The German Question

Dirk Verheyen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974137
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 'German Question, ' long a subject of debate, is considered here at the close of a turbulent century, after Germany's defeat in two world wars, the Weimar failure and Nazi disaster, Cold War division, and the nation's unexpected recent reunification. This book systematically explores the issue in terms of its four central dimensions: Germany's identity, national unity, power, and role in world politics. Ambitious in conception and meticulous in execution, Dirk Verheyen's wide-ranging analysis incorporates historical and geopolitical considerations in an intellectually rigorous yet accessible discussion.

1
A Troubled Identity and a Difficult Fatherland

Before World War II, Charles de Gaulle once depicted Germany as “a sublime but glaucous sea where the fisherman’s net hauls up monsters and treasures.”¹ The purpose of this chapter is to begin our examination of the German Question by addressing a basic question. What has made Germany “Germany”? In the final analysis, many have argued that this is a question about German culture, and perhaps more specifically about the German Weltanschauung, or worldview (if such a thing exists), and German identity.

Any attempt to describe purportedly dominant facets of German identity immediately runs into a number of difficult problems, however. First, there is the question of what is German and what is Germany. It is the kind of question that historically evokes strong feelings of one kind or another. Thus the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once argued that “[i]t is characteristic of the Germans that one is seldom wholly wrong about them. The German soul has corridors and interconnecting corridors in it, there are caves, hiding-places, dungeons in it; its disorder possesses much of the fascinating and mysterious; the German is acquainted with the hidden paths to chaos….” The poet Heinrich Heine would even suffer insomnia on account of his native land: “When I think of Germany in the night, I am robbed of my sleep!”² Closer consideration will show that the answers to this inevitably controversial question are by no means obvious. Charles E. McClelland and Steven P. Scher argue, for example, that “[a]nswers to the question ‘What is German?’ are at least as complex as those to the question ‘What is culture?’” They conclude that “[a]ny closer knowledge of the modern political and social history of the German-speaking peoples must lead to serious doubts whether one can make any binding and continuous statements about ‘the Germans’ or their ‘character’.”³ Perhaps it all merely confirms Goethe’s lament: “The Germans make everything difficult, both for themselves and for everyone else.”⁴ The question is not only relevant to the divided Germany of the postwar era. It is a question of identity that has a long historical legacy, as we shall see presently.

Second, there is the issue of profound historical discontinuity in the German experience, and its consequences for German identity. Richard Löwenthal has noted “a very special lack of chronological continuity, geographic unity and intellectual form and coherence.” He notes the crucial discontinuity of both state and nation in the German historical experience and concludes that “[t]his lack of unity across time, in space, and in the mind is in fact the central problem—or if one wishes, the central secret—of German history.”⁵

Third, one may raise some questions about the quality and usefulness of some discussions of German cultural and political identity. Any cultural analysis runs the risk of careless overgeneralization and exaggeration. But in the German case there is the additional problem that much of the cultural material was written in an attempt to find answers to the “German Problem” or “German Question.” Why has Germany been so involved in warfare, and why was a liberal-democratic political order unable to emerge indigenously? These two questions have often been connected, and the answers have frequently been sought in sociocultural factors. There has been a particular predilection for “national character” explanations, with the Germans as patients in need of a cure.⁶ Many of such national character analyses have focused on Nazism and World War II, and the pressures and emotions of war often had a clearly negative impact on their quality. The result frequently was a constantly reinforced German stereotype.⁷

Perhaps the importance of such stereotyping lies more in its frequency and persistence than in its definitive accuracy.⁸ Its utility for an understanding of the German Question must be considered strictly limited, however. It tends to stress “negative” character traits like arrogance, aggressiveness, authoritarianism, mindless discipline and obedience, and ideological extremism, at the expense of “positive” ones like artistic creativity, diligence (Fleiß), orderliness, thoroughness, or loyalty.⁹ It often involves generalization across politically, culturally, socially, and economically very dynamic periods of history, thereby losing a much-needed sense of nuance. Yet equally significantly from a social-psychological point of view, the world’s perception and conception of the Germans and Germany have undergone considerable historical evolution, from an image of Germans as poets, dreamers, and peasants in the days of Madame de Staël’s De VAllemagne (1810), to a succession of negative images, ranging from the “Huns” of World War I and the unredeemable Nazi barbarians of World War II, to a post-1945 foreign image of the Germans that often mixes elements of (potential) neo-Nazism, pacifist neutralism, and/or domineering but efficient capitalism, depending on the observer’s particular inclinations.

