German Politics and Society

Hannah Arendt and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich produced influential accounts of the postwar West-German population's silence or inarticuleteness. The Mitscherlichs claimed that this silence was symptomatic of a blocked process of mourning; Arendt saw it as a legacy of brutal totalitarian rule. However, both viewed the rapid economic recovery as evidence of the German inability to engage in discursively mediated therapeutic and political processes. Frantic busyness was a form of silence. This paper presents a critical reassessment of these approaches. By drawing on Albert Hirschman's theory of exit and voice, it argues that economic activity possesses a communicative dimension. The alleged retreat from politics is not a symptom of muteness but rather indicates people's preference for an alternative mode of communication. Arendt and the Mitscherlich may be right in assuming a correlation between the postwar economic recovery and ostensible political apathy, but lack the conceptual means to clarify the relationship.

Among the challenges of today's globalizing world is the disruption that local communities experience, in developed and developing countries alike, in the face of economic and political modernization. Yet, such problems are not unprecedented. To the contrary, communities across nineteenth-century Europe faced similar difficulties as a result of the Industrial Revolution and political upheaval. For insights into such challenges, I turn to a perhaps unlikely resource for coming to grips with globalization: Jeremias Gotthelf, whose novel Die Käserei in der Vehfreude has been described by Hanns Peter Holl as an “examination of European developments of the 1840s.“ Through his portrayal of a Swiss village's attempt to form a cheese-making cooperative and sell its wares, with all the difficulties it encounters in the process, Gotthelf reveals himself as an important political thinker, whose treatment of democracy, community, and modernity remains relevant for us today.

Heimat is commonly theorized as an entity both co-extensive with the nation and easily describable in terms of its regional peculiarities (Eigenart). To challenge this view, this article turns to sociolinguistic discussions in the press of Sudeten German expellees in the early 1950s. Rather than speaking as experts on local dialects or folklore, these newcomers resorted to Sprachkritik, a widespread postwar public form of sociolinguistic criticism, to fashion Heimat into a prescriptive, normative authority over the High German standard that they found missing in the Federal Republic. Their attacks on the West German parlance focused on inability of its consumerist diminutives to produce a coherent narrative of the period. By suggesting that Heimat's parameters superseded those of the nation, their interventions countered the widespread cliché of inarticulate, rural expellees at the same time as they put Sprachkritik on the map of West Germany's “miracle years.“

Among the many striking developments that arose out of the 2008-2009

financial crisis and the subsequent EURO crisis has been the policy divergence

between the United States and Germany. Typically, the two countries

have broadly similar preferences regarding economic policy. To be

sure, this is not the first time that Germany and the U.S. have failed to see

eye to eye on economic matters,1 but the recent gap in perception and

policy does warrant attention because it has been unusually large. Unlike

the famous quarrels between Jimmy Carter and Helmut Schmidt in the

1970s,2 personality does not seem to play a role in this case. What then

does explain the gulf?

The transatlantic fallout preceding and immediately following the opening

of the Second Iraq War in 2003 was accompanied by an unusually

widespread public contempt for U.S. President George W. Bush. No doubt,

vast majorities in Germany (and in many other European countries)

rejected the Iraq invasion. But how should we interpret their motives?

Was criticism levelled against a specific policy or was it based on negative

stereotyping of America? Three kinds of arguments have been brought

forward as to why the latter should be the case.

We very much appreciate Stefan Immerfall’s insightful criticism of our

recent contribution to German Politics and Society. Needless to say, we beg

to differ with his views and strongly disagree with his assessment of our

work. For brevity’s sake we will only engage a few points.

Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn, Die Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern: Legenden, Mythos, Geschichte (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010)

Reviewed by Michael Ennis

Katherine Pratt Ewing, Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008)

Reviewed by Julia Woesthoff

Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Reviewed by Daniel J. Walther

Andrew Beckford, Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)

Reviewed by Dale Herspring

Annemarie H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914-1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010)

Reviewed by Catherine Epstein

Charles Lansing, From Nazism to Communism: German Schoolteacher under Two Dictatorships (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)

Reviewed by Catherine Plum