The underlying triune thesis of this book is that nonconformity, dissent, opposition, and resistance make a social and political difference, that their effectiveness is affected by the nature of the political system in which they emerge, and that, in the three incarnations of Germany between 1933 and 1990, these forms of noncompliance and obstruction, even when unsuccessful (as in the case of the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944) had a direct or indirect impact on the political culture, assumptions, expectations, or behaviors of Germans, whether in the short term or in the long term. It may seem strange at first sight to construe nonconformity as a form of obstruction. But, in the project to define, shape, and maintain the mindset of a people, nonconformity represents a refusal to accept the dominant or prescribed mindset.
At the national identity level, conformity is about more than just speaking the same language or accepting certain events in the past as important for the nation. National identity also involves adherence to certain traditions, norms, and social expectations. In other words, national identity always involves conformity. Every stable society endeavors to socialize its citizens, already from childhood, to the norms appropriate to the given society, typically conveying the message that certain values are to be prized over others. Thus, in a society where freedom is given the highest value, such as the United States, talk about equality, especially equality for same-sex couples, is contested and considered by conservatives to be outside the norm (or perhaps “left-wing”), while in, let us say, Stalin-era Russia—to take an extreme example—talk of thinking for oneself or, for that matter, of desiring to travel could result in one’s arrest and incarceration in the gulag. For purposes of this book, I shall distinguish between nonconformity, deviance , dissent or dissidence, opposition, and resistance. To begin with the second in this list, by deviant, following the Cambridge Dictionary, I shall mean “not usual and … generally considered to be unacceptable,”1 and not chosen for any social or political reason. By dissent or dissidence, I shall mean the conscious embrace of views or engagement in actions in opposition either to the government or to society at large, chosen for some higher social or political reason. By nonconformity , basing my definition once again on that offered by the Cambridge Dictionary, I shall mean “the quality of thinking and behaving in a way that is different from [the way most] other people” think and behave.2 Thus, nonconformity , according to this definition, embraces not only both deviance and dissent , but also creative originality (as in the arts), the simple refusal to accept what an individual considers arbitrary idiocy, mere thinking for oneself rather than following the crowd (thus deciding on one’s own criteria for decision-making), seeing decisions to be made where others do not, and other forms of independence. A nonconformist, thus, is a free person, not in the sense of freedom to conform but in a more fundamental sense. But, by the same virtue, a nonconformist, at least in the sense of dissidence, chooses to stand aside from the modal understanding of a society’s identity and, as such, is implicitly, if not explicitly, threatening to the given regime’s identity project. For any regime, whether an authoritarian regime or a democratic regime, whatever other freedoms may be recognized, there is always an endorsement of the freedom to conform.
Two more terms remain to be defined: opposition and resistance . Thomas Ammer distinguishes between these two, suggesting that the criterion for distinguishing between them is their relationship to the law. Thus, according to Ammer, opposition (Opposition ) should be understood as consisting of more or less legal activity, while resistance (Widerstand) involves illegal activity.3 I shall, however, use these terms as they are defined in the Cambridge Dictionary. Here one finds opposition defined as “disagreement with something, often by speaking or fighting against it, or (esp. in politics) the people or group who are not in power.”4 By contrast, resistance is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as “a situation in which people or organizations fight against something or refuse to accept [it].”5 Thus, resistance necessarily entails fighting, while opposition may or may not. Further, resistance typically involves the aspiration either to prevent the government from pursuing policies of highest priority to the party in power, or to overthrow the government or at least remove its chief officeholders. Or, to put it differently, all resistance involves opposition, but not all opposition involves resistance.
I have chosen, in this book, to focus on four battlegrounds (in the Third Reich five, adding race) where the regime has dictated norms for conformity and where national identity has been contested: the state’s concept of what Germanness means or should mean, religion and religious instruction in the schools, understandings of sexuality (can a gay or lesbian be considered a “good” German? what is the significance of abortion for the body politic?), and the arts (especially painting and music, where since the 1920s new idioms such as atonalism in music or abstract art have challenged people’s ways of relating to art and perhaps also to reality). The differences over these policy spheres became visible in the years of the Hohenzollern empire, flared in the Weimar years, continued in the Third Reich, were muffled in the German Democratic Republic, and continued in new forms in the years of the Federal Republic, including where the presence of religious symbols in the schools and the legal status of homosexuality have been concerned. On the face of it, the debates seemed sometimes to pit “modern” or “modernist” views against “traditional” ways of thinking, but the reality has often been more complex.
In Germany, as elsewhere, collective identity is variously shaped or affected or challenged by state conditioning (typically but not exclusively through the schools), repression (e.g., of religious minorities or forms of art of which the Nazis disapproved), programs of control (e.g., of history textbooks), popular protest (building collective self-confidence and affirming values different from those espoused by the regime), resistance, and inevitably and most obviously also regime change. The pressures and policy fronts to be discussed herein relate, as already mentioned, to appropriate gender/sexual behavior, the place of religion in the schools and in society, control of culture (largely a theme for the Nazi era and the German Democratic Republic), and issues related to nation and race—all of which impinge directly on national or regional identity; and of course conformity to Bavarian social norms, for example, would not necessarily signal integration in Hanover or Hamburg. Every state, every regime in the world is interested in how its citizens think and behave and seeks, at least to some extent, to shape the political culture, values, and identity of its citizens. The United States wants its citizens to prize freedom (which for some Americans means the freedom to own and carry guns). Norway wants its citizens to value equality in the first place even to the extent of keeping salary differences within a single organization within a relatively narrow range. Communist regimes, in their heyday, wanted their citizens to be convinced that a one-party regime ruled by a communist party was intrinsically better than any multiparty system, since—it was argued—a multiparty system could allow parties working against the interest of working people to gain advantage. But systems change and, when system change brings in tow changes in the values which the outgoing regime in question wished to promote, then the incoming regime will inevitably seek to reshape the political culture and values of its citizens, perhaps modestly, perhaps radically, and to reconstruct the identity of its citizens, so that they see themselve...