Bonn Republic Research Articles

The Carnation Revolution in the West German press

The revolution of 25 April aroused public interest in Portugal for the first time in West Germany. Compared to other countries, however, the interest was rather modest. None of the Federal Republic of Germany’s newspapers sent a correspondent to Lisbon to report on the day-to-day events of the revolution, as did some European newspapers and even Neues Deutschland, the official organ of the German Democratic Republic’s ruling party. Through the newspapers, the citizens of West Germany received a partial, superficial and biased view of the events in revolutionary Portugal. The treatment of Nelkenrevolution (the Carnation Revolution) in the West German press says almost as much about Portugal as it does about the peculiar political culture of the Bonn Republic, which the Cold War deeply influenced.

Boomers of the Bonn Republic in university research and teaching. An essay on academics with fixed-term contracts.

Boomers of the Bonn Republic in university research and teaching. An essay on academics with fixed-term contracts.

Changing the Image: Photographic Investigations on the Anonymous Modern in Aachen, Germany 1970-1989

In the 1970s and 1980s a certain kind of anonymous architecture emerged in West German cities of the former Bonn Republic which is currently confronted with the risk of demolition, stemming mainly from the lack of recognition and care. These buildings have played a significant role in shaping the character of today’s typical West German cities, thus holding a crucial place in the identity of these urban and suburban areas. Therefore, this paper focuses on the concept of photography as a visual preservation method, using the city of Aachen as a representative example of an average-sized West German city. The objective is to enhance the appreciation of this neglected cultural heritage, both in terms of sustainable urban planning and potential inclusion in the canon of architectural history.

O 25 de Abril na imprensa da República Federal da Alemanha

The revolution of 25 April aroused public interest in Portugal for the first time in West Germany. Compared to other countries, however, the interest was rather modest. None of the Federal Republic of Germany’s newspapers sent a correspondent to Lisbon to report on the day-to-day events of the revolution, as did some European newspapers and even Neues Deutschland, the official organ of the German Democratic Republic’s ruling party. However, through the newspapers, the citizens of West Germany received a partial, superficial and biased view of the events in revolutionary Portugal. The treatment of the Carnation Revolution in the West German press says almost as much about Portugal as it does about the peculiar political culture of the Bonn Republic, which was deeply influenced by the Cold War.

Układ między Polską Rzeczpospolitą Ludową a Republiką Federalną Niemiec o podstawach normalizacji ich wzajemnych stosunków z 1970 r. – refleksje na tle bońskiej polityki europejskiej i wschodniej

The 50th anniversary of the Treaty between the People's Republic of Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany on the basis of the normalization of their mutual relations provides an opportunity to present a number of reflections, including remarks on the significance of this agreement for Bonn's foreign policy. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the relations and basic dependencies between Bonn's European policy (or, more broadly, the so-called Westbindung) and German eastern policy (Ostpolitik) and the Agreement as its element. The 1970 agreement has undoubtedly become one of the focal points in the process of changing, revising West German foreign policy at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s in its key dimensions. It has not only become a part of Germany's relations with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It has also played a certain role and gained certain influence in the sphere of relations between the Bonn Republic and the countries of Western Europe and in the Euro-Atlantic context. Therefore, it seems that the presentation of a set of reflections devoted to this problem, especially in the light of the forthcoming anniversary of the PPR-FRG Agreement, is justified. The considerations below, in the light of the presented assumptions, include an indication of the central directions of West German foreign policy shaped after the end of the Second World War, a reconstruction of relations between Bonn's European policy and its Eastern policy, and an assessment of the Agreement itself and its significance from the perspective of Germany's position in European relations. The analyses were based mainly on (Polish and foreign) achievements of political, historical and legal sciences and relevant sources of law. At the same time, it should be noted that the presented considerations do not aspire to a comprehensive analysis of the signalized problem, but rather constitute a set of reflections devoted to its key mechanisms.

