Germany: The Enduring Fear

...As the Harvard historian Charles Maier has written in The Unmasterable Past: The visit was intended as a ritual of reconciliation...

...There were few transverse routes east and west—until the railroad came...

...One can cite, in this respect, the innovation of the Basic Law of the Federal Constitutional Court, the safeguards for democracy, and, in the parliament, the adoption of the "constructive no-confidence vote," whereby a chancellor can be ousted only if there is a majority for a successor, a procedure that assures political stability...

...This was the basis, for example, of the foreign policy of Japan in the Meiji period: the outward thrust against Korea and China in 1894...

...Hitler capitalized on the fear of the Abyss, 462 • DISSENT Germany: The Enduring Fear the fear of dissolution of the society through inflation and depression, the fear of disorder from contending street armies, and he made disorder a form of order by projecting all these fears onto an "alien" group, and calling up those atavistic emotions to annihilate them, and to bind the German people in primal exaltation and guilt.* Auschwitz is a possibility of all human groups...

...If history is destiny, do the old © Copyright 1990, Daniel Bell...

...In the next two decades, at least, no nation will be able to assert world hegemony...

...The national states, in the words of Leopold von Ranke, became "great ecclesiastico-political individualities...

...A New Nationalism or a New Europe...

...Germany, which had no natural frontiers, standing between the Latins and the Slays, seemed to be the ideal pawn to check the others...

...Those were the questions that Helmut Kohl sought to raise at Bitburg...

...Not the street brawlers of a Schonhuber, but a right tapping the emotional roots of an Ernst Ringer—with his prophetic vision of a "steel force," the union of technology and blood that he sought to derive from the defeat of World War I—to proclaim a new Germany, or a Martin Heidegger and his trance mythos of the primal yolk, transmuted into a new illusion of the "super-power" as the realization of the superman...

...A slim possibility at the moment, perhaps, but a of the world society, I leave aside the problems of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East...

...One hundred pounds of fiber optics are the equivalent of a ton of copper—and have a wider broadband capacity as well...

...It is too big for the small problems because the various regions and neighborhoods have diverse needs that cannot be met by unitary programs from a single center...

...its cost is primarily money...

...All of this is changing...

...The territorial reach envisaged here, from Belgium to the Soviet Union, and from Italy to Denmark, is no longer realistic, but the singing does point to a long-suppressed feeling, now voiced openly, of "Wir sind wieder wer" ("We are once again someone...

...But can these imprints be erased...

...Did it tap pagan roots that may underlie all European civilization...

...The Holy Roman Empire lost its effective power...

...the war against Russia in 1905 in order to protect the flanks of the country, south and north...

...In what army did you serve...

...By modernity is meant the idea of civic equality and citizenship, the recognition of social conflict but the ability to have institutional regulation within bounds and within law...

...and the dynamische Rente, the universal, indexed old-age pensions and other welfare measures, then one can say, to the extent that such matters are ever sociologically possible, that personal security and social stability have largely been achieved in postwar Germany...

...Yet, in foreign policy, there may also be a new "Rapallo," the linking of Germany with the Soviet Union, wherein German technology and capital intertwine with Russian oil and primary products for a new "continental" union...

...As in China, where the army was invoked to repress the popular democratic movement, Gorbachev now faces the dilemma of Deng Xiaoping...

...But what is evident is that the past is still unmasterable and that the whiplash of memory has its own sting...

...For forty-five years, the United States and the USSR battled for hegemony...

...For Germany, there are two esprits (like two seele), which stand in angled contrast to one another: one is the Aufkliirung, the spirit of enlightenment and humanism that reaches out to universalism...

...His answer, briefly put, is that Germany failed to complete the process of modernity—as distinct from modernization, which he identifies as a narrower process of industrialization...

...Thus, the rise of absolutism was the chief political consequence of the settlement...

...What Hitler did was to make it an actuality...

...Where did you grow up...

...Gorbachev cannot be overthrown from within the party, but an army that has suffered humiliation in Afghanistan, and which now finds itself used for police-keeping powers, may itself turn against the leader...

