Andre Markovits and Phillip Gorski's The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond
Birnbaum, Norman
THE GERMAN LEFT: RED, GREEN AND BEYOND, by Andre Markovits and Phillip Gorski. Oxford University Press, 1993. 393 pp. $55, cloth; $16.95, paper. This book traces the development of the...
...How German, the authors insist, are the Greens...
...The Greens entered Parliament for the first time in 1983, increased their representation in 1987, but the West German Greens failed to clear the 5 percent barrier to representation in 1990...
...Authoritarian protest, mobilizing resentment of cosmopolitan elites and xenophobia, threatens the Christian-socialist compromise of postwar Europe...
...It also broke with its antimilitarism and accepted German membership in NATO...
...A new generation thought the Social Democrats far too stolid...
...The authors might have been more emphatic in noting that the Greens' behavior falsified the canard that a West German "left" was an objective accomplice of Stalinism...
...A social contract gave workers social benefits and job security, and through the unions and the party, the labor force became partners in the management of market and state...
...This book traces the development of the German left since 1945, concentrating on what was West Germany...
...The authors dislike Green criticism of Israel, but the Greens are not storm troopers in blue jeans...
...By setting the Greens in their national context, they also cast light on German history as a whole...
...The reformers have now won, and in the general disenchantment with unification, the Greens' antinational attitudes are hardly repugnant to a public that wishes to hear nothing about great new national tasks...
...Germany's political and social consensus rested on a continuous increase in precisely the sorts of material production the Greens wish to reconsider...
...When Willy Brandt took as his theme "Let us dare more democracy," he did so from inSUMMER • 1995 • 425 Books ner conviction, but he was also pushed by the young...
...The authors, of course, can be disputed...
...Brandt's effort to bring the youth movement into the party was partly successful, and by the time he left office in 1974, it had apparently subsided...
...Germany's hyperindustrialization was killing its forests, and at one point the chemical industry succeeded in setting the Rhine afire...
...Many in the intelligentsia thought the party the major repository of democratic tradition in Germany...
...Until the mid-sixties, the left in the Federal Republic considered the Social Democrats central...
...The projects with which it set the agenda of German society during its years in power (1969-1982) are either out of date or no longer exclusively its own...
...The authors are right: the Greens' pacifism is their way of coping with the horrible burden of German history...
...As for the "power" the authors, comfortably installed in their academic chairs, call upon Germans to exercise, perhaps the Greens, far from being naive, are custodians of the national conscience...
...By making the Green challenge the focus of their analysis, they have written a history of recent German social democracy that does justice to its inner contradictions and problems...
...Drawing upon their experience in the social movements of the sixties, they formed the Green party...
...Those seeking socialism thought its working-class traditions (and adherents) indispensable...
...They consider themselves both postcapitalist and postsocialist The question that perplexes the authors is: who are democratic socialism's heirs, and what are their ideas...
...Rather schematically, the authors' argument follows...
...The Greens returned to Parliament in 1994 as the third largest party and have done equally well in state and local elections since...
...Perhaps they should be given credit for their efforts to find, in a very changed world, new definitions of "power...
...In the end, they looked to themselves...
...Their critique of productivism, of quantitative measures of welfare, seems less compelling when welfarist capitalism finds it difficult to distribute its goods...
...They are the children and grandchildren of Hitler's majorities...
...They have little to say to Germans threatened by the transfer of production to nations with far lower wages...
...The Greens argue that as a rich nation Germany should contribute more to the development of the impoverished nations...
...Their 1990 campaign isolated them, and they were isolated even more by public disdain for their perennial doctrinal quarrels...
...Meanwhile, a new political formation has arisen...
...Put differently, the authors enable us to look anew at the debate on modernity...
...In 1959, at its celebrated Bad Godesberg congress, the party formally acknowledged what it had been doing and declared itself a moderately reformist formation, responsible to the nation as a whole and not just to the working class...
...There is enough in the book to argue about, but the authors have written a major work of interpretive history...
...their obdurate internationalism, their opposition to German militarism even in the uniform NATO, were efforts to expunge guilt...
...A socialist reconstruction of German society was impossible, but a very large measure of social decency and political democratization were institutionalized...
...Helmut Schmidt, Brandt's successor, combined didactic patriarchalism and technocratic certainty...
...Environmental issues were real enough for them, but also had metaphoric functions...
...Not the least of its merits is the demonstration that Germany is not a society struggling with backwardness but a very new cultural and social formation...
...The Greens, too, had their own views of the German communist state...