Bauen im menschenfreundlichen Maßstab

AbstractTo build in human-friendly frame. Architecture and urban concept of the University of PassauAfter 1945 the foundation of new universities in the Federal Republic of Germany consisted of three phases. The university of the independent city of Passau belongs not only to one of the last provisional universities in Bavaria, but also in the old Bonn Republic (commissioning winter semester 1978/1979). Main arguments for this new foundation were among others a tradition several centuries long as a place of education and research (Higher Education Institution of Jesuits 1622, Philosophical-Theological University 1923 –1978), equality of opportunity in the area of education anchored in Bavarian Constitution and the lack of university in the administrative district of Lower Bavaria. The legal anchoring for the location of the University of Passau in 1972 as well as the decision to a combined urban idea- and construction-competition in 1976 paved the way for the progressive realization of a modern campus area which was in spatial and structural connection with the four-wing complex of the former Augustinian Monastery of St. Nikola in west of the historic Old Town. Concerning the architectural and urban design of the new university, Passau, like other German cities, received inspiring ideas both from home and abroad, the model of the campus area being a good example. However, specific solutions related to the regional situation were searched and found in detail. The structural and landscaping design of the university area in Passau can be considered as an outstanding urban project. It’s relevance goes beyond Passau

No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. By Andreas Höfele. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Illus. Pp. xvi + 330.

In view of the long and detailed reception history of Shakespeare’s work in Germany, there does not seem to be a great need for more comprehensive studies in this area. To update or even replace the excellent studies by Werner Habicht, Wilhelm Hortmann, Roger Paulin, Simon Williams, and others would require an original approach—which Höfele claims to find in the intellectual tradition of the political right in Germany from the founding of the “German Empire in 1871 to the ‘Bonn Republic’ of the Cold War era” (vii). Unfortunately, Höfele sedulously avoids a differentiated and, above all, truly critical discussion of the most complex phenomenon: “the political right.” Instead, he reduces it to the bland “common set of views and attitudes that is recognizably rightist, i.e. anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal. Without exception, they condemn Western modernity and mechanized mass civilization, upholding in its stead an ideal of organic culture” (viii). It appears that Höfele is aware of alternative views, but often briskly relegates them to a footnote (as, for example, in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche [22n73]).

Carl Schmitt in Ernst‐Wolfgang Böckenförde's work: Carrying Weimar constitutional theory into the Bonn Republic

Carl Schmitt in Ernst‐Wolfgang Böckenförde's work: Carrying Weimar constitutional theory into the Bonn Republic

Rediscovering the Region: The West German Daily Press in the 1970s*

After Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, West Germans began to accept the more permanent division of the country and rediscovered the regional fundaments of their federal political system. A catalyst for this process was provided by a massive regionalization of the daily press in the aftermath of the recession in 1973. That regionalization entailed the delineation of new regional distribution and advertising areas, the launch of new editions, the growth of regularly and irregularly published alternative papers and a stronger emphasis on regional news. In the 1970s regionalization cut across all segments of the market and across party affiliations and affected established papers, the irregular alternative press and even television and broadcasting. It propelled the West German daily press to its height point in German history, with more than 25 million copies per day in 1982. The new regional focus of the daily press increased public awareness of regional protests, regional identity politics and regional scandals during the chancellorship of Helmut Schmidt (1974–82) to such an extent that the article concludes that the 1970s were not only a ‘global’ decade, but also a regional decade. The history of the regional press that is presented in the article for the first time facilitates a new view of regional changes in economic prosperity, criticism of the federal state and the emergence of regional consumer markets between 1974 and 1982. The analysis provides a cornerstone for a more detailed media history of the Bonn Republic and a new understanding of the 1970s.

Self‐annihilation, nuclear play and West Germany's compulsion to repeat

This article investigates Fallex 66, the first of a string of NATO war games that the West German government played in its command bunker between 1966 and 1989. During this exercise, the Bonn Republic simulated nuclear strikes on its ‘own’ targets and the resupply of NATO forces after a nuclear war on German territory. While in line with West German deterrence at the time, Fallex was read in East Berlin as an excessive game of playful self‐annihilation in ways that invite a psychoanalytic interpretation. This article explores Fallex 66 not simply as an enactment of Cold War deterrence, but a Freudian ‘fort–da’ game, a traumatic re‐enactment that was tellingly set in the subterranean space of a German bunker. West Germany's compulsion to self‐abandon, I suggest, has important implications for how we understand the nature of geopolitical games.

“Enemies at the Gate:” The West German Greens and Their Arrival at the Bundestag—Between Old Ideals and New Challenges

The West German Green Party's 1983 entrance into the Bundestag marked a major break, both in the history of this young political force and the parliamentary system of the Bonn Republic. The Greens had been founded in opposition to the guiding principles of the West German postwar consensus and conceived of themselves as an “anti-parliamentary party.” Although they had gained parliamentary experience in some regional chambers, their entrance onto the national parliamentary stage juxtaposed old ideals and new challenges—for the Greens themselves as well as for German political culture. Taking this singular historic moment as a starting point, this article summarizes the formation of the Greens in the context of the changing political and ideological landscape of the 1970s. It also contrasts the party's formation with the transformations in terms of program and personnel that it undertook during the 1980s. The focus lies less on the specific activities of the green parliamentary group than on the broader developments in green politics and thinking.

