German Ideologies Since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic

German Ideologies since 1945 Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic

Edited by

Jan-Werner Müller

German Ideologies since 1945

EUROPE IN TRANSITION: THE NYU EUROPEAN STUDIES SERIES

The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After Edited by Martin Schain Europe at the Polls: The European Elections of 1999 Edited by Pascal Perrineau, Gérard Grunberg, and Colette Ysmal Unions, Immigration, and Internationalization: New Challenges and Changing Coalitions in the United States and France By Leah Haus Shadows over Europe: The Development and Impact of the Extreme Right in Western Europe Edited by Martin Schain, Aristide Zolberg, and Patrick Hossay German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic Edited by Jan-Werner Müller

German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic

Edited by

Jan-Werner Müller

GERMAN IDEOLOGIES SINCE 1945 © Jan-Werner Müller, 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever wthout written permission except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–312–29579–0 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data German ideologies since 1945: studies in the poliical thought and culture of the Bonn Republic/edited by Jan-Werner Müller. p. cm. Chiefly papers of a workershop organized by the Remarque Institute of New York University. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–29579–0 (cloth) 1. Germany—Politics and government—1945–1990. 2. Political science—Germany. I. Müller, Jan-Werner, 1970–. JN3971.A58 G465 2002 320.50943—dc21

2002023880

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India First edition: February, 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Contributors

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Putting German Political Thought in Context Jan-Werner Müller

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Part 1 The Transformation of German Political Thought in the Post-War Period 1 Restoring the German Spirit: Humanism and Guilt in Post-War Germany Anson Rabinbach 2 Normative Westernization?—The Impact of Remigres on the Foundation of Political Thought in Post-War Germany Alfons Söllner

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3 Habermas’ Reconstruction of West German Post-War Law and the Sozialstaat Controversy John P. McCormick

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4 The Westernization of the Political Thought of the West German Labor Movement Julia S. Angster

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Part 2 Critical Theory and the Legacies of 1968

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5 Post-War Ideologies and the Body Politics of 1968 Dagmar Herzog

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6 1968 as Event, Milieu, and Ideology Jan-Werner Müller

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Part 3 German Conservatism: From Technocratic Conservatism to the New Right 7 From the Conservative Revolution to Technocratic Conservatism Dirk van Laak 8

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German Neo-Conservatism, ca. 1968–1985: Hermann Lübbe and Others Jerry Z. Muller

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9 From National Identity to National Interest: The Rise (and Fall) of Germany’s New Right Jan-Werner Müller

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Part 4 German Republicanism and the Politics of Recognition

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10 A Tolerant Republic? Rainer Forst

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11 The Many Faces of the Republic: Or, What’s in a Name? William A. Barbieri, Jr.

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Index

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Contributors

Julia S. Angster is assistant professor in the Department of Contemporary History, University of Tübingen. She is the author of a forthcoming book on the Westernization of German labor and has published several articles on the topic. Her research interests include intercultural transfer between the United States and Germany in the 20th century, and labor history, especially the history of German labor’s political exile in the 19th and the 20th centuries. William A. Barbieri, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Social Ethics in the School of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America, as well as Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program. He is the author of Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany (Duke University Press, 1998). He held a Humboldt Fellowship at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1999. Rainer Forst teaches philosophy at Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. He is the author of Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism (University of California Press, 2001). He has also published articles in moral and political philosophy and is the editor of Toleranz (Campus, 2000). He is currently working on a book about the concept of toleration. Dagmar Herzog is associate professor of history at Michigan State University. She is the author of Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in PreRevolutionary Baden (Princeton University Press, 1996), and is currently writing a book on the history of sexuality in Nazi and post-Nazi Germany. Dirk van Laak is assistant professor at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena. He is the author of Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens: Carl Schmitt in der Geistesgeschichte der frühen Bundesrepublik (Akademie, 1993) and Weisse Elefanten: Anspruch und Scheitern technischer Grossprojekte im 20. Jahrhundert (DVA, 1999). John P. McCormick is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is the author of Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against

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Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and the editor of Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology: German Political and Social Thought from Nietzsche to Habermas (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2001). His next book, Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Jan-Werner Müller is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (Yale University Press, 2000) and the editor of Memory and Power in PostWar Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Jerry Z. Muller is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. His books include The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1987); Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton, 1997), and The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (forthcoming). Anson Rabinbach teaches at Princeton University where he is currently Professor of History and directs the Program in European Cultural Studies. His books include The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Basic Books, 1991) and Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: German Intellectuals in the Shadow of Catastrophe (University of California Press, 1997). In 1973 he co-founded and continues to edit New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies. Alfons Söllner is Professor for Political Theory and the History of Ideas at Technical University of Chemnitz. His recent books include Deutsche Politikwissenschaftler in der Emigration (Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), (edited by), Totalitarismus: Eine Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Akademie, 1997), (edited by) Ostprofile—Universitätsentwicklungen in den neuen Bundesländern (Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998).

Acknowledgments

Most of the chapters in this volume were first presented at a workshop organized by the Remarque Institute at New York University. I am most grateful to the Institute’s director, Tony Judt, for intellectual and financial support. Warmest thanks also to Jair Kessler, the Assistant Director of the Institute, for essential administrative (and emotional) support. Finally, I am grateful to all participants in the workshop who offered comments and criticism. Jerry Z. Muller’s chapter “German Neo-Conservatism, ca. 1968–1985: Hermann Lübbe and Others” has previously appeared as “German Neoconservatism and the History of the Bonn Republic, 1968 to 1985” in German Politics and Society, vol. 18, no. 1 (Spring, 2000). My “From National Identity to National Interest: The Rise (and Fall) of Germany’s New Right” first came out in the December 1999 issue of German Politics, while a different and longer version of “1968 as Event, Milieu, and Ideology” has been published in the February 2002 issue of the Journal of Political Ideologies. I wish to thank the editors of all three journals for their kind permission to reprint these materials. Finally, an apologetic note for the editor appearing twice in the volume— a fact due not to the relentless desire for self-promotion typical of today’s academy, but to the fate of many edited volumes: a contributor dropping out a short notice.

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Introduction: Putting German Political Thought in Context

Jan-Werner Müller

I am … ambivalent because I have the impression that something is deeply amiss in the rational society in which I grew up and in which I now live. On the other hand, I have also retained something else from the experience of 1945 and after, namely that things got better. Things really got better. —Jürgen Habermas

H

ow did Germans overcome the “Germanic ideology,” the fateful mixture of radical nationalism and cultural pessimism that was so pervasive in Germany in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century?1 Or did they? How has political thought developed in Germany since 1945, the supposed “zero hour” in modern German history? What have been the contours of the new German post-war ideologies that have replaced the Germanic ideology? And is there an inner logic to the constellation of political traditions prevalent in Germany after 1945? It is well known that the radical nationalist Right and the radical Marxist Left, which had been so prominent during Weimar, eventually disappeared in West Germany. But did a distinctive German liberalism develop to combat or absorb ideological extremes?2 And why is there no libertarianism in Germany? Is it at all possible to conceive of a German republicanism along French lines, a kind of Federal Republican civisme? What do German conservatives wish to conserve? Which peculiar forms did anticommunism and anti-Americanism take in the divided country—and have Germans managed to construct a lasting democratic anti-totalitarianism, as many post-war liberal thinkers set out to do?3 And what remain the main ideological fault lines in German political thought?

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These are some of the questions—and peculiarities—that this volume seeks to investigate. It starts with the premise that political thought is subject to both logical and cultural constraints.4 Accordingly, an analytical approach to political thought—assessing the logic and the coherence of arguments— is as indispensable as cultural and historical contextualization to understand the nature of political claim-making in a given national framework. Intellectual history, cultural history, social history, and political history cannot be properly separated in a thorough investigation of the history of political thought.5 Consequently, this volume seeks to elucidate the transformations of German political thought after 1945 both by analyzing the kinds of claims and arguments German political thinkers have been putting forward over the past 50 years and by elucidating the cultural as well as institutional contexts of these transformations. Throughout, analysis and genealogy of political thought will be combined. To chart the ideological landscape of post-war West Germany, the contributors put particular emphasis on shared patterns of thought—rather than single-thinker exegesis. “Ideologies” in this more value-neutral sense refers to patterns of thought oriented toward political action, grounded in particular institutional and cultural contexts. The chapters also focus on ideological concepts that are essential to creating consensus and dissensus in German political argument, which therefore are particularly useful in illuminating German political culture more broadly.6 In other words, the chapters assembled here do not seek to provide a pure Geistesgeschichte, the kind of disembodied history of thought so familiar from the conservative German historiographical tradition. Instead, they carefully explicate the cultural and institutional bases of German political argument: West Germany’s peculiar university culture, the world of intellectual journals and what one might call the German version of “thick magazines,” the interface between intellectual life and party politics, as well as the place of political and legal thought in a highly juridified political culture.7 Much of the political thought of the post-war period remains uncharted intellectual territory.8 That there were peculiar German ideologies after 1945 can hardly be disputed—but their complex relationship to the development of the Federal Republic as a by and large liberal-democratic polity have yet to be explored. German scholars themselves, after decades of focusing on social and economic history as supposedly inherently progressive disciplines, are only now warming to cultural history, while also reluctantly returning to political and diplomatic history.9 However, intellectual history, still tainted by its association with Geistesgeschichte as a teleological investigation of nationalist ideas, remains relatively neglected, although there are tentative steps in the direction of what has been called a “new history of ideas.”10 Still,

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only a few timid forays have been undertaken to explore the intellectual and cultural universe of the 1950s, while the 1960s and 1970s remain almost entirely terra incognita, only occasionally traversed by the intellectual protagonists of those times themselves.11 The cycle of historical interest still seems to be determined above all by the laws governing the opening of public records after 30 years. This collection cannot in any sense be comprehensive. It can, however, outline some of the contours of political thought in Germany after 1945, given the peculiar constellation of democratization in a divided nation, the shadows of the Nazi past, and the overpowering presence of the culture and political values of the United States, as well as the Cold War rivalry with the GDR. Since the “Bonn Republic” has now come to an end with the official move of the government to Berlin—which in turn marked the beginning of the so-called Berlin Republic—historians are now also presented with a more or less clearly delimited period whose inner logic of political ideas can be analyzed.12 Apart from that, this volume can throw a sharp light on particular controversies that have retained a wider significance for the political culture of the united Germany; for example, the debate about the social policy implications of the Basic Law and the disputes about the relationship between state and religion. Political thought also has to be related to German political culture more widely. Theoretical debates about toleration, for instance, which have gained increasing salience in recent years, cannot be understood without a larger tableau of the particular relationship between state and church in Germany, which is different from that in most other Western nations, the United States and France in particular. In addition, the mixture of liberalism and illiberalism in the way the law treats foreigners in Germany has to be understood before discussion of the options for German republicanism can proceed. Ultimately, we should be able to answer the question of whether there is a peculiar “national style” of political thought and political claim-making in Germany and what its characteristics are.13 Findings about such styles of political thought would be relevant not least because they are bound to clash ever more often, as Europe integrates. Obviously, the German understanding of the state has become different from the French one; German conceptions of “postnational identity”—on which more later—are unique; and a fledgling German republicanism takes a very different form than in France and the United States. Understanding these differences will help to make sense of current and future clashes of different political conceptions of Europe.14 Analyzing to what extent German political thought came to drive or merely reflect the tortuous transition to a more open and democratic society should also be of interest outside the German context. Which strategies do

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conservatives adopt when they are faced with the specter of a past of totalitarian dictatorship, atrocity, and military defeat—and how do liberals import Western political models, while also appealing to homegrown traditions?15 Which strategies do ideological discontents adopt in a fragile democracy? And how do intellectuals adapt to a regime that might merely be an ideological second best for them—in particular the kind of Vernunftrepublikaner, the democrats out of reasonableness rather than conviction, who arguably contributed much to the downfall of the Weimar Republic?16 Of course, one cannot generalize from such cases—and yet, some strategies of adaptation, conversion, and “deconversion” as well as “reeducation” and perhaps selfreeducation might turn out to be paradigmatic, once more comparative research is undertaken in this area.17 German Ideologies and Teleologies: Pangloss at the Rhine Is the evolution of German political thought since 1945 a linear democratic success story? Is it a history of successive breaks with antiliberal traditions, or, to put it differently, a move from Gemeinschaft embedded in thick, nationalist identities to Gesellschaft held together by nothing more than “postnational” procedures?18 Certainly, the once unloved Bonn Republic has found an increasing number of Panglossian historians ready to sing its praises as the best of all possible political and intellectual worlds. As always, it is easier— and safer—to praise worlds once they have passed into history. After a decade in which “transitology” and the study of rapid political change became fashionable, it is tempting to read ever so many transformations back into the twentieth century.19 The great—and unexpected—caesura of 1989 continues to cast its shadow beyond the “short twentieth century.” Where it used to be more or less de rigueur to assert continuities in German history, the pendulum has now almost swung to the other extreme of overemphasizing discontinuities to explain the apparent success story of post-war West Germany. This success story is a true story, but it is only one story. All too easily, it is made into self-satisfied (fairy) tales of final “arrival” in the West, while historians’ views of the old Federal Republic become tinged by melancholy about the loss of what in retrospect appears as a more stable and protected world.20 There is a growing tendency to write a theoretical teleology from conceptions of the state as a quasi-metaphysical “substance” to one of politics as “postmetaphysical” process—or, to put it simply, a story of the steady decline of German statism.21 Such a reading “from substance to process,” sometimes proposed by Jürgen Habermas in his capacity as the “Hegel of the Federal Republic,” would not be entirely false, but in a curious way would somehow be

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a historicist reversal of Friedrich Meinecke’s Cosmopolitanism and the National State.22 In the latter, Bismarck’s nation-state emerged as the telos, whereas now Habermas’s postnational Federal Republic, sometimes also lauded as a “postclassical” nation-state, would become the undisputed outcome of a collective democratic learning process.23 But was there a simple shift from Weimar “mandarins” to post-’45 “Westernized” and “Americanized” intellectuals, or—as this volume suggests—a rather more complicated and multi-layered story of intellectual appropriations, re-appropriations, and also mis-appropriations? After all, there had been a formal or “metaphysics-free” liberalism in the inter-war period, too, most notably in Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law.24 What was distinctive about post-war patterns of thought and belief systems after 1945—apart from the fact that they were backed by American morals, money, and missiles? “Normative Westernization”: Just how Western was West Germany? This raises the question of what is now variously referred to as “Westernization,” “Americanization,” and “modernization” in order to describe an intellectual-normative development away from German peculiarities to something resembling Western European and North American conceptions of liberal democracy.25 This is certainly not a mere academic question. The claim that Germany has finally joined “the West” is nothing less than a central ideological pillar supporting major policy changes initiated by post-unification Germany. As Gerhard Schröder once put it, “after long periods of confusion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germany has at last joined the West. That’s what’s at stake for us. The argument that we cannot take part [in military missions abroad] because of our history no longer holds true.”26 Nothing less than questions of life and death (of German soldiers) rides on reaching a sufficient level of “Westernization.” Needless to say, Westernization, Americanization, and modernization are all loaded and highly controversial terms. After the failure of modernization theory and the waning of theories about a special (and pathological) German path, or Sonderweg, to modernity, such meta-narratives are rightly viewed with a great deal of skepticism.27 In particular, all of these concepts and theories appear to rely on a notion of the West that permanently oscillates among geographical, political, sociological, and normative dimensions. The simplistic identification of the West with an ideal type of liberal democracy is also highly dubious—even in the Federal Republic there were a number of intellectuals who saw themselves as “Westernizers” or “Occidentalists,” but did not necessarily subscribe wholeheartedly to liberal democracy.28 For German historians, it appears, “the West” is always conveniently elsewhere, whether it is Britain,

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France, or the United States—even if that elsewhere is often unrecognizable to British, French, or American historians. In short, “the West” is idealized—and deeply ideological, in a Marxisant sense of the term. Still, exceptionalism remains an attractive historiographical parlor game—but its epistemological status and ultimate usefulness are in doubt even to the most sympathetic observers of the game. Yet, the questions will not go away; something needs to be explained, and one has to make use of the best conceptual tools available. After all, there was a profound transformation of political culture and political argument, and some conceptual scheme is necessary to give a coherent account of it. Even if the existence of “multiple modernities” is now widely acknowledged, and even if the methodological problems and the ideological baggage of concepts such as Americanization, Westernization, and modernization are now generally accepted, they still seem the best approximation of a phenomenon that involved the end of certain German peculiarities and the narrowing of an ideological gap between Germany on the one side and Western Europe as well as North America on the other.29 What matters is not so much the words, but whether as concepts these words are properly defined—and defended through appropriate qualification and contextualization. Therefore, while we do not want to return to the metaphysics of the Sonderweg, the persistent question of German peculiarities will be addressed in every chapter. All contributors will explain the specific use they are making of concepts such as Westernization and situate their accounts in broad comparative frameworks. What emerges, then, is a more complex picture of multiple integrations, in which there was a broad movement of Westernization—in the sense of a conscious adoption of Anglo-American political and cultural models—but in which old (and new) German ideologies also came to be intertwined with various intellectual imports. As students of American influence have long recognized, such processes of assimilation are never one-way streets, and never result in simple imitations.30 And, needless to say, the German image of America and its intellectual products is itself more often than not a projection, and reflects more about Germany than about the United States.31 Recasting German Political Thought in the 1950s: The Invention of an Ironic Nation Who have been the protagonists of the gradual liberalization and Westernization of German political thought? Among readers in the English-speaking world, the names of Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, and perhaps Niklas Luhmann might come to mind most readily—yet, it is not by accident that these intellectuals are first and foremost social theorists or

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sociologists.32 Sociology served as the “science of the present” in post-war West Germany—a country that above all sought to live in the present. Gesellschaft became not only the object of study for sociologists, but, one might say, also their normative goal. Unlike in the history departments, younger scholars in sociology such as Habermas, Dahrendorf, and M. Rainer Lepsius were promoted to tenure at a relatively early point and established a double role as leaders in their fields and as public intellectuals using sociology as a kind of “applied enlightenment,” in Dahrendorf’s words.33 In the same vein, the fact that German historians and even writers have enjoyed prominence as political thinkers seems to indicate the absence of significant political theorists in a more narrow sense—despite, or perhaps because of, the establishment of the subject of “political science” in the Federal Republic after 1945.34 Even more skeptical observers have argued that the post-war transformation of Germany amounted to a “liberalization without liberal thinkers” or a kind of Westernization imposed from outside and above which amounted to sheer imitation.35 As the contributions in the first part of this volume make clear, this perception is not justified—even though the kind of liberalism espoused in the postwar period might indeed hold little theoretical interest nowadays. The claim is not that ideas by themselves were driving Germans into the camp of the West—but the new education (or reeducation) of intellectuals in universities, propaganda and all kinds of covert intellectual action by real and self-declared Western “saviors of the fatherland” no doubt had their share in reshaping German political culture.36 The investigation of the development of political thought becomes interesting precisely at the point at which outside influences, sometimes backed by very tangible political and financial power, indigenous and sometimes buried traditions, and original contributions come to form new, complex syntheses—especially in the context of a country with a rich tradition of radical political thought on both left and right. As Anson Rabinbach shows in his chapter on post-war journals, there were intellectual as well as political reasons why the nationalist Right and the Weimar Left both disappeared from the spectrum of post-war thought. While thought patterns hardly changed overnight and a rhetoric of “spiritual crisis” inherited from the Weimar Republic had a long afterlife in West Germany, the disappearance of these extremes, prompted by the past and present political pressure, did much to advance the liberalization of German thought. In the same vein, the establishment of a democratic political science could not displace older traditions overnight in a post-war situation that had to have been profoundly ambivalent as Nazi ideology had lost its hold, while democracy had yet to take root.37 The emigrants who returned to Germany consciously adopted peculiar strategies to import the methods of American

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academia, while also integrating German approaches. Alfons Söllner uses the example of the Freiburg-based political science professor Arnold Bergstraesser to show what became a characteristic double move among the “remigres”: the politicization of the Kultursoziologie [cultural sociology] inherited from Weimar, and at the same time, the “culturalization” of the political. These ideas fitted perfectly into the neo-humanist political language of the 1950s and allowed for what one might call the adoption of American-style democracy through the back door. While there were multiple restorations in the 1950s, then, one might say that there were also multiple integrations— military and economic, but also political, intellectual, and normative.38 In contrast, the ideas and values of the American labor movement entered through the front door. The representatives of American labor arranged numerous “cultural transfers,” to use Julia S. Angster’s fruitful concept, to make the West German labor movement a factor for stability. It also helped to integrate West Germany into a broadly liberal, Keynesian economic consensus. In short, there was what Jerry Z. Muller has called “deradicalization” on both the Right and the Left.39 While democracy had been achieved on paper with the Basic Law, its interpretation left many avenues of political development open. In the 1950s, the most prominent debate about which direction the new polity was supposed to take on the basis of the constitution involved conservative defenders of the Rechtsstaat [rule of law] and advocates of an expanding Sozialstaat [welfare state]. The former argued that the traditional line between state and society was becoming increasingly blurred, as the welfare state required ever more discretion for the administration and as the rise of material law would cause more and more legal indeterminacy. The proponents of the Sozialstaat, on the other hand, sought to refute these claims, and argued that the Basic Law in fact mandated an extensive welfare state. While the proponents of state-mandated socialism did not carry the day, their efforts were crucial in decentering an older German ideology of the state and opening the path toward an acceptance of the view that state and society should interact rather than be rigidly separated.40 In his contribution, John P. McCormick revisits these debates, which have haunted German political thought ever since, and assesses the latest attempts by Jürgen Habermas to recast the terms of the controversy through his “discourse theory of law.” As Germany seeks to respond to neoliberalism as well as globalization—and in the process defend its model of a social market economy—these debates are sure to retain their salience.41 In retrospect, the 1950s already saw the rise of some of the main mentalities and ideologies that were to characterize what Heinz Bude has called an “ironic nation.” Instead of ideological pathos, West Germans sought refuge

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in hardheaded realism, skepticism, and a self-conscious political sobriety.42 The high-flying humanist rhetoric of the “rubble texts” that Rabinbach analyzes was replaced by a cold conservatism embracing modernity, which Dirk van Laak describes, as well as a pragmatic, pro-democratic Critical Theory put forward especially by Max Horkheimer.43 The heirs to these traditions turned out to be Niklas Luhmann, with his cool functionalist sociology, and Jürgen Habermas, with his embrace of the emancipatory potential of Western liberal democracy.44 Of course, ’68, terrorism, and much else in the subsequent decades were hardly sober or ironic. But figures like Habermas and Luhmann set the tone for an intellectual climate that could never quite be contaminated again by the kind of extremist political enthusiasm of earlier decades of the twentieth century. In many ways, what Benjamin Constant claimed about the bourgeois nineteenth century also fit the Federal Republic: It valued “everything according to its utility, and, as soon as one” attempted “to move out of this sphere,” opposed “its irony to every real or feigned enthusiasm.”45 In the same vein, the “primacy of the political”—the idea that the state, public law, or at least the public sphere should be separated from and dominate society and the private sphere—finally seemed to have come to an end.46 The related ideals of strong state and Gemeinschaft gradually lost their appeal, while a secularized concept of society finally led to the acceptance—if not celebration—of pluralism, conflict, and contingency. The Volksgemeinschaft finally gave way to the Gesellschaftsvolk, to use an expression by Thomas Mann.47 The Strange Rebirth of German Conservatism Apart from the story of the “salvation of German thought” (Hans Joas) from itself through Western models, there was also a curious recasting of German conservative thought in the 1950s.48 The chapters in the third part analyze ideological phenomena that have received scant attention in the English-speaking world but that are essential to understanding post-war Germany. There is hardly any literature on the changing nature of West German conservatism, which was faced with a large ideological dilemma after 1945.49 Could it dissociate itself from National Socialism and gain influence in the relentlessly modernizing West Germany without appearing as simply premodern and subscribing to the largely impotent cultural pessimism that had been typical of the inter-war years? Dirk van Laak traces the transformation of post-war conservatism in the direction of a “technocratic conservatism.”50 After 1945, conservatives such as Hans Freyer, Arnold Gehlen, and Ernst Forsthoff came to affirm modern industrial society, while keeping democracy at bay. They also supported the strong state keeping law and order, while rejecting the welfare state—a rather

