. In our

lead article we are proud to offer yet again the work of Rainer Münz

and Ralf Ulrich, arguably among the most original researchers and

prolific writers on the crucial topic of immigration in Germany and

elsewhere in Europe. In this piece, Münz and Ulrich provide a bevy

of detailed empirical data on immigration and citizenship in Germany.

They succeed in using these rich data to construct their own

theories on immigration and citizenship in Germany that are critical

of existing policies, including those of the Red-Green government.

In Germany, as in many other European democracies, immigration

and citizenship are contested and contentious issues. In the German

case it was both the magnitude of postwar and recent immigration as

well as its interference with questions of identity that created political

and social conflict. As a result of World War II, the coexistence

of two German states, and the persistence of ethnic German minorities

in central and eastern Europe, (West) Germany’s migration and

naturalization policy was inclusive toward expellees, GDR citizens,

and co-ethnics. At the same time, the Federal Republic of Germany,

despite the recruitment of several million foreign labor migrants

and—until 1992—a relatively liberal asylum practice, did not develop

similar mechanisms and policies of absorption and integration of its

legal foreign residents.

The process of social integration between eastern and western Germans has been significantly slowed by unexpectedly severe tensions along two major axes: the tempo of life and work on the one hand, and interaction patterns on the other. Although distinct explanations for the antagonisms have been offered by easterners and westerners, they share a number of similar weaknesses: a tendency to look outward toward the putative weaknesses of “the other,” a failure to provide multidirectional and broadly multicausal explanations, and a neglect of the manner in which single factors are embedded contextually in configurations of forces. Articulating a series of arguments in opposition to all unidirectional, monocausal, and acontextual modes of analysis, and emphasizing the importance of bringing values, customs, and conventions into the debate, this study calls for an expansion of the parameters of the explanatory framework and a greater acknowledgment of the complexities of east/west social integration.

The approach of the new millennium appears to signal the demise

of traditional models of social organization. The political core of

this process of change—the restructuring of the welfare state—and

the related crisis of the industrywide collective bargaining agreement

have been subjects of much debate. For some years now in

specialist literature, this debate has been conducted between the

proponents of a neo-liberal (minimally regulated) welfare state and

the supporters of a social democratic model (highly regulated). The

alternatives are variously expressed as “exit vs. voice,” “comparative

austerity vs. progressive competitiveness,” or “deregulation vs.

cooperative re-regulation.”

In May 1995 German academe was rocked by the revelation that one

of its most respected members, Hans Schwerte, the recently deceased

former rector of the University of Aachen and Goethe scholar, was

actually Hans Ernst Schneider, a high-ranking official in Himmler’s

research organization, the SS-Ahnenerbe (“ancestral heritage”). Since

this revelation there has been a veritable explosion of literature, no

less than twelve monographs and essay collections, devoted to the

questions of whether Schneider as Schwerte is an exemplary or symbolic

figure for Germany’s transformation into a democratic society,

whether his career as an “academic manager” in the Third Reich and

his university career in the Federal Republic attest to the well-known

continuity of elites, independent of political beliefs, and whether

Schneider owed his subsequent professional success to connections

with somewhat unsavory (albeit fully legal and quite public) networks

of former Nazis.

Anne Sa’adah, Germany’s Second Chance: Trust, Justice, and Democratization

Review by Laurence McFalls

Karl-Rudolf Korte, Deutschlandpolitik in Helmut Kohls Kanzlerschaft: Regierungsstil und

Entscheidungen 1982-1989. Geschichte der deutschen Einheit, Band 1

Werner Weidenfeld, Aussenpolitk für die Deutsche Einheit. Geschichte der deutschen Einheit, Band 4

Review by Clay Clemens

William A. Barbieri Jr., Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany

Review by John Brady

Anton Pelinka, Austria: Out of the Shadow of the Past

Review by Erik Willenz

Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation

Review by Kristin McGuire

Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination

Review by Johannes von Moltke