The Routledge Handbook of German Politics & Culture

Sarah Colvin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317600145
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia tedesca

The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture offers a wide-ranging and authoritative account of Germany in the 21st century. It gathers the expertise of internationally leading scholars of German culture, politics, and society to explore and explain

• historical pathways to contemporary Germany
• the current 'Berlin Republic'
• society and diversity
• Germany and Europe
• Germany and the world.

This is an essential resource for students, researchers, and all those looking to understand contemporary German politics and culture.

Part I

Pathways to contemporary Germany

1

The history of a European nation

Ute Frevert

Translation: Mark Taplin

What is a European nation?

This chapter’s title might come as a surprise, and it does raise some questions. What is a European nation? What makes contemporary Germany into one? And how far back does the concept of a ‘European nation’ go, in the German case?

We could look for easy answers. A European nation is a nation in Europe, and geography tells us that Germany is placed firmly in the centre of the European continent. We could go on to write contemporary German history as one that starts at the end of World War II, with the division of the continent and the nation into two antagonistic parts. And we could finish with reunification and its aftermath, using Willy Brandt’s famous quote of 10 November 1989 as a leitmotiv: ‘Jetzt wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört’ (what belongs together will now grow together). We could even present reunified Germany as a model or case study for what has happened in Europe at large: East and West moving towards each other and striving to overcome the rift created by the Iron Curtain during the Cold War period.

But that is not how the history of Germany as a European nation will be told here. For Germany to be called a European nation demands more than geographical evidence: it calls for a deeper and more complex understanding of what Europe actually means. Is there anything like a common understanding of a nation’s Europeanness? Has Europe been a national point of reference, and if so, in what way? Has it been used as a historical or political argument, in a strategic or legitimising sense? And have there been attempts to turn Europe into more than an argument by, for example, fostering institutional ties on a decidedly European level? Has Europe been a realm of experience (Koselleck 1989), and has it set the horizon of expectations for German citizens?

Focusing on contemporary Germany, all these questions might easily be answered in the affirmative: yes, today the Federal Republic does consider itself part of a European project defined in political, economic, and cultural terms; yes, politicians and public opinion constantly refer to Europe as a frame of reference and as an argument; yes, there are strong institutional ties on all levels and in many spheres, ranging from student exchanges and city twinning arrangements to financial policies, a common currency, and infrastructural support. Much of this is channelled through the organising power of the European Union, which has developed into a supranational structure integrating close to 30 European nation states. While the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) was one of six founding members of the EU’s forerunner, the European Economic Community (EEC), it is now widely seen as the Union’s most important and powerful member state, at least when it comes to economic and financial issues.

That said, contemporary Germany appears as a clear case – even a showcase – of a European nation. As early as 1949, the preamble to the Basic Law (Germany’s constitution) stated that the German people not only wished to preserve (or rather, regain) national and state unity, but also strove to support world peace as a ‘gleichberechtigtes Glied in einem vereinten Europa’ (an equal member of a unified Europe). Germany’s new postwar identity and politics were thus clearly situated in a European context. In 1992 parliament added a clause that confirmed the Federal Republic’s status as a member state (Bundesstaat) of the European Union. Taking a similar, though semantically restricted stance, a Supreme Court judgment from 2009 saw the Basic Law as authorising policies to contribute to and develop a European association of states (Staatenverbund).¹ And when asked about their country’s Europeanness, German citizens overwhelmingly testify to their affinity for Europe. In an opinion poll published in December 2013, 84 per cent of Germans answered the question ‘Is your country today European or not European?’ in the affirmative, compared with 59 per cent in France and just 40 per cent in the UK.²

History and memory

How do we explain the striking attachment to Europe – the European identity, even – of the Germans and of Germany today? What experiences lie behind it, what aspirations are linked to it, and what interpretations of history have fed into it? I argue that history is of key importance in helping us to understand Germany’s relationship with Europe. By history, I mean not so much the past per se as the ways in which it is interpreted. Two examples will serve to illustrate the point.

Example 1: Commemorating the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig

On 18 October 2013, a ceremony was held in Leipzig to commemorate the bloody battle fought out near the city, over three days, between the army of Napoleon and his allies and their opponents exactly 200 years earlier. In Napoleon’s ranks were not just Frenchmen but soldiers from Italy and the Confederation of the Rhine, made up of various German states, while the opposing forces included Russians, Prussians, Austrians, and Swedes. In total, almost 600,000 men took part in the engagement, in which around one soldier in six was either killed or wounded. The battle continued to be remembered not just because of its gigantic scale, but because of its outcome – a decisive defeat for the French Emperor, halting his triumphal progress – which assured it a prominent place in the European history books. In Germany, it represented the culmination of the so-called wars of liberation, which in the 19th century came to be seen as an important factor in the process of German nation-building. Veterans’ associations celebrated its anniversary and boasted of their contribution to national unification. At the start of the battle, Prussia had confronted Bavaria and Saxony as enemies, yet by the end the Saxons and Bavarians, too, had gone over to the coalition against Napoleon.