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surprising stance, given that in Germany the welfare state has mainly been a creation of authoritarian and conservative figures, from Bismarck to Adenauer.51 Finally, conservatives stressed the cultivation of traditions not so much for their own sake, but for their uses in providing normative orientation and emotional comfort in the face of the sheer alienation and instability produced by modern industrial civilization. This sober, functionalist, and sometimes subtly ironic view of tradition came to be a hallmark of West German conservatism. Yet technocratic conservatism—with its attitude of amor fati vis-à-vis liberal modernity—remained an ambivalent achievement. It ostensibly modernized German conservatism but also continued strands of thought that had been characteristic of the Third Reich—which, of course, itself had its modernizing aspects. Conservatives turned away from religion and metaphysics, as well as “blood and soil,” but their belief in established institutions remained deeply authoritarian. Jerry Z. Muller, on the other hand, demonstrates (and defends) with a case study the peculiar nature (and ambivalence) of German neo-conservatism. Clearly, German neo-conservatism, like other versions of this particular ideology, involved disillusioned liberals and Social Democrats. Yet, as Muller demonstrates, the German neo-conservatives never went as far in either their moralism or libertarianism as their counterparts in other countries. In many cases, their thought also did not have a strong religious background. In that sense, unlike other Western European countries and in the United States, neoconservatism remained much closer to classical forms of liberalism. In the final chapter in the section on conservatism, I seek to chart the rise and fall of the New Right—a development of the 1990s that, however, is inextricably linked to the ideological context of the “old” pre-1989 Federal Republic. After dissecting the “conceptual anatomy” of New Right thinking and highlighting the importance of rewriting the history of National Socialism for New Right intellectuals, I argue that the phenomenon has to be understood against the background of various strands of conservative thinking in West Germany. Contrary to observers who have claimed an analogy with the 1920s “Conservative Revolution,” the New Right was akin to nationalist intellectuals in the Federal Republic, and suffered from the same structural dilemma that conservatism had encountered in West Germany. Its failure can be attributed to a lack of ideological innovation, an excessive fixation on the ’68ers as the ideological enemy, and finally, a lack of party support. The conservative thought of the post-war period that is likely to last is arguably that of the great ironists like Luhmann, Thomas Nipperdey, and Johannes Gross, who renewed a German tradition of ironic conservatism that reaches back to Thomas Mann.52 They deployed irony and a cool skepticism against efforts at social emancipation put forward by the citizens’

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groups that became characteristic of West Germany’s “protest culture,” to use one of Luhmann’s terms.53 Yet, unlike the conservatives of the 1950s or the neo-conservatives, for the most part, they did not idealize organic communities and strong institutions. Instead, they simply sought a sober, disenchanted democratic functionalism—even if that functionalism retained traces of a kind of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Luhmann in particular often seemed to offer a peculiar mixture of Talcott Parsons’ systems theory and Arnold Gehlen’s pessimistic philosophical anthropology, combining an American import—which also had to be declared as a re-import of Max Weber—with a very German approach to state and society.54 Nevertheless, in the end, conservatism came to be as “postmetaphysical” as some of its progressive opponents on the Left. Above all, it came to be much less nationalist than Christian Democratic and right-wing parties either in the German past or in other Western countries. ’68 and All That While a democratic conservatism found a secure home in the Federal Republic, questions about the ideational legacy of the ’68ers remain much more controversial. For one thing, 1968 remains an event in search of an interpretation.55 German academics—as opposed to the friends and enemies of ’68 itself—have only very recently begun to subject the German événements to critical scholarship. Even this process, however, is in danger of entangling myth and history further.56 By focusing on the effects of 1968, scholars have come to emphasize its liberalizing and democratizing elements, making the events into a “second founding” of the Federal Republic. This might be true from the point of view of the cunning of democratic reason, but it hardly says much about ’68 itself. Such teleologies could become at least more nuanced if more attention were paid to the historical and moral imagination of the ’68ers themselves. As Dagmar Herzog’s chapter demonstrates, not only was ’68 itself mythologized, the ’68ers themselves fell victim to various invented traditions and myths, such as the legend of sexual repression in the Third Reich. Herzog’s contribution also shows that German political thought could neither remain immune from the theories that swept the globe in 1968 nor escape the shadow of the past—or at least its projections. My chapter focuses on the theoretical development of the ’68ers, and seeks to recover some of their political ideals from oblivion. I argue that ’68 was not simply about staging a surrealist “shock” or indirectly preparing the participants for a more flexible, fluid lifestyle suited for postindustrial society— aesthetic and quasi-Hegelian interpretations that have become common

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thirty years after the events. While not devaluing the specific nature of ’68 as an event, I claim that it was the interplay between theory and event that made ’68 distinctive, but that also posed particular theoretical challenges for the student leaders. They put their hope in “learning through action” and a “reconstruction of theory through praxis,” since the basis for class struggle in the form of a truly organized working class had disappeared. But, I argue, ultimately theory and praxis could not be mediated—instead, some of the radicals sought to short-circuit the hard labor of theory altogether by engaging in direct action. Again, there is the question of whether ’68 meant the “final arrival in the West” for the Federal Republic, as some observers have argued.57 Clearly, ’68 did ultimately have liberalizing effects, but a focus on political thought shows just how much of a German ideology the thought of the ’68 radicals was. The mix of étatisme and a belief in direct action was a specifically German phenomenon, and left a particular legacy in the form of 1970s terrorism and the large, anti-statist alternative milieu that grew out of the initial counterculture. ’68 is likely to remain a contested site of German memory. In a republic that has not seen many breaks and discontinuities, friend and foe are able to fixate on ’68 as an ideological landmark. For a dwindling number of conservatives, ’68 remains proof that the Federal Republic could contain a new form of political extremism, while a growing consensus claims that ’68 constituted the second liberal founding of West Germany—which was especially important since the first had to be done for the Germans by others. A German Republicanism: Many and Divisible? The final section focuses on the developing strands of republican thought in Germany. Republicanism might strike the reader as an odd ideology in the German context. Yet, as the Berlin Republic is inventing itself as a “postnational polity,” the question of how to hold an increasingly heterogeneous republic together has come to the forefront.58 With the recent change in citizenship law, which finally reformed the Wilhelmine ius sanguinis in favor of ius soli and thus granted children of foreigners born in Germany German citizenship, there is also the question of how republicanism and multiculturalism are to be related. Germany, the European country with the largest number of foreigners and more than three million Muslims in its midst, has now had its own “headscarves affair,” in which a teacher in Baden-Württemberg was prohibited from wearing a headscarf when giving lessons. On the other hand, Islamic religious teaching is now firmly established in state schools, with the Berlin-based Islamic Federation having won a number of crucial court cases to have the right to give instructions alongside Catholic and Protestant teachings. There is as yet no consistent policy in schools on whether and how to

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teach religion, even though a process of further differentiation is likely.59 Above all, the Constitutional Court has handed down a number of controversial decisions on the state’s relationship to religious groups, in particular the 1995 “crucifix verdict,” which Rainer Forst discusses in his contribution. How are these developments to fit together? Does Germany have to become a republic one and indivisible to ensure social cohesion and lasting “integration,” or can Germans invent a more porous form of political belonging, a civic identity that does not essentialize (or fetishize) the culture of the Federal Republic or the cultures of immigrants? German republicans are eager to avoid the intolerant and exclusionist elements traditionally associated with, for instance, French republicanism.60 While French republicanism can remain a nationalist project even for the Left, such an association is much less plausible in the Federal Republic. Instead, German republicans have turned to the “constitutional patriotism” of Jürgen Habermas as a means of holding the polity together through shared universalist values enshrined in the constitution. Postnationalism along Habermasian lines was certainly one of the ideological peculiarities of the Bonn Republic. According to Habermas, Germans have been forced by their catastrophic past to question their national traditions and conventional communitarian accounts of morality. Instead of centering political belonging on national culture and a glorious past, they had to fashion a constitutional patriotism grounded in the universalist principles of liberal democracy and a critical examination of their traditions.61 The frequent reproach that constitutional patriotism is too thin an ideology to inspire loyalty has not been followed by convincing communitarian alternatives. William A. Barbieri, Jr., in weighing the different models of German republicanism, concludes that German republican traditions strongly support both a Kantian emphasis on individual rights and a social democratic emphasis on egalitarianism, while offering only a tenuous basis for narrower cultural or nationalist conceptions. Rainer Forst asks whether Germany is now a tolerant republic, and, in providing a paradoxical answer, excavates different concepts of toleration that are at work in German political culture. He argues that a peculiar combination of liberal-democratic values with Christian faith makes for a rather restricted conception of toleration, which, however, has deep roots in German history, and, in certain respects, continues to define the ideological essence of the Federal Republic. Yet, as the movement for a more comprehensive conception of toleration gains strength, more culture wars about toleration are likely to ensue in a country that has no tradition of laïcité or a strict separation between church and state. Especially, if conceptions of European citizenship are to become more substantial, these traditions have to be taken into account—and, at the same time, fundamentally renegotiated.

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Beyond State, Sameness, and Stability: Farewell to the Bonn Republic The German political theorist Ernst Vollrath, a student of Hannah Arendt, once forcefully argued that there is a peculiar German perception of the political, which oscillates between a hard-nosed, amoral Realpolitik and an idealization of the political as potentially peaceful discourse.62 These extremes are certainly present among the intellectual figures and currents of thought analyzed here—yet, what ultimately emerges is a picture that relativizes some of the common preconceptions about German political thought. Many of the thinkers presented here were indeed preoccupied with questions of state stability and social cohesion—as one would expect, given the specter of Weimar but also the authoritarian traditions of German Staatsrechtslehre, the old-fashioned public law doctrines which held that a strong state should stand above and order an always potentially unruly society. Despite the development toward a Gesellschaftsvolk, the concerns about the social bond and the state’s foundations in complex societies have still been central to much post-war political thought—on both the Right and the Left. It is not an accident that ErnstWolfgang Böckenförde’s dictum according to which “the liberal, secular state lives off preconditions which it cannot itself guarantee” has become one of the most-quoted sentences in post-war political theorizing.63 Often enough, German thinkers have advocated some kind of homogeneity, whether national, social, or cultural, as a remedy for the supposed dangers of democratic anomie. Recent debates about whether immigrants should have to subscribe to a German Leitkultur or “guiding culture” show that even after the change in citizenship law, the cultural terms of political belonging have yet to be liberalized—and that especially conservatives find it difficult to take leave of the idea that society has to be held together by a central cultural-cum-ethical substance.64 A distrust of diversity remains deeply ingrained. On the other extreme, there certainly has been an idealist strand in German post-war political thinking—pervasive, above all, in the antiauthoritarianism of the ’68ers, but also in the idealizations of a harmonious national community to which a minority of conservatives still aspired. A strong desire to reduce conflict even when conflict is contained within democratic constraints—sometimes going so far as to want to end conflict for good—has been present in ideologies of the Right and the Left. Yet, irony and utility also increasingly proved their uses when dealing with ideological and social conflict. After all, as Norbert Elias pointed out many years ago, the capacity for self-control in the context of conflict, the ability to gain some distance and strive for mediation, is part of a long, sometimes painful process of acquiring a democratic civilization—and civility.65

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Some of the questions of the functions of the state and social integration will of course retain their salience, just as much as certain emancipatory projects will continue to inspire novel forms of political agency—and yet many observers feel that after a long period of transition during the 1990s, Germans are reluctantly bidding farewell to the automatic assumptions and aims underpinning politics in the old Federal Republic.66 In the broadest terms, a culture of consensus is said to be giving way to a culture of conflict, as the old Rheinish corporatist model is being dismantled from both above and below.67 Many of those once opposed to the modest, defensive, practical, and remarkably stable “little state” of the Federal Republic have now begun to idealize it. This increasingly Panglossian picture smoothes over the political paradoxes of the Federal Republic—and, not least, its provinciality, which might have been intimately bound up with its protected nature. Above all, it fails to acknowledge that the old Federal Republic saw its fair share of conflict—in fact, more so than the Berlin Republic.68 Consequently, it is time not for nostalgia, but for a proper historicization of the political thought and culture of the Bonn Republic. Clearly, this volume is able to throw light on only a few of the political traditions and patterns of thought that have become characteristic of post-war Germany. Much work remains to be done, especially on questions of how Anglo-American political theory has transformed German thought yet again in the wake of the global success of Rawls’ Theory of Justice and of how German ideologies have in turn informed the project of European integration. For now, the purpose of this volume will be fulfilled if it allows historians and political theorists to tap into the rich veins of German political thought, while also sensitizing them to its specific historical and particularly cultural contexts. Notes 1. Still the best analysis of these strands of thought remains Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961). See also Louis Dumont, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1998). 2. On this question see primarily Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). 3. Gesine Schwan, Antikommunismus und Antiamerikanismus in Deutschland: Kontinuität und Wandel nach 1945 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999). See also William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), and Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford UP, 1995).

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4. For this approach to ideologies, see in particular Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996). For a fine application to the French context, see Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994). 5. For an argument justifying the concept of “political thought” in this context— as opposed to “political philosophy” or “political theory”—see Henning Ottmann, “In eigener Sache: Politisches Denken. Oder: Warum der Begriff ‘Politisches Denken’ konkurrierenden Begriffen vorzuziehen ist,” in Jahrbuch Politisches Denken 1995/1996 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1996), 1–7. 6. Indispensable as background to the investigation of German concepts remains Reinhart Koselleck et al. (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1997). 7. The last point is of particular relevance. On the position of the Constitutional Court and its fraught relationship with politics, see Donald P. Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (Durham: Duke UP, 1997), and now also the illuminating essays in Dieter Grimm, Die Verfassung und die Politik: Einsprüche in Störfällen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001). 8. One of the very few exceptions in English is Chris Thornhill, Political Theory in Modern Germany: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 9. On the ongoing struggle between social and cultural historians, see Thomas Mergel and Thomas Welskopp (eds.), Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Theoriedebatte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997). 10. See the special issue on “Neue Ideengeschichte” of Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 27, no. 1 (2001). 11. For the 1950s, see Robert G. Moeller (ed.), West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), Axel Schildt, Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur westdeutschen Ideenlandschaft der 50er Jahre (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1999), Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany 1949–1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), and Klaus Naumann (ed.), Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001). 12. For the best historical overview of the Bonn Republic, see Anthony J. Nicholls, The Bonn Republic: West German Democracy, 1945–1990 (London: Longman, 1997). 13. See also Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). 14. For one such attempt, see Larry Siedentop, Democracy in Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2000). 15. On some of these dilemmas, see Anne Sa’dah, Germany’s Second Chance: Trust, Justice, and Democratization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1998). 16. See also my “Compromised Republicans: The Vernunftrepublikaner and the Transformation of Liberal Thought from Weimar to the Federal Republic,” in Henning Tewes and Jonathan Wright (eds.), Liberalism, Anti-Semitism, and Democracy: Essays in Honor of Peter Pulzer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 127–47.

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17. On these questions, see also the discussion in A. Dirk Moses, “The Forty-Fivers: A Generation Between Fascism and Democracy,” in: German Politics and Society, vol. 17 (1999), 94–126, and Birgit Schwelling, Wege in die Demokratie: Eine Studie zum Wandel und zur Kontinuität von Mentalitäten nach dem Übergang vom Nationalsozialismus zur Bundesrepublik (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2001). 18. See for instance Paul Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft: Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000). 19. On post-war transformations in West Germany in general, see John Brady, Beverly Crawford, and Sarah E. Wiliarty (eds.), The Postwar Transformation of Germany: Democracy, Prosperity, and Nationhood (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 20. Otherwise excellent books prone to turning into tales of final arrival are Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen: Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1999), and Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, 2 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000). See also Klaus Naumann, “Reden wir endlich vom Ende!” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 30, 2001. 21. Somewhat in this vein, see Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft. On the decline of statism in particular, see Gregg O. Kvistad, The Rise and Demise of German Statism: Loyalty and Political Membership (New York: Berghahn, 1999). 22. Jan Ross, “Der Hegel der Bundesrepublik,” in Die Zeit, October 11, 2001, and Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trans. Robert B. Kimber (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970). 23. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen. 24. See, above all, Hans Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre: Einleitung in die Rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik (Leipzig: F. Deuticke, 1934). 25. For use of modernization as the main concept to understand post-war transformations, see Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek (eds.), Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau: Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1998). 26. Schröder quoted in The Economist, October 13, 2001. 27. For a thoroughgoing critique, see Philipp Gassert, “Die Bundesrepublik, Europa und der Westen: Zu Verwestlichung, Demokratisierung und einigen komparatistischen Defiziten der zeithistorischen Forschung,” in Geschichte ist immer Gegenwart: Vier Thesen zur Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart: DVA, 2001), 67–89. 28. Ibid. 29. See for instance the special issue on “multiple modernities” in Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 1 (2000). On the concept of “Westernization,” see Anselm DoeringManteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), and Heinz Bude and Bernd Greiner (eds.), Westbindungen: Amerika in der Bundesrepublik (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999). See also Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen. It is an open question whether Europeanization might be added to these concepts. Arguably, there is now less of a serious European conversation about fundamental political questions than there was before the establishment of the EU. Given the relentless pressures of academic specialization, the kind of broadly

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30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

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educated political thinker, fluent in a rich idiom of European culture, who was embodied by figures such as Jacques Maritain, Raymond Aron, R. G. Collingwood, and Carl Schmitt, seems to have become extinct. See for instance Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger (eds.), Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (New York: Berghahn, 2000). James Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997). This preeminence of sociology is convincingly explained by Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft, 208-73. Ibid., 247. Dahrendorf quoted in Volker Meja, Dieter Misgeld, and Nico Stehr, “The Social and Intellectual Organization of German Sociology,” in: Volker Meja, Dieter Misgeld, and Nico Stehr (eds.), Modern German Sociology (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), 1-30; here 7. On the peculiar role of historians, see Paul Nolte, “Die Historiker der Bundesrepublik: Rückblick auf eine ‘lange Generation’,” in Merkur, vol. 53 (1999), 413–32. On the role of West German intellectuals in general, see my Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000). For the idea of “liberalization without liberals,” see Mark Lilla, “The Other Velvet Revolution: Continental Liberalism and its Discontents,” in Daedalus, vol. 123, no. 2 (1994), 129–57; Lothar Albertin, “Das theoriearme Jahrzehnt der Liberalen,” in Schildt and Sywottek (eds.), Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau, 659–76; and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “History of political theory in the Federal Republic of Germany: strange death and slow recovery,” in Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk (eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context, 40–57. See also Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), and Michael Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongreß für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen (Munich: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998). The term “savior of the fatherland” was used by Hannah Arendt for members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. See Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Briefe 1936–1968, ed. Lotte Köhler (Munich: Piper, 1999), 248. See also Wilhelm Bleek, Geschichte der Politikwissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001). For the idea of multiple restorations, see Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1997). Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987). See also Christian Graf von Krockow, “Staatsideologie oder demokratisches Bewußtsein: Die deutsche Alternative,” in Politische Vierteljahrsschrift, vol. 9 (1965), 118–31; and Peter C. Caldwell, “Ernst Forsthoff and the Legacy of Radical State Theory in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in History of Political Thought, vol. 5 (1994), 615–41.

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41. On the social market economy, see Anthony J. Nicholls, Freedom with Responsibility: The Social Market Economy in Germany, 1918–1963 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 42. Heinz Bude, Die ironische Nation: Soziologie als Zeitdiagnose (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999). 43. Clemens Albrecht et al., Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1999). 44. On Luhmann, see William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000); and on Habermas, Robert C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 1991), as well as Martin Beck Matuˇstik, Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). For the epic intellectual-cum-political battle between Luhmann and Habermas, see Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Sozialforschung? (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1971). 45. Benjamin Constant, “The spirit of conquest,” in Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamara Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 51–83; here 55. 46. Thornhill, Political Theory in Modern Germany, 1–17. 47. Mann quoted by Nolte, Die Ordnung der Gesellschaft, 402. 48. For the problems faced by conservative thought in the post-war world more generally, see Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994). 49. See also Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1971), and Axel Schildt, Konservatismus in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998). 50. For pre-war conservative ideologies, see Stefan Breuer, Grundpositionen der deutschen Rechten 1871–1945 (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1999), and Stefan Breuer, Ordungen der Ungleichheit: Die deutsche Rechte im Widerstreit ihrer Ideen 1871–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001). 51. See also Paul Nolte, “Konservatismus in Deutschland: Geschichte—und Zukunft?” in Merkur, vol. 55 (2001), 559–71. 52. Nolte, “Konservatismus in Deutschland,” 570. 53. Niklas Luhmann, “Immer noch Bundesrepublik? Das Erbe und die Zukunft,” in Otthein Rammstedt and Gert Schmidt (eds.), BRD Ade! Vierzig Jahre in RückAnsichten (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 95–100. 54. Meja, Misgeld, and Stehr, “The Social and Intellectual Organization of German Sociology,” 12. 55. Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993), 122. 56. See also Heinz Bude, “Achtundsechzig,” in Etienne François and Hagen Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. 2 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 122–34. 57. Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen. 58. See for instance Günter Frankenberg, Die Verfassung der Republik: Autorität und Solidarität in der Zivilgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997).

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59. Jürgen Kaube, “Der Islam: Ein europäisches Schulproblem,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 30, 2001. 60. Cécile Laborde, “The Culture(s) of the Republic: Nationalism and Multiculturalism in French Republican Thought,” in Political Theory, vol. 29 (2001), 716–35. 61. See also Patchen Markell, “Making Affect Safe for Democracy? On ‘Constitutional Patriotism’,” in Political Theory, vol. 28, no. 1 (2000), 38–53. 62. Ernst Vollrath, “Die Kultur des Politischen: Aspekte politischer Wahrnehmung in Deutschland,” in Volker Gerhardt (ed.), Der Begriff der Politik: Bedingungen und Gründe politischen Handelns (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990), 268–90. 63. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “Die Entstehung des Staates als Vorgang der Säkularisation,” in Recht, Staat, Freiheit: Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie, Staatstheorie und Verfassungsgeschichte (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 92–114; here 112. 64. See also Richard Herzinger, Republik ohne Mitte: Ein politischer Essay (Berlin: Siedler, 2001). 65. Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Michael Schröter, trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). 66. See also Michael Jeismann, Auf Wiedersehen Gestern: Die deutsche Vergangenheit und die Politik von morgen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001). 67. Wilhelm Heitmeyer (ed.), Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Auf dem Weg von der Konsens-zur Konfliktgesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 68. A historiographical war about the interpretation of the Federal Republic is well under way. See for instance Kurt Sontheimer, So war Deutschland nie: Anmerkungen zur politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999).