...That won him the respect of the managers and the loyalty of the old working class but impelled the sixties generation to look elsewhere...
...That partnership relegated utopian hopes to the past (or the indefinite future), and engendered bureaucratized behavior and complacency...
...They entered national government in 1966, as junior partners to the Christian Democrats, and Willy Brandt became chancellor in 1969...
...When the denim-clad Greens made their tumultuous entrance into Parliament in 1983, many older members from the established parties were near-apoplectic...
...Much of the German right accepts the welfare state, and the practice of parliamentary democracy has at last been domesticated east of the Rhine...
...The Greens drew, the authors suggest, upon German legacies...
...Of course, they were integrated in society—but they also shaped it...
...That was largely the work of a Social Democratic party that has recently stumbled over its own triumphs...
...They consider the fate of socialist tradition in a period in which the industrial working class constitutes a declining segment of the labor force...
...But appearances were deceptive and in fact, the sixties generation had created the ideological and organizational preconditions for the emergence of the Greens...
...q SUMMER • 1995 • 427...
...They criticize the Greens (and many Social Democrats) for opposing the Gulf War and for their skepticism about using German "power" in the world...
...They reviled its repressiveness and strenuously supported the dissidents who later surfaced as the New Forum movement of the fall of 1989...
...Whether Green proposals for new standards of economic and social productivity can provide answers to a crisis that has put the Social Democrats on the defensive is a very open question...
...I have departed, I see, from summary to reflecting on the issues evoked by the authors—a tribute to the strengths of a very good book...
...The book uses the story of the rise of the Greens to reflect the postwar course of the left as a whole, but concentrates on the period that began with the rise of a large extraparliamentary opposition in the mid-sixties...
...They are, sometimes, tactless sentimentalists...
...Suppose that the Gulf War was not a sublime venture on behalf of international order but a sordid application of a first principle of American foreign policy, that the ruling house of Saudi Arabia (and our access to cheap oil) must be preserved...
...The Greens are the offspring of a German left once entirely dominated by the Social Democrats...
...The task of politics was to reclaim a lost human autonomy...
...The main difficulty of democratic socialism in Germany, the authors argue, is the success of a welfarist version of capitalist democracy in the Federal Republic...
...The welfare state has been widely accepted, and calls to defend it are hardly likely to evoke revolutionary energies...
...Indeed, angry provincialism, enraged corporatism and obstinate localism are the new forces in West European politics, and they are attached not to democratic socialism but to traditions of social fascism (Haider in Austria, Le Pen in France, Fini in Italy...
...The Social Democrats' support of the war in Vietnam, however tepid, repelled the young...
...From the very beginning of the postwar period, the Social Democrats governed large cities and populous states...
...They argued that industrial capitalism had destroyed what liberalism valued so highly, the separation of public and private spheres...
...It was former President Von Weizsacker, a veteran of the war and the son of a prominent collaborator of the Nazis, who declared that the world was not eager to see yet more demonstrations of German military prowess...
...Citizens' rights were prominent in their project, as were feminism and a countercultural disdain for the insufferable stuffiness of life in Germany...
...They are now seen as integrated in the political system, as potential coalition partners of not only the Social Democrats but even of the conservative Christian Democrats...
...Its themes were a rejection of the bureaucratic centralism and the consumerism of West German politics...
...Above all, the sixties generation rejected the large elements of authoritarianism in German life...
...Once in Parliament (and in city and state governments) they had to decide whether they were a party of fundamental opposition to industrial capitalism or new sorts of reformists, willing to compromise with others to make some progress toward their ultimate goals...
...The Greens were so antinationalist, so critical of consumerist capitalism, that they were surprised that a large majority of East Germans wanted nothing better than to join the Federal Republic...
...The youth movement of the earlier part of the century expressed romantic ideas of the sacredness of nature...
...The Greens transformed these notions into a systematic critique of quantitative criteria of progress, a search for qualitative concepts of public and private goods...
...The German far right has done poorly in recent elections, but has succeeded in moving the political spectrum toward its own concerns—hatred of multiculturalism and immigration...
...Nuclear power plants were so many time bombs...
...426 • DISSENT Books The authors use their narrative to confront issues far larger than the rise, fall, and revival of the Greens...
...The Greens have reached the threshold of acceptability just as that consensus is disintegrating...
...The Greens supposed that they could supersede the Social Democrats as the party of new ideas, but it is possible that both may be submerged as bearers of a tradition of the Enlightenment that ordinary Europeans think they cannot afford...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