...Adorno and some American collaborators in the book The Authoritarian Personality, which drew on earlier studies of the German family by Erich Fromm and the Frankfurt Institute's Autoritat and Familie, published in Paris in 1935...

...The unification of Germany, driven by emotional and material impulses, is now becoming an actuality...

...But a question also has arisen: How long does one continue to allow the past to "becloud" the present...

...It is these that have made [Prussia] considerable since the time when I began to have them...

...It is too small for the big problems because the character of global capital and commodity markets make it less and less effective as a management instrument...

...Once more is heard the forbidden prewar national anthem "Deutschland Uber Alles," with its celebration of a Grossdeutschland that stretches "von der Maas bis an die Memel/ von der Etsch bis an den Belt...

...He has sought to diminish the power of the party, but now finds himself beholden to the army to maintain stability...

...Where do you live now...

...If we turn from history (and myth) to the social sciences, our inquiries have to go along three tracks: national character, changes in social structure, and a nation's ability to master and transcend a past...

...It is the duel for the control of memory...

...A ruler is treated with no consideration if he does not have troops and means of his own...

...Frederick William had one basic axiom...

...For Dahrendorf, Germany (like Thatcher's England, perhaps) has changed decisively, for it has finally completed the bourgeois revolution that it had not completed in the nineteenth century...

...Historical Antecedents Let me start with three historical imprints, for each, in its contours, outlines a successive Reich (though I have reset the first in a modern context...

...Yet it took the combined efforts of one hundred and sixty Russian divisions from the East, the Allied Expeditionary Forces (the American and British armies) from the West, an Italian offensive from the South, and eight months of devastating air attacks after the Allied armies had crossed into Germany before resistance ended with Hitler's suicide on April 30, 1945, and the formal capitulation of Germany a week later when General Jodl surrendered to General Eisenhower...

...Or was it the special nature of the tribal past, the genossenschaft and gesamtwille, the community of blood and the group will embodied in the mythos of the yolk, which appealed to Heidegger and burst out in the furies of the Fiihrer, to which the people responded...

...Dominating the Rhineland, linking north and south Germany, Prussia became the strongest power and gained supremacy in industry and commerce...

...With him begins the drive to centralization, unified administration, and the development of bureaucracy and the Prussian military...

...At the Congress of Vienna these were consolidated into the German Confederation of thirty-five monarchical states and four city republics...

...Central to both was the rise of BrandenburgPrussia to dominance and the new assertiveness of the Hohenzollern dynasty under the Great Elector, Frederick William of Brandenburg FALL • 1990 • 461 Germany: The Enduring Fear (1620-1688...

...Can nations, like individuals, remake themselves in every generation...

...Again, the German Question Reflecting upon history after World War II, the famous liberal economist Wilhelm ROpke defined Die deutsche Frage (1945) as the necessity "to protect Europe against Germany, as Germany against herself...

...But are we enchained by the past...

...MAY, 1990 trajectories remain...

...None of the diplomats foresaw the future consequences...

...After the defeat of France in 1871, an empire emerged, with Germany as the strongest military and political power on the Continent, and with it the expansive glories of the Wilhelminian regimes...

...For the Russians this became converted into a fear of revanchism, of a resurgent Germany moving once more against Russia...

...Memory escaped from the control of its normal custodians—politicians who sought to play on it, and academics who lived by analyzing it—and became an unpredictable force...

...It is the responsibility of the German political leaders to tell us, and without deception...

...That battle is now over as well...

...If there has been imprinting, do these memory traces return...

...The question now is whether there will be one Europe, politically as well as economically, or a multiplicity of contending nations...

...translate the issue into the depth of the imprints and the possibilities of their reemergence...

...The third imprint is the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler...

...In fact, in the first report of the Club of Rome in 1973, it was copper, not oil, that was assumed to be the most critical item among future shortages...

...If one adds the continuing economic prosperity...