PART ONE

The Transformation of German Political Thought in the Post-War Period

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CHAPTER 1

Restoring the German Spirit: Humanism and Guilt in Post-War Germany

Anson Rabinbach

I

n March 1944, Allied bombers destroyed the house of Johann Wolfgang Goethe in the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt am Main along with most of the city. Shortly after the German surrender on May 8, 1945, at a time when one might expect other concerns to take precedence, a heated and protracted debate over what to do about the venerable site was already in full swing. On one side of the controversy were the noted architects of the German Werkbund who saw the loss of the original house as an opportunity for a new building in a more appropriately modern style. On the other were the city fathers and Goethe enthusiasts who believed that the house should be rebuilt exactly as it had been. The year 1949 was soon approaching, the two-hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth, and the city fathers feared that the historic edifice would not be ready in time for the celebration. As the left-wing Catholic intellectual Walter Dirks wrote at the time: “The enthusiasm of the friends of this honorable site and their concern over the rescue and restoration of this until then long-preserved piece of memory pressed for a rapid decision.” So it was decided: The Goethe house would be rebuilt unchanged according to the original architectural plans on the old site. On the fifth of July 1947, the cornerstone was laid. For Dirks the decision to reconstruct the old Goethe house was an event not of local but of national significance. Like post-war Germany, Dirks bitterly observed, it was to be rebuilt “as if nothing had occurred.”1

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The story of the Goethe house evokes the theme of a conservative cultural restoration apparent to many critics of Germany’s post-war years. However, it is a one-sided allegory, leaving out the fact that with the defeat of the Nazis, the occupying forces encouraged a more complex intellectual and cultural reconstruction, even if avant-garde and radical currents so prevalent during the Weimar years did not make a significant comeback. The restorative tendencies described by Dirks came to the fore only after a brief, but intellectually vital, period of confrontation with the Nazi past during the first years after the war had given way to the more conservative era accompanied by the Cold War. More than a decade ago, the historian Karl Dietrich Bracher distinguished three competing trends in the reestablishment of German intellectual life after 1945. The first, he said, was a conservative desire for the restoration of Europe and its values; the second a turn toward the left and a rejection of all right-wing dictatorships; and the third, a reaction against communist totalitarianism in East Central Europe.2 This account is now in need of revision, ignoring as it does both the German nationalist “community of silence” that was, despite its lack of public visibility, a powerful intellectual aspect of the post-war epoch, as well as the complex features of the confrontation with the Nazi past and the renewal of democratic culture in the first post-war years. In reassessing Bracher’s judgment, we should now also have to take into account the situation in the SBZ, the Soviet occupation zone, which, perhaps not surprisingly, in many different respects paralleled the much more well known situation in the West. We also notice that each of Bracher’s trends, though they overlapped, corresponded to phases in the development of Germany’s post-war political culture represented by distinct generations. The conservative restoration was symbolized by the austere figure of Konrad Adenauer and was dominated by a generation of men (and a few women) who were born in the nineteenth century and whose reputations and careers were already made in the Weimar Republic—Alfred Weber, Marianne Weber, Karl Jaspers, Ernst Robert Curtius, Georg Lukács. The second was dominated by men and women who were born between 1900 and 1915 and whose life experience was largely shaped by the events of the 1920s and 1930s, like Johannes R. Becher, the expressionist poet who eventually became minister of culture in the GDR; Walter Dirks, who founded Die Frankfurter Hefte; and Dolf Sternberger and Hans Paeschke, editors respectively of two of Germany’s most influential postwar journals, Die Wandlung, founded in 1945 in the American zone, and Merkur, founded in 1947 in Baden-Baden, the center of the French zone. Finally there were those younger men, like the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and Bracher himself, who were born

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between the First World War and the Depression and who became the intellectual elite during the later years of the Cold War. Of these three generations, the latter was far more oriented toward the United States and toward a more pluralistic, American-style democracy. An even younger generation, we might add, founded important periodicals not in Germany, but in places like Fort Van Etten (Rhode Island), where Der Ruf (founded in 1945) was the periodical of left-wing German prisoners of war edited by Walter Schoenstedt, who was an American officer, and by the writer Alfred Andersch.3 Germany’s intellectual reconstruction during the immediate post-war era can be mapped in many different ways, by generations being only one of them. Another important dimension that I propose to consider is the contrast between the “official” public culture that emerged under the aegis of the occupation in the four zones and the perhaps even more influential “private” dimension of intellectual life that was not officially restored after 1945, the community of silence of conservative intellectuals. In the case of the former, we can legitimately speak of an official culture of guilt and penance, while in the latter we are dealing with an unrepentant, nationalist culture of resentment and refusal to acquiesce in Germany’s defeat. Second, I will examine the constellation of a few keywords that played a crucial role in the intellectual discourse that emerged during the immediate post-war era. In short, I am interested in the relationship between the institutional foundation of post-war German intellectual life and its conceptual foundation. Despite difficulties caused by the strict licensing requirements imposed by the Allies—above all an antifascist orientation—endemic paper shortages, financial exigencies of the currency reform, and a palpable lack of heat in the offices, German intellectual life during the late 1940s was much more intellectually vigorous than in the 1950s. A survey of these periodicals during the period of “the Nuremberg interregnum” between 1945 and 1947 reveals that there were many articles concerned with the Nazi past, with the problem of German guilt, and with the impact of the war and the German catastrophe on Europe’s intellectual future. In retrospect, we can see many more continuities between the thematic emphases of the 1960s and those of the 1940s than we might expect from the mythology of a New Left critical intelligentsia emerging sui generis during the mid-1960s from the bleakness of the conservative post-war “land of the Mandarins.”4 Public intellectual life in post-war Germany reemerged haltingly under the watchful, but not always panoptical, eye of the occupying powers. Between the first publishing license issued to Die Wandlung in the American zone in November 1945 and the highpoint of post-war intellectual debate, the controversy between Georg Lukács and Karl Jaspers at the Recontres Internationales in Geneva in September 1946, prominent German intellectuals in all four zones

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were engaged in the sometimes painful process of rebuilding the ruined traditions of scholarship and public intellectual life—the two were often closely connected, as for example in selecting Heidelberg as the site for the founding of Die Wandlung—in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat. The proliferation of “black,” “gray,” and “white” lists of persons who were strongly, partially, and completely untainted by Nazi involvement respectively was an important facet of the intellectual contours of that era.5 Those identified with the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar Republic, figures like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and Gottfried Benn, whose connections to National Socialism were well known to the occupation authorities, were either still in custody or officially forbidden to participate in public life. But also absent from the cultural configuration of immediate post-war Germany was the Weimar left and those émigré writers and artists who were still abroad. The famous debate between Thomas Mann and Frank Thiess over the “inner” emigration versus the exiles was only the most visible version of a conflict that pervaded the immediate post-war years, and which ultimately did not favor the émigrés. Their absence from the scene was paralleled by the suspicion that accompanied the few antifascist intellectuals who tried to rebuild their careers after the war. A case in point is Werner Krauss, the distinguished romance literature scholar who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Gestapo and who was allowed to join the editorial board of Die Wandlung only at the insistence of the American authorities. After a short period in Heidelberg, Krauss crossed over to the Soviet zone, where he continued his academic career. It is striking that in the French, American, and British zones almost all of the newly established editors of the intellectual journals founded at the end of the war had not been in exile and at one time had served in the middle ranks of periodicals closely associated with the “inner emigration.” Dolf Sternberger was an editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung until his removal in 1943, Hans Paeschke had served as an editor of Fischer’s Neue Rundschau, and Joachim Moras was editor of Die Europäischen Revue until it was banned. In the case of Der Spiegel, founded in Hannover in 1946, Rudolf Augstein assumed the editorship only after three of its four original editors were denied a license to assume their posts because of their activities in the Third Reich.6 In the SBZ the practice was largely the same, and it is indicative that Peter Huchel was appointed editor of Sinn und Form by Johannes R. Becher, who was the most prominent cultural figure in that zone. If their editors were in part chosen for having remained in Nazi Germany, the new journals strongly reflected the cultural orientation of the respective occupying powers, in both political and literary matters. Die Wandlung was the most democratically oriented, and certainly the most emphatic in its

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insistence on a moral and spiritual reckoning with the Nazi past, but like most of the new periodicals, it did not often treat contemporary political questions and even less frequently historical ones. In fact, history seems to be the missing dimension in the first post-war years. The Historikerverband was founded in 1948, the first Historikertag did not convene until 1949, and a historical journal was not published in Germany until the early 1950s. Though he had rejected an article entitled “On the Decimation of the Image of German History in the Hitler Reich,” submitted by the distinguished Freiburg historian Gerhard Ritter to Die Wandlung, Sternberger could still bemoan the fact that “we do not have a political historian [accent mine] who is capable of decisively and acutely representing and elaborating the ethos [Gesinnung ] of our situation.”7 Still, Die Wandlung was exemplary in its publishing of documents of direct political relevance to the crimes of Nazism, including a report on the euthanasia murders and the chilling Stoop report on the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. From Sternberger’s point of view, these documents were vital. He was one of the first to make explicit the connection between a Germany bound to the memory of the Nazi past and the reconstitution of its political existence: “We must hold fast to memory, even the most bitter, and forget nothing, so that we are not ourselves forgotten.”8 Yet, despite the importance of these documents, they often appeared without reflective commentary, as self-evident testimonies to the depravity of the regime. Merkur published even fewer articles concerning the Nazi era and its origins, preferring more contemporary contributions by Swiss or French writers like Denis de Rougement or André Malraux. The journal’s orientation was literary-philosophical and its German writers gravitated toward Parisian trends. Unlike Die Wandlung, the Merkur focused much more on the universal “guilt” of the West, and only secondarily on German responsibility. With only the barest hint of the difficult issues posed by the presence of its French patron, Merkur emphasized the pan-European dimensions of the Nazi experience: “The magnitude of German guilt corresponds to the depth of German competence in the question of the Occidental cultural crisis.”9 In its lead editorial Merkur reiterated the obligatory refrain: “Whoever feels themselves to be free of guilt remains silent.”10 But the tone of Paeschke’s contribution to the first issue, a lecture delivered at the Southwest German Kulturring in November 1946, is markedly less pious, more skeptical, and ironic in tone than the articles in Die Wandlung, mocking the “deceptive identifications” of the intellectuals, and quoting Valéry, who defined “concepts like justice, fatherland, humanism, socialism, as chasing after parrots.”11 There were other important distinctions between these “flagship” cultural reviews, but not always ones that were self-evident. For example, despite the

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explicit antifascism of the journals established in the SBZ, German nationalist rhetoric was more prevalent in the Soviet zone than elsewhere, perhaps because, democratic rhetoric notwithstanding, the German communist leadership was always perceived as alien and the SED, the East German Socialist Unity Party, regarded as “the Russian Party.” The Soviet cultural officer Sergei Tulpanov, schooled in matters of German intellectual life, recalled that when Becher’s pamphlet Wir Volk der Deutschen appeared in 1947, he was given to “second thoughts” [auch ich begann darüber nachzudenken] and he confronted the uncomprehending Becher with his display of unabashedly “volkisch” ideology. Though Becher shared with the communist party leaders Ulbricht and Pieck the hope that the SBZ would soon become a full-fledged German communist state, his nationalism was not entirely strategic. During the war, Becher had refused to participate in a Swedish anthology of “Deutsche Literatur im Exil” because he felt he had more in common with those who had “remained silent within the country” than with those who had gone into exile. Despite the official SBZ cultural organization’s [the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung] appeal to the émigrés to return home to the Eastern zone, Becher believed in the “common fate of the Germans” and considered the barriers between exile and inner emigration artificial. At one point, Becher even tried to mediate between Mann and Thiess in their famous dispute.12 In the Soviet zone cultural denazification was often looser than in the Western sector, where at least as far as prominent cultural figures were concerned, denazification was taken somewhat seriously. Tulpanov frequently told German communists who wanted to apply more stringent denazification measures to instead read the works of Marx and Engels, which, as his critics could readily see, did not offer much practical advice as to how to denazify conductors, writers, actors, or directors. When the highly compromised conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler declared himself ready to conduct a concert in the Haus der Rundfunk in the Soviet zone, the attending Soviet officer was shamelessly overjoyed. The fact that the great conductor was prepared to perform despite the legal proceedings against him initiated by the Americans in Berlin far outweighed any grumbling about Furtwängler’s Nazi past.13 The Soviets even approached Furtwängler to take over the Staatsoper located on Unter den Linden in their sector.14 In literary taste the post-war journals, including those in the early SBZ, were in a retrospective mood, preferring to revive many of the until recently banned modernist classics than strike out on their own. Consequently, the high modernism of Weimar, Paris, and New York in the 1920s and 1930s enjoyed a tremendous revival during the 1940s. Die Wandlung published T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound but took a critical distance from their politics, while the francophone Merkur served up generous portions of Gide and

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Valéry, as well as the contemporary philosophers Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain. German writers, especially those who had been part of the Conservative Revolution, were few and far between, though one occasionally finds a poem by Friedrich Georg Jünger buried in the back pages of Merkur. Clearly, these journals reflected a highly selective relationship to the German past, preferring to ignore rather than confront those elements of pre-1933 German intellectual life that were not restored to public life after 1945. As Jeffrey Herf points out, the volkisch-nationalist Right, whose political and cultural proximity to National Socialism was self-evident, was prohibited public expression. But it is also true that outright criticism of the Conservative Revolution was also markedly absent, perhaps because, as Jaspers said of his own refusal to publicly condemn Heidegger after the war, he held him in too high esteem, or because, as Sternberger privately admitted was the case with Die Wandlung, fairness did not permit him to attack writers who could not defend themselves. It is also apparent that those writers who refused to accommodate with the occupying powers, and who either remained silent or wrote very little, still enjoyed enormous support among cultural elites, a fact which any public controversy was sure to underscore. Also absent in the Western zones, as well as in the SBZ, were the main figures of the Weimar left, especially those who had espoused heterodox Marxist views and who were associated with the cultural and political avant-garde. To be sure, Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper was performed in Berlin in 1945, but only in the Western sector, and it was severely criticized by communists and noncommunists alike for its amoralism. The motto “erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral” was hardly the right order of priorities for a situation that demanded political and moral atonement, noted one irate reviewer.15 With the radical conservatives and the radical left missing from the intellectual horizon, the vocabulary of the post-war years was decisively unpolitical and heavily weighted toward moral and theological concepts. Four keywords appear with astonishing regularity in all the intellectual reviews founded in the Western zones in immediate post-war Germany. Those words are “guilt,” “spirit,” “Europe,” and “humanism.” Sometimes they appear singly in articles entitled “Der Geist und die Geister,” and sometimes combined, as in the “spirit of humanity,” or of the European spirit, which was the title of the famous Geneva convocation in 1946. For the most part these words were invoked with sincere reverence; at other times unctuously; and less frequently, skeptically, as for example, in Heidegger’s famous “Letter on Humanism,” in which authentic humanism is contrasted with the subjectively centered, “metaphysical” humanism of the worldview of Western man since Plato.16 But whatever the particular elective affinity that binds these words together, their very ubiquity should caution us not to underestimate

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the power that they had for contemporaries. It is to these keywords that I will now turn to analyze post-war intellectual developments more closely. “Guilt” was, of course, the paradigmatic category with which German intellectuals chose to confront the past in the immediate post-war era. In an emphatic sense the post-war discussion of German guilt was a discussion of German national identity manqué. In both the Soviet and Western zones, most intellectuals believed that Germany still existed only as a “provisorum,” and many writers of that era pointed out that the outcome of the war could be summed up with the words “finis Germanae.” As Otto Flake wrote in the first issue of Merkur, “we have to assume the consequences of our situation as soberly and as realistically as a businessman faces the bankruptcy of his enterprise.”17 German sovereignty was contemplatable only from the perspective of the renewal of an “inner” Germany, rather than from any global political standpoint. That perspective was most clearly stated by Paeschke when he explicitly reversed Ranke’s primat: “For us there is henceforth only ‘Innenpolitik’.”18 Die Wandlung was dedicated to the reestablishment of Germany’s “inner spiritual moral constitution” [innere, geistig-sittliche Verfassung], which could prepare the ground for a new politics.19 The goal of the journal was the elementary transformation of “thought” and “the ethos of the individual” to bring about what Sternberger called a “decisive humanism.” The philosopher Karl Jaspers, who along with Werner Krauss and Alfred Weber joined Die Wandlung under Sternberger’s stewardship, was the most important exemplar of that moral and spiritual renewal in that era, contributing numerous articles on that theme. Sternberger, who had been Jaspers’ student at Heidelberg, recalled that “a different Jaspers emerged out of the obscurity of oppression.”20 The philosopher’s 1946 Heidelberg lecture and subsequent brochure, Die Schuldfrage, was the classic statement of the post-war discourse of the penitential German, though it was also a text brimming with ambiguities and paradoxes. In his opening remarks Jaspers emphasized his larger purpose: to provide a moral guideline for German reconstruction, “through the drafting of an ethos that remains for us—even if this is the ethos of a people regarded by the world as a pariah people.”21 Jasper’s understanding of the concept of the “pariah people” derives from Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism, which portrayed the ethos of the pariah people as one of social exclusion and worldliness, combined with an inner anticipation embodied in the ecstatic visions of the Prophets. The suffering of the Jews in exile was the path to inner purity and collective redemption. For Jaspers, the Germans too, in an astonishing reversal, had now become a people deprived of their national existence and excluded from the community of nations because of the enormous suffering they had inflicted on others, above all, the Jews. Their state destroyed, their country under foreign rule, their leaders in flight or in

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custody, Germans now occupied a position not unlike the one occupied by the Jews—in an ironic twist, they had begun their own political diaspora.22 In both intellectual discourse and practice, guilt was treated differently in each of the four zones. In the British zone the guilt question was dealt with either not at all or matter-of-factly, emphasizing the distinction popularized by Jaspers between collective responsibility and collective guilt. The main debate occurred in the American zone, where the writer Major Hans Habe edited Die Neue Zeitung, which, in contrast to other periodicals, invited the exiles to express their skepticism about the possibilities for German renewal. Though Habe personally rejected the thesis of collective guilt, he gave expression to a variety of views and published even explicitly anti-German articles by Sigrid Undset and Franz Werfel, alongside those by Martin Niemöller. Under his auspices the famous debate over “inner emigration” between Mann, Thiess, and Walter von Molo was first showcased to the German public. In both Die Wandlung and Merkur the emphasis was on distinguishing a spectrum of guilt, whether it be the distinction between the unleashing of aggressive war and the responsibility of each individual soldier, or Jaspers’ famous fourfold distinction between criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical guilt. The debates that followed revealed the often wide differences that emerged over different meanings of German guilt, as well as the less apparent implication of the discourse itself, which, at least for Jaspers, precluded any further survival of the German nation-state. Even among the editors of Die Wandlung, there was no agreement that the question of guilt should take precedence over reflections on economic, social, and political issues affecting Germany’s reconstitution. The social philosopher Alfred Weber, for example, had advocated a democratic socialist reform program, and was hardly in agreement with Jaspers’ or Sternberger’s insistence on guilt: “The entire first issue with its overweening traditional Christianness does not breathe the same spirit as I do,” he wrote. “I stick out like a foreign body. I feel that the same danger will repeat in the subsequent issues.”23 Weber’s fear that the journal’s theological tone would eventually come to dominate its pages was well founded. Yet, the Christological language of the journal was not merely the result of its editors’ proclivities. It also reflected readers’ expectations and preoccupations. It is no accident that the most divisive and vociferous controversy in Die Wandlung concerned the famous statement issued as the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of the Evangelical Church in October 1945. So extraordinary was the outcry against that document, which Sternberger opened the journal’s pages to a host of critics from within the Christian community, most of whom attacked it for its “theological absolutism” and its “irrepressible similarity to the political totalitarianism of the past twelve years.”24 The controversy over the Declaration of Guilt and the

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letters to the editor about Jaspers’ Schuldfrage made it apparent that Die Wandlung’s efforts at coming to terms with the past were not generally applauded. From a flurry of angry readers’ responses to what they regarded as the “guilt burdened” [schuldbeladen] era, the editors were made aware that such well-publicized declarations only elicited resentment against the Allied pressures that produced the statement in the first place. Even Die Wandlung’s competitors could not resist chastising its moralizing editorials. Otto Flake noted in Merkur that the source of the German’s “bad actions did not lie in any defect of morality, but rather in a defect of intelligence.”25 Such negative responses were vastly more prevalent than even the public intellectual discourse of the 1940s might reveal. Nor were they limited to disgruntled readers. There was also a counter-discourse, emanating from the community of silence that encompassed former active Nazis and fellow travelers, as well as those intellectuals who, in the early years of the Hitler regime, either had been enthusiasts of the Hitler revolution, like Schmitt, Heidegger, and Benn, or, like Ernst Jünger, had remained aloof from its plebeian character. With the collapse, disillusionment turned to bitterness at the occupation and at the perceived arbitrariness and political character of the new situation, which was perceived in terms of an “inner civil war” and revenge of the victors. The history of that silent community is only now beginning to be written, as for example, in Dirk von Laak’s Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens, an indispensable study of the Carl Schmitt circle.26 From Schmitt’s perspective, “silence” was pregnant with theological and political meaning: It not only registered the remove of the “spiritually rich personality” [ geistreichen Persönlichkeit ] from society, a position of “refusal” of the liberal order of power, but it also occupied a key place in the “semantic field” of the post-war rhetorical repertoire that in some ways was more audible than those voices that dominated the public sphere. In 1947 Schmitt characterized his situation not as passive withdrawal but as an expression of “defeat.” He referred to the conscious position of those educated persons [ gebildete] whose ethos was to oppose what Heidegger and Schmitt considered to be the chatter of the “they” [das Gerede des Man]. In Schmitt’s view, “silence” was the only authentic ethos befitting “authentic conversation” in the circumstances of defeat, political impotence, and imposed cultural imperatives: “Whoever knows and speaks rather than remaining silent … writing and speaking is the worst.”27 At the same time there is an important parallel between “the world of silence” and the discourse of guilt, both of which emerge from an explicitly religious response—Catholic and Protestant, respectively. If the public sphere was the theological-therapeutic space of penance, the private conversation of the silent community provided the space for the moral affirmation [Besinnung] of the intellectuals who repudiated Germany’s post-war condition. Not surprisingly,

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the community of silence excoriated Jaspers as the philosopher of “national betrayal” [Landesverrat ], and Schmitt blamed him for initiating West Germany’s officially sanctioned sanctimonious culture of guilt. Schmitt even composed this little ditty about Jaspers’ Die Schuldfrage: Wie hat sein Bußgerede mich empört Wie ekelt mir vor seinen faulen Fischen Jetzt ist er endlich, wo er hingehört: Im Spiegel und der Deutschen Telewischen. [How he outraged me with his talk of atoning How he disgusted me by his lazy fishin’ Now he is finally where he belongs In Der Spiegel and on German television].28

The philosophical breach between Heidegger and Jaspers was perhaps even more symptomatic of the separation between public speech and silence in the immediate post-war years. Jaspers’ insistence on communication, his conviction that “no one can in honesty withdraw from political activity and cooperation,” was directed against Heidegger’s militant refusal to admit any culpability. For Heidegger, Germans were not required to choose among the various “tribunals of the victors,” while for Jaspers, the occupation of Germany was the opportunity for a new beginning, in which the European “spirit” and, more importantly, the “rights of man” and the ideals of the West—democracy, freedom, and responsibility—could become part of a new political culture.29 From the discussion of German guilt it was not far to the conclusion that there was something terribly defective in the German “spirit,” as Ernst Robert Curtius accused Jaspers of asserting several years later. The rhetorical preoccupation with the word “spirit” in the immediate post-war years marks an important point of continuity with the later years of the Weimar Republic, in which books like Jaspers’ jeremiad On the Spiritual Situation of Our Times (1932) enjoyed great popularity. Do we not hear in the reassertion of the word “spirit” itself—as Derrida argues in De l’esprit—echoes of the vocabulary that characterized both the Conservative Revolution and the “inner emigration”? The insistence on “spirit” rhetorically invokes a kind of loyalty to an intellectual state of affairs that no longer exists, a commitment once defined by Konrad Ackermann as “an ethos which feels itself to be sworn to the world of spirit and the spiritual order in a world that has fallen from spirit.”30 Both Jaspers’ preface to Die Wandlung and Paeschke’s essay “Responsibility of the Spirit” evoke spirit as having priority over material necessity. “Together,” wrote Jaspers, “we build not only the world of our material being, but the spirit and ethics of our society.”31 Paeschke too asserted that the destiny of Europe lay in the future of its spirit, because “the responsibility of spirit or ‘Geist’ belongs to the integrating elements of the public life of a Nation

