West German Politics Research Articles

Financial Constitution Issues in Development of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948-1949

This article analyzes the key problems of the financial constitution in the development of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in 1948-1949, based on materials from the Constitutional Convention at Herrenchiemsee and the Parliamentary Council of West Germany. It emphasizes that the relevance of this issue was influenced by Germany’s historical development, which had a long-standing experience in both regional and imperial financial administration. This led to high significance of financial constitution issues in post-war West German politics. It is concluded that the main approaches to this problem were developed at the Herrenchiemsee Convention in October 1948, and the main content of the financial section of the Basic Law was formulated in the financial committee at the beginning of October 1948. A key role in developing the financial constitution was played by parliamentarian H. HöpkerAschoff. However, until May 1949, the parties could not reach a consensus on matters of financial administration system and financial equalization. This was significantly influenced by constant objections from the occupying administrations, the position of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), uncertainty in assessing financial conditions, and the Social Democrats’ consistent defense of broad financial powers for the federal center.

Introduction

For many decades, stability and predictability were the defining features of German party competition. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, West German politics was dominated by the well-known two-and-a-half party system, which later expanded with the rise of the Greens in the 1980s and the addition of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) after German reunification.1 Despite the expanding party system, party competition continued to be anchored by the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) on the center-right and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) on the center-left, such that government coalitions at the federal and state level could typically be formed by two coalition partners, while ideologically coherent coalitions among parties on the left or the right were the norm.

Energy, Ecology, and the Remaking of West German Politics in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract This article traces the transformation of West Germany's political system during the 1970s and 1980s, when an extra-parliamentary ecological opposition emerged to challenge the governing Social Democratic Party (SPD). Demographic, economic, and structural features in West Germany's political system created the space for this opposition, eventually leading to the formation of the Green Party. This article argues that ideas about energy were crucial to the movement's success, providing a focal point for reform that aimed to spur an energy transition. This movement of experts and activists pulled West Germany's political system in an ecological direction, forcing the SPD to become green itself. The transformation of West Germany's political system, in turn, set the Federal Republic on a different energy trajectory than the United States, Great Britain, and France.

‘Victory or Siberia’: Imaginings of Siberia and the Memory of German POWs in the USSR

Abstract This article explores the memory of German prisoners of war (POWs) from the Second World War in the USSR. The article first identifies the trope of Siberian captivity, which it refutes using two digital humanities methods: geographic information system (GIS) mapping and text analysis. The article then raises a series of factors, covering both experiences, memoirs and novels of First World War captivity in Russia and also Nazi propaganda, to show a long-standing association between Siberia and German captivity in Russia and the Soviet Union. Finally, the article explores West German politics and memory culture to argue ultimately that the trope of Siberian captivity persisted as a result of West German anti-Communist policies and an attempt to displace blame and complicity for the war. While German memory changed between the 1950s and the present and although scholars have worked to expose many misrepresentations of the war that started in West Germany in the 1950s, this is the first study to examine the idea of Siberian captivity and its links to POWs in the USSR.

“The Limits of Human Jurisdiction”: Protestantism, War Crimes Trials, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany

In the years after 1945, German Protestant church leaders and lay intellectuals emerged as ubiquitous critics of the war crimes trials conducted by the Allied occupation governments. Marshaling the financial resources and international connections of the newly formed Protestant Church in Germany, a network of church administrators, theologians, and jurists petitioned occupation authorities for the release of hundreds of convicted Nazi perpetrators. While a generation of critical scholarship has linked the campaign against war crimes trials to the persistence of Protestant nationalism in Allied-occupied Germany, this article argues that the campaign also marked an inflection point in postwar German politics. Protestant church leaders and jurists not only echoed popular attacks on Allied “victors’ justice” but also developed a novel language of human rights that would shape their later interventions in West German politics. Rejecting the dominant contemporary discourses of human rights, rooted in Catholic natural law or American exceptionalism, Protestant trial opponents recentered human rights around a theology of human fallibility in order to criticize the alleged excesses of political justice. Yet even as they promoted tendentious accounts of the Nazi past, Protestant leaders contributed to institutionalizing human rights in West German politics. By the 1950s, veterans of the postwar amnesty campaigns would defend the rights of conscientious objectors and recognition of Germany’s territorial losses. The Protestant campaign against war crimes trials demonstrates how human rights gained power in postwar Germany as a political language that bridged nationalist and internationalist commitments, with ambiguous consequences for the consolidation of democracy.