...Two large oil FALL • 1990 • 465 Germany: The Enduring Fear companies, British Petroleum and Arco, bought Kennicott and Anaconda copper, as diversification...

...Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury in the Roosevelt administration, seeking to break Germany's might, proposed the dismantling of all German industry and the country's reversion to an agrarian economy...

...And with the sudden collapse of East Germany and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, we have seen an emotional upsurge in German nationalism...

...It failed as ceremonial because it mobilized contrary impulses about history...

...These are the questions, fateful, not playful, that one must ask in considering the reunification, the unification, or the anschluss — already the use of each designation is a political judgment—of the two Germanys in 1990 and its consequences...

...Yet Germany today is so completely bourgeois, prosaic, and materialist...

...In the Russian army...

...Catholicism is an "authoritarian" ideology, yet no single personality pattern follows...

...As he put it: Alliances, to be sure, are good...

...The axis of the question, as it is for all historians, is continuity and change, but, since there is always a degree of both, I would prefer to * Some observers thought that German morale would collapse under the crushing weight of the attacking military forces in the last year of the war...

...Protestantism, in its core beliefs, is antinomian and anti-institutional, yet produced rigid personalities such as its founders, Luther and Calvin...

...Politically, Germany before Napoleon had been fragmented into 1,789 different territorial entities, most of them just a few castles and villages, calling themselves principalities...

...There may now be one Germany rather than two...

...A man is asked: where were you born...

...And that would create new economic difficulties...

...it ended as a catharsis manqu...

...For nations may not be natural organisms but social inventions, created and re-created by will, in the sense, for example, of the United States being "the first new nation," in a flood today of almost a hundred other "new nations...

...Given its intensity, it is surprising how recent all this is...

...In Europe, it is a united Germany that may become the paramount power, to the dismay of France on one side and Eastern Europe on the other...

...Nietzsche, in one of his punning moods, called Germany the Tausche-Volk, because time after time it has surprised the world by acting in least expected ways...

...And, at the other half of the concept, psychologists have failed to define a "modal personality" that is distributed among an entire population and is consistent across generational time...

...For the past two or more decades, in large measure because of security problems vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and, more recently, with the acceleration of the European Economic Community, Germany has become embedded more and more in a European home...

...The reason is the substitution of fiber optics for copper in telecommunication cables...

...In Germany, the major waterways run north to south, along the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder, and the Wiese...

...If these are still relevant, which of the two is salient today...

...Today, "space" has been eroded (unless one assumes that European nations will revert in the future to "conventional warfare," which itself is a utopian prospect...

...But it also initiated two processes: One was the building of a central German authority, the other the shifting alliances and balances of power between nation-states as the arena of politics...

...In Czechoslovakia...

...Or is history contingency and uncertainty, paths not taken, accidents that, as Hugh Trevor-Roper has insisted, have at every period created unforeseen configurations that have decisively affected events ever since Cleopatra had a perfect nose...

...when does one say, it is time to put the past behind us and for Germany to be treated as an honorable equal among the nations...

...The "authoritarian" concept, however, is difficult to sustain on close examination...

...Out of the shattered unity of Europe rose the national states...

...The crucial question is one of mastering the past...

...Yet Richard von Weizsacker, the West German president, has forcefully repudiated any effort at exculpation of responsibility by historical analogies...

...Slices of territory were moved about like chess pieces...

...Taylor tartly suggested that the answer to "the German question" lay in the unity of Germany's neighbors and the continuing disunity among the Germans themselves...

...The growth of composite materials and the "revolution" in materials engineering have reduced the dependence on traditional metals and minerals...

...Not at all...

...In Asia, it is Japan that is already the paramount power...

...Bitburg was to be the conclusion of the day of atonement...

...The Nazi regime lasted only a brief twelve years, but chronological time counts for little against this searing experience...

...For this reason, the Historikerstreit that has wracked German academic life in the last few years becomes a turning point in contemporary history...

...Economic unification is relatively easy...