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and has responsibilities that are prior to those of society.”32 The Left too adopted the rhetoric of primacy of “spirit,” as for example when Becher referred to German writers as the “executors of the spiritual testament” of those—both exiles and in Germany—which had died in the past 12 years.33 That the words “spirit” and “spiritual” were so often evoked implied an interpretation of National Socialism which was widely shared—that of a “doctrineless revolution.” It is remarkable that given the widespread recognition of the crimes of the Nazi regime, so little attention was paid to the doctrinal sources of Nazi racial policy in volkisch thought. Instead, the regime was perceived as lacking in any doctrinal or ideological commitments, as an amoralism without intellectual foundations. For Jaspers, the “actual evil is nihilism,” and that evil was not specifically German or Nazi but, rather, a European evil, one that required a European-wide spiritual response. The liquidation of the “ideas of the West” by National Socialism, Paeschke wrote in Merkur, only accomplished what the “crisis of the modern spirit had long ago thrown into the frying pan everywhere in the world.”34 The theme that European nihilism was responsible for National Socialism, and that German philosophy since Nietzsche was corrupted by its irrationalism and lack of values, was also prevalent in the SBZ. In February 1947 the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung organized a discussion on the question “Is there a particularly German crisis of the spirit?” Participants included both Christians and Marxists, communists and noncommunists, among them Alexander Abusch and Klaus Gysi, but also Ernst Niekisch, Josef Naas, and others. All agreed that there was indeed a specifically German crisis of the intellect, but that the “spiritual vacuum” was universal and that “bourgeois democratic” and even Marxist humanism was also in some sense culpable.35 The view that a new Europe, rather than a new Germany, was to be the most promising consequence of the post-war era may be the most widely shared illusion of that era. Even those on the left, like Walter Dirks, who imagined a coalition of radicalized Christian workers and democratic socialists united in a new “Labour Party,” believed that the nations of Europe had become too small, and that a European confederation might “make a true virtue out of the necessity of the hour.”36 Along with European unity came the idea of “the West” [das Abendland ], which graced the title of no less than three new journals in 1946, all of which sounded the alarm that “the West” or Europe was in danger, which the threat was to no small degree permanent.37 In September 1946, when Europe’s intellectual elite gathered in Geneva to discuss the relative health of “The European Spirit” at the Recontres Internationales, the meeting was, perhaps paradoxically, characterized by a shamelessly competitive ostentatious Bildung. Speakers vied over whether the

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European spirit was “contaminated,” [befleckt] “sick,” “moribund,” or still worse, in the words of Jean Guehénno, already dead before it could be born. Organized as a series of duels between the polarities of post-war discourse—freedom versus justice, socialism versus Christianity, national versus universal values—the stirrings of the Cold War were everywhere in evidence. As one speaker put it, America was characterized by freedom without justice, the Soviet Union, by justice without freedom. Ilya Ehrenburg refused to attend because “its only purpose was to prepare for a new war.” But just as the participants were beginning to tire of the bidding war of apocalyptic scenarios, the “event of the congress” occurred, a stunning dialogue between two philosophical titans, the representative of Marxist cultural criticism, Georg Lukács, and the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. For Lukács, European history since the French Revolution had been characterized by a dialectic between formal bourgeois equality and the real inequality of the bourgeois world. That dialectic produced either resignation or counterattack on the part of the bourgeoisie and was responsible for the spiral of “irrationalism” that began with romanticism, developing into a variety of forms from Nietzscheanism to aristocratic pessimism to racism, finally culminating in fascism. Only a dialectical and critical humanist rationalism that could overcome both national and class divisions could, Lukács asserted, solve the antinomies that had wrought such destruction. His presentation was a tour de force of Marxist exposition, the Big Picture that encompassed the partial perspectives of all of the previous speakers. But, as Merleau-Ponty asked in the subsequent discussion, did not Lukács’ “adventures of the dialectic” end up in a rationalist Hegelian-Marxist version of Russian mysticism, in which the collective absorbed the individual, while the utopian city of light turns into the police state? Jaspers’ rejoinder was no less impressive than Lukács’. Ranging from Homer to Lao Tse to Marx, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, from the ancient Jews to the modern Germans, he drew a picture of the origins of the great civilizations, the preeminence of European science and technology, its power, and its inevitable fall into nihilism. Like Lukács, Jaspers depicted European history as a dialectic and as a fall, but unlike Lukács, he emphasized that all the polarities need not be resolved. It was precisely that openness to polarity, he claimed, that preserves freedom, and its inability to resolve those contradictions was precisely what Jaspers meant by his famous concept of life “at the extreme.” The historical struggle for freedom—for a Europe that does not dominate—occurs in real history and takes as its “example” the Jews, for whom reconciliation could exist only “in the world.” The horizon remains transcendent, Jaspers concluded, but the goal could never permit its realization. As if to respond directly to Lukács, he remarked, “No one sees the whole. We are always in it, not outside it or above it.”38

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In April 1949, during the commemoration of the two-hundredth anniversary of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s birth, to which I have already alluded, Ernst Robert Curtius published a scathing pamphlet denouncing Jaspers’ assertion that the “Goethe cult is over.” Like Jaspers’ Geistige Situation der Zeit, which had made similar pronouncements on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power, Curtius’ Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (1932) represented late Weimar conservative cultural criticism in an apocalyptic mode. In 1949, behind the controversy over Goethean humanism was of course the larger question of German guilt. Curtius used the occasion to accuse Jaspers of setting himself up as “praeceptor germaniae,” of arrogantly undermining the German spirit, and of defending “collective guilt.” After 1945 Curtius remained wedded to his earlier conception of “the nobility of the spirit,” as opposed to a reckoning with the Nazi past: “If spiritual Germany had to choose between Goethe and Jaspers, there will still be a few that will vote for Goethe. It is for them that I have spoken.”39 The appeal to Goethe and the continuity of German humanism in 1949 was not restricted to the now unified Western zone. Just as Curtius rejected the discourse of German guilt via an affirmation of Goethean “humanism,” so too in the SBZ Goethean “humanism” affirmed the continuity of progressive German traditions while attacking Western and “cosmopolitan” influences in the cultural domain. During the heyday of the “anti-cosmopolitan” trials of Rudolf Slansky and Laszlo Rajk in Prague and Budapest, anti-Semitism was beginning to appear in the GDR. Indeed during 1949, the assertion of national continuities in German history, the assault on formalism à la Zhdanov, and the attack on “Western cosmopolitanism” and Zionism in the newly created GDR could all count on the dead poet’s support. As David Pike has shown, “celebrating Goethe’s two-hundredth birthday was just another way of establishing a national alibi that, nonetheless, came down to the reconciliation of Goethean attitudes with Stalin’s obsession with Soviet Jews whose antipatriotism stemmed from their lack of national roots.”40 The Goethe Association in Weimar issued a set of strict precepts governing the reception of the poet’s ideas. They concluded by affirming that Germany’s renewal would be accompanied by “the development of Goethe’s idea of humanity from an individual ideal of Bildung to the socially formative act of our epoch.”41 By 1949, both in the West and in the GDR, the classical tradition of “bourgeois humanism” had become the vehicle by which German national continuity and the positive legacy of German culture could be validated, as opposed to the caesura with the past that confrontations with guilt and the crisis of the German spirit had signified just a few years earlier. It was not surprising to hear Soviet cultural officers speaking of “national interest,” as the tradition of bourgeois humanism served to affirm national continuity in

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the context of the new increasingly divided German sovereignty. As Walter Dirks recognized in his famous essay on the “restorative character of the epoch,” what was occurring was neither a reactionary nor a conservative turn, but rather a return to the unpolitical “climate” of prewar German traditionalism, without, and this was his point, the national conservative politics of the Weimar era. Those politics, still thoroughly discredited by Nazism, remained, as I have argued, largely underground. Both the discredited Right and the exile-émigré Left—especially in the SBZ—were kept out of the new constellation of German intellectual and political life. As Dirks noted, it was not conspiracy but rather inertia [Trägheit ] that produced such restorations, and for that purpose the humanist tradition of the “unpolitical” German served inordinately well in both the Western zones and the communist east. By 1947 the new discourse of guilt, with its religiosity, and the talk of the crisis of humanism was dispelled, the hope of a unified Europe postponed. Instead, the old cultural structure was not so much lovingly rebuilt as replaced by a museal version of humanism, just as the old Goethehaus was replaced by an exact replica rather than a restoration. What resulted was, as Dirks predicted, what unavoidably must result from such a dubious enterprise: “ein schlechter Bau.”42 Notes 1. Walter Dirks, “Mut zum Abschied: Zur Wiederherstellung des Frankfurter Goethehauses,” Walter Dirks: Sozialismus oder Restauration, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Fritz Boll, Ulrich Bröckling, and Karl Prümm, eds. (Zürich: Ammann, 1987), 182–3. 2. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeit der Ideologien: Eine Geschichte politischen Denkens im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: DTV, 1985). 3. Jérome Vaillant, Der Ruf: Unabhängige Blätter der jungen Generation (1945–1949) (Munich, New York, Paris: K. G. Saur, 1978), 14. 4. See for example Hauke Brunkhorst, Der Intellektuelle im Land der Mandarine (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). 5. Henric L. Wuermeling, Die Weiße Liste: Umbruch der Politischen Kultur in Deutschland 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, Wien: Ullstein, 1981). 6. Barbro Eberan, Luther? Friedrich “der Große”? Wagner? Nietzsche … ? Wer war an Hitler schuld? (Munich: Minerva, 1985), 56. 7. Dolf Sternberger to Hermann Rauschnigg, September 11, 1946, in Monika Waldmüller, Die Wandlung: Eine Monatsschrift. Herausgegeben von Dolf Sternberger unter Mitwirkung von Karl Jaspers, Werner Krauss und Alfred Weber 1945–1949 (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1988), 41. 8. Ibid., 53. 9. M. Meister, “Noch etwas über die Schuldfrage,” Merkur I, (1947), 294. 10. Merkur I (1947), 102.

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11. Hans Paeschke, “Die Verantwortlichkeit des Geistes,” Merkur I, (1947), 103. 12. David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945–1949 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford UP, 1993), 129. 13. Manfred Jäger, “Kultureller Neubeginn im Zeichen des Antifaschismus,” Studien zur Geschichte der SBZ/DDR, ed. Alexander Fischer, Schriftenreihe der Gesellschaft für Deutschlandforschung, vol. 38 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), 121, 122. 14. Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil’s Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler (New York: Oxford UP, 1992), 303. 15. The discussion is elaborated in Pike, The Politics of Culture, 190. 16. See Anson Rabinbach, “Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism as Text and Event,” New German Critique 62 (Fall 1994): 1–35. 17. Otto Flake, “Etwas über die Schuldfrage,” Merkur, vol. 1 (1947), 140. 18. Paeschke, “Verantwortlichkeit des Geistes,” 109. 19. Wandmüller, Die Wandlung, 39. 20. Dolf Sternberger, “Jaspers und der Staat,” Karl Jaspers Werk und Wirkung: Zum 80 Geburtstag Karl Jaspers (Munich: R. Piper, 1963), 133, 134. 21. Ibid., 135. 22. See Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), chapter 4. 23. Alfred Weber to Dolf Sternberger, December 3, 1945, in Waldmüller, Die Wandlung, 39. 24. Waldmüller, Die Wandlung, 46. 25. Flake, “Etwas,” 140. 26. Dirk van Laak, Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens: Carl Schmitt in der politischen Geistesgeschichte der frühen Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993). 27. Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951, ed., Eberhard Freiherr von Medem (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991) 11. 28. See Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus: Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Cologne, 1950), 70. Cited in Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 219. 29. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Dial, 1947), 45. 30. Konrad Ackermann, Der Widerstand der Monatsschrift ‘Hochland’ gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1965), 38. Cited in Reinhold Grimm, “Im Dickicht der inneren Emigration,” Die deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich: Themen—Traditionen—Wirkungen, Horst Denkler and Karl Prümm, eds. (Stuttgart: Philip Reclam, 1976), 420. 31. Renato de Rosa, ed. Karl Jaspers’ Erneuerung der Universität: Reden und Schriften 1945/6 (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1986), 111. 32. Paeschke, “Verantwortlichkeit des Geistes,” 100. 33. Cited in Pike, The Politics of Culture. 34. Paeschke, “Verantwortlichkeit des Geistes,” 100.

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35. Gerd Dietrich, Politik und Kultur in der SBZ 1945–1949 (Bern, Berlin: Peter Lang, 1993), 95. 36. Dirks, Sozialismus oder Restauration, 48. 37. See for example Neues Abendland (Augsburg). 38. Karl Jaspers, The European Spirit, ed. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: SCM Press, Ltd, 1948), 49. 39. Ernst Robert Curtius, Die Tat, April 2, 1949; Die Zeit, April 29, 1949. Cited in Waldmüller, Die Wandlung, 76, 77. 40. Pike, The Politics of Culture, 616. 41. “Leitdanken zum Goethejahr.” ed. Deutscher Goethe-Ausschuß, 1949. Cited in Dietrich, Politik und Kultur in der SBZ 1945–1949, 350. 42. Dirks, “Mut zum Abschied,” 187.

CHAPTER 2

Normative Westernization?—The Impact of Remigres on the Foundation of Political Thought in Post-War Germany

Alfons Söllner

I. “Science of Democracy”? The Role of Emigrants in the Foundation of West German Political Science

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hat were the individual factors that influenced the development of a democratic culture in the Federal Republic of Germany? In my opinion, no definitive answer has as yet been given to this question; however, it figures among the most difficult questions posed by West German post-war history. In the beginning, a reference to a remarkable shift in the priorities of research in this field may suffice to at least delimit this question as far as the contribution of American occupation policy to the introduction of a democratic order is concerned. Whereas a large part of the earlier literature was based on the “economist” premise that West German democracy—though not directly imposed by the Americans—had been introduced as an instrument for the “restoration of capitalism,”1 the more recent research emphasizes the comparatively “mild” character of occupation policy in general,2 and of the measures of reeducation in particular. Thus, Hermann-Josef Rupieper has shown that the policy of reeducation was not only highly differentiated in its concept and carried out in a very careful manner, but that it also took into account

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the reflexive and unavoidably long-term character of a reorientation toward democratic living conditions. Despite all short-range failures, as they occurred, for instance, briefly in the educational policy or in the reform of public services, something like cumulative public learning processes must have contributed to the growing identification with the new democracy. Cultural exchange programs or the “Amerika-Häuser” probably supported this development.3 One field of studies that, for several rather obvious reasons, might well serve a more exact sounding of what could be called the acculturation of democracy is the field of political science during the 1950s and early 1960s: First, this discipline was itself undergoing a strenuous foundation process and thus reflected in miniature the initial difficulties of democracy within the larger framework of the political order; second, due to its disciplinary and methodological orientation, it embodied, per definitionem, a direct relation with contemporary political life, i.e., with the building of democracy; and, finally, this discipline did not consider itself a “pure” science or a value-free search for truth; rather, it was programmatically conceived as an institution that claimed to become a part of public life through academic training and political education as well as through journalistic and advisory political work.4 Is this simply a polite paraphrase of the reproach that political science, had been confronted with from the very beginning, namely that it was “imported from America” and thus did not fit into the German educational tradition? Was political science, as “the science of democracy,” a product of reeducation and finally the dictate of the “victors of 1945”?5 In fact, there is not the slightest doubt that the idea of the foundation of a science of politics did not come from the restored academic milieu that had come to terms with National Socialism for better or worse but, rather, from circles in which the objectives of reeducation aimed at by the American occupation authorities and the plans for the future sketched by dissidents and members of the resistance against Hitler overlapped spontaneously. In many respects decisive, however, proved to be a small group of emigrants who looked back on successful careers as political scientists in the American exile and who had already offered their help to the American authorities during the war.6 When looking at the early stages of this discipline after 1945, one can see that sincere initiatives occurred rather late, after the universities had reopened. And the earliest of these initiatives, the setting up of a College of Political Science at Frankfurt in 1947, already aborted in 1948, still serves as an early example of the decisive influence of emigrants. The impulse had been given by Hajo Holborn, historian at the German Institute of Politics at Weimar and now high-ranking adviser of the military government; and two further emigrants had been envisaged as future directors: Arnold Wolfers and Ernst Wilhelm Meyer.

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The Hochschule für Politik at Berlin, reopened in early 1949,7 which was soon to become the guiding star of the general trend, seems at first sight to contradict this constellation. This initiative had its basis in the social-democratic circle around Otto Suhr, and its stabilization was initially due not so much to the smooth realization of an especially protected project but, rather, to the dramatic development of the Berlin crisis and to the averting of communist incursions. No direct motivational link is evident among the most important political events of the late 1940s, e.g., the federation of the Western zones, the debates of the Parliamentary Council, the institutional realization of the Basic Law within the federal government in Bonn. Yet, it is still conspicuous that real movement was brought into the continuously slackening conditions only once the Western state had taken shape in the Federal Republic and the impression prevailed in the circles of the emigrants and both their German and American interlocutors that, with the foundation of the state, a democratic development was by no means guaranteed.8 Decisive for the breakthrough of political science was a series of conferences that took place between 1949 and 1952. The participants at these conferences literally struggled for the existence or nonexistence of political science. The conference of Waldleiningen was convened in September 1949 by a prominent initiatory group of persons from the university and from the political scene and carried the programmatic title “Introduction of Political Science at the German Universities and Institutes of Higher Learning.” In opposition, another group formed, which was backed by, among others, the early West German University Rectors’ Conference; this group voiced grave doubts, especially with regard to the intended integration of the new science into the German university system. Their arguments partly derived from the arsenal of a neo-humanist conservatism and openly insinuated that political science was an imported article alien to the German university tradition and sprang from the dictate of the occupying powers. In this conflict situation, the energetic intervention of the emigrant Karl Loewenstein proved decisive; Loewenstein had taught political science at Amherst College since the 1930s and, as an adviser of the military government, had both developed the idea for this conference and procured the money for its realization. Loewenstein mediated skillfully between the two positions by breaking, on the one hand, a lance for the new science and by pointing, on the other hand, to the fact that a simple transplantation of American political science into the German system was neither necessary nor desirable.9 The subsequent conferences at Königstein (1950) and Frankfurt (1952) were characterized by similar, even more precarious conflicts, the easing of which was again mostly due to the presence of the emigrants. The conference at Königstein dealt with, among other things, the issues of what the new

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discipline’s attitude was toward the neighboring disciplines, e.g., history, law, philosophy, and whether it was concerned primarily with the processing and secondary integration of the latter’s results was provided with a subject and methods of its own and was thus to be considered an autonomous discipline. The alternatives were already evident in the nomenclature. While the opponents and skeptics spoke of the political sciences, i.e., in the watery plural form, the other group, including those emigrants who were present at the conference— Loewenstein, Franz L. Neumann, Ferdinand A. Hermens—favored the singular: “science of politics,” a phraseology that was then positively expressed in the conference’s final resolution. A similar situation presented itself two years later, at the small conference held at the reopened Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, which only came about due to the presence of Franz L. Neumann. “Professor Neumann wants to convince himself that the infant ‘political science’ is growing”—with these words the chairman Alexander Rüstow, who had emigrated to Turkey, introduced the conference, and accordingly, the conference’s progress was determined by the intention to maintain political science’s independence from the traditional academic disciplines, especially from jurisprudence. As Franz L. Neumann stated in plain language: “The integration of political science into the law faculty is the end of political science itself.”10 With the postulate of autonomy we have touched a neuralgic point of early political science that, on the one hand, constituted a link between the very question of existence and the future form and that, on the other hand, clearly illustrates the emigrants’ influence. By insisting on the factual and methodological demarcation of this field of knowledge and by directly deriving from this postulate the need for its institutional independence as a university discipline, the emigrants were able to secure a place for political science in the reestablished educational hierarchy, thus resisting the considerable restorative trends that had by then gained ground in the universities. They could play such an exposed role and keep it up against the different obstacles of a material, social, or scientific nature not so much because they could claim for themselves the authority of the American occupying power but, rather, because they had themselves become, in the course of emigration, “established” representatives of political science. They represented in person an alternative scientific tradition and knew how to defend their factual authority with self-assurance but also with delicacy in front of their German colleagues. The developments in Berlin serve to demonstrate this specific, sensitive, and at the same time strategically decisive role played by the emigrants in the foundation process, for, in Berlin, there was for a short term and under the influence of a few especially committed figures, something like an institutional double structure still serving one aim, namely to pave the way for political science as an autonomous university discipline. It is interesting that,

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initially, the Berlin foundation of 1949 actually constituted a “refoundation” in so far as it followed the footsteps of the Weimar precursor institution both from the organizational and the conceptual point of view, though of course not with regard to personnel. It strove to be a kind of institution of political adult education and, for the first few years, it actually operated as such: It was open to students from all social backgrounds and was politically committed to the fight against totalitarianism and for a future democracy. Accordingly, the initial curriculum was oriented toward popular education, i.e., with little scientific differentiation, or, as the rector, Otto Suhr, realistically stated in 1950: “There is a science of politics!” however, we “still lack a clarification of politics as science.”11 It is exactly this desideratum that formed the basis for the critical objections and positive conclusions formulated by the emigrants; with regard to the Berlin conditions, this is very well exemplified by Franz L. Neumann, professor of political science at Columbia University and, since 1942, adviser to the American government regarding questions of German policy. In January 1950, he gave a much-noted lecture at the Hochschule für Politik, in which he not only gave his esteemed colleagues a good talking-to concerning questions of a theory of science, but also presented a both ambitious and intricate program for the “science of politics in a democracy.”12 In his lecture, he managed to present this program, which was directly modeled on his New York faculty and which he recommended as worth imitating, as the sum of all that which had been grounded by nineteenth-century German Staatswissenschaften, but which had then been thwarted by the juridical positivism of the totalitarian state. Subsequently, Neumann went on to not so much propose to the Freie Universität the foundation of an institute of research in political science but, rather, to force such a foundation on the Berlin University, for he had in the meantime forked out a considerable amount of money from American foundations, which the Freie Universität, whose financial difficulties were notorious, could hardly reject. In fact, the research-oriented Institute of Political Science was actually founded in the same year, 1950. The further development of political science in West Berlin13 is an excellent example both for an assessment of the institutionalization of the discipline in the early Federal Republic and for judging the success of the objectives aimed at by the emigrants. Here, again, it is interesting to look at Neumann: The actual clue in his course of action was a sort of double strategy and consisted in supplying, on the one hand, the Hochschule für Politik with a more solid scientific foundation through intensified research activities and, on the other hand, forcing the Freie Universität to offer an institutional home to political science, either as an independent discipline or even as a faculty in its own right. This double strategy was all in all successful, at least

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if one disregards internal turbulence of both a staff-related and a conceptual kind and if one makes allowance for the delay of almost a decade: In 1958, the Institute of Political Science became a regular part of the Freie Universität, and the Hochschule für Politik followed suit in 1959, both as well equipped, independent, and co-operating academic institutions. It would be misleading to generalize about the success story of West Berlin political science and to transfer it onto the rest of the Federal Republic—still, on a smaller scale, West Germany during the 1950s also showed a considerable development. According to the both elaborate and critical report by M. Rainer Lepsius in the summer term of 1960, political science had, after one decade, reached the following level: At 12 of the 18 universities, political science was taught, but only at half of these did it constitute an independent discipline; the rule was still that the subject be represented by a few individual professorships; as institutes in their own right, the report mentions only Berlin and Munich; there were 24 full professors and associate professors, 10 of whom taught at Berlin, where alone a diploma was granted. We must not forget that Lepsius was extremely negative in his comments on the academic shape of the new discipline: What it lacked above all was the internal differentiation and the delimitation from other disciplines, and this in turn was connected with the lack of empirical research and the neglect of international politics.14 If one reads this evaluation report ordered by the German Research Association, then it appears that things did not go well for the young discipline of political science at the beginning of the 1960s. But perhaps the standards applied by Lepsius are not really to be considered the decisive ones when looking at the parallels between political science and the young West German democracy. In fact, West German political science in its formative phase can simply not be understood if considered as primarily an academic, or even a purely scientific, event. Rather, it first of all was—and it could hardly be anything else, with or without a science-theoretical foundation—a provisional arrangement, a multidimensional being by no means easy to characterize, which had to mediate between two poles: not only between theory and practice in general, but also between representatives from different disciplinary fields and cultures, and even between entire national traditions. Such a redefinition of the problem from one oriented by the history of science to a “culturalist” problem is not the result of the methodological a priori of an alternative research perspective alone. Rather, it has to be assumed, with regard to the contemporary historical scenario at the beginning of the Federal Republic as a whole, that the concept of democracy itself represented a complex that was in great need of clarification. “Democracy” simply could not be a finished name for a given political system, but merely

