Postwar West Germany Research Articles

The Perils of Privacy and Passivity: Antidemocratic, Racist, and Antisemitic Sentiments in Postwar West Germany

Abstract This article analyzes the affective economy of West Germany's postwar society. After delineating the intellectual history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research's “Gruppenexperiment,” which consisted of 137 group interviews with different segments of West German society, my article focuses on one transcript of a 1950 group discussion of young fashion-designer apprentices. Based on a close reading, I study how the younger generation in West Germany constructed a passive and privatist self-image in which they could both articulate their emotional dissociation from National Socialism while clinging to antidemocratic, racist, and antisemitic feelings in metamorphosed form. The micrological focus of the analysis of the group's emotions is balanced by a rereading of both Helmut Schelsky's study about the “skeptical generation” and texts by researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research who came to markedly different conclusions about the West German youth.

The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany By Jennifer M.Kapczynski and CarolineKita (Eds.), University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 268. $75.00 (hardcover), $59.95 (e‐book)

The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany By Jennifer M.Kapczynski and CarolineKita (Eds.), University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 268. $75.00 (hardcover), $59.95 (e‐book)

Legal Counterrevolution: Property and Judicial Power in the Weimar Republic

This article offers a new account of the rise of judicial power in modern Germany. Strong judicial control of the government is often associated with the constitutional ethos that emerged in postwar West Germany as a reaction to Nazi rule. This article locates the origins of German judicialization in the political struggles of the Weimar era. It shows how the assumption of a power to judicial review by Germany's highest court, the Reichsgericht, was the product of the successful cooperation of the judiciary with conservative political parties on the issue of property rights in the young republic. These were at the centre of two controversies examined in the article: the expropriation of princes of former ruling houses and the consequences of the hyperinflation of 1923. In both cases the Reichsgericht used an understanding of property as an inalienable right to radically reinterpret Germany's first democratic constitution, which had in fact granted the legislature extensive power to modify property relations. This suited the judiciary's own objective of assuming stronger controls over legislative action and bolstered the political position of conservative forces in Weimar politics. What emerged was a supra-positive constitutionalism that sought to supersede the written constitution. These political realities were an essential context for theoretical debates on the extent and limits of judicial power between theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller, Franz Neumann, and Ernst Fraenkel. An examination of the complex interaction of parliamentary, judicial, and popular politics concerning the issue of property reveals that German judicial empowerment amounted to an attempt to rewrite the Weimar Constitution and limit the scope of Germany's democratic revolution.

Philosophy and University Studies

The German social philosopher, educator, and founder of critical social theory Max Horkheimer wrote his work ‘Philosophy and University Studies’ as a speech delivered on August 6, 1948, at the University of Frankfurt before returning from emigration to the United States to post-war West Germany. A year later, after Horkheimer was reinstated as Director of the Institute for Social Research, this text was first published in the fourth issue of the ‘Frankfurter Hefte’. In this work, with which the German philosopher began a cycle of his philosophical and educational works, he continued the previous theme of the book ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (1947), which, published in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, has the character of a programmatic socio-philosophical work of post-war critical theory. Horkhamer’s critique of the ideological elimination of the phenomenon of Western individual, which he made in his post-war article ‘Authority and the Family in Modernity’ (1947-1949), also found its theoretical continuation here. Following the theoretical essence of the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, the Frankfurt philosopher identified one of the factors negative for the humanistic socio-cultural development of Western European society, which historically led to the humanitarian catastrophe of the Nazi ideology carriers domination, the theoretical knowledge that has powerfully eliminated the presence of customary principles of moral coexistence in Western society. The author also noted the process of ideological abolition of the social significance of the individual’s activity as a phenomenon of Western culture. Philosophy, primarily as a producer and carrier of abstract meanings, including humanistic ones, ideologically significant for normal social life, because of the social alienation caused by such a theory and society, has lost the opportunity to be a significant knowledge for both Western European society and university education as a common tool for this culture to educate the Western personality. In order to renew the spiritual forces of social life and turn the course of history towards humanised change, it was proposed to bring to the forefront of the renewed university education the power of personal critical thinking, the ability to foster which social power could not completely destroy in philosophy because of its traditionally inherent spiritual resilience.

