German Politics and Society

Following our special issue on culture, we are pleased to present an

open issue of German Politics and Society. Our lead article by James

Ryan Anderson investigates a woefully underresearched area of German

politics and policy making: the Bundestag’s role in shaping the

country’s foreign policy. While the bulk of Anderson’s empirical

data hail from the 1950s and 1960s, the article does an excellent job

in looking at the German Bundestag’s constitutional role as overseer

of the executive and controlling the administration in foreign affairs

by using what the author calls “formal instrumentalities.”

In a little more than a decade, Germany’s role in international affairs—

particularly from a military perspective—has radically changed. Whereas

German participation during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was

basically limited to providing financial support to the international

coalition led by the United States, by the end of 2001, German soldiers

were operating under combat conditions in the United Nations peacekeeping

mission to Afghanistan. During (and even before) this transition,

little attention has been devoted to the German Bundestag’s

constitutional role as overseer of executive foreign affairs activities.

This article discusses a screenplay of the television thriller Armer

Nanosh (Poor Nanosh), written in 19891 by the famous German

author Martin Walser and Asta Scheib.2 The screenplay deals with

the relations between Germans and Germany’s Sinti, or Gypsy, population

in the shadow of Auschwitz,3 a subject that has hardly been

touched upon by postwar German authors and dramatists.

Christopher Simpson, ed., War Crimes of the Deutsche Bank and the Dresdner Bank. Office of Military Government (U.S.) Reports (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 2001)

The epigraph seems to border on hyperbole: were the debates in the

fall of 2001 really “exclusively” subsumed by domestic politics? But

Bassam Tibi, one of the hundreds of experts who made the rounds

on the endless talk shows and conferences in Germany, may be on to

something. In a recent book about how the public intellectuals, religious

leaders, and celebrities reacted to the terror attacks of September

11th, Der Spiegel essayist Hendryk Broder made a similar point as

he aimed his bittersweet satirical wit at the navel-gazing, self-righteousness,

and hypocrisy of Germany’s public intellectuals.2 Broder’s

book is a self-conscious example of that timeless German genre, the

Streitschrift, an erudite polemic in the service of both noble edification

and less high-minded settling of scores with one’s intellectual

opponents. Although exaggerated, one-sided, and terribly funny,

Broder’s analysis of the German public discourse of the fall of 2001

does contain some serious arguments that anyone interested in the

European perception of America cannot ignore. In this essay, I will

sketch the contours of that reaction by focusing first on the kinds of

issues that preoccupied German intellectuals in the wake of the

attacks of September 11th; second, I will contrast that reaction to how ordinary Germans and government officials perceived those

events; third, I will explore the role that anti-Americanism played in

the intellectual debates of fall 2001; and finally, I will reflect on the

significance of September 11th for German society in general.

Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR: From Anti-Fascism to Stalinism, 1945-1953 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000)

M.E. Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil: East Germany and Ostpolitik, 1969-1973 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996)

Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Austin Harrington, Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: A Critique of Gadamer and Habermas (Routledge: New York, 2001)

Review by Farid Abdel-Nour

Steve Breyman, Why Movements Matter: The West German Peace Movement and U.S. Arms Control Policy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001)

Review by Alice H. Cooper

Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

Review by Frank Biess

Thomas Poguntke, Parteiorganisation im Wandel: Gesellschaftliche Verankerung und Organisatorische Anpassung Im Europäischen Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag GmbH, 2000)

Review by Steven A. Weldon

Elizabeth A. Strom, Building the New Berlin: The Politics of Urban Development in Germany’s Capital City (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001)

Review by Richard L. Merritt and Anna J. Merritt

Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression. The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London, New York: Routledge, 2000)

Review by William H. Rollins

The most deceitful aspect of Gerald Feldman’s commentary on my

book is his tacit claim that he is engaged in something other than

character assassination. As in other academic jihads he has pursued in

the past, Feldman’s most effective weapon has been his capacity for

ad hominem attack. Straightforward debate concerning disputed historical

evidence is considerably further down his list.