Do 'the Germans' Exist?

...Since German civilization is extremely complex, with a long history and broad social, regional, religious and educational diversity, Mr...

...In other words, scientific evidence is still lacking to show not only what is typically German but even whether there is a typically German culture pattern...

...Lowie effectively refutes the popular notion that the political and social behavior of the millions of people who constitute a nation can be explained by probing their childhood experience...

...Lowie admits that no definitive study can be written today...

...He suspects that the subdivisions of Western European cultures are not identical with the political frontiers of presentday France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia and Germany, but that there are other, still uncharted lines of demarcation besides the customary, easily misleading national or linguistic boundaries...

...Lowie is aware of the danger of ascribing to "the Germans" characteristics and attitudes which can indeed be found among Germans but which can also be found among other peoples...

...Mr...

...After disregarding the many "characteristics" which people everywhere have shown in reaction to situations like those that have existed in Germany at various times, and which are therefore human rather than German, he finds that "the concept of a German culture sphere with which we have been tentatively operating turns out to be an ill-defined, if not indefinable, entity...

...The author's tentative conclusion marks a provocative departure from current assumptions...

...With constantly shifting political frontiers, no common racial characteristics, and even linguistic ties rather loose, the author can find only one trait common to "the Germans" —the use of Schriftdeutsch, the secondary and artificial language of modern literary usage, as the standard means of communication...

...No trait, no attitude is the German trait or attitude unless it is panGerman and pan-diachronically so...

...David Abrahamsen, a Columbia University psychoanalyst, attributed Nazism to the German family system in which the father ruled the household as a tyrant while the mother counted for nothing...

...Throughout his book, he keeps posing the question of whether there is such a thing as "the Germans" at all and, if so, who they are...

...The contention, then, is not that Germans are exactly like other peoples," Mr...

...Lowie concludes, "but rather that Western Europe as a whole presents a continuum—one culture area with admittedly innumerable local variations...

...Just as Geoffrey Gorer ascribed the Soviet political system to the alleged Russian custom of "swaddling" infants and the social world of the United States to American child-feeding methods, Dr...

...He therefore systematically compares his German evidence with that available in the politically nonGerman but racially and linguistically German nations of Austria and Switzerland, and also on occasion with the evidence available in other nations...

...Lowie shows on the basis of painstaking research that this was the case in only a minority of German families, and that German fathers were neither more nor less authoritarian than fathers in other Western European countries, some with and some without the experience of dictatorships in their histories...

...This seems a valuable starting point for a new understanding of Europe...

...and it is not distinctively German unless it is found only among Germans...

...He states that "no finding about the Germans is scientifically valid until we know the distribution of the phenomena in space and time...

...What he does is present his facts and interpretation in an apparently new and highly useful context...

...author, "The Return of Germany" Robert H. Lowie, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, attempts to tackle the task of understanding Germany, in his own words, "not as a partisan or a moralist, but as an objective scientist...