Die Verfassung der Berliner Republik

Contemporary constitutional history faces a methodological dilemma: Historiography traditionally calls for scientific dissociation, both temporal and individual, from its objects of research. Yet, changes in constitutional normativity are typically of an incremental nature and can best be studied through a close approach of the contemporaries. Given such a dilemma, this essay undertakes to analyze key features of constitutional law and science of the »Berlin Republic«. Its main thesis is that contemporary constitutional history in Germany can be seen as a »farewell to the interim«, which the »Bonn Republic« can be construed to have been. Several leitmotifs can be identified: The concept of constitutional identity gains attention and influences the discourses implicitly and explicitly. Among them are debates about the scope of constitutional rights (human dignity, freedom of speech) as well as about the structure of the democratic and federal polity. Simultaneously, social change gives rise to fundamental constitutional questions such as religious pluralism or same-sex marriage. At the same time, the science of German public law, both within the dimensions of constitutional and administrative law, undergoes a profound process of self-ascertainment. This process brings about a renaissance of fundamental research in the fields of constitutionalism and theory of state. Recommended citation: Krüper, Julian, Die Verfassung der Berliner Republik. Verfassungsrecht und Verfassungsrechtswissenschaft in zeitgeschichtlicher Perspektive, in: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 23 (2015) 16-51, online: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/rg23/016-051

Imagining Yugoslavs: Migration and the Cold War in Postwar West Germany

In recent years historians have argued that after the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945, the concept of race became a taboo topic in postwar Germany but that Germans nonetheless continued to perceive resident foreign populations in racialized terms. Important studies of Jewish displaced persons, the black children of American occupation soldiers and German women, and Turkish guest workers have highlighted continuities and transformations in German racial thought from the Nazi era into the postwar world, particularly in West Germany. In a programmatic essay, Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach argue that “the question of race remained at the very center of social policy and collective imagination during the occupation years, as the Western Allies worked to democratize Germany, and during the Bonn Republic,” and they call for a new historiography that is more attentive to the category of race and the process of racialization in Germany and Europe after 1945. While this newfound emphasis on race in Germany's postwar history has been salutary, an approach that puts race and racialization at the center of German interactions with resident foreign populations runs the risk of sidelining the experiences of foreign groups that Germans did not view in primarily racial terms. Indeed, to a certain extent this has already occurred. By the mid-1980s, public and policy discourse on immigrants in West Germany came to focus overwhelmingly on Turks and the problems raised by their “alien” Islamic cultural practices. That West Germany's guest worker program had resulted in the permanent settlement of hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Yugoslavs was largely forgotten. When historians, anthropologists, and scholars in other disciplines began taking more interest in Germany's migration history in recent decades, they too focused overwhelmingly on Turks. Only in recent years has the historiography of Germany's postwar migration history started to reflect the multinational character of Germany's immigrant population.

Old Weimar Meets New Political Economy: Democratic Representation in the Party State

One of the prominent questions surrounding Weimar Theory of the State was that of the significance and influence of the political parties within the state. From the perspective of constitutional law, parties were as undesirable as they were an “inescapable” fact of modern statehood. They appeared to be an absolutely necessary consequence of the emancipation of all classes and social strata: Legitimation of state rule was no longer conceivable merely as a natural rule from above; on the other hand, there was no longer a unified bourgeoisie, and it thus seemed impossible for the political whole to be represented by people who felt beholden exclusively to the common weal. The homogeneous “people” had become a heterogeneous “mass.” The parties seemed to be a necessity, on the one hand, for active citizens to articulate themselves in the political system and, on the other hand, for state unity not to be torn apart by the power of a plurality of interests leaning in many different directions. Parties could therefore be conceived of as aprerequisitefor state organisation: The idea of the “party state” was born. One important protagonist in the discussion on the status of parties within the state structure was the constitutional legal scholar Gerhard Leibholz (1901–1982). In Weimar times, he was the most prominent representative of party state theory (Parteienstaatslehre), and as someone who “had somehow fallen between the eras,” he also actively shaped the party state of the Bonn Republic for over twenty years (1951–1971), as a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht), by significantly influencing legislation on parliamentary, party, and electoral law. His persona was therefore a particularly important bridging link between the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany, and even today, his theses are highly topical: “Beyond all eras, Gerhard Leibholz stands for the great tradition of German constitutional theory.”