War Imprisonment and Clinical Narratives of Psychiatric Illness, Psychiatric Hospital Charité, Berlin, 1948-1956.

While the historical analysis of psychological trauma from warfare has been extensive, traumatic illness in East German psychiatric practice after the Second World War has drawn little attention. The dominant literature uses West German political and medical discourses as sources to investigate the relationship between traumatic experience and psychiatric illness. This paper instead draws from East German patient files from 1948 until 1956 to examine efforts at the Charité Hospital in Berlin to interpret the psychiatric illness of former prisoners of war (POWs). By examining Socialist Party discourse at the time, the paper argues that psychiatric explanations created parallels with political debates by foregrounding social readjustment difficulties as the cause of postwar illness. Against this background, the final section explores the way in which war imprisonment could constitute a challenge to the clinical restructuring of former POWs' patient histories. Using strategies of confabulation, POWs confronted the documentary negotiation between bodies and meaning, provoking ambivalence.

A Bit of Theory but Little Empirical Research: Public Finance as Topic of the West German Political Sciences (1949–1989)

Der Artikel untersucht den Umgang der Politikwissenschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1949–1989) mit Fragen der offentlichen Finanzen. Es zeigt sich, dass angesichts der thematisch dominierenden Probleme der Etablierung einer Demokratie sowie der Aufarbeitung des Nationalsozialismus weder Steuer- noch Haushaltspolitik in den ersten zwei Jahrzehnten eine Rolle fur die sich etablierende Disziplin spielten. Erst im Rahmen der vor allem neomarxistisch gepragten Debatten um den Staat setzte in den 1970er-Jahren ein Interesse an dessen Finanzen ein. Die daraus hervorgehenden Beitrage argumentierten jedoch vor allem auf der Meta-Ebene. Erste empirisch gesattigte und international vergleichende Studien entstanden vor allem zur Haushaltspolitik in den 1980er-Jahren.

‘Bekennen gegen den Atomstaat’. Die Evangelische Kirchen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die Konflikte um die Atomenergie, 1970–1990Medizin gegen den Kalten Krieg. Ärzte in der anti-atomaren Friedensbewegung der 1980er Jahre

The final third of the twentieth century has been described by the intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers as an ‘age of fracture’, when the means of talking about the ‘aggregate aspects of human life’ changed dramatically. Similarly, Tony Judt argues in his magnum opus Postwar, old political constituencies based on ‘elective affinities of large groups of voters’ gave way to interest in specific policies by much smaller, more closely defined groups in the 1970s. So it is fitting that two new books on the debate over nuclear technology, which became a seminal subject within West German politics during the late 1970s and early 1980s, approach the issue from the perspectives of particular confessional and professional organizations, and thus contribute to our understanding of the way politics functioned in a disaggregated society.

Petra Kelly, International Green Leader: On Biography and the Peace Movement as Resources of Power in West German Politics, 1979-1983

This article uses the biography of the activist and Green Party co-founder Petra Kelly in order to rethink the Greens' founding process and to articulate a new conception of charismatic political leadership. It shows how Kelly used her activism in the new social movements as the basis for her leadership role in the Greens, and how her ongoing work in the peace movement provided her a means of maintaining power within the nascent party during the early 1980s. By examining Kelly's contributions to the Greens' approach to politics, the article shows that she was more than just a figurehead for the new party. Most importantly, the article shows that throughout her career as an activist and politician, Kelly used her biography to establish credibility and to support her unique style of charismatic leadership. The German public's response to Kelly reveals the influence of this charismatic leadership and shows how her movement-driven and biographically informed approach, which brought personal experiences and emotions into politics, was part of a larger transformation of the political in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.

Booming solidarity: Sandinista Nicaragua and the West German Solidarity movement in the 1980s

This article explores the reasons for the strength and persistence of West German solidarity with Sandinista Nicaragua during the 1980s. The image of Nicaragua played a key role for activists, as it motivated commitment and identification with the revolution. Their positive perceptions were shaped by the revolutionary reforms in Nicaragua and an effective image campaign by the Sandinista government as well as by activists' political desires and their discontent with West German politics. By promoting their reform policies through a transnational communications infrastructure, by practising cultural and public diplomacy as well as by playing host to thousands of visitors, the Sandinistas encouraged supporters to identify with the revolutionary process and feel part of it at a time when many activists felt like an isolated leftist minority in the Federal Republic.

