Resistance as Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, Struggles for Civil Society

Abstract

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's thoughts on the occasion of his nephew's baptism were a bequest. Resistance, he admonished the child and his parents, does not end with rebuilding the institutions destroyed by the National Socialist regime but continues as a process of social and spiritual renewal. The act of resistance during the Nazi regime entails a call not to commemorate but to participate in the reformation of society. Resistance, instead of being the record of past events, thus becomes a defining mark for the ongoing and always contested struggle to carry on a tradition of social action whose moral grounding seems to make it peculiarly German. The eschatological fervor of moral resistance surely remains the exception, but ever since the 1950s it has been an element of German political culture and, at times, a very forceful one at that.2 Has the successful upheaval against communist regimes completed this project of conversion and brought it to an end? What, if anything, does Bonhoeffer's plea entail in our new Grulnderzeit? If the successful mobilization against communist regimes seemed to be a natural extension of this tradition in 1990, sentiments have changed drastically in 1991/92. Now, the analogy between the former German Democratic Republic and the Nazi regime has become overwhelming. Implicit in this analogy is the presumption, buttressed by the revelation of the