Europeanizing Germany's Twentieth Century

Abstract

Looking at Germany’s twentieth century from a post-1989 perspective alerts us to a new sense of space and proportion. With the Iron Curtain torn down and buried for good, Germany—East and West alike—is no longer perceived as a border country pinpointing the political split of Europe. Instead, it reemerges as the geographical center of a continent that impatiently seeks to restore and reinvent itself as a political, economic, social and cultural entity. Germany’s central position is not, to be sure, purely geographical. The size of its population plus its economic strength qualify it as a major player in the theater of European integration well underway since the 1950s and spurred on after 1990. Not surprisingly, this raises suspicions, even fears. Some contemporaries envisage Germany as a power that is either overtly or subversively striving for hegemony in Europe. History can easily be invoked to “prove” this assumption—has Germany not constantly attempted to “Germanize” Europe and mold it according to its own needs and desires? When war twice failed to attain this goal, it resorted to more peaceful means, disguised as supranational politics in a West European setting. 1 The enlargement of the European Union and the accession of East European member states fuel further anxieties—would Germany again seek a “special” and “peculiar” path between East and West as it had done so often and persistently before 1945? Would it leave behind the traits of westernization and resort to notions of Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) discussed since the late nineteenth century? 2