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something like the intersection of cultural lines the topical meaning of which had first to be determined. And this, in turn, necessitated both strained and strenuous orientative work, a public learning process in which questions of cultural origin, on the one hand, moved to the center of interest and, on the other hand, clearly had to be reflected in view of future developments. All in all, when investigating the interiors of the young Federal Republic, one cannot restrict oneself to its “politics of the past”15 but also has to take into account what could be called its “politics of the future.” In any case, it seemed to have the double perspective of opening toward the future and being the cultural foundation of democracy; and, above all, effectively linking these aspects—a task through which political science proved to be an especially significant field of observation and, at the same time, a politicalcultural asset of the young Federal Republic. In order to give a tangible form to the field of forces thus hinted at, we can draw on “hard” sociological data, again on the role of the emigrants. While the names mentioned above stand for the midwives of the first hour, it was essential to the formative phase of political science well into the 1960s that a large number of further emigrants decided to return to the Federal Republic of Germany. This regular remigration may have been permanent or planned for only a short period of time16—in any case, it led to the very specific constellation that the organization of West German political science rested to a considerable degree with the remigrants. Seen in relation to the small dimensions of the discipline in its early stages, their sheer number alone is impressive: During the 1950s and 60s there were no less than 16 remigrants working for longer or shorter periods of time, but as full-time professors, in West German political science. When observing the geographical distribution while at the same time aiming at a cautious political classification, we come up with the following rough picture: As many as 4 of the 16 remigrants worked in the Social Democratically dominated Western part of Berlin (Ernst Fraenkel, Ossip K. Flechtheim, Arcadius Gurland, Richard Löwenthal), while the more liberal-conservative figures were concentrated in southern and western Germany. How “strong,” i.e., institutionally manifest, the remigrants’ influence actually was can also be determined by looking at the number of those remigrants who were directly offered chairs as founding professors or who quickly attained to distinct leading functions: thus Arnold Bergstraesser in Freiburg, Heinrich Brüning and Ferdinand A. Hermens in Cologne, Fraenkel and Gurland in Berlin, Siegfried Landshut in Hamburg, Fritz Morstein-Marx in Speyer, and Eric Voegelin in Munich. However, the actual and, at the same time, the least researched pole of this field of forces can be reached only when taking into account that the majority of the remigrants working in political science had come back from the

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United States. And this, in turn, meant that the impressions with which they returned and that they then applied within the West German context were in one way or the other determined by their American experience, either in the general sense that the United States acted as the horizon of their thinking and acting or in the more specific sense that many of the remigrants had become professional political scientists during the time of emigration, i.e., at American academic institutions. In both cases we have to take into account that the emigration from Hitler Germany had usually been neither an apolitical nor a voluntary process, but rather a political-existential event in the full sense of the word: The memories of the “old homeland,” the experience of forced exile, and the saving superimposition of this experience through the “new homeland”—this dissonant triad was by no means resolved once an emigrant decided to return; rather, it could well reach a new loudness and even a different tone.17 II. The Restoration of “Abendland” and Political Science as a Theory of Cultural Leadership: Arnold Bergstraesser With Arnold Bergstraesser we focus on a remigrant who has become one of the portal figures of West German political science. Indicators of this prominent position can be found in the conventional repertory of the historiography of the science: If, in the early phase, there had taken place something like the successful foundation of a school, then this can be traced back to Arnold Bergstraesser and his “Seminar für Wissenschaftliche Politik” at Freiburg—although they lacked a binding theoretical foundation, the second generation of West German political scientists was still substantially determined by Bergstraesser’s disciples.18 A comparison with other founding fathers yields additional arguments: even if one considers, for instance, Ernst Fraenkel, “inventor” of so-called neo-pluralism as the paradigmatic theory of the early phase and the prominent head of the great Berlin Institute, who still had clearly fewer students. Furthermore, it is interesting that it was Fraenkel who, at the beginning of the 1960s, ostentatiously moved toward Bergstraesser, and not the other way round—perhaps an indicator of the end of the period of formation. When, in 1954, Arnold Bergstraesser took over the newly established chair of “political science and sociology,” he was fifty-eight years old and had been through a real odyssey. Having been an active member first of the “Wandervogel” and later of the students’ youth movement, his academic character had been molded during the 1920s at the Heidelberg Institut für Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften, above all by Alfred Weber. Initially his main interest centered on a theory of culture, academically documented in a book on France;19 with the crisis of the Weimar Republic, however, he

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increasingly professed a political position that saw the solution in a bündischauthoritarian state and considered German culture an instrument for a nationalist mission. Although Bergstraesser, after 1933, lent a ready ear to the language of the “national revolution” and was willing to make concessions to the National Socialists regarding the interior policy of his institute, he still had to emigrate to the United States in 1937, due to Jewish ancestors. After these entanglements had led to new political turbulence in the host country and thus prevented his professional integration in California, Bergstraesser managed to establish himself, at least temporarily, at the University of Chicago, where, from 1944 onward, he taught “German Cultural History.” When, around 1950, he returned to Germany, disillusioned, but determined to try a new beginning, all he seemed to have to build upon was one English book on Goethe20 and good relations with a German–American circle in which the intentions of a conservative group of emigrants coincided with the declared value-conservative endeavors of the Chicago “Committee on Social Thought.” The attempt to return to the Heidelberg institute was obviously thwarted by the resistance of the old Alfred Weber, and it was only after several guest professorships and strenuous efforts to use his good relations that Bergstraesser was able to establish himself in the growing discipline. Although the prehistory can be sketched only cursorily, it is still important to note, on the one hand, that Bergstraesser’s thinking had its committed origins in the cultural-scientific conservatism of the period between the wars, which, in the case of individual representatives, either concretized itself as plebiszitäre Führerdemokratie or backed a “national-cultural mission.” No less informative, however, were the mixed feelings with which Bergstraesser remembered—and probably experienced—emigration: on the one hand as “Jahre des Abseitsstehens und Ausgeschlossenseins”21 [“years of isolation and exclusion”], but on the other as obviously a sort of moratorium in which a cultural scientist capable of national enthusiasm was able to turn himself into a figure who was to play a characteristic role in the changed scenario of the West German post-war society. In order to be able to understand this, one has to concentrate above all on that attribute that is the most noticeable in Bergstraesser’s work in the early Federal Republic: his stupendous ability to develop from a rather vapid humanist ideology a program of political science, or rather, a normative strategy. Reading the texts with which Bergstraesser, around 1950, “reported back” to the West German post-war discourse,22 a specific “tone” reveals itself as the most striking feature, a style of thinking in which the imploring analysis of the threat to humankind, the most general recourse to the European tradition of values, and the zealous search for consolation in the “great” literature

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and philosophy support one another. As authorities for this neo-humanist ideology function Goethe and Hofmannsthal; the objective of this mobilization of meaning, however, is obviously not of a purely internal-esoteric kind but, rather, it aims at the stabilization of a “mental attitude” that also lasts in the external, political, and social world. This ductus of giving meaning, simultaneously feuilletonistic and highly rhetorical, does by no means disappear in the transition to the writings of the Freiburg period; rather, it is only now that we get a precise picture of the target point to which Bergstraesser’s talking and endeavors orient themselves strategically. He aims at establishing or, rather—the memory of the recent and only vaguely defined epochal break being always present—at restoring a communal European code of values that forms the starting point for all further theoretical and practical operations. Characteristic are, for instance, two speeches given in 1955, in which Bergstraesser traces “European universality in present thought” and explains “Europe as intellectual and political reality.”23 The entire line of reasoning is just as pompous as the title. It starts with an appeal to the “geistige Ordnung, als Sinngebung des Daseins verstanden”; just as Heidegger’s category of Zeitlichkeit announced a “gemeineuropäische geistige Wirklichkeit,” thus the “universalgeschichtliche Besinnung” leads to the “Gespräch mit Denkern aus der dreitausendjährigen Vergangenheit des christlichen Abendlandes, der Antike und der anderen lebenden Hochkulturen.” What they have in common is “die beiden Grundbefähigungen des Menschen zur Wahrheit, dem Sehen und dem Vernehmen.”24 And what is more: Because the “Reich des Geistes” functions as the “bedingende Voraussetzung für den Bereich des Politischen” and Occidental technology and civilization has become a common good of the whole world, “so ist also das geistige, wirtschaftliche und soziale Dasein Europas zum Weltschicksal geworden.” Just as Bergstraesser is of the opinion that thus a traditional topos of German cultural criticism—the derogation of civilization as opposed to culture—is refuted, the “Gespräch zwischen den Geistern von dreitausend Jahren” reveals not only the original, but above all the currently binding reality of the humanist world of values: “Hier sind alle geographischen Grenzen gesprengt. Europa erscheint als das Europäische; es verdichtet sich zur Gesinnung … weil der Kern des Europäischen als das schlechthin Menschliche verstanden wird.”25 In this context one has to notice the crucial significance, perhaps even the primacy, of the rhetorical and the normative in Bergstraesser’s work. Not only are almost all of his publications dating from the post-war period compilations of speeches, lectures, or other “opening texts” but even more significant is that Bergstraesser’s style of reasoning itself is often limited to programmatic or strategic considerations, with regard to both the form and the content of

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his texts. This is true for all three topical fields that can be distinguished in his post-war writings, without however wanting to suggest a clear delimitation or, vice versa, a logical organization, which is exactly what is missing in Bergstraesser’s work—for the more cultural-theoretical essays, on the one hand; for the efforts to ground political science, on the other; and finally for the essays on international politics, that promise a sort of synthesis of the first two subjects. These texts are, despite all protestations to the contrary, held together not so much through a fully developed theoretical grounding, not to speak of a philosophy of science but, rather, through the declamatory or sometimes programmatic ductus—one could even say through a willingness to act that is controlled by being transformed into rhetorics. What this refers to is most adequately illustrated by the essays and lectures with which Bergstraesser has entered West German history of science as the founder of the normative-ontological branch of political science.26 Far from actually presenting a theory-of-science program, these texts, too, are limited to a powerful presentation and an effective didactic repetition of a few fundamentalist theses: Just as Bergstraesser haughtily assumes that the science of politics has the same origin as Occidental thinking as a whole, thus his specification of the genuine question of political science remains most general: “Aus dieser Freiheit und Not entscheiden zu müssen, und zwar wenn es um eine politische Entscheidung geht, jeweils für ein soziales Ganzes entscheiden zu müssen, erwächst die Fragestellung, die für das wissenschaftliche Denken konstitutiv ist.”27 Also the four “Einzelgebiete des Fragens im Bereich des politischen Denkens”28 distinguished by Bergstraesser—sociology, internal politics, international politics, as well as political and social philosophy—are differentiated not so much according to methods and factual issues; rather, they all remain immersed in the one universal historical sketch of Occidental cultural development, for which Jacob Burckhardt, Alfred Weber, and Ernst Robert Curtius are cited as witnesses. Two things are left as proprium at the end of this pretentious essay on the “Stellung der Politik unter den Wissenschaften”: on the one hand, the effort toward synthesis and integration, for which Bergstraesser coins the term “Synopse” [synopsis]; and, on the other hand, the disassociation from the “antiquated” historical research and the emphasis on a practical topicality, for which stands the differentiation of the res gestae and the res gerandae. Thus, the theoretical foundation of political science undertaken by Bergstraesser is more or less limited to these two formulations: “Die soziologisch-politische Wissenschaft bedarf also der Fähigkeit des Zusammensehens. Ihre Spezialisierung vollzieht sich in der Arbeit an einem ihrer Fragestellung entsprechenden Verfahren der Synopsis, welches Einzelanalyse und Synthese in ein Gleichgewichtsverhältnis bringt.” And: “Politik als Wissenschaft ist ein

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Versuch, die Unbestechlichkeit der wissenschaflichen Bemühung in den Dienst der Vorbereitung des politischen Urteilens und Handelns zu stellen.”29 One has to bear in mind the theoretical scantiness of this foundation of political science in order to become aware of the “phenomenon Bergstraesser” in its entire paradoxy; for if it is beyond doubt that this man had an extraordinary impact on science and politics in the early Federal Republic, then one inevitably has to draw the conclusion that this influence was based on other factors than the elaboration of his theoretical and scientific arguments. What were these factors and how can they be located in the most specific situation of political culture for the cumulative effect to become visible that seems to link the Gründerzeit of the Federal Republic with the foundation of political science, and this, in turn, with Bergstraesser’s Gründungsbilanz, his stocktaking of this phase? That such a connection does in fact exist and that it constitutes the actual secret of the success of Bergstraesser himself and of his “seminaristics” has been frankly pointed out by his now prominent students. Thus Hans Maier, political scientist at Munich since the 1960s and longtime Bavarian minister of culture and education, refers to his teacher as a scientific Condottiere, and the historian and biographer of Adenauer Hans-Peter Schwarz from Bonn calls Bergstraesser an “empire-builder” who became a mediator between university, society, and politics.30 Superficially, one is of course referred to the fact that, in the early Federal Republic, Bergstraesser was presented with an abundant field for the political activism he had been used to since student years. A certainly incomplete list of his activities includes: cofounder of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien; head of the advisory board of the political academies at Tutzig and at Eichstätt; director of the research institute of the Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik at Frankfurt, member of the executive board of the Deutscher Hochschulverband, of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, and of the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft, member of the commission for civil education convoked by the federal government; adviser of the Thyssen Foundation; president of the German UNESCO commission; coeditor of the major journals of social and political sciences; not to mention Bergstraesser’s “personal” foundations: e.g., the Freiburg Arbeitsstelle für kulturwissenschaftliche Forschung or the Studien zu Politik und Soziologie. And, of course, the relation and communication networks thus established were available as he was confronted with the task of transforming the Freiburg seminar into that fabric of habilitation that formed the long-term basis for Bergstraesser’s academic influence. All that, however, does not really explain the unerringness and the extraordinary dynamism emanating from Bergstraesser’s scientific-political activities, for which an intrinsic reason must be assumed—the more so because

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the rhetorical and declamatory character of their foundation is obvious. I presume the decisive connection in a specific normative strategy, in the use of moral concepts and cultural traditions for the redefinition or new definition of a collective identity. In view of Bergstraesser’s Weimar origins, one could speak of a politicalization of cultural sociology. If he already showed an instrumentalization of cultural theory for political objectives even then, this interaction of culture and politics had to gain in importance in the early years of the Federal Republic, when this country was—despite military integration into the Western world and the beginnings of the German economic miracle—still characterized by an extreme insecurity, and lived morally in a state of depression and nationally in a state of separation. A both strenuous and strategic search for identity was the order of the day. It seems to have been this enormous “need” for giving meaning to the normative and cultural foundation of the young democracy that Bergstraesser’s style of thinking “matched” like no other. This thesis is exemplified by material from the third of the above differentiated topical areas in Bergstraesser’s work of the Freiburg period, i.e., his essays and treatises on international relations.31 Because it is in this field that Bergstraesser achieved the strongest professional profile and factual differentiation, it has to be stressed that only the basic approach to a theory of international politics can be sketched here, and not the considerable level and the extraordinary range of his proposals, which are concentrated above all in his writings of the early 1960s. It is here that we encounter not only ingenious definitions and pertinent analyses of the traditional topics of international politics, such as the concept of the national state as historical subject or of diplomacy and international law as traditional instruments of foreign policy, but Bergstraesser also presents sketches of the current situation and of the perspectives of world politics, which could again be of interest in today’s debate on globalization. Of immediate impact are his reflections on the tasks and methods of area studies in particular, which were simply revolutionary on the level of international scientific development and in the context of German post-war history: They paved the way for the so-called Third World research in the Federal Republic. In fact, one meets with a sharp ambivalence when comparing the extraordinary potential of Bergstraesser’s observations on international relations with what has been said so far. While the former has seemingly to do with a methodological development in cultural sociology that is factually expanded to the field of international relations and that leads to an actually realistic differentiation of the economic, social, and cultural factors in developmental politics in particular,32 there also exists a contrary trend that shifts the entire coordinate grid system of the science of international relations. And this is connected with the obsessive, hardly discursive, and by no means value-free

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project of neo-humanist restoration of values, which, as it were, “loads” Bergstraesser’s analysis of the international constellation. In this, it is important to recognize that the degree of abstraction and the inclination toward vagueness are themselves of a strategic meaning. And this, in turn, is not restricted to the internal orientation toward the conditions within the Federal Republic but, rather, finds its proper purpose not only on the level of international relations, but also on that of world politics. Here, the concept of universal history in its pompous compactness is applied. In order to explore this connection, one has to look at the two vertices that Bergstraesser’s concept of politics comprises in principle, i.e., the fields of internal and foreign policy, to which it is also restricted. If the “culturalist” foundation of politics, as we know it from the manifests, initially merely referred to the fact that special attention was paid to its intellectual and ethical foundations, it soon developed into a fundamentalist definition: Now the proper “nature” of politics is deduced not only from the anthropological necessity to reach decisions, but rather—and the ontological association is certainly in order—it is directly and immediately equated with “leadership.” In sum, the decisive basic concept is that of “intellectual leadership,” especially manifest in two essays published in the early 1960s, which may well be Bergstraesser’s most characteristic publications: Here, the concept of “intellectual leadership” is made the basis of both a “cultural” world history and the definition of the current position.33 What are the rough outlines of this “decision analysis” based on world history? Here, just as in the other post-war texts published by Bergstraesser, it is made clear in almost every sentence—thus rendering any individual reference superfluous—that the prominent basic conflict carried out during post-war history—and thus of the actualization of world history—is the conflict between totalitarian and liberal-constitutional ideologies. This urgent assessment of the situation never deals merely with the difference between social institutions and political regimes; rather, the East–West conflict is obviously given both an existential deep dimension and a special range. Maybe one could say that Bergstraesser designs something like a theory of cultural leadership on a world scale. We are dealing with a “political theory” in the eminent sense that—in addition to an analysis of the prerequisites—the objectives themselves are provided for a missionary action that claims cultural world hegemony and, in this, focuses on the problem of leadership. It is not only concerned with the wish that “die Entschlossenheit, beizutragen zur Verwirklichung der Freiheit, sich stützen kann auf eine weltgültige Grundkonzeption der Daseinsordnung”; he also states: “Die für den Kulturwandel unserer Epoche entscheidende Frage ist die nach den künftigen Führungskräften der modernen Welt.”34

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When looking, for a moment, from the elevated plateau of the “cultural world horizon,” on which this is decided, down onto what had in the beginning been said about the young Federal Republic, then sentences standing right next to the above adopt an additional, very concrete meaning: “Denn das dienende Ausgreifen in die Welt entspricht der Universalität der Sorge und der Menschlichkeit der Gesinnung, welche die Gipfel unserer eigenen Geschichte von tausend Jahren auszeichnen. Mit dieser Universalität und Menschlichkeit den Stolz unseres geschichtlichen und nationalen Bewußtseins zu verbinden, würde uns dabei helfen, die Kraft und das Maß für die Politik der Zukunft wie für unsere kulturelle Selbstachtung zu finden.” Just as it had been a self-evident part of Bergstraesser’s analysis of the East–West conflict that, after 1945, the United States had risen to the position of the decisive leading power of the Western world, the seemingly idealist concept of “intellectual leadership” contained an extremely realistic potential: for if values—via the culturalist definition of politics—are a substantial part of leadership systems, then the provision of value systems must mean that one exerts considerable influence on the formation of political hegemonies. Maybe it is this reflexive “dialectics” of cultural hegemony and political imperialism that reveals the secret of the success of Bergstraesser’s work during the early stages of the Federal Republic: by pursuing the restoration of the Occidental world of values as a project of the greatest generality imaginable, the culturally expansive scope of which also gave room to the American hegemonic power, he was able to reverse, at least in part, the obvious realpolitische asymmetry within the Western world through the definition of a cultural hegemony. As long as a prominent place in the Occidental culture was reserved to the German tradition, represented by Herder, Goethe, and Hofmannsthal, an influential place in the Western world was secured for that part of Germany that laid claim to this tradition. Of course, such strategic formulations are not to be found expressis verbis in Bergstraesser’s writings; however, he shows a distinct antenna for such connections, for instance when writing: “Das oszillierende Verhältnis zwischen Deutschland und den USA … hat heute deutlich die Richtung auf die Konvergenz genommen. Das Bewußtsein der kritischen Verfassung des abendländischen Daseins hat auch Amerika erreicht. Westliches Naturrecht und deutsche Humanitätsidee kehren uns heute eher ihre gemeinsame Seite zu anstatt der trennenden, wie sie noch vor drei Jahrzehnten als ausschlaggebend betont wurde. Ihre gemeinsamen Ursprünge in der abendländischen Überlieferung werden, historisch wie philosophisch gesehen, stärker sichtbar.”35

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III. Americanization or Westernization? The Change of Cultural Horizon in the Early Federal Republic of Germany Research on West German post-war history experienced a new boom during the 1990s. A gratifying aspect of this development has been a noticeable and increased broadening of perspectives: The time of occupation now appears as a period of transition from National Socialism to the Adenauer era; the history of political institutions is embedded in a social and cultural history of the early stages of the Federal Republic; the economic reconstruction presents itself as a variant of the general process of modernization; and, finally, the focus shifts toward the increasing international intertwinement, without which the German success story would remain just as incomprehensible as the long-term failure of the “rival enterprise” GDR. It is in the nature of things that new perspectives assume a tangible form only to the degree to which new guiding concepts are offered that give analytic support to specific research and contours to the formation of judgment. One of the concepts that come up in many of the recent publications is that of “Americanization.” This notion seems the more enticing because it combines the span of the post-war conditions with the clearness of an international center of forces, because it has the value of giving cultural signals and, at the same time, has clear-cut political connotations, and because it still conveys—at least within the realm of the West German memory—the taste of the past fashion. It testifies to the by now manifest distance between two generations, but also speaks for a high level, that research in this field is not dazzled by these advantages. In fact, the concept of Americanization as a guiding notion in research on West German post-war history is not only discussed with general skepticism, it is even rejected in almost all of the fields of detailed research for being much too unspecific; however, this does not mean that the United States’ influence on West German development is considered insignificant. Thus, Arnold Sywottek, in his summary of the so far most comprehensive socio-historical approach to West German society of the 1950s, finally falls back on the concept of modernization, considering it to permit the greatest differentiation.36 And the as yet most ambitious attempt to fit the history of the two German states into the antagonistic hermaphroditic conception of “Americanization and Sovietization” reveals that, with regard to the West German part, the notion of Americanization was most sharply rejected in just that area in which it had thus far seemed most applicable: in politics and in popular culture.37 In connection with our approach, the historian Anselm DoeringManteuffel’s methodological considerations regarding German–American relations during the decisive period of 1945 to 1965 seem to be the most informative. He focuses, from the start, on the dimension of cultural relations