The events of 1813 seemed to prefigure the national unification eventually achieved following the victories at Wissembourg and Sedan in 1870. The date was commemorated as a ‘feast day’ on which – as the propagandist Ernst Moritz Arndt proposed as early as 1814 – all citizens would assemble for a ‘großes teutsches Volksfest’ (great festival of the German people) in honour of the ‘erste große Gemeinsame, das uns allen angehört’ (first great collective event to which all of us can lay claim). Alongside this national festival, which was to become ‘ein starkes und mächtiges Bindungsmittel aller Teutschen’ (a strong and powerful unifier of all Germans), Arndt planned a national ‘Ehrendenkmal’ (memorial) near Leipzig, which he envisaged as ‘groß und herrlich’ (large and magnificent), ‘wie ein Koloß, eine Pyramide, ein Dom in Köln’ (like a colossus, a pyramid, or Cologne cathedral) (Arndt 1814: 8–9, 18, 20–1).

But it took time for the colossus to become a reality; its official opening was delayed until the 100th anniversary of the battle, in 1913. At 91 metres high, the monument towered over the flat surrounding countryside and was visible from miles around. It may have been built using modern materials (concrete), but its iconographic scheme was highly traditional. Guarding the entrance was a supersized image of the archangel Michael, patron saint of all soldiers. The circular interior housed a crypt, which served as a symbolic tomb for the fallen and contained four statues, each almost 10 metres high: the Totenwächter (Guards of the Dead) representing the four virtues of the German people during the wars of liberation, namely courage, faith, national vigour, and self-sacrifice. The monument was financed through private donations; neither the state of Saxony nor the German Empire (nor the Kaiser himself) was a major contributor. Instead, a patriotic association drummed up support by mobilising the network of sports clubs, singing clubs, shooting clubs, and veterans’ associations scattered across Germany. It was, therefore – just as Arndt had intended – an initiative from below, a ‘volkstümliche That’ (act of the people) through which donors affirmed the ‘Geburtstag des deutschen Volkes’ (birthday of the German people) in the ‘Volkskrieg’ (people’s war) against Napoleon (Spitzner 1897: 12–13, 33). The project can be seen as a manifestation not just of bourgeois self-confidence, but of the rampant nationalism to be found throughout Europe during this period. The flip side of pride in one’s own ‘national vigour’ was contempt for other nations, especially the French. Even former allies, whose crowned heads attended the opening ceremony in 1913, found themselves sidelined in the iconography for this ‘purely German’ monument (Poser 2003).

By 2013 all trace of this nationalist reading of history had vanished. This time the celebration was for a double anniversary, commemorating both the battle of 1813 and the unveiling of the memorial 100 years later. And it was organised with a critical eye to history. For many decades, this monumental colossus had been commandeered for national or nationalist purposes. During the Nazi period, huge parades had been staged there, while later, under the German Democratic Republic (GDR), it was the place where new recruits to the East German army (NVA) were sworn in and initiated into the tradition of brotherhood in arms with the Soviet Union (Bauer 1988: 57–9; Johnson 2008: 37–8). Now, however, the dominant theme was European unity. Even back in the 1990s, the director of the Leipzig historical museum (Stadtgeschichtliches Museum) had proposed that it take its place in a ‘Verbund von Friedensdenkmalen’ (chain of peace memorials) extending from Spain (Guernica) to Russia (Stalingrad). The symbols that commemorated and bore witness to wars waged within Europe were to be reconstituted as monuments to peace, as befitted the self-image of the new Europe, united within the European Union, as a zone of peace. In this context, the city fathers and mothers of Leipzig were able to throw a party for the whole of Europe, with the ‘Ball of the Nations’ as its climax. There were performances by European choirs and a re-enactment of the battle of 1813 by 6,000 people from both Germany and other countries; services of reconciliation were held in the churches, while young people from 11 European nations read out a message of peace. In his speech for the occasion, the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, described the monument as a European place of memory, and expressed delight at the fact that ‘fortunately, we in Europe have managed to overcome the ultranationalist mentality’ expressed in its original design (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 2013; Keller 2012).³

