The identity crisis of the German left
Markovits, Andrei S.
THE YEAR 1999 will be second in significance only to 1989 in the history of postwar German politics. The transition from Bonn to Berlin as the country's capital was completed this year, and the...
...He spent the last year at the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin...
...The government's main mandate—to reduce unemployment in a significant way—has remained unfulfilled...
...Add to all this the personality clashes between Schroder and Lafontaine—both are strong-willed and vain— and a combustible atmosphere developed...
...Germany's century-old legal framework of blood lineage (jus sanguinis) as a basis of citizenship was replaced with a variant of jus soli, in which place of birth determines who will be part of the German polity...
...This legislation significantly dilutes the Greens' original proposal, which had a much more permissive view of citizenship than either the Social Democrats or the Free Democrats would allow...
...They also pointed to Bosnian Muslims' and Croats' collaboration with the Nazis...
...AHIGH UNEMPLOYMENT level has beset Germany for the past dozen years...
...Such remarks could only come from a postwar baby boomer whose age and political orientation placed him beyond any suspicion of sympathy with rightwing radicalism, let alone National Socialism...
...Unlike previous governments in the Federal Republic of Germany, this coalition came to power through a significant shift in the voters' political preferences...
...They felt more comfortable with the Bonn Republic—an "economic giant but a political dwarf...
...Although Germans gave their new government a low-key welcome—it contrasted sharply with the exuberance that accompanied Francois Mitterrand's socialist victory in France in 1981 and Tony Blair's Labour triumph in Britain in 1997—expectations were nonetheless high...
...The year marks the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fiftieth anniversary of the Federal Republic...
...It thus moved the country much closer to the Western (that is, Anglo-American and French) notion of territorially based citizenship...
...What would have been unacceptable from Helmut Kohl and Christian Democrats is commonplace under Schroder...
...When Lafontaine lectured G-7 finance ministers on the desirability of "target zones" in which currencies would be pegged to each other rather than traded freely, the Schroderists were deeply dismayed...
...So Kosovo made things more complicated for the already complex German left...
...This time, however, after sixteen years of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, voters clearly wanted something new...
...The result represents a generational change...
...Milosevic was often compared to Hitler, at least in his evil intentions...
...Finally, the Greens had to accept a painful trimming of the tax increases they proposed on sources of energy that polluted the environment...
...Pro-NATO leftists, in contrast, broke a fiftyyear tradition of post-Nazi pacifism and allied themselves with the awful Americans...
...Some blamed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) for the whole situation and some believed the KLA to be little more than a revival of the Albanian SS division that fought alongside the Nazis...
...Indeed, Chancellor Schroder declared on a number of occasions that a poet and author like Walser had license to say what politicians could not...
...Last October, author Martin Walser used a prestigious public forum to protest what he called the "moral cudgel" of Auschwitz, which, he said, is used to constrain and de18 DISSENT / Summer 1999 mean today's Germany...
...Although the European Central Bank (ECB) has replaced it as part of the process of Europe's monetary unification, Germans made sure that the ECB modelled itself after the Bundesbank...
...Until the 1998 elections, change took place through postelection jockeying by the three main parties, in particular the small, whimsical Free Democrats, who switched their support from the conservative Christian Democrats to the progressive Social Democrats and back again...
...Still, the new law transformed an essential dimension of liberal democracy in Germany by redefining political inclusion...
...The Red-Green coalition reworked tax policy to the clear advantage of middleand low-income earners...
...Those days of innocence were ended this spring, with the birth of the Berlin Republic and the beginning of the Kosovo war...
...Also, it moves the notion of "Germanness" in a new direction—away from its unhappy past and more appropriate to the unifying Europe of today, where Germany is the most powerful actor...
...Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, now minister of development with responsibility for the third world, was once known as Red Heidi...
...The Red-Green government seemed to offer real policy changes concerning economic equality, social justice, and ecology...
...German involvement in NATO's Kosovo action inevitably generated intense debate, because it is Germany's first military engagement since the fall of the Third Reich...
...The interior minister, Otto Schily, is the only sexagenarian in the cabinet...
...The transition from Bonn to Berlin as the country's capital was completed this year, and the Euro was inaugurated during a German presidency of the European Union...
...According to most economists, the small drop in unemployment that occurred this past spring was due more to specific events (like the weather) than to the government's policies...
...When Lafontaine quit, the business community was rid of the man it considered its most potent foe...
...DISSENT / Summer 1999 19...
...Kosovo represents an unexpectedly early wake-up call to new and complex realities that the German left can no longer avoid...
...All this has happened on the watch of the first national "Red-Green" (Social DemocraticGreen Party) governing coalition...
...World War II also served to justify supporters of NATO...