...As Helmuth Plessner, the German philosophical anthropologist, once wrote, national character is a tautology in FALL • 1990 • 463 Germany: The Enduring Fear which one singles out a particular continuity that may have re-emerged and calls it national character...

...For a more detailed examination of this problematic concept, see my essay, "National Character Revisited," in my collection The Winding Passage (New York: Basic Books, 1980...

...The second imprint was the Congress of Vienna of 1815, an assembly of emperors, czars, German princes, and diplomatic representatives of two hundred states, principalities, and cities, gathered under the guidance of Prince Metternich to reconstruct Europe...

...Copper was once a vital metal...

...the adoption of mitbestimmungsrecht, the provision of co-determination in heavy industry, which gives the trade union a place in management...

...Raw materials, with the crucial exception of energy, are now of lesser importance, largely because of substitution, especially technological substitution...

...The old symbols were the phoenix and the Owl of Minerva...

...The way was open for Bismarck...

...From an American point of view—and it is the view of many in Europe as well—the hope is that Germany can be enmeshed into the larger European community...

...That is a question that the changes in social structure alone cannot answer...

...Not in this instance...

...and to limit Russian expansion into Central Europe...

...But what is the identity of Germany, and will the imprints of the past still shape the future...

...and the adventure into Manchuria and China in the 1930s to obtain coal and other raw-material resources...

...In Adorno's work, there is a confusion between ideology and personality...

...After 1945, the plurality reappeared...

...With the railroads, an entirely new logistical pattern was now opened up that made the centralization of military power feasible...

...In a ballistic age, territory is no longer the basis of security...

...Germany: The Enduring Fear possibility that Gorbachev has to take into account...

...How does one even begin to look for an answer to nonrational mysteries...

...We need some new birds of passage...

...But does that make a nation more pacific...

...Caesar, mindful of his future name, feared the poet Catullus more than any general...

...A second approach, one more congenial to analysts today, is to focus on social structure: the elite and class composition of a society, the character of law and citizenship, the structure of employment and welfare, and so on...

...0 FALL • 1990 • 467...

...As I formulated it a number of years ago: the nation-state has become too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life...

...History, once the master, now waits for a clue to the future...

...We have had three Reichs, and now a Fourth...

...A more elusive concept, yet one with a stronger claim on history, is the idea of the "spirit of a nation," using spirit in the sense of Montesquieu's esprit, or the animating or defining ideals of a society, one that sums up the aspirations and images of a nation...

...the other is the Ehrenkode, the ethos of honor and heroism, the soldierly virtues of a military caste that goes back to the Teutonic knights, and which the German general staff sought to graft onto the nation...

...I have lived in the same village all my life...

...Was the Russian Revolution (October, not February) inevitable...

...Who writes the present shapes the memory of the past...

...Just as the development of the railroad transformed the topography and logistics of Germany to facilitate the military might of Prussia, so the nature of the new postindustrial order makes obsolete many of the frameworks of analysis of great power confrontations derived from traditional theories of war and power...

...Given the history of many countries, there is the further question of what is a "nation," and over how long a period of time...

...And we may hope that they can sing...

...The new strategic "resources" are technology and professional skills...

...Much of this was codified by T.W...

...The foundation for the traditional thinking was the emphasis on territory as the basis of security and a guaranteed supply of rawmaterial resources for industrial strength...

...What we are seeing is the emergence of regional blocs...

...So did people...

...In Central Europe, as in most countries, commerce and trade followed the natural transportation routes, which were principally rivers...

...As Golo Mann has written: Nazism was as German as anything could be, produced and supported by a wider cross-section of the population than any previous German system of government...

...From that perspective, the "German question," as posed by the eminent sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, in his Society and Democracy in Germany (1965), was: "Why is it that so few in Germany embraced the principles of liberal democracy...

...It may be said that World War II is finally over, and it is a historical irony that the winners are Germany and Japan...

...Prussia was forced to give up some Polish provinces and become largely a German state, straddling the North German plain, the Oder valley, and the Central Elbe region, and assuming sentry duty along the Rhine...

