German Politics and Society

As we finalize this issue, the horrible events befalling the United

States on September 11, 2001 have changed the world—in ways that

we, only two weeks after the attacks, are still watching unfold. In

terms of the journal and its New York-based publisher, Berghahn

Books, we have lost a wonderful business partner and friend: Doug

Stone, the owner and founder of Odyssey Press, was aboard American

Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center

towers. We would like to express our sincere condolences to Doug

Stone’s family, friends, and colleagues at Odyssey Press.

Our purpose in this article is to analyze changes in the German wage

bargaining system, a system that has attracted enormous attention

from scholars of comparative political economy and comparative

industrial relations. We argue that the wage bargaining portion of

the German model is neither frozen in place, headed for deregulation,

nor merely “muddling through.” Rather, we see the institutional

capacities of the key actors—especially the unions and employer

associations—making possible a process we term “experimentalism.”

In briefest form, experimentalism allows organizations that combine

decentralized information-gathering abilities with centralized decision-

making capacity to probe for new possibilities, which, once

found, can be quickly diffused throughout the organization. We will

show that the capacity for such experimentalism varies across actors

and sectors. And, to make things even tougher, neither major German

social actor can sustain innovation in the longer term without

bringing along the other “social partner.”

The formation of a national elite in Germany during the period before and after political unification, 1871, is still a largely unexplored topic in German social history. The Prussocentric perspective in German historiography, which is still prevailing in much of the work done by the so-called critical history of the 1960s and 1970s, has tended to give scant consideration to the sociocultural diversity underlying and enshrined in the federal structure of the Empire. The process of national consolidation of Imperial society could profitably be studied along the center-periphery continuum of national integration. It would be interesting, in particular, to subject to closer scrutiny the notion of “preindustrial elites,” which held on to the reigns of power in Prussia-Germany at a time of such rapid social and economic change.

Joschka Fischer (b. 1948), Germany’s foreign minister and for several

years one of the country’s most popular politicians, is a man of

the moment, of consequence both domestically and beyond his

country’s borders. Nationally prominent as leader of the “realo” faction

of the Greens, he was instrumental in turning a protest movement

into the partner in power of the Social Democratic Party

(SPD). During the Kosovo crisis, he was a key figure in securing

German participation in the NATO intervention. He has played an

influential role in the unfolding debate about institutional reform

within the European Union. During the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian

violence, he has actively tried to bring the parties to the table.

After Different Drummers (1992) and The Twisted Muse (1997), Michael

H. Kater has presented Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits, as

“the last in a trilogy on the interrelationship between sociopolitical

forces on the one side, and music and musicians in the Third Reich,

on the other” (264). The author is Distinguished Research Professor

of History at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies

(York University). The author of the present review, a musicologist,

must express his gratitude to Professor Kater for helping to

make it professionally unacceptable to restrict oneself anymore to

“the music itself” when considering certain composers active in Germany

of the 1930s. By the same token, Kater’s reticence about “the

music itself” (which presumably springs from humility) will leave

many a musicologist itching to adduce (if not consult) the scores to

confirm or to contest Kater’s points, for Kater is writing about lives,

not works, unless the works have impinged on biographical issues.

Jans B. Wager, Dangerous Dames. Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999)

Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum, eds., Democracy in the European Union (New York: Routledge, 2000)

Dusan Sidjanski, The Federal Future of Europe: From the European Community to the European Union (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2000)

Hanna Schissler, ed. The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001)

Review by Johannes von Moltke

Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2000)

Review by Andrea Orzoff

Felix Philipp Lutz, Das Geschichtsbewußtsein der Deutschen: Grundlagen der politschen Kultur in Ost und West (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2000)

Review by Eric Langenbacher

Kathleen James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience (London: Routledge, 2000)

Review by Eric Jarosinski

Thomas Elsaesser, Michael Wedel, eds., The BFI Companion to German Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1999)

Review by Christian Rogowski

Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914. Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Review by Frank Biess