German Politics and Society

In March 2003, Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder

announced a series of reforms that his government plans to undertake

in order to deal with Germany’s pressing economic problems.

These reform proposals, known as Agenda 2010, include cutting

unemployment benefits, making it easier to hire and fire workers,

reducing health insurance coverage, and raising the retirement age.

The reforms mark a change in the direction of the German Social

Democratic Party’s (SPD) economic policy. Rather than promoting

traditional social democratic values such as collective responsibility,

workers’ rights, and the expansion of state benefits, Schröder declared

that “We will have to curtail the work of the state, encourage more

individual responsibility, and require greater individual performance

from each person. Every group in the society will have to contribute

its share.”1 Despite opposition to these reforms by labor unions and

leftist members of the party, Agenda 2010 was approved by nearly 90

percent of SPD party delegates at a special party conference in June

2003.2 Several of the reforms, including health care and job protection

reforms, were passed by the legislature at the end of 2003 and

took effect on 1 January 2004.

In times of political or social crisis, issues of identity and affiliation

tend to become more salient. In response to the threatened or actual

disruption of the routines of material provision, social order, and

ideological legitimation, definitions of self and community that had

formerly been considered authoritative come under more frequent

and more extensive questioning. Responses to this condition of

uncertainty and doubt about identity and affiliation are typically

forthcoming from many different quarters: party politicians, leaders

of social movements, public intellectuals, religious authorities. Such

responses can also be quite varied as was the case, for example, in

the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only months after the

event and with major questions about the future of the two Germanies

in the air, Jürgen Habermas surveyed the various possible sources of German identity that were on offer at that time—economic prestige

(“DM nationalism”), cultural inheritance, linguistic unity, ethnic

descent, historical fate, aesthetic experience, and constitutional patriotism—

and found all but the last seriously wanting.3 In any given

episode of crisis and questioning, most responses will ultimately

have little or no effect; the eventual reestablishment of the routines

of provision, order, and legitimation usually means that one or

another set of definitions of self and community has won out and

become authoritative for a critical mass of citizens.

Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, eds., The German Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2002)

Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)

Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Review by Mitchell P. Smith

Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries. German Communists and their Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)

Review by Henry Krisch

Victor Grossman (Stephen Wechsler), Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)

Review by A. James McAdams

Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eilard and Joel Golb (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003)

Review by Silke Weineck

Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003)

Review by Joel Freeman

Dominik Geppert, The Postwar Challenge: Cultural, Social, and Political Change in Western Europe, 1945-58 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Review by Richard L. Merritt and Anna Merritt

Brett Klopp, German Multiculturalism: Immigrant Integration and the Transformation of Citizenship (Westport, CT: Prager, 2002)

Review by John Brady