Example 2: World War I

Although the phrase ‘ultranationalist mentality’ is perhaps too strong and does not fully reflect the political complexity of the original Leipzig ceremony in October 1913, it is understandable that today people should want to link the event to the world war that broke out only a few months later. However, those present for the unveiling of the colossus could not have known that this was taking place ‘am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges’ (on the eve of the First World War), as the President of the European Parliament put it. It was possible to make such connections only in hindsight – and even then there has been an excessive tendency to see outcomes as preordained. In 1913–14 the people of Europe were not, in fact, clamouring for a new war or doing all they could to bring one about. Every country had its nationalist fanatics, there was the odd journalist ranting on about war as a cure for decadence and feminisation, and some young students were anxious to prove their manhood in the heat of battle, but these groups did not set the tone for society at large. As late as July 1914, anti-war demonstrations in Germany and France were attended by many hundreds of thousands of people. In the following month, we find evidence of a surge of enthusiasm for the war, but the phenomenon seems to have been confined largely to the cities – and even there it did not last long (Verhey 2000; Ziemann 2006). It was this that led the warring governments to set up propaganda departments, which inundated citizens with an unprecedented stream of images and texts. The propaganda they produced, in which the enemy was painted in the blackest colours, seems to have been most effective on the homefront. Many serving soldiers, by contrast, tended to dismiss such caricatures, despite – or, indeed, because of – the direct contact they had had with the enemy (Schmidt 2006; Lipp 2003; Reimann 2000: 178ff.).

Experiences of and discourses about the war also played a crucial political role, especially once the great slaughter had come to an end. The Weimar Republic experienced political fragmentation and social militarisation in which the memory of the war – and the losses suffered by Germany as a consequence – acted as a driving force. Before the war, Germans had felt surrounded by enemies jealous of their country’s success; after 1918, this feeling turned into a cast-iron certainty. The Treaty of Versailles, which labelled Germany as solely to blame for the war and used this to justify the imposition of massive reparations, was regarded as shameful victors’ justice by politicians of all stripes. The country’s political ostracisation, in the form of exclusion from international organisations (the League of Nations, academic associations, etc.) and events such as the Olympic Games, was also universally resented. The humiliating occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops in 1923 served only to reinforce the sense that Germany was being isolated and treated like a pariah. In the first half of the 1920s, the country was further from being a ‘European nation’ than at any other time.

Fast-forward to 2014, when a huge round of commemorations was scheduled to mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the war. Events were planned in almost all European countries, not just in capital cities and at major battlefields but at a local level, in both towns and rural districts. Even before the ceremonies had got underway, the memory of the war was being invoked for the sake of domestic political interests. In November 2013, France’s embattled and much-criticised President, François Hollande, used a formal address in honour of the victims of the world war to call on his compatriots to come together. Echoing the appeal in 1914 to the union sacrée of the French people, transcending political, social, and religious differences, Hollande emphasised the need for national solidarity, even though in 2014 the battles to be fought and won were economic rather than military. By remembering their victory in the world war, the French people could gain the self-confidence they desperately needed to overcome their current economic plight (Hollande 2013).

However, Hollande’s choice of battle imagery was far from apposite. International economic competition, unlike war, is not about shedding blood or about weakening or even destroying one’s opponent. Hollande also risked creating the impression that once again France saw its enemy as lying east of the Rhine, in the economic superpower that is Germany – a country with which, moreover, it is allied within Europe. The French President sought at once to dispel this impression, repeatedly stressing his country’s commitment to the project of European unification and to its close relationship ‘with our German friends’. What is more, he invited the German Federal President to Paris for 3 August 2014, the 100th anniversary of the start of the war.

In doing so, Hollande was continuing a political tradition that had begun in the 1980s. In September 1984, Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President François Mittérand made a joint visit to the battlefields of World War I. For the first time, a French president set foot in a German military cemetery and, together with the German Chancellor, laid a wreath in memory of the dead. Afterwards they travelled together to the ossuary at Douamont, home to the mortal remains of 130,000 fallen soldiers of different nationalities. When the Marseillaise was played, Mittérrand suddenly took Kohl’s hand. There could be no more powerful way of sending out the message, ‘We are reconciled. We have come to an understanding. We are friends’.⁴

While politicians committed themselves to reconciliation, mutual understanding, and friendship over the graves of the fallen, academics worked on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART I Pathways to contemporary Germany
• PART II The Berlin Republic
• PART III Society and diversity
• PART IV Germany and Europe
• PART V Germany and the world
• Index