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and, in this, also demonstrates a guiding dynamism of a conceptual kind: While, initially, he deals—just as benevolently as is generally the case—with Americanization in politics and in culture, another concept gradually comes to the fore, the more specifically the actually formative relations between West Germany and America are studied.38 Doering-Manteuffel speaks of the “normative Western orientation of intellectual elites” and, synonymously, of their role in the Verwestlichung [Westernization] of the Federal Republic, meaning the mostly unexplored field on which the political culture of the young Federal Republic constituted itself or, better formulated, was formed by cultural elites that, on the one hand, oriented themselves by a Western field of forces compounded of democratic-Atlantic value patterns and ideas, but which, on the other hand, were still confronted with a rather vital “national cultural traditionalism.” It is, of course, mere speculation to consider the conflict of ideas insinuated here as having resolved itself in a clear-cut and compact “victory” of one side, regardless of how one wants to interpret the result. However, only a small amount of fantasy is needed to suppose that the emigrants, and particularly the small group of remigrants, formed an intellectual elite that was better suited to play the role of the ideal Western orientation than any other group, and that actually fulfilled this part. Here, a promising methodological junction between historiography regarding the Federal Republic and so-called emigration research manifests itself, which has so far been used much too little. While, in the past few years, emigration research has increasingly focused on remigration and, thus, on the work of emigrants in the Federal Republic,39 it should beware of allowing the often demonstrated opposition to remigrants in the Federal Republic to obstruct its insight into the fact that some of them rose to definite key positions. Such a constellation is certainly to be assumed with regard to the science of politics in particular and to political culture in general, with the actually sensitive point of contact probably to be found in the questions concerning the theoretical and normative foundation of democracy. This point I would like to illustrate with a specific result of research on emigration: Based on a quantitative evaluation of remigrants in the parliaments of the young Federal Republic, including the parliaments of the individual Länder, Jan Foitzik has come to the conclusion that the remigrants’ influence was considerable, but that it was determined “weniger durch amerikanische Modernität … als vielmehr durch den rechtspositivistischen Traditionalismus des deutschen Staatsrechts,” for which reason it was Weimar, and not America, that provided the most revealing symbol for the remigrants’ political impact on West German politics.40 This line of reasoning, the degree of truth of which cannot be denied, allows not only an indication of the difference between institutional political practice and political

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culture, but also better delimits the academic remigrants’ impact on political culture. This influence was clearly of a more subtle kind than that exerted through work done in parliamentary or other political institutions but, still, it was of considerable importance to the development of the Federal Republic. I assume this influence to have led to a shifting of the general cultural horizon, which became effective only in the long term and that stabilized the self-understanding of the Federal Republic as a democratic society by a gradual fusion of the autochthonous conceptions of politics into the differing Western patterns of thought and values. If this very specific process can be described as “normative Westernization,” one certainly has to add that Arnold Bergstraesser in this context surely represents but a special, if not an extreme, case. However, the example given by him is particularly suited to find—as it were, ex negativo—cogent arguments for the thesis of the Westernization of the political culture through the remigrants. For, if we are right in assuming that Bergstraesser, by means of a restoration of the Occidental community of values, tried to achieve the normative integration of the Federal Republic into the Western confederation of states, then he necessarily initiated a process of cultural fusion that changed considerably both the starting point and the goal. In fact, Bergstraesser’s post-war work gives concrete indication of both: Thus, in diametrical contrast to the anti-American tendencies of the conservative cultural criticism of the period between the two wars, from which he himself originated, Bergstraesser not only comes up with a positive picture of America, at the beginning of 1960s he also voices sharp criticism concerning the thesis of Americanization itself, arguing—analogously to recent research—that the United States’ influence on the Federal Republic was nothing but the (surely ambivalent) tribute to a necessary social and political modernization.41 And when looking at Bergstraesser’s essays on American culture with which he underlined his early and vigorous commitment to an institutionalization of American studies, one meets with a concreteness and vitality of observation that pleasantly corrects the vapid generality of his universal history of the Christian-humanist Occident.42 Such contradictions have to be taken into account and joined to a vivid overall picture in order to understand what characterized, above all, many of the intellectual remigrants who attained influential positions in the Federal Republic: virtuosi of cultural translation, acrobats in the fusion of entire value horizons, the political poles of which were formed by Germany and America. This picture has to be kept free of any idyll and is, of course, in need of both political and discourse-analytic differentiation, as we say today, because it seems that this task could not be accomplished unpolitically or in aseptic isolation from the ideologies of the Cold War, which overlapped in

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Germany in particular. Thus, an analysis of the post-war work of Ernst Fraenkel, the second portal figure of West German political science, would probably reveal that his studies on America were not only much more polished than those carried out by Bergstraesser, but also offered a much more solid democracy-theoretical basis for thinking of Germany and the Western democracies as one.43 And the most outstanding philosopher of the returned Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, Theodor W. Adorno, is, from today’s point of view, probably the most interesting because he managed to make his contribution to the intellectual modernization of West German culture with a downright negatively apostrophized picture of America. However, they all probably have in common that they in fact made a contribution to the Westernization of political culture in the Federal Republic—not so much through the (negative or positive) propagation of America as an “idol” but, rather, through the organization of a politicalcultural learning process, aimed at binding German traditions to the Western world of ideas concerning human rights and democracy. The reflexive mediation of a new cultural horizon was their contribution to the stabilization of West German democracy. Notes 1. E.g. Tilman Fichter, Ute Schmidt, Der erzwungene Kapitalismus, Frankfurt/Main, 1972, or Theo Pirker, Die verordnete Demokratie, Berlin, 1977. 2. Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, Munich, 1995. 3. Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie, Opladen, 1993. 4. The most thorough description is given by Arno Mohr, Politikwissenschaft als Alternative: Stationen einer Disziplin auf dem Weg zu ihrer Selbständigkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bochum, 1988. 5. Cf. the early publication by Gerhard Ritter, Wissenschaftliche Historie, Zeitgeschichte und “politische Wissenschaft,” Heidelberg, 1959, 5. Later, as an overall historical perspective: Hans Joachim Arndt, Die Besiegten von 1945, Berlin, 1978. 6. Cf. my summary essay: “Die Gründung der westdeutschen Politikwissenschaft— ein Reimport aus der Emigration?” in Claus-Dieter Krohn and Patrick von zur Mühlen (eds.), Rückkehr und Aufbau nach 1945: Deutsche Remigranten im öffentlichen Leben Nachkriegsdeutschlands, Marburg, 1997, 253pp. 7. Cf. Gerhard Göhler, Die Wiederbegründung der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik: Traditionspflege oder wissenschaftlicher Neubeginn? in Gerhard Göhler and Bodo Zeuner (eds.), Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der deutschen Politikwissenschaft, Baden-Baden 1991, 144pp. 8. A concerned overall analysis from the pen of an emigrant is Franz L. Neumann, “Deutsche Demokratie 1950,” reprinted in Franz L. Neumann, Wirtschaft, Staat, Demokratie: Aufsätze 1930–1954, Frankfurt/Main 1978, 327.

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9. Cf. his essay “Über den Stand der politischen Wissenschaften in den Vereinigten Staaten,” in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, vol. 106, 1950, 349. 10. References for the quotations are given by Mohr, Politikwissenschaft, 122. 11. Quoted in Göhler, Die Wiederbegründung der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik, 154. 12. “Die Wissenschaft von der Politik in der Demokratie,” in Franz L. Neumann, Wirtschaft, Staat, Demokratie, 373. 13. Cf. Hubertus Buchstein, Gerhard Göhler, “Von der ‘deutschen Hochschule für Politik’ zum ‘Otto-Suhr-Institut,’” in Leviathan, vol. 17, 1989, 127. 14. M. Rainer Lepsius, Denkschrift über die Lage der Soziologie und Politikwissenschaft, Bonn 1961. 15. See Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit, second edition, Munich, 1997. 16. A historical typology of the remigration after 1945 is attempted by Hans Georg Lehmann, “Rückkehr nach Deutschland? Motive, Hindernisse und Wege von Emigranten,” in Krohn et al., Rückkehr und Aufbau, 39. 17. For a general survey of the emigration after 1933, cf. Claus-Dieter Krohn et al., Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998); on the emigration of political scientists, cf. my publication Deutsche Politikwissenschaftler in der Emigration: Akkulturation und Wirkungsgeschichte, Opladen, 1996. 18. A both methodologically and empirically thorough analysis is to be found in Horst Schmitt, Politikwissenschaft und freiheitliche Demokratie: Eine Studie zum “politischen Forschungsprogramm” der “Freiburger Schule” 1954–1970, BadenBaden, 1995. 19. Arnold Bergstraesser, Staat und Wirtschaft Frankreichs, Berlin/Leipzig, 1930. 20. Arnold Bergstraesser, Goethe’s Image of Man and Society, Chicago, 1949. 21. Arnold Bergstraesser, Weltpolitik als Wissenschaft: Geschichtliches Bewußtsein und politische Entscheidung, ed. Dieter Oberndörfer, Cologne/Opladen, 1965, 12. 22. Exemplary are for instance “Goethe und unsere Zeit,” in Monatshefte, vol. 1950, 77ff; “Hofmannsthal und der europäische Gedanke,” in Kieler Universitätsreden, issue 2, Kiel, 1951. 23. “Die europäische Universalität im Denken der Gegenwart,” and “Europa als geistige und politische Wirklichkeit,” reprinted in Arnold Bergstraesser, Politik in Wissenschaft und Bildung: Schriften und Reden, Freiburg, 1961, 151. 24. Quoted from ibid., 151, 152, 154. 25. Ibid., 156, 162, 163. 26. Exemplary is the paper “Die Stellung der Politik unter den Wissenschaften,” read to the German-French University Rectors’ Conference of 1957, that constitutes a programmatic prelude to the later miscellany Politik in Wissenschaft und Bildung, 17. 27. Ibid., 19. 28. Ibid., 21. 29. Ibid., 27 and 29. 30. Quoted in Schmitt, Politikwissenschaft und freiheitliche Demokratie, 90.

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31. They were edited posthumously by Dieter Oberndöfer. Arnold Bergstraesser, Weltpolitik als Wissenschaft, Cologne/Opladen, 1965, here also his laudatory note, 9. 32. Tangible examples in “Gedanken zu Verfahren und Aufgaben der kulturwissenschaftlichen Gegenwartsforschung,” in Weltpolitik als Wissenschaft, 85. 33. Arnold Bergstraesser, “Führung in der modernen Welt, Freiburg 1961 and Geschichtliches Bewußtsein und politische Entscheidung” (1961), in Weltpolitik als Wissenschaft, 206. 34. Bergstraesser, Führung in der modernen Welt, 55–6. 35. Bergstraesser, “Amerikanische und deutsche Soziologie” (1953), in Politik in Wissenschaft und Bildung, 247. 36. Arnold Sywottek, “Wege in die 50er Jahre,” in Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek (eds.), Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau: Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre. Textbook edition, Bonn, 1998, 13. 37. Cf., in particular, the contributions by Hermann-Josef Rupieper, “Amerikanisierung in Politik und Verwaltung Westdeutschlands. Ein problematisches Konzept,” as well as Kaspar Maase, “Amerikanisierung der Gesellschaft. Nationalisierende Deutung von Globalisierungsprozessen?,” in Konrad Jarausch, Hannes Siegrist (eds.), Amerikanisierung und Sowjetisierung in Deutschland 1945–1970, Frankfurt, 1997, 49 and 219. 38. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Dimensionen von Amerikanisierung in der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, vol. 35, 1995, esp. 25. 39. Cf. Krohn et al. (eds.), Rückkehr und Aufbau; Claus-Dieter Krohn et al. (eds.), Exil und Remigration, Exilforschung, vol. 99, Munich, 1991; the Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration contains a chapter on remigration, too. 40. Jan Foitzik, “Remigranten in parlamentarischen Körperschaften. Eine Bestandsaufnahme,” in Krohn et al. (eds.), Rückkehr und Aufbau, 88–89. 41. Arnold Bergstraesser, “Zum Problem der sogenannten Amerikanisierung Deutschlands,” in Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, vol. 8, 1963, 13. 42. Cf. above all “Amerikanische und deutsche Soziologie” (1953) and “Prinzip und Analyse in der amerikanischen wissenschaftlichen Politik” (1958), in Bergstraesser, Politik in Wissenschaft und Bildung, 221pp. and 249. 43. Cf. Ernst Fraenkel, Das amerikanische Regierungssystem, Cologne/Opladen 1960 and Deutschland und die westlichen Demokratien (first 1924), 7th edition, Frankfurt/Main, 1990. Interesting tips are given by Hubertus Buchstein, “Ernst Fraenkel als Klassiker?” in Leviathan, vol. 26, 1998, 458.

CHAPTER 3

Habermas’ Reconstruction of West German Post-War Law and the Sozialstaat Controversy1

John P. McCormick

T

he ostensible “zero-hour” founding of the Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War compelled its legal theorists and practitioners to confront in an apparently rather abrupt manner the predicament of law in an industrial democracy. While other Fordistdemocratic regimes were able to adapt somewhat gradually to the consequences of an increasingly interventionist state in the twentieth century, or even manage to conceal such consequences, West Germany confronted headon these realities and their legal ramifications for the rule of law. Two aspects of this historical change are a novel relationship of state and society, on the one hand, and of governmental branches, on the other. The traditional nineteenth-century conception of the rule of law, or Rechtsstaat, understood the law as a set of clearly defined rules that kept state and society, and different institutional branches of government, apart from each other in a way that preserved individual freedom. Law put into the service of the twentiethcentury Sozialstaat, so the argument goes, suffers a crisis of indeterminacy as state activity blurs the distinction between state and society, as well as among legislative, executive, and judicial institutions. As socio-political arrangements become “muddled,” so too do the rules designed to coordinate them. The debates over this historical transformation raged throughout much of the post-war era but reached particular intensity during its early years and

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then again in the 1970s.2 Recently, Jürgen Habermas has found it necessary to revisit these debates in the elaboration of his discursively social democratic theory of law and constitutionalism, Between Facts and Norms (1996). Habermas takes up the task of reconciling the competing claims to justice of respective sides of the debate over the Sozialstaat so as to formulate a theory of law that preserves liberty, as in the Rechtsstaat model, and pursues equality, as in the Sozialstaat one.3 How can the vast inequalities generated by capitalist political economy be minimized in ways that do not infringe upon the individual liberties necessary for a thriving civil society? Habermas develops a “reflexive theory of law” that allows courts—embedded institutionally within a democratic framework—to avail themselves of either Rechtsstaat formal law or Sozialstaat material law depending on the appropriateness for the case at hand. This enterprise can be understood as Habermas’ attempt to theorize a Sozialrechtsstaat adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century.4 In what follows I recount and evaluate this exercise, concluding with historical criticisms of Habermas’ project. Notions of the Traditional Rechtsstaat In Habermas’ account, the traditional Rechtsstaat presupposes first and foremost a sociological separation of state and society. State activity is confined to the guarantee of internal and external security of citizens, with the assumption that a self-regulating market economy will provide the substantive means by which all or at least the vast majority of citizens could achieve a good life (174–5). The Rechtsstaat separation of state and society ensures the rule of procedurally legitimated law rather than the rule of executive-enacted force. The executive arms of government merely concretize in specific circumstances the general contents of statutes; they serve to make real the semantic formulas of abstract and general norms (188–9). Thus the grammar of legal rules itself has a distinctive character under the Rechtsstaat: abstract, general, formal and conditional. The latter characteristic is best illustrated by the “if x, then y” formulation of law under the Rechtsstaat. The structure of law itself limits state activity: the state may take appropriate action y only “if ” certain circumstances x arise in social reality (208). Along with the sociological separation of state and society, the Rechtsstaat depends on the political requirement of the separation of powers, in which courts function as semi-autonomous institutions. In Habermas’ account, courts function as neither the puppets of legislatures, which make laws, nor the ignored-as-irrelevant weaker institutional siblings of executive authorities. Rather, courts are granted powers of oversight over both of these ostensibly more powerful arms of government. While to some extent bound by the

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terms of statutes produced by parliamentary majorities in adjudication, constitutional courts in many contexts have had the authority to strike down such legislation on the basis of constitutional principles. Moreover, while possessing no specific enforcement powers of their own, courts have been served with more or less good faith by the effective enforcement of their judicial decisions by executive actors. Thus a functioning separation of powers is an institutional sine qua non of the traditional Rechtsstaat (245–6, 431). In other words, in this admittedly highly abstract model, proper court activity under the rule of law entails a certain balance between autonomy from and dependence on other institutional actors. The ramifications of this limited-autonomy or enabled-constraint, depending on how one looks at it, is an institutional safeguard against the more political branches of government. The latter might encroach upon the basic constitutional principles of the regime itself, such as protection of minorities, equality before the law, state non-intervention into spheres of economic freedom, the prohibition against ex post facto judgment, the relatively consistent reliance on precedent, etc.5 Thus the delicate institutional position of the judiciary in the Rechtsstaat is preserved by the form of the kind of laws legislated and adjudicated in this largely nineteenth-century model. Confined to the adjudication of cases testing statutes dealing with criminal law and a narrow conception of property, courts were seldom perceived as illegitimately encroaching on the responsibilities of the other branches. Thus they were rarely treated in a hostile manner by the other branches, which would threaten their autonomy. When courts did challenge the activity of other state institutions, they would do so on the basis of explicit and often written constitutional provisions that were not open to varied or controversial interpretation. As parliaments begin enacting, and courts gave up resistance to, the legislation or management of an increasingly industrial economy in the twentieth century, we perceive the emergence of the welfare state, or Sozialstaat. Again, following Habermas, courts now adjudicate more substantively defined principles of liberty and equality transcending those narrowly associated with property rights. State activity in all branches of government becomes concerned with issues of redistributive taxation, the collective organization of labor, worker safety, social insurance, discouragement of monopoly, public control of fiscal markets, etc. So-called classical administration under the Rechtsstaat was reactive to actual and specific social events, functionally divided among branches, restrained in its approach to intervention. This gave way to service administration under the Sozialstaat, which provides public goods, infrastructure, planning, and risk prevention to society. Service administration, unlike classical administration, is necessarily future-oriented, to often-hypothetical situations, and expansive in

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approach (431). Law no longer looks like conditional propositions with universal claims but rather takes the form of special legislation, experimental temporary laws, broad regulative imperatives with uncertain prognoses, blanket clauses, all couched within indefinite statutory language (431) (see Scheuerman 1994). The conservative participants in the controversy conceived the traditional Rechtsstaat in such a way that the rule of law encompassed only rights against the state, legal guarantees of public order, and prohibitions on the abuse of “economic liberty”—all maintained through general and abstract law. On the basis of this strict conception of the traditional Rechtsstaat, the Sozialstaat appears to be a “corruption” of, or “upheaval” against, law itself (245–6, 431). The very nature of law might be compromised by recourse to less than clearly defined conditional phrases and declarative imperatives that enable broad policies, fundamentally infused with appeals to substantive principles; a “remoralization,” a “deformalization” of law, if you will (246). I will refer to this as “material” law. The separation of powers is likewise jeopardized by an unhinging of executive and judicial activity from the express will of the legislature, resulting in the illegitimate expansion of their power vis-à-vis the latter (246, 431). In short, for critics, the Sozialstaat obscures the clarity and mechanical application of Rechtsstaat law due to the vagueness of social law and the discretion it affords the enforcers and adjudicators (188–9). This sacrifices the freedom of individual actors vis-à-vis the state in the name of social projects meant to coercively enforce egalitarianism. Legal indeterminacy means that executive and judicial arms usurp the position of legislatures. Society now suffers the intrusion of executive and judicial decrees. So much of the discourse distinguishing the two paradigms of the rule of law serves to validate one or the other: the neo-conservative versus the social democratic vision of law. In his resolution of the dispute, Habermas doesn’t choose between these two positions that deliberately misread each other. Habermas asserts a compatibility and mutually enforcing relationship between the traditional Rechtsstaat and the Sozialstaat—a mutuality institutionalizing the indispensability of freedom and equality for each other.6 Habermas identifies this as the internal relation of private and public autonomy (135). As I show in the next section, Habermas’ Aufhebung of what he calls bourgeois-formal and welfare state—material law privileges neither the formal character of law construction and adjudication, on the one hand, nor the substantive content of economic equality, on the other, but rather a discourse-centered process that renders contemporary law constituent of and by both (134) (see McCormick 1997). Habermas’ discourse theory of law has as its goal not just the protection of equal private rights nor the realization of the principles of social justice,

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but the retention of both in the achievement of “an exclusive opinion- and will-formation in which free and equal citizens reach an understanding on which goals and norms lie in the equal intent of all” (270). The essence of law is not just the pursuit of economic gain nor the attainment of economic equality, but the realization of an active—or rather interactive—pursuit of the conditions by which these may be expanded in non-pathological (i.e., capitalist exploitative or state-socialist repressive) means. Habermas proposes a strategy whereby lawmakers and -adjudicators explicitly invoke the principles and methods characteristic of either bourgeois-formal law (the Rechtsstaat) or welfare-state material law (the Sozialstaat) depending on whether a particular case suggests liberty-allowing or equality-encouraging priorities. As we will see in the third section, Habermas deems this a reflexive theory of law (393, 410). Rechtsstaat Formal Law versus Sozialstaat Material Law In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas finds in the legal theory of, among others, Ronald Dworkin (1977, 1986) the grounds to solve the indeterminacy crisis at the core of the Rechtsstaat/Sozialstaat controversy. Habermas looks to account for the different and often opposing values that are invoked in twentieth-century legal adjudication. He seeks to understand the relationship of liberty and equality, or formal and material law, more flexibly than they are usually understood in indeterminacy debates (388–409). The emphasis on freedom that accompanies market arrangements of state and society in the nineteenth-century Rechtsstaat was expressed in formal strategies of law. The greater need for socio-economic regulation in the twentieth century required state-society arrangements that institutionalized equality through the materialized law of the welfare state, or Sozialstaat (216, 221). Since both right and left recognize, or at least claim to recognize, that both liberty and equality, individualism and altruism, are requisite components of a robust social order, Habermas is not surprised or alarmed that they should compete in twentieth-century legal debates. His negotiation of the two principles, however, hinges to a great extent on his response to the neo-conservative indeterminacy critique.7 Drawing on Dworkin, Habermas claims that the supposed indeterminacy of social democratic law does not result from the structure of the law itself understood in terms of linguistic limitations, political pressure, or judicial preference in the welfare state. Habermas reveals the sinister agenda of social engineering that neo-conservatives see lurking behind material law to be not all that. Rather, indeterminacy quite often simply reflects judges’ failure to put forth the best arguments in particular cases (214). Judges, as human

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beings, are not perfect interpreters of the law. Moreover, the institutional history to which they regularly have recourse often resists fully rational reconstruction in adjudication. Judges do not stand outside of history and must deal with the baggage that they inherit from the tradition in which they are embedded—even when applying formal standards (214). Neither of these facts imply a structural indeterminacy in Sozialstaat law built-in by leftist meddling. In fact, there is much evidence that the deliberate infiltration of personal preference or political pressure in supposedly muddled welfarestate adjudication is far less pervasive than many would have it. For Habermas, the understanding of all cases as “exceptions” in material law leads neo-conservative critics to the conclusion that since there is no coherence to material law, there must be no justice. Because each law is capable of contradicting another, a fact exacerbated by subjective judging that takes advantage of indeterminate social reality or institutional confusion over competence, the whole legal order is suspect. But Habermas argues that at base this assumption confuses legal rules with legal principles (216–17). Rules are more likely to bear the conditional construction associated with the Rechtsstaat model: They are norms specified for application in particular cases—for instance, stipulations for drawing up wills or traffic laws. Rules are often preceded by an “if ” clause, which clearly identifies the application situation: Again, if circumstance x obtains, then procedure y is in order (208). Principles, on the other hand, are general legal standards with far fewer prespecified application guidelines. The meanings of procedural rights, human rights, or equal protection are ultimately made specific in interpretation and application (172, 208). Rules may collide in irreconcilable ways, but they do not constitute the broader workings of justice as such, as do principles. In fact, rules are supposed to conflict because they are so finely specified for particular situations that the legal system depends on their conflict. This kind of conflict can be interpreted as facilitating the determinacy of the system, rather than as thrusting it into indeterminacy jeopardy (217). Rules are highly determinate because they set the conditions of their own application. They are what Habermas calls “self-executing” laws, whereas principles like equality or mutual recognition are “implemented along administrative paths,” where their meaning is fully fleshed out (172). Principles are necessarily indeterminate, to some extent, because they do not apply themselves, but rather require “additional specification” (217). Unlike rules that virtually apply themselves in appropriate circumstances, in jurisprudential practice, a principle must be carefully examined to see if another, better one conforms to a particular case. There is an intimate relationship between rules and principles, for Habermas, but they ought not to be collapsed. When one perceives all law

