German Politics and Society

This article analyses the development of Left Party/PDS-SPD coalitions in the eastern German Länder. It develops an explanatory framework based on attempts to understand how red-green coalitions came into being in the 1990s. The article concludes that red-red coalitions emerge when four basic criteria are fulfilled: the SPD has few other viable potential coalition options and believes it can gain in strategic terms; the ideological distance between the Left Party/PDS and SPD is small; and the personal relationships between Land-level leaders are good. The paper also argues that the heterogeneity of the Left Party/PDS is likely to ensure that Land-specific solutions to Land-specific coalition dilemmas are very likely to remain of significance in the future.

After presenting a brief summary of the events leading up to the German Autumn, this article offers a close analysis of media responses in major German newspapers and magazines in the months following these violent and confusing political developments. It compares these responses to reports in January 1980, where the events of the late 1970s serve as a catalyst for fears of global change. Media articulate these fears about the stability and identity of the West German nation state in increasingly vague and generalized terms and relate them to a global situation that is "out of control." The discussions in this article suggest that these expressed fears reveal tensions, interruptions, and gaps in the conservative fantasy of the secure and prosperous Western nation state.

British-German relations have undergone a considerable transformation since 1945 with both countries having to adapt to significant changes in their own status, as well as a very different international environment. Germany's status as a morally and militarily defeated and occupied power in 1945 is in stark contrast to the confident role it is playing at the beginning of the new millennium when—sixty years after the end of World War II—the German chancellor for the first time took part in the VE-Day celebrations of the victors. This article analyzes recent dynamics of collective memory in both countries and examine if and to what extent their collective memories play a role in British-German relations.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies in western democracies are turning increasingly to electronic surveillance tools in their efforts to identify and combat new terrorist threats. But this does not mean that they are equally equipped to undertake these measures. As the author shows by comparing surveillance activities in three countries—Great Britain, the United States, and Germany—the Federal Republic's more restrictive legal norms and institutions provide its government with much less freedom of maneuver than its allies.

Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Reviewed by Jeffrey Anderson

Norman J. W. Goda, Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Reviewed by Anne Sa’adah

Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Reviewed by Susan E. Scarrow

Lars Rensmann, Demokratie und Judenbild: Antisemitismus in der politischen Kulturder Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005).

Reviewed by Andrei S. Markovits

Brian Currid, A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Reviewed by Celia Applegate

Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Reviewed by Tobias Brinkmann

Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Reviewed by Ian Reifowitz

Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld, eds., Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).

Reviewed by Steven Beller

Article Abstracts

Notes on contributors