German Politics and Society

We are delighted to present a somewhat unorthodox line up in this

issue of German Politics and Society.

In our lead article, “A Nation in White: Germany’s Hygienic Consensus

and the Ambiguities of Modernist Architecture,” William

Rollins offers a fascinating analysis of modernist architecture in the

Weimar Republic through the lens of the bourgeois hygienic reform

movement. In particular, the article features an innovative discussion

of the centrality of the color white to this esthetic debate.

“White, everything white.” White was the color of the Weimar

Republic, or at least so it seemed to cultural critic J. E. Hammann

writing in the journal Die Form in 1930. In his article Hammann did

not just note the trend toward white in interior design, but rather he

was determined to understand the greater significance in his fellow

Germans’ overwhelming color preference. White, Hammann surmised,

was a “characteristic mark of the way in which we grasp our

age,” a “chief indicator of the times,” and a powerful evocation of

the “new spirit” behind Weimar’s “modern weltanschauung” (121f.).

In this essay I examine the dispute between the German Green

Party and some of the country’s environmental nongovernmental

organizations (NGOs) over the March 2001 renewal of rail shipments

of highly radioactive wastes to Gorleben. My purpose in

doing so is to test John Dryzek’s 1996 claim that environmentalists

ought to beware of what they wish for concerning inclusion in the

liberal democratic state. Inclusion on the wrong terms, argues

Dryzek, may prove detrimental to the goals of greening and democratizing

public policy because such inclusion may compromise the

survival of a green public sphere that is vital to both. Prospects for

ecological democracy, understood in terms of strong ecological

modernization here, depend on historically conditioned relationships

between the state and the environmental movement that foster

the emergence and persistence over time of such a public sphere.

In November 1993, more than fifty years after patrons of the popular

Café Josty on the famed Potsdamer Platz in Berlin came to enjoy a

good cup of coffee and a piece of cake, or smoke a rare fine cigar

before the bombs would raze the café to the ground, a hydraulic excavator’s

bucket stopped in mid-air and miraculously saved five white

porcelain cups with the initials CJ engraved upon each one in red.

The delicate cups had rested under no more than ten feet of loose soil

and rubble near the place where the café’s basement had been. The

bombs that fell on the Potsdamer Platz between 1943 and May 1945

and a scoop by an excavator bucket bookend a series of perilous situations

the cups survived. The East German regime sent tanks across

the square during the uprising in June of 1953, and the wall separating

Berlin was built right through the middle of it in August of 1961.

After lying dormant and overgrown with weeds for many of its subsequent

thirty years, the Potsdamer Platz was finally all but leveled; the

Weinhaus Huth was the only building that escaped the dynamite and

wrecker ball. The swing of the wrecking ball made room for the most

controversial construction project in recent German history: the citywithin-

a-city Daimler-Benz would build on the Potsdamer Platz.

Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Julian Young, Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997)

Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998)

Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000)

Linda Fuller, Where Was the Working Class? Revolution in Eastern Germany (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999)

Jonathan Grix, The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000)

Elke P. Frederiksen and Martha Kaarsberg Wallach eds., Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past. German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present (Albany, 2000)

Lorna Martens, The Promised Land? Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic (Albany, 2001)

Wolfgang Schroeder, Das Modell Deutschland auf dem Prüfstand. Zur Entwicklung der industriellen Beziehungen in Ostdeutschland (1990-2000) (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000)