‘The Sons of Marx Greet the Sons of Sandino’: West German Solidarity Visitors to Nicaragua Sandinista

This article explores the phenomenon of revolutionary tourism to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and conceives of it as a practice of transnational solidarity, which was fostered by activists and Sandinistas alike. Individual visits and solidarity brigades proved to be an effective tool to strengthen support for the revolution. It provided activists with the possibility to experience the revolutionary process first-hand and to establish personal, emotional bonds. The knowledge and experiences collected during visits represented a strong incentive to engage in solidarity actions afterwards, thus emphasizing the multiplying propagandistic effects of solidarity tourism. On the one hand, personal motivations of solidarity visitors mostly met the official political expectations of Sandinistas and their solidarity partners abroad, on the other hand, they also reflected notions of protest against contemporary West German politics and sometimes also purely touristic desires.

GOING PUBLIC: REVIVING JEWISH LIFE IN POST-WAR GERMANY

This article explores the process of reconstituting Jewish communities and redefining Jewish identity in post-Holocaust Germany through an analysis of the work of Karl Marx and Dr Hendrik G. van Dam, the two principle Jewish communal leaders. It also pays special attention to their role in the larger constellation of West-German politics during the 1960s.

‘Outcast From History’: The Fischer Controversy and British Historiography

Fritz Fischer’s 1961 Griff nach der Weltmacht enjoys a well-deserved reputation as a landmark in later twentieth-century German historiography. The impact of the so-called ‘Fischer controversy’ on British scholarship, by contrast, was varied and ambiguous. Even so, the reaction of British historians to Fischer’s work as such and the fierce public debate it generated in West Germany is revealing on a number of counts. It throws into sharper relief different interpretations of Great Power politics in the long nineteenth century that reflect different national academic traditions. As this article shows, moreover, Fischer’s work burst onto the scene at a time of considerable turmoil in the historical profession in the United Kingdom. This examination of the reaction to Fischer’s work thus throws a revealing light also on the state of history as an academic discipline as well as on contemporary perceptions of West German politics and society.

Zur Krise der westdeutschen Grenzwertpolitik in den 1970er Jahren: Die Verwandlung des Berufskrebses von einem toxikologischen in ein sozioökonomisches Problem

The paper tackles the changes that occurred in the political culture and the episteme of risk in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s. The objects of observation are limit values for hazardous industrial materials, especially for carcinogens. At the forefront of the production of such values in Germany was the German Research Society's Senate Commission for the Examination of Hazardous Industrial Materials. Limit values bring economy, politics, and science together and they mediate different interests. This makes limit values an ideal object of study to bring together changes in different parts of society. In 1972, a new category of limit values for carcinogenic substances is introduced, the so called "Technische Richtkonzentration" (TRK). This category of values does not assume that complete safety can be reached, as do limit values for hazardous industrial materials, so called "Maximale Arbeitsplatzkonzentrationen" (MAK). This means an important rupture in toxicological thinking. Until the 1970s, Paracelsus' dictum about dosage and poison still served as starting point for toxicologists. The innovation of TRK marks an important rupture in the episteme of regulating dangerous matters. Whereas until the 1970s there existed, at least as an ideal, the myth of "no risk" or "zero tolerance" even in the case of carcinogens, since the beginning of the 1970s, certainty is no more guaranteed by epistemically, but by socially robust knowledge. This also means the return of the risk society at the beginning of the 1970s, whereby cancer at the workplace becomes--in the view of the regulatory bodies--out of a medical problem a socioeconomic illness. The paper argues that these changes are connected to a general feeling of disorientation.

