German Political Culture Research Articles

The Foreign Policy of the German Sudeten Council and Hans-Christoph Seebohm, 1956–1964

Recent historical studies on the organizations of German expellees and their influence on West German political culture highlight the insincere attitude and deception by the whole West German political establishment toward the expellee politicians and activists and their cause. One study in this field is Matthias Stickler's important book “Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch,” and a more recent one by Manfred Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen?, takes Stickler's thesis even further. It creates the impression that the expellee organizations, highly dependent on the government for financial and political support, had no option in this matter and were even helpless in that they had to accept the noncommittal rhetoric and the West German government's unwillingness to obligate West Germany for their cause. In this article, I probe this portrayal of the expellee politicians and activists as objects rather than subjects of German politics by inquiring into the political and public relations activities of the German Sudeten Council (Sudetendeutscher Rat) in the field of foreign policy during and around the tenure of Hans-Christoph Seebohm as the leader (Sprecher) of the German Sudeten Expellee Homeland Society (Landsmannschaft) (1959–1967). The Sudeten Council is a non-party association; one half of its members are elected by the federal assembly of the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft and the other half by the political parties of the Bundestag. As well as being a politician of the expellee organization, Hans-Christoph Seebohm pursued the longest political career in the German federal cabinet—seventeen years. He served as Minister of Transportation and Mail of the Federal Republic from 1949 to 1966 under Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard. To date, no monographic work has been written about Seebohm.

Culture politique et crise de la démocratie de Weimar

Among the reasons of the failure of the Weimar democracy, the part played by the political culture inherited from the 19th century has undoubtedly not been emphasized strongly enough. The German political culture regards the State as sacred and mistrusts political parties, considered as factors of division in society; this culture thus does not view a parliamentary regime favourably. It shows that most Germans in 1914 are satisfied with the non-parliamentary constitutional monarchy and its dualistic system whereby the executive, represented by the emperor and the chancellor, has a supremacy over the Reichstag, elected by universal suffrage. This political culture reflects both a heterogeneous society and a fragmented system of parties, a situation which is not conductive to a British-style parliamentary system. The Weimar constitution, with its dualistic system favourable to the president, lies in the continuation of a political culture which has not been questioned fundamentally by the November 1918 revolution.

Habermas' Öffentlichkeit: A reception history

Since its appearance in 1962, Habermas' concept of Öffentlichkeit has gained and lost significant valencies. Originally a response to concerns about the state of German political culture shared by political radicals and conservatives alike, it was later incorporated into Habermas' broader concerns with the character of human communication more generally. In recent years Habermas has returned to problems that motivated the earlier work, but has sought to make sense of them using his ‘mature’ concept of Öffentlichkeit. The results of this have been mixed, both analytically and politically; this is illustrated by his recent statements about religion and the public sphere.

Una triplice Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. La politica del passato in Germania

- The article discusses that specific aspect of German political culture known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, i.e. the going over the totalitarian past through a threefold reworking: judicial (trials, convictions, political and administrative purges), economic (compensations and reparations) and cultural (a deep historical knowledge of what happened, the working out of moral and law criteria for judgment, an at least symbolic declaration of solidarity towards the victims). The German case is interesting because of its uniqueness. First of all, from the judicial point of view, the way the past was reworked has had an extraordinary impact, being at the root of present developments in international criminal law. From the political and the moral-philosophical perspectives, no other population has so thoroughly re-defined its identity with respect to its past: constitutional and post-national patriotism are a case in point. One more exceptional aspect is that, after the reunification, Germany has lived through a new Vergangenheitsbewältigung which suggests interesting comparative considerations.

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.

Vernichtungskrieg, Kalter Krieg und politisches Gedächtnis: Zum Umfang mit dem Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion im geteilten Deutschland

The divided political memory of the war on the Eastern Front is the subject of this article. It analyzes and contextualizes the ways in which the interpretation of the war against the Soviet Union (1941-1945) by political elites shaped postwar German political culture as old alliances crumbled and new alliances formed in the unfolding Cold War. This is the first comprehensive analysis of the memory of the Eastern Front focusing on the intersection of memory and politics and seeking to make a contribution to the history of Germans' coming to terms with their past ({!Vergangenheitsbewältigung}). The politics of memory, i.e., the attempt to place a narrative of past events into the service of a present political cause long dominated both Germanies. This analysis, on the other hand, pays close attention to the individual biographies of the protagonists and argues that the often selective and ambiguous commemoration of the Eastern Front was not only the result of an ideology-driven instrumentalization of history in the shadow of the Cold War but was also rooted in the manifold individual encounters with the horrors of genocidal war on the various fronts of that unparalleled conflict.