Weak Decisionism and Political Polytheology: The Neutralization of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology by Hans Blumenberg and the Ritter School

Abstract In this article, I explore the liberal–conservative reception of Carl Schmitt’s political theology in post-war West-Germany. By focusing on the work of prominent members of the Ritter School – Hermann Lübbe, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, and Odo Marquard – and on the contributions of Hans Blumenberg, I will demonstrate how Schmitt’s thought was appropriated and critically inverted, in order to provide theoretical support to liberalism. This project of liberalizing Schmitt involved developing a “weak decisionism,” which avoids the state of exception, providing a liberalist reading of Schmitt’s Hobbes-inspired narrative on the origin of the modern state and even formulating a “political polytheology.” Finally, this article offers a reflection on “political theology” as a conceptual field. I argue that the liberal–conservative, “neutralizing” reading of Schmitt is to some extent already available as an option within this framework, and I conclude that this finding problematizes Schmitt’s own dualistic antagonism.

Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Caroline A. Kita, editors. The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany

Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Caroline A. Kita, editors. <i>The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany</i>

“One Would at Least Like to Be Asked”

Abstract As the leading public intellectual of postwar West Germany, Jürgen Habermas was a prominent opponent of the unification of the two Germanies after 1989. While his fears regarding the identity, collective memory, Western orientation, and economic power of a united Germany are important, in contrast to the existing literature, I argue that Habermas's objections are primarily procedural, focusing on the normative deficiencies in Chancellor Helmut Kohl's executive-led, administrative approach to reunification. In Habermas's eyes this procedure short-circuited the democratic processes of public opinion- and will-formation necessary to fulfill the normative presuppositions of popular self-determination. Methodologically, I make this point by reading Habermas's “short political writings” alongside his theoretical writings, especially his early postwar readings of the German constitutional theory. In addition to reframing the debate over his opposition to unification, I also oppose realist critiques of his work by showing that Habermas's theoretical writings have direct implications for contemporary politics.

‘We should no longer sit on packed suitcases’: German expellees’ emotions in post-war West Germany

ABSTRACT This article examines the integration into West Germany of those Germans expelled from Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia after the Second World War through an emotional perspective. The focus on evangelical communities serves here the purpose of exploring the significant role of evangelical churches and pastors in comforting the expellees, as well as their wishes and expectations. Since expellees used to share existential and intimate questions with their pastors, this correspondence provides a closer look at their multifaced emotional universe, which often diverged from the stereotypical image proposed by the expellee political representatives. The discrepancy between these two images reflected the political rupture that occurred between the expellees and their political leaders from the mid-1950s. The article’s aim is to show that significant emotional reasons underlie this progressive political detachment that deals both with the transformation of the expellees’ idea of homeland and with the desire to look forward from the Nazi legacy.

Forced Migration and Local Public Policies: Evidence from Post-War West Germany

Abstract We study the effect of forced migration on public policy setting in the migrant-receiving country. After World War II, eight million expelled Germans arrived in West Germany within 5 years. We use regional variation in the population share of forced migrants across West German cities to estimate the effect of this inflow on cities’ taxation and spending decisions. To identify a causal effect, we pursue an instrumental variable strategy that leverages push factors of the expulsions while being orthogonal to local conditions in the destination regions. Our results show that cities with high inflows of forced migrants increased spending on welfare and education, decreased spending on infrastructure, raised local taxes, and incurred more debt. Part of these effects can be attributed to shifts in political preferences. The migrants held voting rights upon arrival and supported parties that explicitly catered to their interests and needs.

