German Politics and Society

The year 2005 marks the fifteenth anniversary of unification, and over the course of the next several issues, German Politics and Society will showcase this topic whenever possible.

The Frankfurt School's first years on Morningside Heights progressed very smoothly. Based on the group's activities and accomplishments, it is clear that its members had not misrepresented themselves to Columbia's sociologists and administrators. The emphasis that had been placed on scientific social research had not been an empty marketing scheme. Members of the Institute for Social Research were throughout the 1930s. This was never more true than during the first five years on Morningside Heights. Although members of the Horkheimer Circle later played up stories of their anonymity and isolation at Columbia, evidence that suggests that such claims were greatly exaggerated. heavily engaged in social research

According to German historian Hermann Weber, 25 percent of all

published studies on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) have

focused on the early years of the regime of the Socialist Unity Party

(SED), 20 percent on the 1980s and collapse of the dictatorship, and

only 3 percent on the years in between.1 While the GDR itself may

not have become a mere footnote in history as novelist Stefan Heym

predicted, studies of East German history in the 1950s—before the

construction of the Berlin Wall, when the regime of Walter Ulbricht

was most vulnerable—are exceedingly rare.2 Archive-based studies of

Ulbricht’s response to the Hungarian revolution of 1956 are rarer

still.3 A recently edited volume of essays published in Germany

about responses to the Hungarian revolution, for example, included

the reactions of nearly every East European country, except those of

the GDR.

German politicians, journalists, and analysts are predicting that the DVU's and the NPD's tenure in state parliaments will be brief. Referring to the NPD, Wolfgang Bosbach of the CDU claimed that the party would quickly lose its appeal because its politicians were "generally lazy, not very intelligent and therefore ineffective in parliament." Similar opinions have been voiced about the DVU. In this article, I argue that, while the DVU is likely to remain a marginal player in German politics, the NPD's electoral breakthrough represents a major new development. Over the last decade, the NPD has evolved into a highly organized social movement in eastern Germany. The fact that it can now mobilize portions of the eastern electorate strongly suggests that it has become a political force as well.

Throughout these shows, a value system is constructed that runs counter to the apparent, stated aim of normalizing the everyday experience of eastern Germans. GDR consumer goods are brought into the mainstream, only to be reconfined to the periphery as "strange" and nonwestern. In so doing, the programs invite former GDR citizens to join a club of western German consumers and to laugh along with them at their bizarre, ridiculous past. Consequently, while Ostalgie might not be what it used to be, the power dynamic between east and west remains the same. In these shows the GDR is no longer presented as a "Stasi state." Instead, through Ostalgie, it becomes a world of curious consumer products. Nevertheless, even if the gasps of horror and disapproval of earlier representations are replaced now by curiosity and amusement, these recent television shows still furnish us with a representation of the east from which the Federal Republic can distance itself, thereby finding further validation as the better German state (which of course it is). But it is also a state that, for many indignant eastern Germans at least, still fails to engage honestly and in a differentiated manner with their preunification experience.

Tina Campt: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 2004)

Review by Kader Konuk

Agnes C. Mueller, ed., German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It? (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004)

Review by Barbara Mennel

David Crew, ed., Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2003)

Review by Jennifer Jenkins

Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men. War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003)

Review by Frank Biess

Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion. West Germany and Eastern Europe 1945–1990, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Review by Henning Süssner

Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Postwar European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)

Review by Peter C. Caldwell

Gerhard Hirscher and Karl-Rudolf Korte, eds., Information und Entscheidung: Kommunikationsmanagement der Politisichen Führung (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag GmbH, 2003)

Review by Steven A. Weldon