It is certainly appropriate to keep in mind Hermann Eich’s insistence that “[o]ne will come nearer to a just assessment of a nation by recognising its contradictory nature rather than by branding it wholly black or wholly white.”¹⁰ Or, as Willy Hellpach once suggested in Der deutsche Charakter, “[e]very nation is in a perpetual state of transformation.”¹¹ In addition, “national character” generalizations run the risk of neglecting very real sources of cultural and attitudinal variation, based on region, generation, or social class.¹²

Describing the “pitfalls of domestic explanations,” David Calleo has argued that

[f]inding the key to the German Problem in the country’s domestic character has been a major preoccupation of postwar studies…. Often a series of stereotypes is patched up into a collective German “character.” The result seems a composite projection of those qualities that people dislike most about their own societies. In many instances, the characteristics seem misinterpreted in their German context and, moreover, are easily found in other societies. At their worst, such attempts at definition seem reminiscent of the very racist techniques made notorious by anti-Semites.¹³

One does not have to agree completely with Calleo’s critique; one might even consider his condemnation of sociocultural explanations too radical and absolute, and his own international-structural answer to the German Question too narrowly focused. His essential point is nonetheless an appropriate one. It is the aim of this and subsequent chapters to demonstrate that although sociocultural factors cannot be neglected in any serious exploration of the German Question, broader ideological but also historical, international-structural, and geographic elements must be duly incorporated into an analysis.

A Troubled National Identity

The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, prior to the complete defeat of 1945, shows evidence of a basically uncertain self-identity and a simultaneous assertion of an alleged German historical mission and uniqueness, all of this connected with a constant attempt to define the essence of Deutschtum (“Germanness”).¹⁴ A proper understanding of the significance of this theme of troubled German identity requires a somewhat extended historical perspective, particularly focused on the rather incomplete impact of Liberalism and the Enlightenment in Germany, the influence of Romanticism, and the country’s historical lack of unity and sense of failure. In the total context of the German Question, this is a truly fundamental theme.

It has often been argued that German culture was characterized historically by a basic ambivalence, if not enmity, vis-à-vis many of the revolutionary ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Löwenthal, we should remember “that Germany in the age of the French Revolution was the great ‘developing country’ of the West.” The new ideas and discoveries of the new age that came to Germany from outside at that time induced a fundamental German ambivalence regarding the process of modernization in culture and politics: “on the one hand the excitement about the new ideas and the wish to be equal to [foreign] examples in the development of liberal constitutionalism and modern forms of life, indeed, if possible to surpass them—on the other hand the fear regarding the impact of foreign influences, the loss of one’s own soul, and of one’s national identity in the process of a diligent imitation of envied examples.”¹⁵

The weak or incomplete impact of the Enlightenment on Germany should be understood in its historical context. According to George Bailey,

[historians generally hold that German national resistance [to] the Napoleonic invasion unfortunately evolved into German nationalist rejection of the Enlightenment. It was as if the whole ethical corpus of the Enlightenment had stumbled into the line of fire and suffered mortal wounds. The Prussians—and indeed the majority of Germans awakened into some sort of national consciousness by the French invasion—threw out the Enlightenment with the invader and persisted in rejecting most of what the Enlightenment involved because it was French and therefore anti-German.¹⁶

The Enlightenment did not affect a unified Germany but instead a crazy quilt of little states and principalities in which, so the argument goes, the sociopolitical preconditions for a sympathetic reception of Liberal ideas were largely absent, with the possible exception of certain western and southwestern areas such as the Rhineland and Baden.

The German reaction to the Enlightenment became most clearly embodied in Romanticism.¹⁷ The differences between the two cultural and philosophical movements were profound. The Enlightenment gave expression to an optimistic sense of progress, worshiped human individuality, stressed a rationalist and empiricist approach to life and its problems, and focused on human rights and freedoms as well as questions of basic human equality. The Romantics, however, were animated by a greater sense of pessimism and tragedy. At times such attitudes could be joined to a strong sense of terror, excitement, and foreboding. Instead of rationalism and empiricism, many of them tended to stress the irrational, the metaphysical, the mysterious or mythical, and the poetic.

The importance of the Romantic epoch for the historical German worldview cannot be understood when divorced from the quest for German unity and identity. Disunity and a lack of clear identity have been mutually reinforcing aspects of the German experience. Thus Bailey suggests that

[i]dentity has always been the main aspect of the German Problem. The Germans have shown a remarkable lack of the sense of identity: they have fought each other in full enmity down the ages. They have banded together with foreigners against other German tribes as often as they have allied themselves against foreigners: Germans have always been more than willing to fight Germans. They have never been united in the sense that the classic nation-states of Europe were and remain united.¹⁸

Initially, Romanticism was a largely cultural and intellectual phenomenon and fairly apolitical in orientation. The historian Thomas Nipperdey, for example, points out that “Romantic nationalism is based on culture, not on the state.”¹⁹ The Napoleonic wars and the resulting efforts at national liberation caused a clear politicization of Romantic thinking, however. National unity and identity were increasingly sought along Romantic lines. In the words of Nipperdey, “the cultural conception of the nation was politicized.… Romantic nationalism became the le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Troubled Identity and a Difficult Fatherland
• 2 Cultural Change and National Identity in West Germany, 1945–1990
• 3 East Germany: An Enduring Legacy?
• 4 Shifting Traditions and Lessons in Foreign Policy
• 5 Philosophical and Ideological Orientations in West German Foreign Policy, 1945–1990
• 6 The Last Cold War Decade: A New German Question?
• 7 The Unification of Germany and the Transformation of Europe
• 8 United But Not Yet Unified: Germany Between Past and Future
• 9 Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary German Foreign Policy
• Selected Bibliography
• Index