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as rules, as the neo-conservative participants in the Rechtsstaat controversy do, this sets up a false either/or dilemma for adjudication. Thus viewed, all legal materials are potentially in chaotic disagreement with each other. The conflating of rules and principles does not acknowledge that formal and substantive modes of law can coexist in the Sozialstaat rule of law, and encourages the appearance of arbitrary and conflicting practices that may not actually exist upon more differentiated analysis. For Habermas, the formalism of the law has a very precise meaning. Formalism pertains primarily to the law’s construction: that is, it is logically correct and established through prearranged procedures. The decisive aspect of the adjudication of principles, however, is not necessarily an airtight formalism, but rather appropriateness for a particular case (218). According to Habermas, in the application of principles, all suitable normative reasons must be collected and then the situation itself interpreted. From a high level of abstraction, the formal modes of law, associated, for instance, with principles of criminal justice like retribution, appear irreconcilable with the more concrete, or material, modes of law that actualize the principle of substantive equality through social welfare provisions. But each is appropriate to a vastly different set of cases. To illustrate this point: Rosenfeld (1992) and Weinrib (1988) have each used the distinction between corrective and distributive justice to clear up misunderstandings stemming from conflations of the two. The primarily backward-looking quality of corrective justice—redressing a wrong already perpetrated by means of procedures previously established—makes its workings appear relatively transparent. The future-directed quality of distributive justice deals with quantities not always known in advance—how much of what, to whom, and by what means? This seems terribly vague when contrasted with criminal justice codes. But it is inappropriate to do so. Just because the conditions of principle, as opposed to rule, adjudication cannot, nor should, be fully laid out in advance, this does not render them hemorrhaging wounds in the body legal. It is largely their open-endedness that gives the process a public and democratic quality. According to Habermas, in legal discourses of application, competing parties and state authorities present arguments over what norms are most relevant to the facts of a case (172). There are two interpretive steps for judges that are not preordained: the description of facts and the description of norms (218). According to Habermas, “once the situational features of the case have been described as exhaustively as possible from all normatively relevant points of view,” the appropriate principle can be selected (260). When one norm is selected over another for application it does not invalidate, nullify, or render irrational those not chosen. “Recessive principles”—according to Habermas,

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those that are decided to be less relevant—do not lose validity for a case, as do rules, but only their “contextual relevance” (209). One must take care to distinguish between principles contradicting one another per se and those that collide in a particular case (216). Because a particular principle was not applied does not render it at war with other principles that were applied or with the system as a whole. “A plausible connection [is maintained] between the pertinent norm and the norms that … do not prevail such that the coherence of the rule system as a whole remains unaffected” (260). This is not an ideological weighing or privileging of one over the other but, rather, a logical selection. The law and the Sozialstaat debate basically poses an ultimatum between nineteenth-century-style formal law and twentieth-century-style material law, each of which, if practiced alone in an “advanced” industrial legal order, would compromise the coherence and legitimacy of adjudication. If one observes and evaluates the operation of welfare state materialized law with the standard of nineteenth-century formal law, the former is likely to appear incoherent or indeterminate. If one approaches them with historical and analytical honesty, each type of law can be equally coherent or determinate in its appropriate sphere of jurisdiction. How does Habermas accomplish this? Reflexive Law as Solution to the Rechtsstaat Debate Habermas proposes a “reflexive” approach to law that draws upon one or the other type of law, formal or material, depending on its appropriateness for particular circumstances (393). The explicitly invoked popular, legislative, and judicial choice of either formal or material paradigms, those associated previously with private market participants and entitlement-receiving clients, helps in the selection of principles for adjudication, such as freedom of contract or substantive equal opportunity (216, 221). Claimants, legislators, and judges should explicitly invoke either formal or material paradigms. Habermas proposes that the option of choosing between them should become part of citizen’s discourse, legislative language, and judicial practice. The appeal to formal or material law should be as commonplace in policy debates as are appeals to the First Amendment or Equal Protection in the United States. This will aid in the selection of specific principles of adjudication, such as freedom of contract or substantive equal opportunity, thus blunting the indeterminacy critique of Sozialstaat critics. The invocation of principles associated with Rechtsstaat freedom or Sozialstaat equality provides clearer guidelines to governmental actors for the appropriate means of implementation. Rather than an undifferentiated demand for “regulation,” the reflexive theory of law provides an intermediary step that clarifies the goals of social policy.

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Understanding law in terms of formal and material paradigms relieves the judge of “the hypercomplex task of surveying an unordered set of prima facie valid principles and norms” and applying them to cases (221). “The outcome of a procedure then becomes predictable for the parties … insofar as the pertinent paradigm determines a background understanding that legal experts share with all citizens” (221). The explicit invocation of specific principles during a law’s formulation, in claimant’s activity, and in judges’ decisions counteracts the charge of vagueness against Sozialstaat material law. It is democratic to the extent that laypersons participate, and determinate to the extent that the process, if not the results, is coherent and predictable. The responsibility of deploying principles affiliated with one or the other paradigm means that judges, except under obvious occasions of gross misconduct, are not unencumbered creators of law. Habermas draws on Dworkin again to demonstrate how, in adjudication, judges appeal to the principles that were invoked and deployed by lawmakers, who in turn are responsive to those invoked by deliberative publics. This ties individual cases and decisions to the normative substance of the whole legal order. Under Habermas’ model, courts need only be more specific in invoking principles associated with liberty or equality. Whether or not a court “gets it right,” the fact that it has signaled which set of principles it deems appropriate makes its decision more decipherable on appeal, should there be any. Determinacy has not been lost but rather affirmed. Welfare-state law is rendered clearer and more democratic. Notwithstanding the court-inclusive quality of Habermas’ solution to the law and Sozialstaat debate, he is not susceptible to charges of a court-centric theory of law and democracy. Habermas draws upon his rather elaborate discourse theory of constitution- and lawmaking set forth by the whole of Between Facts and Norms, in which he understands judicial adjudication as a rational moment within a normatively rich constitutional order. Habermas conceives constitutional orders such that at every level of opinion- and willformation, and of law- and policymaking, there obtain the structures to facilitate full communicative interaction leading to general assent. As a result, the formality of legality can be rendered substantively legitimate: “If discourses … are the site where a rational will can take shape, then the legitimacy of law ultimately depends on a communicative arrangement: as participants in rational discourses, consociates under law must be able to examine whether a contested norm meets with, or could meet with, the agreement of all those affected” (103–4). Habermas theorizes a process of will-formation that is open to constant change yet stable in its adherence to the procedures themselves: “The preferences entering into the political process are viewed not as something merely given but as inputs that, open to the exchange of arguments, can be discursively changed” (181, 162–8). The universality of,

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and continual intervention by, “general assent” or “reasonable consensus” proffered by such proceedings ensures legitimacy defined in terms of social control of the state and the economy (147, 155). In Habermas’ “reflexive strategy,” the requirement of finding the appropriate Rechtsstaat or Sozialstaat principle for a specific case means that the judicial process cannot be, and should not be, preordained before judging. The theory of liberal adjudication is no more comparable to the objectively predictable workings of a machine than it is equivalent to the arbitrary whim of judges. Opponents of the Sozialstaat rule of law hence deploy determinacy in the wrong sense. Habermas suggests that those so fixated on indeterminacy must themselves expect a predetermined outcome in the judicial process. For Habermas, the appropriate expectation from procedural rights in the legal system is neither certainty of outcome nor arbitrary pronouncements from lawgiver judges, but rather clarification of the pertinent facts and legal questions (220). According to Habermas’ democratic proceduralism, wherein adjudication is tied into communicative practices, affected parties should be confident that the procedures leading to judicial decisions regarding rules and principles entail relevant reasons, and not arbitrary ones (220). Formal law promises no stronger guarantee of determinacy than that, and material law does not jeopardize it in that sense. Habermas hopes that critics of law in the Sozialstaat will be satisfied that a place is made for the formal Rechtsstaat type of law within his reflexive model. Rechtsstaat formal law is not overwhelmed by Sozialstaat decree. Additionally, more substantively material law characteristic of welfare-state regulation is explicitly guided by specific principles that prevent it from becoming unbounded administrative domination. For Habermas, determinacy has not been lost but rather can be better assured in contemporary legal practices. Habermas’ reflexive approach, however, begs the question of whether the neo-conservatives engaged in the Sozialstaat law debate would want to deploy material law in even a partial or limited capacity. It still is quite controversial whether critics would be willing to concede that equal protection-like principles could be invoked to justify wide-scale state intervention. But Habermas never addresses this point. Conclusion: National Limits on the Reflexive Theory of Law Here I want to raise two historical questions about Habermas’ theory: one pertaining to the past, the other to the future. First, in accepting the dichotomy between formal and material law, does Habermas concede too much to the neoconservative side of the Sozialstaat law debate? To admit the facts of the materialization of law thesis is to capitulate in a certain romanticization of

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nineteenth-century law and the relationship of state and society. Progressive adherents to the materialization of law thesis, like Habermas, will acknowledge that the nineteenth-century state was not fully non-interventionist. What they rarely concede is the lawlessness of nineteenth-century legal arrangements. Critics of the materialization of law argue that Sozialstaat law is a contradiction in terms. Law is supposed to separate the state from society except when society explicitly calls for its intervention by and through law. Material law purportedly facilitates intervention that—even if called for by society—becomes excessive because of the muddled, unlimited, and arbitrary way that it is exercised. An argument could be made that the widespread lack of access to courts, as well as the reluctance of courts to engage in certain jurisdictions, facilitated a greater level of lawlessness in the nineteenth century. The lawlessness of an absent state, or a state restrained by the power of certain groups of social elites, could be more guilty of an unjust relationship with society than one that tries to ameliorate injustice, however imperfectly. Habermas never raises this issue to question the validity and force of the neo-conservative critique of the Sozialstaat. By swallowing the terms of the Rechtsstaat/Sozialstaat controversy, Habermas does as much to undermine the legitimacy of the legal status of the welfare state as buttress it. The second historical criticism concerns the future: Whether one would find it simply ironic or, rather, another affirmation of the power of Minerva’s owl, Habermas’ resolution of the law and Sozialstaat debate, and solution to the predicament of the rule of law in Fordist nation-states, more generally, may be too little too late. It is disconcerting that such an articulate reconception of the relationship of Rechtsstaat and Sozialstaat types of law, and refutation of the indeterminacy critique of the latter type, as well as prescription for the appropriate deployment of one or the other paradigm, should come at a time when its geopolitical and sociological conditions of possibility are so questionable. In works subsequent to Between Facts and Norms, Habermas argues for the transposability of his model to supranational levels, specifically that of the European Union (e.g., 1998). He recognizes the development of supranational organizations as a symptom of, or reaction to, a new phase in the history of capitalism. But the adequacy of the reflexive theory of law for such a new phase remains to be demonstrated rather than assumed. Specifically, it seems somewhat naive for Habermas to expect that the demands of justice on the law can be satisfied in a new transformation of capitalism, by combining the outcomes of two previous transformations of capitalism. The formal legal arrangements of the Rechtsstaat and the material ones of the Sozialstaat were embedded in specific socioeconomic arrangements: moments crudely understood as nineteenth-century laissez faire and twentieth-century Fordist

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political economies. This is an open question, but should we expect legal strategies adequate to a new socioeconomic moment to entail a combination of the last two? The limits of the reflexive theory of law may be Habermas’ failure to elucidate the new legal strategies for pursuing justice that can not be derived by the selection of one or the other of the previous strategies. Let me mention one way in which Habermas’ model of law may be problematic in the very supranational context in which he thinks it is applicable, the EU. Habermas’ account presupposes courts that are entrenched in nationalconstitutional orders. While his account may not suffer from the legitimacy deficit generally launched against court-reliant accounts of democracy, it does make assumptions about courts that may not be generalizable beyond the Fordist nation-state to supranational levels where law is presently functioning. In this sense, by so carefully resolving a previous debate regarding law and democracy, Habermas may have left himself at something of a disadvantage for addressing the present one. Despite criticisms like those launched on the neoconservative side of the Sozialstaat debate, the territorial cohesion of national constitutional orders like that of West Germany shielded courts from excessive backlash and unfaithful enforcement of their decisions within the Fordist nation-states of the postwar era. Habermas takes this for granted as a situation that obtains now and will do so for the immediate future in the EU. Almost two centuries of entrenched arrangements of the separation of powers in the liberal democracies of Europe and North America insulated courts from shocks caused by the transition to the social from the capitalist Rechtsstaat that might otherwise have thrown courts from the historical vehicle of constitutional politics. Recent scholarship suggests that standards of both the traditional and the social-democratic rule of law are being challenged and, to some extent, compromised by recent supranational developments associated with globalization and regionalization. It is argued that international legal fora are faced with a greater encroachment on their functioning by state and multinational actors than national courts have been by their domestic institutional counterparts. For instance, the enforcement of European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions is at the mercy of the potentially arbitrary enforcement patterns of authorities not directly linked to them institutionally through territorially bound constitutions, such as the Council of Ministers and national judicial institutions. Empirical studies heatedly debate whether the purview of supranational court jurisdiction will be expanded to include substantive social and political concerns any time soon. Such jurisdiction, rather, seems constrained to more narrow economic ones.8 On the most superficial level, this does not seem the fertile ground in which Habermas’ reflexive model of law guaranteeing liberty and equality may develop. Perhaps the role of national courts in carrying out the social

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welfare projects of the twentieth century could not have been predicted in the nineteenth. In fact, all of the evidence would have argued against it. In any case, unless we understand the emergence of Sozialstaat law as some combination of the Rechtsstaat with common law, Roman law or Canon law, the prospects for predicting the future on the basis of a fusion of discrete juridical pasts are not very hopeful. A supranational realization of Habermas’ discourse theory of the rule of law in a continental constitutional state does not seem feasible for the immediate future.9 One can only hope that Habermas’ overcoming of the tension between traditional Rechtsstaat and welfare-state Sozialstaat principles as manifested in the West German debates, if not directly operational, will at least inform controversies over the rule of law and social change in the future in a way that continues to make social justice a central component of legal agendas at any political or regional level. Notes 1. Paper prepared for presentation at the conference on Ideology in Postwar Germany, Remarque Institute, New York University, April 30–May 1, 1999. Portions of this essay are drawn from McCormick 1999a. 2. Some of the main figures of these debates were Ernst Forstoff (1954a,b), Wolfgang Abendroth (1952, 1954), Peter Häberle (1972), Erhard Denninger (1990), Dieter Grimm (1991), and, perhaps most importantly, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1976, 1991). Caldwell (n.d.) is an excellent account of the early BRD debates; moreover, one that demonstrates that these debates did not emerge from a “zero hour.” 3. I address Habermas’ reconstruction of these debates rather than the arguments of the specific participants, as other contributors, such as Dirk van Laak and Jerry Muller, do so. 4. Habermas himself does not employ the term Sozialrechtsstaat, which can be rendered as “rule of social law” or “social rule of law.” Despite the fact that it has been used derogatorily on both the Left and the Right of twentieth-century legal theory in Germany, it corresponds nicely with the aim of Habermas’ reflexive theory of law, combining the strengths of nineteenth- and twentieth-century models of law. 5. On general elements of the rule of law, see Fletcher 1996. 6. For other considerations on the compatibility of the rule of law and the welfare state, see: in the European context, Teubner 1988, and MacCormick 1984; and in the U.S. context, Sunstein 1990, 1997; Ackerman 1983, 1981. 7. Habermas acknowledges the use of the indeterminacy critique by self-understood radicals such as the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement. 8. The following volumes lay out quite well the constraints on an expansion of the rule of law in the global arena, while nevertheless advocating the pursuit of this very possibility: Kochler 1995; Held 1995; and Teubner 1996. I explore this issue in McCormick 1999b.

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9. Although Habermas would suggest otherwise: see “The European Nation State— its Achievements and its Limits: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” “Remarks on ‘Does Europe Need a Constitution?’ ” and “Citizenship and National Identity,” in 1998. For an assessment, see McCormick 1999a.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Trans. William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Grieff, eds. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Hans Kochler. Democracy and the International Rule of Law: Propositions for an Alternative World Order Springer Verlag, Berlin: 1995. Kommers, Donald P. 1997. The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany. Durham: Duke University Press. MacCormick, Neil. 1984. Legal Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McCormick, John P. 1997. “Habermas’ Discourse Theory of Law: Bridging AngloAmerican and Continental Legal Traditions.” Modern Law Review 60 (September): 734–43. McCormick, John P. 1999a. “Three Ways of Thinking ‘Critically’ about the Law,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 2 (June 1999). McCormick, John P. 1999b. “Supranational Challenges to the Rule of Law: The Case of the European Union.” In David Dyzenhaus, ed., Recrafting the Rule of Law. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Rosenberg, Gerald N. 1991. The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosenfeld, Michel. 1992. “Deconstruction and Legal Interpretation: Conflict, Indeterminacy and the Temptations of The New Legal Formalism.” In Cornell, Drucilla et al., ed. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge: 152–210. Schauer, Frederick. 1988. “Formalism.” Yale Law Journal 97 (March): 509–48. Scheuerman, William E. 1994. Between the Norm and the Exception: the Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Sunstein, Cass R. 1990. After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sunstein, Cass R. 1996. Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sunstein, Cass R. 1997. Free Markets and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Teubner, Günther, ed. 1988. Dilemmas of Law and the Welfare State. New York: de Gruyter. Teubner, Günther, ed. 1996. Global Law Without a State. London: Dartmouth Publishing. Weinrib, Ernest J. 1988. “Legal Formalism: On the Immanent Rationality of the Law.” Yale Law Journal 97 (May): 949–1016. Yablon, Charles M. 1985. “The Indeterminacy of the Law: Critical Legal Studies and the Problem of Legal Explanation.” Cardozo Law Review 6 (Summer): 917–45.

CHAPTER 4

The Westernization of the Political Thought of the West German Labor Movement1

Julia S. Angster

D

uring the 1950s, a transformation of the West German labor movement took place that indicated an approximation to Western political thought. The central argument here is that this transformation of West German labor, which became manifest in the new programs of the Social Democratic Party and the German Trade Union Federation, in the Godesberg program of 1959 and the Düsseldorf program of 1963 respectively, and which also had a profound impact on the whole of West German society, was not just evolving by itself in an entirely internal process, but rather was very strongly influenced by external factors. To put it more provocatively still, it was the result of a cultural transfer from the Anglo-Saxon Western world, involving German laborites as well as American trade unionists. There were two main contributory factors to this cultural transfer: on the one hand the experience of German socialists and unionists during their years in exile, especially of those who spent the war years in Great Britain or the United States; and, on the other, the active role played by the American trade union federations in Western Europe between 1945 and the mid-1960s. German reformers in Social Democracy and in the trade unions cooperated with American trade unionists during the 1940s and 1950s, working for a transformation of German labor to make it a more liberal body that would actively

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promote the “Westernization” of Germany, the foundation of its society on Western values, and its integration into a Western world of ideas. Labor was to become a stabilizing factor in the Federal Republic’s parliamentary democracy and was to play a crucial role in the workings of a Keynesian liberal economic order. Although the labor movement of the United States was a major actor in this process, it is suggested here that the notion of Westernization is more adequate to this special phenomenon than that of Americanization.2 For, as far as the labor movement was concerned, there was a marked difference between Americanization and Westernization. Both notions describe a specific process of change, and both of them actually took place in West Germany during the 1950s. If one looks at the West German labor movement and its history between 1945 and 1965, the particular meaning of Westernization—not as opposed to but rather as different from Americanization—becomes palpable. Labor Movements and Political Thought in the United States and Germany In 1945, the German Social Democratic Party was rebuilt basically according to its prewar traditions.3 Although its chairman, Kurt Schumacher (1895–1952), attempted to open the party to sympathizers from other social strata and other ethical backgrounds than its traditional working-class electorate, he and his followers still held closely onto long-standing socialist core beliefs. Socialization of plants in key industries, a “third way” between communism and capitalism, and the firm connection of democracy and socialism marked the Social Democratic Party’s basic outlook and served as a blueprint for its policies in the immediate postwar years.4 The German trade unions in 1945, which had to be rebuilt from scrap and were, in marked difference to the interwar-years, restructured as a cross-party movement, did in their majority also cling to traditional socialist assets.5 Their membership as well as their functionaries were convinced that capitalist economy had, as a whole, collapsed and that an entirely new economic order was now necessary.6 Parliamentary democracy on its own was, as the failure of the Weimar Republic had demonstrated, unable to sustain itself unless accompanied by a socialist economy. Industrial democracy was to be the twin of political democracy. In 1949, the Munich resolution of the newly founded German Trade Union Federation outlined the three basic demands that were to ensure the setup of an “industrial democracy” and thus underpin parliamentary democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany: socialization of key industrial plants, central planning, and codetermination of industry by organized labor. Capitalism and democracy were deemed incompatible,

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and the unions, like the SPD, sought for a third concept between the political economy of the communist East, which was considered “alien to the German people,” and that of the capitalist West, which was regarded as not democratic.7 German labor did not believe their country and its political culture to really belong to the West in regard to political thought. For, although Schumacher, as well as Hans Böckler, the first head of the DGB (1875–1951), opted for an integration of West Germany into the political West as a bloc and, with certain misgivings, also as an economic unit, they certainly did not intend to make Germany share the liberal, free-market, and individualistic culture of the Anglo-Saxon West. Instead, they meant to form something new by, as Schumacher recommended it, reconciling the traditions of Western civil revolutions, especially their liberal and pluralist elements, with German socialist traditions, mainly their collectivist elements and socialist economic thinking.8 Therefore, both parts of West German labor showed a strong continuity with the inter-war years, not only in their quest for a socialist economic order. For if one looks at the underlying ideas, in the realm of political thought, at their concept of democracy, at their notion of what a society was to be like, and at their idea of the role labor was to play in this society and vis-à-vis the state, the pattern was repeated. The traditional German understanding of socialism, as it dated back to the Erfurt Program of 1891 and as it still prevailed in the inter-war years, belonged firmly to the German tradition of political thought, which differed from the one that came to dominate “the West” after 1945.9 While the latter had its roots in the English Enlightenment and the subsequent developments in the Anglo-Saxon political culture, including the United States of America, the German tradition of political thinking had had a strong influx from the French Enlightenment and the ideas of the French Revolution, in addition to internal German contributions. These were mainly Protestantism, classical German philosophy, and German Idealism and Romanticism. Crucial features of political thought were influenced by Luther’s ideas about freedom in the privacy of the mind and obedience toward the authorities, which strongly affected Protestant understanding of the state in Germany; Kant’s philosophical work, especially the idea that conflict between individual interests should be dealt with by general norms, by a common law; and Hegel’s understanding of the state as realization of individual liberty. Conflicting interests, and political, social, and private interactions needed, in this pattern of thought, to be regulated by a general rule, by legislation, and by the state. Individual freedom was not understood as freedom from the authorities, but instead as freedom within the state, as freedom granted by the authorities. Individual freedom hence was realized within the group, the state, or the collective. From a German perspective, the notion of free competition of

