German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany, by Frank Biess

Abstract

In October 1983, 17-year-old Frank Biess participated in a ‘human chain’ demonstration in south-western Germany, protesting the stationing of American Pershing II missiles, armed with nuclear warheads, in the Federal Republic. As did many of his peers, Biess professed a profound fear of a ‘nuclear holocaust’, the destruction of the world in a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers. Afraid was how he felt at the time, writing (by his own admission) dark and very bad poetry, walking through the Swabian forest to see its alleged dying (the infamous German Waldsterben) for himself, reading the novels of Gudrun Pausewang about the consequences of nuclear war, or watching movies such as The Day After, depicting what nuclear war would do to the American Midwest. The historian Frank Biess uses this autobiographical sketch as an entry point for a history of the Federal Republic, from its foundation to the present, through the lens of one emotion: fear. What were Germans afraid about, he inquires, and what did this mean for the country’s political history? Did fear undermine the project of building a democratic polity in the aftermath of National Socialism, or did fear actually help with West Germany’s democratisation? Asking these questions, Biess seeks to challenge narratives of post-war German history that portray the Federal Republic somewhat uncritically as a ‘successful democracy’. ‘Was there not a peculiar tension between the optimistic story of the Federal Republic as told by historians and the pessimism of contemporaries’, Biess wonders (p. viii).