Germany's New Right as Culture and Politics by Roger Woods

Abstract

MLR, I03.4, 2oo8 I I75 the emergence of the theories and second-generation literarywritings explored in the study, fromBitburg and the fortieth anniversary of the ending of the Second World War in I985 through to the 1995 and 2005 anniversaries that each marked a caesura in cultural memory. How the 200I attacks on the World Trade Center may have contributed to these developments generally still awaits attention, despite the appearance of salientworks such as Spiegelman's recent In theShadow ofNo Towers. Instead, thematerials considered in McGlothlin's study seem to testifyto a statically conceived notion particularly of the Jewish second-generation condition, rather than the shifting global and national paradigms of cultural memory that this generation has both charted and helped to shape. Scholars working on thebroader topic of second generation, aswell as the individual authors examined in this study,will no doubt find in thedetailed and well-conceived discussion of the theories and literary texts rich inspiration for further investigation, and thebook is also recommended as a source text forundergraduate and postgradu ate teaching on the topic. UNIVERSITY OFMANCHESTER CATHY S. GELBIN Germany's New Right as Culture and Politics. By ROGERWOODS. (New Perspectives inGerman Studies) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. ix+ I83 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-o-230-50672-5. Discussing Germany's New Right and political culture, Roger Woods sets out to identifythe contradictions and tensionswithin amovement which isbeset by a form of conservative cultural pessimism but which also seeks touse culture as aweapon in the struggle forpolitical dominance. Questions as towhat culture actually is, letalone what purposes itcan be put to, are raised here, as is the relevance of the attempt to translate aGramscian project for the creation of a revolutionary counter-hegemony of the Left into one of a coherent and political culture of theRight. Woods points out that the essential dilemma forconservatives is thatwhile the Left in the I920S were able tocreate a dynamic which was forward-looking, embracing modernism and futurismamong many other culturalmovements as part of thecultural objective of re volutionary transformation, theRight is still obsessed with decadence and the sense of loss of something fundamental within the nation. Its cultural sense is therefore based in anamnesis rather thanprolepsis, and isoften characterized by an appeal to a backward-looking sector of societywhich seeks to re-establish old certainties. It is probably for this reason that the Far Right has only really been able to find its feet in theex-GDR, as there,paradoxically, the anamnetic and nostalgic desire for 'Germanness' has been translated into a sublimated political identificationwith the SED-state as a quasi-Blochian Heimat. On a recent research trip to a neo-Nazi bar inDresden, forexample, the current author found a high degree of overlap between identificationwith Germany as cultural reservoiron theone hand and theGDR of the antiquarian Honecker years as itsbest representative on the other.As Woods points out, quoting Riidiger Safranski, theNew Right has the problem of trying to create a cultural counter-hegemony at a timewhen thenotion of hegemony itself iswidely disputed. The death of history and of thegrand narrative has swept away the cultural foundations of theRight inmuch the same way as ithas for the Left. The Right has, in one sense, an easier time of it as itcan hark back to pre-modernist and reac tionary traditions-including even a cautious Autobahnismus-and yet it is no more convincing or relevant to thewider public than theAmpelmdnnchen simplicities which affectmany on the Left. The form of globalized capitalist modernization prevalent since themid-I 970s isessentially and inherentlydisruptive and, as de Benoist points I I76 Reviews out (quoted byWoods), has no place fornationalism other than as a quaint means ofmaintaining a sense of subjective identity in the face of fundamental uncertainty. This isnot todownplay thepolitical and cultural significance of thenation of course, quite the opposite in fact, but what theNew Right has noticed-and this iswhy Habermas is right to see it as being essentially based in the traditions of theCon servative Revolution-is thatGerman nationalism has to be complemented not only by anti-modernism but also, logically, by anti-capitalism. This prevents it from ever pulling out of theorbit ofNational Socialism. Woods has written a thought...