Romantic Subjectivity and West German Politics in Wolfgang Rihm's "Jakob Lenz"

Romantic Subjectivity and West German Politics in Wolfgang Rihm's Jakob Lenz In the late 1970s, the German composer Wolfgang Rihm was still in his late twenties, but he had already gained international recognition. He had established himself through a compositional style that incorpo rated historical allusion while aiming toward intense expressivity. The intended expressive immediacy of his music has often been understood in stark contrast to the complex, highly intellectualized compositional techniques of preceding years.1 Particularly illustrative of this style isJakob Lenz, a chamber opera that Rihm composed in 1977-78. The opera's libretto is based on a narrative textwritten by Georg Biichner around 1835. Buchner's text is about an episode in the life of a real historical figure: the eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang writer, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-92).2 True to Buchner's Lenz, themost obvious topic of Rihm's one-act opera is the psychological condition of itsprotagonist. Jessica Balik Wolfgang Rihm'sJakob Lenz 229 Rihm's opera depicts the subjective state of the character Lenz. More specifically, the opera's drama emphasizes tension between general, socio-historically established conventions and Lenz's individual, subjective state. Similarly, Rihm's music also exudes tension between the historical conventions to which it alludes and the unique music that Rihm nonetheless creates. Through both the depiction of itsprotagonist and the construction of its music, therefore,Jakob Lenz engages with the idea of preserving subjectivity against established theories and conventions. This paper cites examples of the tension, and explains two ways that such concern for the preservation of individual subjectivity can be understood in relation to the sociopolitical climate fromwhich this opera emerged: West Germany during the 1970s.3 Subjectivity vis-A-vis Convention Biichner's text and the opera's libretto portray Lenz as a psychologically unstable character. In both texts, Lenz is sent by a friend named Kaufmann on a journey through themountains to find a pastor named Oberlin. Kaufmann hopes that Oberlin can nurse Lenz to health. Although Lenz does find Oberlin, Oberlin is unable to help him. The opera ends with Kaufmann and Oberlin binding Lenz in a straitjacket, and with Lenz sufferingamental and emotional breakdown. While this ending makes Lenz's psychological agitation clear, itdoes not explain what underlies Lenz's affliction. In a study of Biichner's text, Gundula Sharman understands Lenz's instablity to concern external frameworks that conventionally imbue human lifewith stability and meaning. They fail for Lenz.4 Nature is one example. Sharman notes that walking through the mountains is a trope of German Romanticism that usually yields "rejuvenation" and "communion with nature."5 Although Biichner's Lenz is indeed a piece of German Romantic literature that references this trope, Lenz's journey through themountains does not produce any salubrious effects. Another example of an external framework that fails to keep Lenz psychologically sound is religion. In Rihm's opera, for instance, Kaufmann reminds Lenz that his father would like for him to return home. Even if it is not made explicit in the opera, Lenz's biography makes it clear that his father is a pastor who is disappointed about Lenz's refusal to become a pastor himself.6 Kaufmann and Oberlin both suggest that Lenz should return home and obey his father, but near the close of the opera's sixth scene, Lenz responds with incredulity that he cannot.7 230 Perspectives of New Music Just as Lenz's dramatic narrative does not adhere to these conven tional frameworks for creating a psychologically stable life, so too does Lenz's musical line tend to eschew convention. One example occurs in the ninth scene. Rihm's performance indication at its beginning reads "Quasi Sarabande."8 It opens with the cellos establishing a stately triple meter. They also reference the second-beat accents and dotted rhythmic patterns that characterize the Sarabandes of many eighteenth-century dance suites, even though they also distort these characteristics by playing pizzicato. In so doing, Rihm references this dance in part by distancing his own music from its conventions; therefore, the adjective "quasi" within his performance indication is indeed crucial (see Example When Lenz's vocal line enters this scene, the...

Death and the Making of West Berlin, 1948-1961

This essay traces shifts in attitudes towards death, practices of burial, and rituals of mourning in West Berlin from the 1948 currency reform to the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall. It shows that West Berliners in the years immediately following the Second World War maintained an arduous devotion to their dead—particularly the war dead. Yet as the war became a less immediate experience over the course of the 1950s, broad cultural shifts took shape, including a renewed sense of optimism and an emerging feeling that the suffering associated with the war could be and was being redeemed. Meanwhile, a cult of the dead long venerated as part of the very foundation of German culture gradually became ‘less German’ and ‘more Western’ over that same period. In this way, it also became a means of distinguishing West Berlin from its Communist neighbour to the East. By focusing on shifts in perceptions and practices surrounding death, the essay reveals part of the process by which moral and ethical values were reconstructed after Nazism, and how the racist collectivism of the Third Reich gradually gave way to the broadly individualist, democratic-socialist humanism that would form the basis of an expressly West German politics and society.

