German Politics and Society

In the aftermath of unification, studies consistently uncovered differences in trust between citizens of the east and west of Germany. This article examines if this remains the case. It evaluates the trends and individual-level drivers of trust from 1984 to 2018 using data from the German General Social Survey (allbus) showing, first, that Germans are cautiously trusting of institutions, trust is more extensive than at any point since unification, and the differences between the east and west have narrowed; and, second, that trust is shaped by factors that are broadly similar between the two parts of the country. Multivariate models and post-estimation analyses show that trust is steeped in a variety of phenomena, some of which provide it with resilience and durability. The study rejects suggestions that Germany is suffering from a legitimacy crisis and concludes that the project of national integration is more complete than has previously been thought.

Does political ambivalence increase vote switching? While the effects of ambivalence on vote switching have been investigated in the American political system, its application to multi-party systems has not been explored. To address this gap, this article investigates the effects of ambivalence on vote intention switching and vote switching in Germany's multi-party system, which has recently experienced electoral instability. Using the German Longitudinal Election Study (gles), the article teases out the mechanics of party ambivalence, leader ambivalence, and party-leader ambivalence. The results suggest that ambivalence increases the probability of voters switching parties during the pre-election campaigning period and between two consecutive elections. Ambivalence therefore has important implications for vote switching and for understanding the underlying determinants of electoral volatility in twenty-first-century politics.

This article examines the response of West German cities to the end of guest worker recruitment in 1973 and to the federal government's implementation of its foreigner policy of “consolidation” in the mid-1970s. It argues that cities critiqued federal policies as failing to address the long-term impact of a permanent migrant population and called for a more comprehensive immigration policy that addressed such a population. Fearing potential social problems from a settled foreigner population, cities saw greater social infrastructure investments as essential for the integration of not just individual guest workers but entire foreigner families. By continuing to support the reunification of foreigner families after the end of guest worker recruitment, cities decoupled their assessment of a resident foreigner population from a purely labor market perspective and thought more broadly of the multifaceted impact and demands that the foreigner population made on their communities.

The German novelist and Nobel laureate Günter Grass investigated the connection between nationhood, language, and politics throughout his literary career. In particular, he advocated a form of “literary nationhood” called Kulturnation (cultural nation) that conflates a nation's letters with its national identity. Grass believed that this identity served as a form of resistance to the nation-state and could force the German people to acknowledge the Holocaust. In going about this alternative nationality, Grass utilized what he called the “worm's-eye view” to align a literary imagination from the perspective of history's “victims” rather than its “makers.” The result of this literary methodology are two novels: The Meeting at Telgte (Das Treffen in Telgte) and Too Far Afield (Ein weites Feld). This article traces the development of the Kulturnation in these works and discusses its implications for politics, with special attention given to the tension between language and politics.

Anna von der Goltz, The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Andrei S. Markovits, The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2021).

Samuel Clowes Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).

Steven Press, Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperial Ambitions in Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).

Larry Frohman, The Politics of Personal Information: Surveillance, Privacy, and Power in West Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020).

Rebecca Pates and Julia Leser, The Wolves Are Coming Back: The Politics of Fear in Eastern Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

Ulrich Herbert, Wer waren die Nationalsozialisten? (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2021).

Sean Eedy, Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021).