HABERMAS'S POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1984–1996: A HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) has for decades been recognized as a leading European philosopher and public intellectual. But his global visibility has obscured his rootedness in German political culture and debate. The most successful historical accounts of the transformation of political culture in West Germany have turned on the concept of German statism and its decline. Viewing Habermas through this lens, I treat Habermas as a radical critic of German statism and an innovative theorist of democratic constitutionalism. Based on personal interviews with Habermas and his German colleagues, and by setting the major work alongside his occasion-specific political writings from 1984 to 1996, I interpret Habermas's political thought as an evolving response to two distinct moments in German history: first, the mid-1980s, and second, the revolutions of 1989 and German reunification in 1990. This essay challenges the dominant interpretations of Habermas's mature statement of his political theory.Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Democracy(1992), which have described it as marking a distinct break with, and reversal of, the commitments of his earlier work. By contrast, I describe the work as an intellectualsumma, consistent with Habermas's previous thought and career, and containing remarkable historical interpretations of two intertwined phenomena: the intellectual and institutional dimensions of the Bonn Republic and Habermas's own biography.

« Deutschlandvertrag » et intégration européenne. Le point de vue de Wilhelm Grewe (1948-1955)

During the years 1948-55, the relationship between the Federal Republic and the Western Allies continued to be overshadowed by memories of the war. However, the emergence of the Cold War soon led political decision-makers to realize that peace could only be achieved through European cooperation, including German participation in Western defence. Germany in turn saw this as an opportunity to regain its sovereignty in exchange for its contribution. Wilhelm Grewe, professor of international law and a leading lawyer of the early Bonn Republic, played a key role in the drafting of the “Deutschlandvertrag” which abolished the occupation statute. Using legal skills and political pragmatism, he greatly contributed to the rapprochement of former enemies and the restoration of lasting peace in Europe.

Performing the New German Past: The People's Day of Mourning and 27 January as Postunification Commemorations

The article sketches the ruptures in today's German memory culture, concentrating on the Volkstrauertag (People's Day of Mourning) and the Gedenktag für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Remembrance Day for the Victims of National Socialism) on 27 January. It starts with an overview of the history of the Volkstrauertag with its (outward) transformation from a commemoration day for dead German soldiers into one for “all victims of war and violence.” The inclusive model of commemoration that was typical for the Bonn Republic is disintegrating today. In united Germany, the Volkstrauertag and 27 January reflect antagonistic memory strands, that is a memory focussed on the war dead and German suffering or on the Holocaust and German guilt. In light of discussions about commemorating Bundeswehr dead, the article ends by describing a re-heroicizing of the Volkstrauertag and, in a more general way, tries to outline the shifting construction of German national identity.

Lieder machen Leute:Teaching Postwar German Identity through Song

The negotiation of a West German identity in the decades that followed World War II can be traced in the issues and movements that preoccupied the populace. These in turn are documented in the work of socially and politically motivatedLiedermacher. Songs thus serve as a point of entry for students into how Germans saw themselves in the Bonn Republic. By focusing on theWirtschaftswunder, anti‐nuclear activity, the environment, and patriotic militarism as addressed in five song texts from 1967 to 1985, this article provides a resource platform from which to build learning units and student projects exploring this era.

Collective Memory and National Identity in the Berlin Republic: The Emergence of a New Consensus?

At the turn of the millennium, a consensus seemed to exist which suggested that Germany had faced up to its National Socialist past and confronted questions of responsibility and guilt. At last, the Holocaust and the Second World War seemed to have become an integral part of German national identity. Within a few years, however, debates about Germany's past once again turned away from suffering caused by the Germans and returned to the issue of German suffering. This contribution will argue that recent dynamics of German collective memory suggest that a new consensus has emerged which acknowledges German responsibility for crimes committed between 1933 and 1945 at the same time as recognising German suffering. Germany is thus less restricted by its past than it has been at any other point since 1945 resulting in much more confident expressions of German national identity than had been possible in the Bonn Republic.

The Concept of the State in German Political Thought

It appeared that the troubled history of German political thought had finally come to an end in the consensus of the Bonn Republic about the de-thronement of the concept of the state. Debate in the Berlin Republic, however, suggests that the concept of the state has become contentious once again. In part this is fed by the resonance of past debates and connotations but it is also a product of new complexities in governance. The result is that the state may no longer be linked with the language of crisis. Instead it is associated with the language of paradox.