...The occasion was the fortieth anniver 464 • DISSENT Germany: The Enduring Fear sary of V-E Day, the day of the Allied victory in Europe...

...That is the problem...

...The United States remains a major power, but its domain is principally the North American continent, in particular as the economic unification of Canada, Mexico and the United States proceeds...

...All this was codified in the geopolitical theories of Mackinder and Admiral Mahan on the relation of land-power to sea-power, and of Karl Haushofer on the domination of the heartland as the fulcrum of control over Eurasia...

...Now, with the putative reduced threat of the Soviet Union, traditional security problems may diminish...

...Paradoxically, a wealthy and successful bourgeois Germany may be the best barrier against such apocalyptic and "reactionary modernist" movements...

...Now, forty-five years later, we once again confront "the German question...

...Thus, we are told that the Germans are obedient, compulsive, driven to order and cleanliness, yet when these guards are down, they become gross, sentimental, cruel, sensual, sadomasochistic, and so on...

...In Poland...

...And now...

...Modern Germany begins with the end of the Thirty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648...

...But will it lead to an enlargement of German national power, or will it be a step toward the older dream of a single European civilization becoming a single European political entity...

...From the viewpoint of Eastern Europe, a unified Germany raises once more the threat of revanchism, and while Herr Kohl has stated, finally, that he would respect the Oder/Neisse line with Poland, nations do not, nor can they, place their fate on the word of a single political figure...

...Thus, through the German patriarchal family and the rigid character structure, there is an alleged continuity of national character...

...There is little need here to rehearse that controversy...

...Konrad Lorenz—and it is no accident, perhaps, that he was interested in obedience—has acquainted us with the tale of the duckling that follows the bird to which it becomes bonded...

...Was Nazism rooted in German character structure or in the military ethos of the nation...

...Those societies that have a large and effective pool of trained professionals, a reservoir of advanced high technology, a market system that allows for flexibility and adaptation to the new technological innovations, and a supply of savings or access to capital command the power in the world today...

...access to copper was a logistical necessity...

...The second historical irony is that 1990 witnesses both German integration and Soviet disintegration, and each, in its different way, may become a threat to the unity of Europe...

...National character is often the quickest route of inquiry, for it draws on the stereotypes that we attach to the facile differences among peoples...

...Or are there new considerations that make these traditional themes irrelevant...

...To turn Clausewitz on his head, economics is the continuation of war by other means...

...Fr a millennium, there has been one European civilization, but since the Reformation, many nations...

...As in ethology, it may be a form of "imprinting," the memory traces that, like the virgin tracks through a forest, shape the ways peoples move, or, as in the dreamworld, the hypnagogic experiences that form the primal character of identity and repeatedly stir echoes that prompt us to listen to those voices...

...Out of this belief came one of the mightiest machines in history, the code of honor and battle, and an explicit theory of war...

...Yet the present is "another country...

...Was Hitler's accession to power an accident of Hindenberg's political blindness and von Schleicher's ineptness...

...In 1876, he nationalized the Prussian railroads, "to pull the reins of state control tightly [and] guarantee the most advantageous solution for the national tasks of the Reich...

...German representatives had been excluded from the 1984 D-Day commemoration, and that exclusion still rankled...

...and each of them lost several billion dollars...

...But the two do not cohere...

...The Soviet disintegration creates a new specter, for in Gorbachev's effort to coerce Lithuania, to resist Georgian independence, and to stabilize the situation in Armenia/Azerbaijan, he has to resort to the army...

...He answers, in the Austro-Hungarian empire...

...Will there be a new German right...

...It remains a living presence...

...One sees this depicted in the cartoons of George Grosz or the literary accounts of the excesses of the Oktoberfest...

...Bulk goods, grain, and coal moved along the waterways...

...One can think of history in less apocalyptic terms...

...How can one encapsulate a demonic evil that overflows all boundaries...

...From a historical point of view, the nation-state, which has been an adaptive political device only in the past hundred and fifty years, is increasingly dysfunctional...

