German Politics and Society

The disagreement between Germany and the United States over the

war in Iraq was massive. During the winter of 2002, many observers

spoke of a long-term rift between these longstanding allies and a

total loss of credibility on both sides. No one can doubt, regardless

of recent healing overtures,1 that the German-American partnership

has been altered and significantly weakened. It has suffered a blow

far more damaging than those that accompanied past conflicts over,

for example, Ostpolitik, the neutron bomb, the Soviet gas pipeline,

the flow of high technology products to the Soviet Union, the imposition

of trade sanctions in 1980 against the military government in

Poland, the stationing in the late 1970s of middle-range missiles on

German soil, and the modernization of short-range missiles in 1989.

The puzzle explored in this article is why Germany, in spite of its

superb record in environmental policy and health care, has systematically

thwarted measures to reduce smoking rates. At this point,

thousands of large-scale epidemiological findings demonstrate a relationship

between smoking and disease. Moreover, unlike alcohol,

there is no safe amount of smoking. Cigarettes kill, and smoking is

the single largest source of preventable death in advanced industrialized

states. By various estimates, tobacco kills 500,000 Europeans

per year, including 120,000 Germans. Globally, in the years 2025 to

2030, smoking will kill 7 million people in the developing world and

3 million in the industrialized world. No other consumer product is

as dangerous as tobacco, which kills more people than AIDS, legal

and illegal drugs, road accidents, murder, and suicide combined.

Reflecting on his academic exile in the United States, the German

political scientist Franz L. Neumann emphasized the cross-fertilization

of ideas as a result of the confrontation of different scientific and

political cultures.1 According to Neumann, the migration of hundreds

of European academics to the United States led to a growing

internationalization of the social sciences and a two-way learning

process. The Europeans became accustomed to the practice of the

American liberal democracy and learned to value its political culture;

émigré scholars, on the other hand, brought with them a different

academic Denkstil and contributed to a more critical self-understanding

of American democratic theory.

Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkreig 1940-1945 (Munich: Propyläen Verlag, 2002)

Günther Grass, Crabwalk (Orlando: Harcourt, 2002)

W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003)

Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2002)

Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (Praeger: Westport, Conn., 2001)

Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Leonie Naughton, Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)

Laurence McFalls and Lothar Probst, eds., After the GDR: New Perspectives on the Old GDR and the Young Länder. German Monitor No. 54 (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2001)

Corey Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London: Arnold Publishers, 2002)

Vibeke Rützou Petersen, Women and Modernity in Weimar Germany: Reality and Representation in Popular Fiction (New York: Berghahn, 2001)

Richard C. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity” (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era (New York and London: Routledge 2002)

Review by Kader Konuk

Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002)

Review by Daniel Morat

Julia Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Review by Diane J. Guido

S. Jonathan Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

Review by Simon Reich