...It also marks NATO's fiftieth birthday, which took place during its first shooting war—a war that has included the first German military action since the fall of Nazism...
...The record so far is mixed, but this much is sure: after ten months in power, the German left is in the midst of its most profound identity crisis since 1968...
...But irritation was also felt by other elements of the German public (including some Social Democrats), for whom price stability and zero inflation were higher priorities than fighting unemployment...
...The cabinet is a who's who of '68ers...
...A founder of the Greens (although now an SPDer), he was once the main defense attorney for Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, Germany's most notorious urban guerillas...
...Germany's history cast its long shadow on the Red-Green coalition from its first day in office...
...Their call to close all nineteen German nuclear power plants by 2002 was tabled for an indefinite period...
...Except for redefining citizenship, it has not fulfilled its promises of social and ecological reform...
...Here, too, this government's record has not yet lived up to its commitments...
...This squared with Schroder's repeated assertions that his government would project a newly confident sense of German national identity...
...Most unions, in turn, bemoaned Lafontaine's departure and saw it as a clear victory for capital...
...There was the usual dose of anti-Americanism as well, but this time, in contrast to the Gulf War, antiwar activists could ascribe blame directly to Germany—which, they claimed, in its desire to dismantle a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia yet again, as the Nazis did in 1941, had bamboozled America into fighting a proxy war...
...Alas, what was supposed to be a dynamic combination DISSENT / Summer 1999 17 of the programmatic and the pragmatic degenerated into bickering, leading finally to Lafontaine's exit...
...Lafontaine attacked the Bundesbank, one of postwar Germany's most revered institutions, for its tight monetary policy and stringent interestrate controls (both aimed to prevent the slightest inflation...
...Opponents of participation often recalled Germany's heinous crimes against the Serbs during World War II...
...Suddenly, anti-NATO leftists found themselves on the same side as Germany's neo-Nazis and other rightwingers who supported the Serbs...
...Champagne bottles popped open at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the DAX—Germany's Dow Jones Index—shot up...
...Unemployment was the main reason voters turned to the Social Democrats, who presented an image of compassion and competence, embodied respectively by Lafontaine and Schroder...
...The German New Left's identity was defined by ecological concerns and inclusive politics...
...Nobody from the new government joined Ignaz Bubis, head of the German Jewish community, in objecting to these remarks...
...ANDREI S. MARKOVITS is a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, as well as in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor...
...It was, they insisted, the duty of the grandchildren of the perpetrators of the Holocaust to stop genocidal ethnic cleansing...
...Ironically, thirtynineyear-old Andrea Fischer, a Green minister in charge of health, is the sole cabinet member who generationally has no connection with 1960s leftism...
...Herta DaeublerGmelin, minister of justice, and Walter Riester, minister of labor, came out of 1960s leftism, as did Rudolf Scharping, defense minister, and Oskar Lafontaine, who was the government's finance minister until his unexpected resignation in the spring...
...All of this caused no major friction between the more centrist Schroderists and the more radical Lafontainians...
...This new situation is particularly evident when it comes to actions in Kosovo...
...Problems arose when the Lafontainians argued for more radical economic reform...
...IT IS IN the area of social justice that the Red-Green government won its most impressive victory, when it passed a new citizenship law that redefines what it means to be German...
...THE IDENTITY of the Social Democratic ("old") left has always been tied to promotion of economic and social equality...
...Lafontaine's constant calls for a more permissive monetary policy and lower interest rates irked German business...
...It is now about 11 percent (4.5 million people) and reaches double that figure in parts of former East Germany...
...The government began on an egalitarian roll: it restored health benefits and unemployment compensation packages, which Kohl had begun to curtail (albeit gradually by American standards...
...The Greens' demands for ecological reforms were scuttled barely four months into the new government's term...
...Defense Minister Scharping and foreign minister Fischer repeatedly invoked the memory of Auschwitz and the Nazi death camps in their defense of the war...
...Soon after this, their attempt to persuade France to shut down its nuclear plants along the border touched off an ugly scene of old-style nationalism when German Green Daniel CohnBendit (of Paris '68 fame), running on the French Green ticket in European parliamentary elections as part of the first attempt at a cross-border candidacy, was jeered by French workers who saw in the German Greens' ecological concerns a threat to their jobs...
...Chancellor Gerhard Schroder once headed the "Jusos," the radical young socialist wing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD...
...For fifty years, the Bonn Republic delegated power and responsibilities to the French or to the Americans...
...Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer comes from Frankfurt's street-fighting anarcho-socialist "Sponti" scene...
...If a Red-Green government cannot make a significant dent in the unemployment rate by the end of its term in 2002, it will have betrayed the most consistent tenet of progressive politics...
...Finally, both lefts—old and new—still have difficulties with Germany's power...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
