German Politics and Society

The “Willy Wahl” of 1972 saw Chancellor Willy Brandt run on the strength of Ostpolitik, his diplomatic engagement with the Eastern Bloc. This study examines how Brandt's moves toward reconciliation impacted his electoral chances while challenging the dominant view that seeking improved relations is politically dangerous. To accomplish this, the study introduces a theory which argues that reconciliation impacts voting in two ways: first, it drives partisans closer to their parties, and, second, it makes those with weaker partisanship more likely to vote for the party of reconciliation. Tested on data from the 1972 election, this theory indicates a strong relationship between support for rapprochement and the spd's success and finds that views on Ostpolitik overshadowed all other topics, including the economy.

Why does the predominant actor in an international organization like the European Union (eu) regularly make important fiscal concessions? Why do these concessions come rather late, halfheartedly, and with conditions attached? This article argues that Germany, the member state with the most fiscal resources, acts as the eu's status quo power. Often enjoying high indispensability and limited vulnerability, it prefers the regulation of national fiscal policies over European capacity building. However, when faced with threats to its own economic model and to European polity stability, Germany, again and again, makes targeted fiscal concessions. Developing and testing arguments derived from national material interests and foreign policy orientations, the article documents Germany's significant but highly ambiguous role in the creation of two recent eu instruments with strong fiscal components: the Next Generation recovery plan and the joint purchasing of energy. The findings have implications not only for Germany's European policy, but for eu fiscal politics and European integration more generally.

In this article, we investigate the question of whether political socialization in the German Democratic Republic before the fall of the Berlin Wall has had an effect on current attitudes toward German unification and the role of intra-German migration in this context. We used the data of the Saxon Longitudinal Study to measure gdr identification of the respondents in 1987 and to test their influence on attitudes toward unification more than 30 years later. Results show that a consolidation of gdr identity in adolescence shapes the affinity for socialism in the further course of life, but does not seem to play a role in the later approval of unification and in the feeling of being disadvantaged as an East German.

This article centers on former Chancellor Angela Merkel's major standalone televised address to the nation—her coronavirus speech during the initial phase of the covid-19 pandemic—and reactions to it in mainstream German newspapers and among social media users. Employing a case study approach, we investigate the communicative means used by Merkel to generate unity and appeal to people's solidarity, the ways in which the mainstream press echoed or challenged aspects of her speech, and how social media users engaged with the speech online. Merkel's address demonstrates strong persuasive potential that is reflected in public opinion (via high approval ratings), fairly balanced coverage in established newspapers, and generally supportive reactions among most social media users. In contrast, those with links to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) on social media used a considerably more negative tone to voice their opinions, often revealing their outright antipathy toward Merkel rather than criticizing pandemic-related policy measures. Implications for political elites’ crisis communication are discussed during times of increased uncertainty and against the backdrop of the rise of the far right.

Raymond Jonas, Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024), 384 pp.

Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, Kapitalismus am Limit Öko-imperiale Spannungen, umkämpfte Krisenplitick und solidarische Perspektiven (Munich: Oekom Press, 2024), 224 pp.

Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Caroline A. Kita, eds., The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022), 278 pp.

Michael A. Hansen and Jonathan Olsen, Political Entrepreneurship in the Age of Dealignment: The Populist Far-Right Alternative for Germany (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2024), 209 pp.

Andrew I. Port, Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023), 416 pp.

Manès Weisskircher, ed., Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament (New York: Routledge, 2024), 246 pp.

Zi Wang, The Role of Language in the Wellbeing of Migrants: East Asian Communities in Germany (New York: Routledge, 2023), 198 pp.