Ordnungen in der Krise: Zur Politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1900-1933

That the first three decades of the twentieth century constituted both the climax and crisis years of classical modernity in Germany—a period of rapid socio-economic and cultural change as well as profound upheaval in the wake of war, defeat, revolution, and economic depression—is not a new insight. It is only in the last two decades, however, that historians inspired by the ‘cultural turn’ have contributed to a fuller understanding of this period by investigating the ways in which the modernization process (and its crisis) in Germany transformed the important (but historiographically often marginalized) concepts of gender, time, and space as fundamental ‘orders’ of human existence. Based on a conference held at Berlin's Humboldt University in 2004, Wolfgang Hardtwig's edited volume on ‘orders in crisis’ aims to integrate the stimulating research that has been undertaken in these fields in recent years into a ‘new’ history of early twentieth-century German political culture that challenges both the still dominant periodizations of a ‘long nineteenth’ and ‘short twentieth’ century and a narrow understanding of ‘political culture’ as a set of norms and values restricted to the realm of high politics. In his introduction to the volume, Hardtwig convincingly argues that a periodization which separates the interwar period from the modernization processes of the late Wilhelmine period is of limited use to scholars interested in a broadly defined history of political culture. Most of the causes of and debates about Germany's ‘crisis of modernity’, he suggests, had their origins in the period around 1900. Without denying the watershed quality of the Great War (and its outcome) for notions of crisis in Germany, the volume therefore advocates a more long-term perspective on continuities and discontinuities in the history of political culture in Germany from the turn of the century until the Nazi seizure of power. Hardtwig rightly argues that during this period the widespread perception of a fundamental ‘crisis of orders’ overshadowed Germany's socio-political and cultural life and ultimately increased the population's receptiveness for radical (fascist and Communist) ideas of reorganizing society.

The Origins of Chancellor Democracy and the Transformation of the German Democratic Paradigm

The role of Konrad Adenauer in the proceedings of the Parliamentary Council in Bonn and his decision after his election as first federal chancellor not to form a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party paved the way to a fundamental transformation of the traditional German democratic paradigm versus the Anglo-Saxon concept of interaction between government and parliamentary opposition. The inherited pattern of constitutional democracy that had contributed to the structural weaknesses of Weimar parliamentarism was replaced by the concept of an interaction between government and opposition. Political parties took on the primary tasks of securing stable parliamentary majorities and providing sufficient electoral support for the chancellor. Adenauer's resolved political leadership, therefore, was an indispensable contribution to the reorientation of West German political culture from the former distrust of unrestricted parliamentary sovereignty toward Western democratic traditions.

Bismarck's shadow: the cult of leadership and the transformation of the German Right, 1898-1945

Introduction * From Bismarck to Hitler? The Nature of the Project * The Development of an Obsession: Bismarck and the German People * Defining the Nation: Bismarck and German National Identity * Charismatic Authority and the Crisis of Leadership * The Role of Bismarck in German Political Culture: Method and Structure of the ProjectChapter One: The Living Legend, 1866-1898 * Establishment of the Legend: Bismarck as Founder and Protector of the Reich * The Chancellor as Legend: Bismarck in Political Practice * The Chancellor Unbound: The Bismarck Legend in the Wake of the Dismissal * Reestablishing the Right: Bismarck in Retirement and the Politics of National OppositionChapter Two: 'Forward in the Spirit of Bismarck!' 1898-1914 * Death, Deification, and the Development of the Bismarck Cult * Crying in the Wilderness: The Early Cult in Political Practice and the Quest for Legitimacy * The Legitimization of Right-Wing Populism and the Radicalization of the Right during the Wilhelmine Crisis PeriodChapter Three: Bismarck in the Crisis Decade, 1914-1923 * Germany's 'Holy War': The Bismarck Cult and the Spirit of 1914 * War-time Radicalization: Leadership Crisis, Democratization, and the Emergence of the Fatherland Party * Challenging the Iron Chancellor: Bismarck and the Revolution * A New Bismarck for a New Right: The Iron Chancellor as Counter-Revolutionary Icon in the Civil War PeriodChapter Four: A Hopeful Interlude: Bismarck and the 'Years of Stability', 1923-1930 * Gustav Stresemann and the Pursuit of a Moderate Bismarck * The Radical Bismarck and the Undermining of Weimar DemocracyChapter Five: Beyond Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor in the Third Reich, 1930-1945 * 'Solving' the Crisis of Leadership: Bismarck in the Last Years of Weimar * From Bismarck to Hitler: The Iron Chancellor in the Wake of the Nazi Seizure of Power * In Hitler's Shadow: The Decline of Bismarck in the Third Reich Conclusion * From Politics to History: The Decline of Bismarck in German Political Culture after the Second World War * Analyzing the Shadow: The Role of the Iron Chancellor in the Crisis of German Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right