...Oh, you must have moved around a lot in your lifetime...

...Germany's imperial adventures and the Drang nach Osten were impelled by similar motives...

...Yet the presence in the cemetery of the graves of forty-nine Waffen Schutzstaffel (SS) troops raised a storm...

...this is the most serious accusation that one can make against the Germans...

...And with the onset of economic nationalism, which is already evident, this will be a market characterized more and more by quotas, protection, and similar devices negotiated on a reciprocal basis.* * Because I am not sketching an economic-political model 466 • DISSENT Nationalism and Community In the next decade the fate of Germany—and Europe—will be framed by the coordinates of two axes: one is nationalism, the other a common Europe...

...Combined with myth, the taproot of emotion, it becomes the fate of a people...

...The telltale indicator is Thailand, which is emerging as the new "tiger" in Asia, shaped by Japanese capital and technology...

...World War II was, in a sense, the "last war" of the old civilization, for the huge land mass of the Soviet Union allowed the Soviet army to retreat to an interior distance, as Kutuzov had before Napoleon...

...Was destiny the foundation of the sonderweg, the "special path" to modernity that joined the powerful drive of Prussia with the German idea of kultur, to become a unique nation in the modern world...

...At the moment, all of this is unlikely, but if the Russian perestroika continues to falter, and the army becomes a more potent political force, the wende becomes a more distinct possibility...

...But given Germany's place in the center of Europe, the emerging cold war dictated that West Germany become, for the United States and the Allies, a barrier against the Soviet Union, as it had once been a barrier against France...

...But what is that Germany...

...Until Hitler, the French word for Germany was plural, les Allemagnes...

...People need strong emotional attachments (and often enemies as well), and nationalism has proved to be the most potent emotional identity for peoples...

...One "price" of the support of the army may be the slowdown in arms-control negotiations and a halt to the effort to reduce the size of the armed forces and their share of output that was slated for the civilian sector...

...The English historian A.J.P...

...The crux of the issue lies in the character of German nationalism and aspirations today...

...The Peace of Westphalia gave individual princes and cities full powers over their subjects...

...All German political leaders today accept the moral responsibility for the past...

...It lasted only twelve years, yet the question is whether it may have left a transgenetic implant, recessive for the moment but possibly emergent at some future combinatorial time...

...but a force of one's own, on which one can rely, is better...

...To illustrate a difficulty: there is the story of a fragebogen distributed in Central Europe just after the war...

...The chief purpose was to construct a delicate balance, with Austria-Hungary as the centerpiece, in which no single power could dominate the continent: to protect against the possible renewal of any French effort, after Napoleon, to begin a new conquest...

...What we can see, at its center, was a cadenced mobilization of emotions, the triumph of will, the fusion of advanced military technology with atavistic irrationalities, the effort to establish a thousandyear Reich and to enthrone a yolk across the body of Europe...

...Religion lost most of its universal character...

...New Conditions, New Thinking All these imprints, with the exception of the psychological, are mired in the past...

...The past, a poet once said, is a foreign country...

...So, the "rational" need is for new political entities to manage the larger economic scales and the smaller social scales of life...

...What is to its credit is that issues have been finally raised and directly confronted: the pus of some medieval humors has spilled out, such as Ernst Nolte's claim that Hitler's model of extermination was Stalin's "Asiatic deeds," not the German past...

...In Germany, one can date it perhaps to the 1840s and the rise of the Young Germany movement (one of whose fathers, ironically, was the German Jewish writer Ludwig Baruch, who had changed his name to Ludwig Borne) and its roots to romanticism, in that dark night of instinct (the Hymnen an die Nacht) that Novalis eulogized, rather than in bourgeois life...

...But more fatefully, few if any understood the consequences of a new technology that would entirely transform geography and the logistics of war...

...And without the realization of this fact, most of the discussions about Germany are pale echoes, and possibly wrong ones, derived from the past...

...Its main thrust is less toward Europe or even the United States than to Southeast Asia, repeating the old East Asian Co-Prosperity scheme...