German Politics and Society

In December 1995, the Center for German and European Studies at

the University of California at Berkeley hosted the conference, “The

Postwar Transformation of Germany: Prosperity, Democracy, and

Nationhood.” During the proceedings and in the edited volume that

resulted, conference contributors explored the reasons for Germany’s

success in making the transition to a liberal democratic polity

supported by a rationalized national identity and a modern, dynamic

capitalist economy. In charting postwar Germany’s success, the contributors

weighed the relative contribution institutional, cultural, and

international variables made to the country’s transformation.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the German literary critic, recalls in his

recent memoirs that at age ten, when he set out from his small town

in Poland, his teacher said with tears in her eyes, “Mein Sohn, Du

fährst in das Land der Kultur.” Elias Canetti recalled in the first volume

of his memoir—The Tongue Set Free—how when he was age eight,

his mother, recently widowed, found fulfillment at the Burgtheater

and left Manchester to take up residence in Vienna. Was it just the

magic of the German language that transported these Jews and made

literary overachievers of their children? A vision of metropolitan culture

and assimilation? Culture was “the way ‘in,’” as Louis Spitzer

puts it in his book on marginality, Lives in Between.

The future political culture of eastern Germany and, with it, the relationship

between unified Germany’s once divided populations will

depend heavily upon how all Germans respond to a distinctive fact

about the east. The region experienced not one but, counting the

German Democratic Republic (GDR), two separate eras of dictatorship.

This fact can be, and has been, understood in two different

ways, with significantly different implications in each case. The first

is the perspective of the victim. According to this view, the citizens of

the GDR uniquely had to shoulder the burden of having been born,

in effect, “in the wrong place.” Not only did they endure greater

hardships than their western counterparts, such as the rebuilding of

Germany after World War II, but they suffered by themselves

through the debilitating consequences of Soviet occupation and their

inability, until 1990, to act upon the right to “free self-determination”

(to quote the original preamble of the Basic Law). As a result, according

to this argument, easterners were owed special treatment after

unification because of their distinctive misfortunes.

After ten years of research on Germany’s postunification political

culture, there is no scholarly consensus on the critical questions of

east-west differences, the impact of unification on western German

culture, and developmental trends in the two regions. These questions

have become more acute in the light of decreased eastern economic

growth, high unemployment, and growing evidence of a

radical right-wing subculture in the new states.

In the past century, Germany, for better and for worse, offered itself

as a natural laboratory for political science. Indeed, Germany’s

excesses of political violence and its dramatic regime changes largely

motivated the development of postwar American political science,

much of it the work of German émigrés and German-Jewish

refugees, of course. The continuing vicissitudes of the German experience

have, however, posed a particular challenge to the concept of

political culture as elaborated in the 1950s and 1960s,1 at least in

part to explain lingering authoritarianism in formally democratic

West Germany. Generally associated with political continuity or only

incremental change,2 the concept of political culture has been illequipped

to deal with historical ruptures such as Germany’s “break

with civilization” of 1933-1945 and the East German popular revolution

of 1989. As well, even less dramatic but still important and relatively

rapid cultural changes such as the rise of a liberal democratic

Verfassungspatriotismus sometime around the late 1970s in West Germany3

and the emergence of a postmodern, consumer capitalist culture

in eastern Germany since 19944 do not conform to mainstream

political culture theory’s expectations of gradual, only generational

change. To be sure, continuity, if not inertia, characterizes much of

politics, even in Germany. Still, to be of theoretical value, the concept

of political culture must be able not only to admit but to

account for change.

In 1995, as a Fulbright professor, I taught a seminar on “culture and

international order” at Humboldt University in Berlin. There I

reached the conclusion that, in order to analyze Kultur in Germany,

one also had to take into consideration the work of Schweinerei. In the

five years between the opening of the wall and my seminar, there had

been an explosion of interest in the concept “Kultur”—defined quite

concretely in public discourse as an element that united (or divided)

East and West Berliners, or as a substance that had been damaged

during the cold war and now needed restoration.1 Irrespective of the

speaker, Kultur was always something good, a positive ordering. One

never needed less Kultur. Either one argued, as a proponent of Multikulti,

for more of them, more cultures, or, as a monoculturalist, for

merely better (more refined, more pure) Kultur and the value of a

distinct German culture. The decision reached in 1991 to move the

capital from Bonn to Berlin as a means of unifying Germans also cast

a kind of Klieg light on Kultur, as the relocation itself drew many

new visitors, who, having only construction sites of the future capital

to view, spent the rest of their time enjoying Berlin’s numerous (often

duplicate) cultural institutions and industries for the first time.2 At this

very moment of general good will, inclusiveness, and prominence,

these Berlin cultural institutions had the most to lose (or gain), as

ministers of the newly unified state promised more selective support

following a round of rationalizations if not eliminations.

Many observers of the German scene have argued that the long-term

non-German resident populations have become de facto permanent

members of German society. Beginning in the 1980s, the term

Heimkehrillusion, the “illusion of returning home,” gained prominence

in accounts of the guest workers’ trajectories, as many social scientists

and policy makers came to dismiss the continued assertions of some

migrant populations of their intention to eventually return “home.”

The increasingly accepted view was that “even though many [migrants]

have the goal to return sometime, this goal becomes increasingly

unlikely the longer they stay in Germany. For many families who have

established themselves here, there are no possibilities left in the country

of origin” (Institute für Zukunftsforschung, 15). The evidence that

“most of the ‘guest-workers’ would not return to their home countries”

continues to be pointedly cited in more recent efforts to push the German

state into reforming citizenship laws and taking responsibility for

the multicultural reality of German society (Hagedorn 2000, 4). The

permanence of the non-German population and their growing commitment

to life in Germany has, over the years, been the cornerstone of

progressive arguments that non-German residents merit full membership

in the German polity and that notions of “Germanness” must be

de-ethnicized and made more permeable. Explicit reference to

Heimkehrillusion has largely dropped out of current discussions of citizenship

reform and forms of belonging, but the conclusion that all resident

migrants in Germany are unambiguously there to stay has come

to form the unquestioned basis of contemporary debate.

Contemporary interstate relations in Europe are proclaimed by

Europeans to be little short of ideal. Every nation and every state is

told to behave toward others as do the states of the European Union.

Inter-European relations, we are told, illustrate the norms to which

everyone should aspire. Moreover, the same civilized rules of political

behavior apply within each country.