The Baltic Question in West German Politics, 1949–90

While previous research by international lawyers has emphasized Bonn's value-neutral legalistic approach to the Baltic question from 1949 to 1990, this article–based on documents from the German Foreign Ministry archives–shows that the West Germans saw the Baltic issue as a political problem that interfered with their highest national aim: German unification. It addresses the following questions: first, why Bonn never made an official announcement of, and never publicly gave a justification for, its stance on the Baltic question; and second, why Bonn granted Baltic refugees the same rights that it offered other Heimat-less foreigners, whereas the remnants of Baltic diplomatic services or self-proclaimed exile governments found no official recognition in Germany. Finally, it comments on the role of the so-called German Balts in West German politics, and in Bonn's Baltic policies specifically.

The Holocaust through the Prism of East German Television: Collective Memory and Audience Perceptions

��� The German Democratic Republic never took the same responsibility for Holocaust memory as the Federal Republic of Germany. East Germans learned relatively little about the Holocaust thorough their popular culture. East Germans were less likely to identify the Holocaust as a critical piece of German history than West Germans, but by examining the muted narrative of the Holocaust that did appear on East German television, this article also shows how East Germans came to have a distinct collective memory of the Holocaust, notwithstanding their viewing of West German television. The following makes use of rarely cited viewer surveys, which offer unique insights into what East Germans thought about the programs they watched. It is a generally accepted fact that East Germans never experienced the same confrontation with the Holocaust that their West German counterparts did prior to the reunification of Germany in 1990, in large part because the official state anti-fascism celebrated almost exclusively the suffering and struggle of the communist resistance fighters. 1 When official state discourse did engage the Holocaust, it was interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of Marxist class analysis, which stated that antisemitism was only a diversionary tactic of the ruling class to distract the workers from the class struggle and revolution. We also know that East Germans regularly participated vicariously in West German political and cultural developments via frequent watching of West German television. Archival documents show that during the early 1970s between 50% and 78% of prime-time viewers directed their attention to the West. 2 The German historian Lutz Niethammer suggested in the 1980s that this dual access to Germany’s difficult past may have led East Germans to a more differentiated view of National Socialism. 3 Yet, unlike the West Germans, the East Germans lacked an open public space within which to discuss their views. Thus, although many East Germans certainly watched the American television series Holocaust when it was broadcast in the West, 4 they were not able to participate in the same wide-ranging public discussions that immediately followed. Nor were they able to participate in the sustained public Holocaust discussions in the West during the 1980s, which took place on television and radio, in the print media, and also in the cinema. 5 One result of this was that East Germans appeared much less likely to

Eastern Germany Ten Years After Unification

On October 3, 1990 the territory of the German Democratic Republic was incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany, thereby ending forty-five years of German division. At the time, assessments varied widely about whether the wholesale introduction of the West German political, legal, and socioeconomic systems into the formerly communist east would be a success, and what the implications of success or failure would be for the new united Germany. Ten years later, opinions on these fundamental questions remain divided. One group of optimistic observers maintains that the full integration of the east into an enlarged Federal Republic is well underway, though these observers acknowledge that progress has been slower and more uneven than first anticipated. A more pessimistic assessment is provided by those who claim that, if the present pattern of development continues, the east will remain in a position of permanent structural weakness vis-à-vis the west in a way analogous to that of Italy’s Mezzogiorno.

The rise and demise of German statism: loyalty and political membership

Preface Introduction: Political Membership, Logics of Appropriateness, and Political Loyalty in Germany Chapter 1. State Bureaucrats before Societal Citizens: Articulation and Consolidation of German Statism in the Early Nineteenth Century Chapter 2. The Most Democratic Democracy in the World:German Statism Survives the Weimar Republic Chapter 3. Institutional Politics of Postwar West Germany: Parteienstaat, the Professional Civil Service, and the Political Mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s Chapter 4. German Statism and West German Political Party and Intellectual Discourse in the 1970s Chapter 5. Tensions Endemic to an Alternative Politics in a Statist Context: West German Greens between State and Society Chapter 6. Discourse of German Unification: Between Statist Reassurance and Societalist Risk Chapter 7. Unified Germany and the New Politics of Rational Membership: Civil Service and Naturalization Policy in the 1990s Conclusion: Demise of German Statism and the Tensions of Democratic Political Membership Bibliography