‘A Final Solution for Humanity’? Modern Design and the Ambivalence of Redemption in Post-War West Germany

During the Third Reich, a modern shape of everyday objects was propagated as realising a German nation defined as an organic and racial entity. What happened to this cultural nexus after 1945? Historical scholarship has emphasized above all that modern design went on to be successfully framed as a cultural good that redeemed West Germany from the Nazi past. This redeeming opposition between the political meanings of modern design before and after 1945, however, appears less clear-cut if one acknowledges the structure of denial in post-war discourses by focussing on the silences, omissions and discrepancies in various publications. Such an analysis exposes how the coding of modern design as ‘timeless’ together with its promotion in the context of the Marshall Plan made it possible to blur any historical understanding of how the underlying notions of everyday aesthetics had been intertwined with racially loaded ideas of the German people. This obscurity in the context of a not yet decolonized West facilitated the continuing influence of at least some aspects of modern design’s more troubling political legacies.

The Archive of Gerd Huber (1921-2012) at Bezirkskrankenhaus Günzburg

Gerd Huber (1921-2012) was an influential West German psychiatrist and neurologist of the postwar period. Especially his studies with imaging techniques on the question of brain atrophy, the long-term course and the basic symptoms of schizophrenic disorders made a significant contribution to the research of schizophrenia and were discussed internationally. The Huber Archive, which was handed over to Bezirkskrankenhaus Günzburg, is currently being catalogued for research purposes. The archive contains Huber's private and professional papers, his writings, and a small partial archive of Kurt Schneider. These archival records not only reflect the development of Gerd Huber's academic career, but also are significant for research on the history of psychiatry in postwar West Germany, the development of concepts in the fields of schizophrenia research and biological psychiatry, the history of universities and everyday life, and other topics.

In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy

In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy

German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism by Hester Baer

Reviewed by: German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism by Hester Baer Leila Mukhida German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism. By Hester Baer. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth €117.00. ISBN 978-9463727334. The iconic, red-haired protagonist of one of Germany's biggest international box-office successes of all time, Tom Tykwer's Lola rennt (1998), is an exemplary neoliberal subject according to Hester Baer. Not only is Lola flexible, entrepreneurial, and able to effectively self-optimize, carrying over skills she learns in one of her video-gamelike frenzied excursions through Berlin from one life to the next, she is also literally driven by her quest for money. Thus, the film, Baer argues in her new book German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism, embodies German state-funded cinema under neoliberalism on an intra- and extradiegetic level, whereby profit is the key motive of both the film industry as well as human activity. In Tykwer's film, Lola's efforts are futile as it is her boyfriend Manni who ultimately triumphs by delivering the money he owes to its recipient; Baer wryly observes that "Manni—a homophone for money and a metonym for man—prevails" (107). While Lola is indeed the ideal self-optimizing citizen, then, her behavior does not result in fulfillment, which Baer considers to reveal a specifically gendered kind of cruel optimism (via Berlant). I highlight this argument because it illustrates a key tenet of the book's thesis as well as its methodological approach: the films Baer considers explore how cinema can archive the neoliberal turn, exposing its cultural logic on the level of narrative, aesthetics, and production; at the same time, Baer employs a feminist lens in order to expose the representational politics at stake. A number of scholars have explored what constitutes political filmmaking in relation to recent German and European cinema. However, Hester Baer is unique in her insistence on analyzing films primarily through the lens of their conditions of production. Baer convincingly argues that the financialization of the state under neoliberalism has had wide-ranging effects which do not simply permeate the realm of cinema but rather which fundamentally reconfigure the relationship between politics and aesthetics. She turns to Christian Petzold to articulate what is at stake: "economic conditions are trying to annihilate films" (22). Petzold's polemic statement [End Page 390] underpins Baer's claim that Germany offers a particularly interesting case study for assessing filmmaking since the neoliberal turn, which she claims began around 1980. Crucially, a key conceit of the book is that while the effects of neoliberalism on the film industry can be observed all over the world, Germany has a "cinema of neoliberalism par excellence" on account of its history of division and unification (20). In postwar West Germany, neoliberalism offered an escape route out of postwar economic depression, with the Wirtschaftswunder representing a cornerstone in the neoliberal project. This was bolstered further by Helmut Kohl's widespread changes to economic policy that promoted, among other things, Leistung, mobility, and competitiveness. Baer also emphasizes the role of neoliberalism in shaping East Germany too, contributing indirectly to its demise through a build-up of external pressure on the state by market-driven forces, and directly after the fall of the wall, when the new German states were forced to rapidly adapt to a socioeconomic order. Indeed, the economic tabula rasa in East Germany meant that the neoliberal project was implemented in a more accelerated manner than in West Germany. Baer cogently charts these economic and political changes and links them to cinema—a key site of interrogating such changes due to its "dual nature as an industrial and aesthetic form" in order to make the well-founded and somewhat devastating argument that in Germany, a film's value is determined solely by its capacity to make a profit (30–31). So where does this leave German cinema? Baer argues that filmmakers who wish to comment on the machinations of the neoliberal present must necessarily navigate the fact that their mode of production is linked to representational choices, and search for new pictures and new stories to represent advanced capitalism. The films that she...

Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany Emily Richmond Pollock.

<i>Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany</i> Emily Richmond Pollock.

Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989. By Peter C. Caldwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii+226. $90.00.

<i>Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989</i>. By Peter C. Caldwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii+226. $90.00.

Peter C. Caldwell. Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989.

P<scp>eter</scp> C. C<scp>aldwell</scp>. <i>Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989</i>.

Peter C. Caldwell (2019), Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949-1989, Oxford: Oxford University Press, £69.00, pp. 240, hbk.

Peter C. Caldwell (2019), Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949-1989, Oxford: Oxford University Press, £69.00, pp. 240, hbk. - Volume 50 Issue 4

‘Light on the enlightenment’ or ‘counter-enlightenment’?: Rereading Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis in its context(s)

ABSTRACT This article tackles the political implications of Reinhart Koselleck’s first work, Kritik und Krise, re-questioning its relationship to the ‘Enlightenment’ and the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. Rather than establishing the semantic contents of this pair of antonymic concepts in an abstract way, I believe that we must study the concrete uses to which they are put, that is, the discursive strategies of the actors themselves showing, in each case, the specific adversaries against whom they are mobilized and the specific ends to which they are used. The goal of the present essay is to understand whether the early Koselleck belonged to the tradition of the Enlightenment or the Counter-Enlightenment in the specific context of post-War West Germany intellectual debates. By locating Kritik und Krise in the controversies relating to the political identity of the new German Federal Republic, I show that he was not, in the 1950s, a representative of Cold War Liberalism or anti-totalitarianism but, rather, oscillated between different conservative positions (‘Traditional’ conservatism and ‘Conservative Revolution’) that were typical of the post-War period and, in large measure, hostile to the Enlightenment legacy.

Conceptual Explorations around “Politics”

This article discusses the ways of conceptualizing politics in parliamentary debates. When the politics-vocabulary is ubiquitous in them, which kind of speech act lies in emphasizing the political aspect? Focusing on thematized uses allows us to identify conceptual revisions in the politics-vocabulary in digitalized plenary debates of the German Bundestag from 1949 to 2017. My fourfold scheme for conceptualizing politics (polity, policy, politicization, politicking) provides the analytical apparatus. The units of analysis in this study are compound words around politics written as single words, a German language specialty. Their frequency has remarkably risen in the Bundestag debates, and the search engine can easily find them. This research interest allows me to speculate with changes in the understanding and appreciation of politics in postwar (West)Germany.

Conceptual Explorations around “Politics”

Abstract This article discusses the ways of conceptualizing politics in parliamentary debates. When the politics-vocabulary is ubiquitous in them, which kind of speech act lies in emphasizing the political aspect? Focusing on thematized uses allows us to identify conceptual revisions in the politics-vocabulary in digitalized plenary debates of the German Bundestag from 1949 to 2017. My fourfold scheme for conceptualizing politics (polity, policy, politicization, politicking) provides the analytical apparatus. The units of analysis in this study are compound words around politics written as single words, a German language specialty. Their frequency has remarkably risen in the Bundestag debates, and the search engine can easily find them. This research interest allows me to speculate with changes in the understanding and appreciation of politics in postwar (West)Germany