Conspiracy, history, and therapy at a BerlinStammtisch

In this article, I analyze conspiratorial knowledge in discussions of East German politics and history around a Berlin Stammtisch (regulars' table). The Stammtisch is a venerable, mostly masculine institution of German political culture that defines an intimate fraternal space within which social knowledge and political judgments are articulated, negotiated, and contested. Here, I am particularly interested in how talk of the “covert agencies” and “hidden relations” operating behind the scenes of political life in East Germany merged with more general and contemporary concerns about the relationship of Germanness to history. Whereas other anthropologists have emphasized the importance of conspiratorial knowledge as a mode of revealing otherwise obscure social and historical forces, I show how, in this context, conspiratorial knowledge operates in a different way to displace, dampen, or interrupt associations of contemporary Germanness with an imagined cultural inheritance of authoritarianism.

Moralpolitik versus Moralpolitik: Recent Struggles over the Construction of Cultural Memory in Germany

Before the series of 60th anniversary commemorations of the end of the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II in 2005, the big development regarding German collective memories and political culture was the resurgence of memories of German suffering. Contrary to the opinions of prominent observers like W.G. Sebald, this memory, linked to events from the end and immediate aftermath of World War II, is not a repressed or only recently discovered trauma. Rather, the current discussions signal the return of a memory that was culturally hegemonic in the early postwar decades. Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding this return differ significantly from the postwar situation in which this memory first flourished in three main ways. The altered environment greatly affects both the reception and potential institutionalization of such memory, which could lead to deep political cultural changes.

Germany at fifty-five: Berlin ist nicht Bonn?

The 55th anniversary of a democratic Germany coincides with other important anniversaries in German history: the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion; and the 90th anniversary of the start of the First World War, the legacy of which haunted the Federal Republic at its founding in 1949. This book examines how the past has placed constraints on the domestic and foreign policy discourse and practices within Germany, how it has shaped the evolution of the German political culture, and how it has hindered the reintegration of eastern and western Germany.

Sécurité et détente : Dimensions historiques et problèmes actuels de la politique de sécurité ouest-allemande

Against the background of the latest vehement discussions in West-Germany on the implementation of the NATO twin-track-decision this article analyses the current concepts of security and détente presented by the main political forces as well as their historical dimensions. The Christian Democrat/Liberal government pursues a pragmatic Atlanticist security policy, which is based largely upon Adenauer's principles such as exclusive definition of West German interests in the framework of the Alliance, rejection of one-sided disarmament and nuclear disengagement. Nevertheless, the government Kohl has adopted the main instruments of the new "Ostpolitik" in order to establish the calculability of West German policy in East and West. Détente is no considered as a political aim in itself. The Social Democrat concept of a security partnership with the East is strongly influenced by the principles and methods underlying the new "Ostpolitik". This concept aims at the creation of a denuclearized zone in Central Europe in order to facilitate a real détente between East and West. An optimistic view or détente appears to be an essential element of the political identity of the SPD. The ideas of the Greens and the "Peace Movement" - unilateral disarmament, creation of a denuclearized zone, renunciation on "first Use" - are variations of the pacifistic concepts already developped in the 1950's. The main reason for the formation of the "Peace Movement" is a change in West German political culture involving above all the younger population.

Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism

Though nazism can be located as a form of fascism or type of totalitarianism, these generic concepts inadequately account for what was singular about a regime which unleashed such devastating inhumanity — a terrible war of annihilation and the worst genocide the world has yet experienced. So this article suggests an answer located in a unique combination of forces embodied in Hitler’s dictatorship: the extraordinary power of ‘charismatic authority’, drawing on distinctive ideological traits in German political culture, coupled with the bureaucratic capacity of a highly modern state system.

State Symbols. The Quest for Legitimacy in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, 1949-1959

After World War II Germans not only had to rebuild, they had to redefine their national political identity as well. This book traces how state symbols such as national colors, anthems, holidays, capital cities, and postage stamps were used to legitimize the two Germanies from 1949 to 1959. Although the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) developed distinct post-war identities, the one cannot be understood apart from the other, for they were in direct competition to define the same state symbols. The study of symbols offers valuable insights into the realms of identity formation and of politics, that is, how symbols can promote political integration. By examining the creation of state symbols and the processes by which they were established in the public realm, Feinstein evaluates the extent to which German political culture overcame the Nazi past to legitimize both a republican and a socialist system. This book is especially relevant to scholars who want to understand the common ground upon which the citizens of today's unified Germany can construct a shared identity.

Historical Consciousness and the Changing of German Political Culture

Historical Consciousness and the Changing of German Political Culture

Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany

German Sacrifice Today, John Borneman The Meaning of Dying, Marcus Funck Was It All Just a Dream, Brian E. Crim Injury, Fate, Resentment, and Sacrifice in German Political Culture, 1914-1939, Greg Eghigian There Is a Land Where Everything Is Pure, Michael Geyer The Violence of Difference, Uli Linke Sacrifice and Victimization in the Commemorative Practices of Nazi Genocide After German Unification Memorials and Visual Metaphors, Silke Wenk.

Organized Women and the Strong State: The Beginnings of Female Associational Activity in Germany, 1810-1840

This essay examines the history of German women's associations from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Women's organizational efforts endured a lengthy and fitful process, which was a product of German political culture and mentality at the time. Women's associations operated within the confines of patriarchal norms, the reality of a powerful state, and a bourgeoisie interested in defensive re-forms. Against this background, bourgeois women could safeguard their associations' existence only by seeking out influential allies, shying away from the semblance of political activism, and making themselves indispensable in the realm of social welfare. The article also argues that, during the first half of the nineteenth century, German women's associations did not enjoy the same freedoms as their American counterparts.

What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past? Official Memory in German Politics since 1989

In 1959, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture whose title and theme played on Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” {Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarung?). Kant’s essay had begun with the statement that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from self-imposed nonage. Called “What Does It Mean to Come to Terms with the Past?” (Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?), Adorno’s lecture takes issue with tendencies in the Federal Republic of Germany to wish away difficult legacies of the Nazi period. Evoking a parallel between Kant’s “enlightenment” (Aufklarung) and the contemporary expressions “coming to terms” or “working through” (Aufarbeitung), Adorno poses a high critical standard for German political culture. According to his diagnosis, the Federal Republic was more concerned with getting beyond the past, with avoiding difficult memory through what Adorno calls “an unconscious and not-so-unconscious defense against guilt,” than with the genuine working through that would be required to “break its spell.” The latter would demand an act of clear consciousness, a difficult process much like the work of psychoanalysis. According to Adorno, the defensive unwillingness in the Federal Republic to confront the past—at both the personal and official levels—indicated not the persistence of fascist tendencies against democracy (e.g., neo-Nazi groups) but of fascist tendencies within democracy. The latter, he argues, are much more insidious.

Constraining metaphors and the transnationalisation of spaces in Berlin

This paper deals with the impact of the formal principle of membership on the public and scholarly narratives of immigrants' presence in society. It argues that 'ghetto' is a root metaphor of German political culture and explores how this concept, which situates minorities in stigmatised ethno-cultural sites in the city, confines the frameworks and the terminology of immigration debates and the representation of immigrants in the social imaginary in Germany. The ghetto trope of immigrant discourse in Berlin reduces the inscription of difference and belonging in urban space to a simple model of seclusion based on ethnic ties. This constructs a blindness to the transnational spaces of German Turks which provide an arena for the reimagination and negotiation of Turkish immigrants' sociality and belonging to Berlin beyond the given categories of ethnicity and community.