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goods and opinions on a market, of free political, economic, or social negotiations, was seen as individualization and isolation, as a loss of identity in the mass, a lack of reliability and belonging. “Community” [Gemeinschaft ] was the ideal that was held against “society” [Gesellschaft ]. The latter was attributed to “the West,” of which German political thought since the 1870s had not regarded itself as a part.10 German socialism, not only in its more radical Marxist versions but also as far as the decidedly evolutionist Social Democracy was concerned, was as strongly influenced by this common German tradition as were its political opponents. The state played a major role in its political thought, its political practice, and its everyday demands. John Breuilly explains this “in terms of the lack of opportunities on the part of organized workers to act as a pressure group to secure piecemeal legislative redress of grievances. Instead, therefore, of regarding the state as a political institution that could be pressured into altering the context of the generally liberal social and economic order within which labor operated, German workers were encouraged to see the state as the principal regulator of that order. Naturally, when that state failed to act as they wished, ideologies that envisaged how a future state could act in that way became attractive.”11 The SPD was hoping for the working class to become the nation’s ruling force. Socialism, the socioeconomic and political order that was then to be established, would bring about equality, not in the sense of equal opportunity, but in that of equality of outcomes. Economic equality would lead to equality of interests among people, and to freedom, because with economic equality, there could be no more dependence among people, and everyone would be free. Freedom, though, was relating to the group, the working class, the community—not to the individual worker.12 Solidarity, not individualism, was asked of the members of the proletariat. Their equality of interests would lead to the end of social conflict and to general harmony. For conflict of interests was considered harmful to a society, and needed to be stilled once and for all. The aim was social unity, meaning homogeneity of the people among themselves, and people’s sovereignty, perceived of as identity of interests between the rulers and those ruled, between government and the people. Thus, socialism would make parliamentary democracy with its continual strife between conflicting interests superfluous. Behind this can be glimpsed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political thinking, his idea of the Volonté Générale, a Common Weal that was assumed by him to exist a priori and had only to be perceived rightly and then acted out, thus ruling out any notions of conflicting interests as a basis for politics. The idea of democracy that goes with it is direct, “grassroots,” and collectivist (as opposed to representative, parliamentary, and pluralist), and it is this model of democracy that had taken firm root in the

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German labor movement. For even its evolutionary and reformist wing, which was happy to support the Weimar Republic and was sometimes even the only major political force to do so, saw parliamentary democracy as a way, if not the best, to transform the political economy and the social order of the country to socialism, hence to alter it fundamentally, even though in an evolutionary, piecemeal sort of way and by the ballot.13 In 1945, it was this tradition that reasserted itself very quickly in the West German labor movement, although there were, in fact, promoters of programmatic reform to be found within its ranks. The continuity with Weimar days, in spite of all the disruption during National Socialist rule and in spite of the organizational changes in the trade union movement after 1945, seemed to be unshaken in the field of political thought and program, and also in choice of leadership.14 The American labor movement “is a labor movement upholding capitalism, not only in practice, but in principle as well.”15 It was therefore distinctly different from its European counterparts. Although this specific feature has induced especially German scholars now and then to put “American labor movement” in quotation marks,16 and has made especially American scholars lament its refusal to opt for socialist concepts,17 the argument contended here is founded on the assumption that the American trade unions were, in fact, very much a labor movement, even though working from a different viewpoint than the one held by their European, and even their British, colleagues. The set of ideas that determined the outlook of the American unions, and formed the core of their belief system, was firmly rooted in Western political thought and was very close indeed to the specific form of Western liberalism that came to be at the foundations of the Western community of ideas which emerged between the 1940s and the 1960s. The “exceptional” political thought of the American labor movement as well as its organizational framework was the result of political experiences from the end of the nineteenth century up to the Second World War.18 The American labor movement consists mainly of a trade union movement. There is no socialist or workers’ party of any real political significance. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), set up in 1886 as the federation of a great number of powerful crafts unions, soon developed into the leading actor of the American labor movement. Its political ideas were determined by the craftsmen’s republicanism of its founders and their understanding of the worker as citizen. For the first AFL-president, it was “our duty to live out our lives as workers in the society in which we live and not work for the downfall or the destruction or the overthrow of that society, but for its fuller development and evolution.”19

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Socialism was seen as economically harmful, socially wrong, and in fact unfeasible in an industrial society.20 Instead, the AFL developed the approach of “pure and simple unionism:” the task of trade unions was to stick to unionism and to try and achieve, in their very own field, the best possible result at the time being. They should not fix a specific aim, which would make all further exertions unnecessary, but rather keep trying to better the conditions of the working population on a day-by-day basis. This continuous progress in itself was the goal. This program reflected the core of American exceptionalism, the confidence in the possibilities of American society.21 Another crucial feature of American trade unionism that developed in the time around the First World War was so-called voluntarism. This meant a refusal of any interference by the state in labor relations, even if to the advantage of labor. As Gompers put it in 1914: “Any surrendering of a right [ … ] to the state means certain control by the state and no one can tell how far-reaching that may be.”22 This anti-etatism was rooted in the anti-mercantilistic traditions of English Labor according to which the government had to keep clear of the conflicts of social interest groups and instead guarantee the framework for free competition only. There was no advantage to be expected by governmental interference. To the AFL, labor relations belonged to the sphere of civil, not public, law. This need for independence even went so far as to make them steer clear of any definite allegiance to a political party. Instead, labor was to have a firm political standpoint that was derived from a consideration of its own interests. Whichever party—or even whichever single elected official—in Congress served this interest best was to receive support. This principle of ‘reward your friends, punish your enemies’ was a rule the AFL adhered to even though for a time it became a regular supporter of the Democratic Party. Political strength combined with political independence was, in the eyes of the AFL, the best way to serve labor’s interests. And this was also one of the main principles it tried to implement in the West German labor movement, especially with respect to the DGB’s overcautious policies toward the Adenauer government and its pro-industry stance: To American labor it was “obvious that the trade union movement must have freedom of action with respect to a government that very definitely fosters anti-democratic and anti-labor forces.”23 The New Deal and the Second World War finally shaped American labor and the conceptual framework it then tried to export to Western Europe. What emerged was “consensus capitalism” in industrial relations, a concept that closely corresponded to “consensus liberalism,” the social and political consensus that lay at the basis of U.S. post-war political thought.24 And even though in the 1930s, a second American trade union federation, the Congress

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of Industrial Organizations (CIO), was created, which was more “left-wing,” more “social democratic” and “liberal” in an American sense than the AFL tended to be, still it also firmly belonged to the liberal consensus.25 The New Deal brought about a profound change in the relationship between state, society, and labor movement. The implementation of Keynesian concepts provided the trade unions with a crucial part in enhancing purchasing power by wage demands, and it guaranteed acceptance of the labor organizations and their role in the political economy. The Second World War finally with its massive production effort restored the faith in economic growth that the Great Depression had shattered. Not only had it helped the United States out of fierce internal divisions, but at the same time had made it the most powerful economic and political force in the world. Thus, in the 1950s there was a widespread belief in U.S. society that there was no more need for class struggle or similar fundamental conflicts of interests: Social justice was to be gained by productivity, economic growth, and efficiency. Unions and industry were to deal with each other on the basis of mutual recognition and a consensus on the main features of the political economy. Productivity and efficiency required privately owned plants, whereas a just distribution of the fruits of economic growth required strong and independent trade unions, and the governmental task was to provide stable conditions and a fiscal framework that would guarantee continued growth. This concept of “consensus capitalism” had its supplement in the liberal consensus that lay at the foundations of American social relations and political practice in the 1950s and 1960s, or even, as some argue, up to the 1980s,26 and which also provided the blueprint for U.S. policies throughout the world. The main features of this American liberal consensus were Keynesianism, with its reformism and “social engineering;” Anglo-Saxon liberalism, with its strong emphasis on the market as panacea; American Pragmatism, a philosophy that insists on measuring theory by the result it will effect in practice; and a liberal internationalism, which resulted in the idea of an “American mission.”27 For even though this set of ideas was in fact deeply rooted in liberal values and in the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment it was deemed to be non-ideological, derived from scientific and reasonable dealings with a given problem. Another important feature of consensus liberalism was anticommunism. It served more as a catalyst than as an additional element of this specific set of ideas. It enforced the pressure of conformity, within the U.S. as well as within the Western bloc, and helped to join together rather different political groups within the liberal consensus by defining the mutual adversary as the smallest common denominator.28

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This consensus liberalism was indeed a model for the specific form of Western liberalism that came to be at the foundations of the Western community of ideas which was promoted and kept together by United States hegemony between the 1940s and the 1960s. This hegemony, made possible by the Cold War, covered not only the diplomatic, military, and economic spheres, but also the realm of ideas.29 The United States from the early Cold War years on endeavored to swear in Western Europe on a consensus over basic values. But this third level of hegemony, basic as it was to the other two, could not have been established without the consent and cooperation of the West European societies that were involved. This excluded the transformation of the European societies into true copies of America, for a community based on voluntarism has to combine elements from all its members in order to be stable. Both of the American trade union federations shared the conceptual framework of the American government, and were ready to promote it in the world, since they were convinced that in an adversarial world order, the socioeconomic order at home would not survive and that labor had much to lose in that case. The two basic foreign policy aims of the AFL and the CIO were to defy communism in the battle for the workers’ allegiance all over the world, and at the same time to promote consensus liberalism and its consensus capitalist economy. Each of these aims was dependent on the other; they could not be separated in the political strategies of the American trade unions. Communism would tear the world into another war, just like its twin, National Socialism, had done before.30 Economic recovery and stable growth were needed to strengthen democracy against another onslaught of totalitarianism. And it was labor’s task to contribute to the stabilization of the free societies in the West: “For whoever gains the soul of European labor can gain all other objectives.”31 The importance of private property “as an essential element in the defense of the individual and in the guarantee of his freedom against other individuals or groups,” and even against the state, had to be explained to the European workers.32 Here, American labor had a special role to play, for the U.S. government was obviously unable to pursue this policy on its own: it “would be suspected of propaganda.”33 But there was, in the self-perception of the AFL and the CIO, not only an economic side to labor’s role. The American labor representatives were convinced that the strength of the Western model of society lay not least in its pluralist diversity, as opposed to the monolithic rigidity of Soviet rule, as long as there was an underlying consensus over basic values, which would unite the West. Labor movements had to be anticommunist, sustain parliamentary democracy, and be politically active, so they could exert influence on their respective political economies and become a dynamic force in consensus capitalism.

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Transnational Labor Relations and Political Change After 1945, both American trade union federations, the AFL and the CIO, were conducting a major “foreign policy” program, trying to influence the labor movements in all parts of the Western world. The main center of their activities was Western Europe: Great Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany, but also Greece and Turkey in the south; and even Finland and Iceland were involved in their policies. But their contacts stretched also to Eastern Europe: East Germany, Hungary, and Poland; and to the rest of the world: to Latin America, Southeast Asia and China, Africa, and the Near East.34 In the postwar years, the AFL and the CIO were actively engaged in the projects, and the battles, of the international trade union movement, cooperated with U.S. government agencies, for example with the State Department and the Department of Labor, and participated in committees that connected labor and government in their politics toward Europe. Moreover, both trade union federations had begun to set up international departments or committees in Washington and New York City, and were running bureaus in Western Europe, virtual embassies of the U.S. labor movement to the West European ones.35 Never before in history had a labor movement installed offices of representation in another country. This was, indeed, a step toward “transnational foreign politics.”36 The International Departments and European representatives, mainly Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown, and Henry Rutz for the AFL, and Mike Ross and Victor Reuther for the CIO, formed the image the American labor organizations had of the situation in Europe, and shaped their international policies in a decisive way. They not only conducted the official contacts to the European labor organizations, but also built up a network based on personal, not organizational, relations, including politicians, trade unionists, publishers, and journalists in many countries and in the international labor movement: “There is not a single country in Europe where we don’t have contacts, whether in the majority or minority; whether legal or illegal. We have the basis for the finest labor network in Europe from both an organizational and information standpoint.”37 Its center lay in Western Europe, and there it formed the main basis for a development that helped to transform at least the West German labor movement profoundly. This European network was built up between 1945 and 1950, and it was falling apart by the mid-1960s. In the meantime, it played a crucial role in establishing a “consensus liberal” Western community of thought, by building it from within the societies themselves rather than relying on governmental policies only. This community of thought was founded on a liberal consensus that again was rooted in the Anglo-American traditions of Western political thought. And it was a product of the Cold

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War, for only under its external pressure and the resultant internal demand for conformity was there any chance of an integration of the belief systems and the conceptual frameworks of the Western societies. West Germany was one of the centers of the activities of the AFL and the CIO that was strongly emphasized by the additional representative in Germany. Still, it is important to note that the American labor federations did not pursue a German policy, but rather a European one, of which Germany formed an essential, but always integral, part. As the situation of West German labor was to some extent different from that of other countries, a certain prominence was given to its affairs. Being the main stage of the early Cold War, the fight for the people’s minds, the clash of belief systems, was particularly intense in the occupied and soon divided Germany, at least in the immediate postwar years. In the eyes of American labor, the emerging West German republic was, by its double negation of National Socialism and Stalinist communism, the epitome of the concept of antitotalitarianism. The representatives of the AFL and the CIO in West Germany conducted their policy at two different levels. They entertained official relations with the newly emerging West German trade union movement and with the Social Democratic Party (SPD).38 At the same time, they wove a network of personal contacts to individual members of German labor, who shared their basic interests and were ready to cooperate in the pursuit of common aims. Among these were, for instance, Ludwig Rosenberg, a leading functionary and future president of the DGB; Willi Eichler, head of a left-wing group in the 1920s and 1930s and leading figure of the socialist exile in London, who in the 1950s became head of the SPD’s “program commission” and was one of the main authors of the Godesberg program; Werner Hansen, in the 1950s head of the Nordrhein-Westphalian DGB and member of the DGB executive committee; Hans Jahn, in the 1950s head of the German Railroad Union and then president of the international trade union organization ICFTU; and Fritz Heine of the SPD executive committee, also responsible for the party’s “Ostbureau.” Most of them had spent the years of National Socialist rule in exile. This network between individual members of West German unions and the SPD and representatives of the AFL and the CIO was part of the larger, European and international labor network.39 The German coalitioners in the transnational network had their own very good reasons to work for these ends: They believed in the values that lay at its foundations. But in the inter-war years, most of these reformers had been ardent socialists, mostly on the far left of the political scale, or communists.40 None of them had actually been a mainstream German social democrat. To make them proponents of Western liberal political thought took several steps. The main factor was, of course, the annihilation of the German labor movement by the National Socialist regime. In the years of resistance and

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early exile, and also during the Spanish Civil War, in which some of these people took an active part, the former communists broke first with their party, then with communism as such. This was due to their disappointing experiences with the German Communist Party as well as the Communist International, but also to the experiences of working and living closely together with socialists and social democrats.41 Similarly, some left-wing socialists also got estranged from Marxist dogma. This first step led to a bereavement of former beliefs and made them ready to look for other values to turn to. The second step was taken in exile during the early 1940s, when many of them lived in Great Britain, and some in the United States. The experiences there, the entirely different approach of a whole society to the problems of negotiating conflict and making political decisions, seemed to offer a useful answer to their own doubts and questions.42 Contacts with the Fabian Society, the Labour Party, and trade unions in Great Britain, the growing acquaintance with their values and their political thought, made the exiles turn to liberal, Western political thought.43 Unlike German Social Democracy, British Labour perceived itself as an organization representing the interests of the working and middle classes in parliament. Their politics was entirely based on the foundation of the British constitutional order and on parliamentary democracy. Their aim—first and last—was a socialist majority in Westminster, but not in order to transform the system, but rather to implement socialist policies by dint of a socialist government in a representative system. A significant number of German socialists who spent years in London, working with the British trade union movement, the Labour Party, and members of the Fabian Society, slowly but surely came closer to their perception of politics and society. A similar process happened to those exiled in the United States. Some even worked with, or for, the AFL and got to know the position of American labor quite well. But only those German laborites in exile who had previously lost their political faith were open to new values and ideas. On their return, they came home to a strange country.44 Not only had the cities been turned to rubble, but their own organizations, for the reconstruction of which they had planned and schemed for years, had become alien to them. The old traditionalisms did not seem to fit the new times anymore. So, they kept up their mutual contacts from the exile years, and worked in networks for a fundamental change of the programs of West German labor.45 It was then that the AFL and the CIO appeared, looking for partners in their crusade for consensus liberalism. It was not at all an act of betrayal when the German reformers cooperated with, and accepted help from, their American coalitioners. The history of this German cluster in the transnational network can be divided into several phases: a time of building up, a time of operation, and a time of disintegration. The network in Germany was knit between 1945 and

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1952. In this phase the AFL and the CIO each put a very clear emphasis on the organizational or structural perspective, even though they differed in their choice of options. Both tried to influence the shape of the emerging West German trade union movement by influencing the politics of the military government. The result was the concept of “free trade unionism,” which eventually shaped the structure of the West German trade unions.46 It was, and this is important to note, not a copy of U.S. labor relations or industrial relations, but rather a reformed organizational structure catering to West German conditions, which was created to implant new political ideas in a basically conventional framework of trade union politics. After an initial time of orientation, the European and the German representatives of the American trade union federations started weaving a network of contacts that included party and trade unions alike. The AFL representatives tried to effect “closer teamwork with Schumacher, the Ostbureau, the SPD faction in Bonn, the DGB second line officers and [to exert] constant pressure on the American Gov[ernmen]t representatives.”47 But it was individuals within these organizations they worked with, not the organizations as such. The simultaneous official, interorganizational contacts with the DGB and the SPD were, in a way, the diplomatic background, useful for implementing and “legalizing” the results of the proper political interaction that was taking place at the informal, personal level. The acknowledged policy of the AFL and the CIO was to support a very broad range of political and ideological views, provided they were anticommunist and not opposed to the basic principles of parliamentary democracy. To be eligible as a partner of the American labor network, therefore, abjuring traditional socialist ideas was not at all necessary—at least during this first phase of cooperation. The AFL representatives actually believed that the choice in Europe would have to be between Stalinist communism and a British version of socialism, and opted for the latter: America must also proclaim that this is not a struggle between capitalism and socialism. American policy in Europe is not to fight for ‘free enterprise’ but for a free society, for free labor—for the right of the Europeans themselves to determine democratically what form of economic and social controls they shall or shall not have. In the words of General Clay: ‘although the American people believe in free enterprise, they believe even more firmly in democracy.’ In this common loyalty to Democracy, the new capitalism of the U.S.A. and the democratic socialism of British and Western European labor are beginning to approach each other and become eventually joined together in a mutual international economy.48

But when between 1949 and 1952 the outer framework of West German labor politics was definitely settled, things began to change and questions of

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values and political thought came to the foreground. The political system and socioeconomic order of the Federal Republic of Germany had been determined, the country was on its way to integration into a political and economic Western bloc, and the organizations of the labor movement were set up and at work. By 1952, the second phase of cooperation began as the transnational labor network was well established and able to operate efficiently within party and unions. At that time there was also a distinct shift in the official role of the West Germans within the wider European network: They turned from objects into subjects of its policies, and became partners of the Americans in the task of establishing a Western labor movement based on the same basic ideas. West Germany and its labor movement were no longer considered to be in immediate danger of communist subversion, and were also deemed sufficiently democratic to be relied upon as an ally.49 Now questions of program and values began to play a more prominent role in the dealings of the American labor representatives and their German partners. After an initial phase of “external,” or “structural,” assimilation to Western standards and of integration into Western coalitions, there were now manifest attempts to bring about an “internal” Westernization. For this aim, the cooperation of German functionaries was essential. A very open and straightforward discussion of the mutual belief systems set on, focusing on the role of a labor movement in a liberal society and on questions of self-perception and political performance.50 The compatibility of socialist concepts with the reality of the West German political economy was now openly questioned by the AFL representatives. But this was not the view of the American trade union federations alone. A notable faction of their German network partners shared, for their own reasons, very much the same position. Thus in 1953–4, the affiliation of the AFL with the SPD leadership around Ollenhauer weakened, mostly over the issue of West German rearmament, and instead it started to knit closer connections with the party’s right-wing reformers and their counterparts in the DGB who tried to bring about a profound reformation of the organizations’ programs, and by that to finally modify the values at the root of all their policies. Hence, this second phase saw a concentration on value issues, and as a consequence a shift in allegiance to the side of American labor. Thus strengthened, the German labor reformers could more effectively go about their own task of “Westernizing” their organizations’ conceptual framework.51 It was not least their policies in party and unions that brought about a fundamental change in their organizations’ outlook: It was for instance Ludwig Rosenberg who pushed for a programmatic reform in the DGB, and Werner Hansen in the executive committee helped to promote it; in the SPD program committee, Willi Eichler was leading the way. Hansen was also active in party committees, and was a close

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follower and friend of Eichler’s since the 1920s. Others helped from lesser positions, like Kuno Brandel of the Metalworkers Union, who lost his post in the executive committee and was fired as editor of the union’s magazine because he openly advertised a reform within the DGB. He had been in close contact with the AFL, especially with Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, since the late 1930s. In 1959, the SPD decided on a new party program that drew the consequences from the party’s new outlook and self-perception as it had developed during the 1950s.52 The Federal Republic’s free-market economy with its social security net was not only accepted by labor, but openly endorsed and turned into a basis for its own economic thinking, which was now running more or less along Keynesian lines.53 Central elements of socialist “dogma” were thrown overboard as the party made the prevailing socioeconomic order its own. German Social Democracy underwent a “de-Marxification:” Socialism was abandoned as an “end-stake.” The new goals were growth of prosperity, increased productivity, a just share of the national product, and full employment. The concept of “free competition” was endorsed, planning and socialization were reduced to optional tools for the regulation of a “new capitalism” when required.54 Also the party’s electoral basis was now seen as a pluralist, cross-class one instead of the former, mainly working-class constituency. “Anglo-Saxon” liberal elements of political thought had entered this program, making the SPD regard the responsible, reasonable, and selfgoverned individual as the basic actor in history, thus abandoning its former collectivist and etatist reasoning.55 In 1963, the DGB followed suit, also renouncing socialist concepts of class, accepting the country’s political economy as it was, and finally embarking on the type of industrial relations best described as “consensus capitalism.” The West German trade unions had given up on their demands of 1949, on planning, codetermination, and socialization. They opted for corrections of the system, but no longer for its genuine transformation. They had come to see their own role as that of an interest group in a pluralist society, and to accept private property and free enterprise as the precondition for productivity and efficiency, and for a just share of the profits for the workers as the aim of collective bargaining. A Western, liberal conceptual framework was adopted and amalgamated into German traditions of labor politics.56 But just as the German reformers in the SPD and the DGB had accomplished their aims, the coalition of American and German Westernizers died out in the third and final phase, between the end of the 1950s and the mid1960s. Both programs included most of the crucial issues the reformers had been fighting for. But the former partners were drifting apart, and the network was hardly in action anymore by the early 1960s. By 1963, the

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network was at its end, and even the official contacts between the labor organizations were quickly cooling down. Conclusion: Americanization or Westernization? The West German labor movement was “Westernized” in the 1940s and 1950s. Experiences with foreign cultural practices had changed its political thought and had resulted in a different belief system, which again had led to a new political practice. This change was instigated and supported by the network politics of the U.S. trade union federations in West Germany and Europe, but was made possible only by the preceding acculturation of members of German labor in Western societies during their exile. There were three different phases to this process: First, during the 1930s, the future protagonists of Westernization lost their former political convictions and started looking for new orientation. Secondly, during the 1940s, they met and became familiar with Anglo-American political thought and political practice and appropriated these new experiences to make them fit their own specific needs. Thirdly, during the late 1940s and the whole of the 1950s, they worked in networks in order to implement the new set of ideas, to change the core beliefs of their organizations, and to make the SPD and the DGB adopt Western values as a basis of their self-perception and their policies. For, even though the West German labor movement had in fact cooperated with and worked within the political and economic system of their country, still it had, as far as its programs were concerned, done so in the hope of eventually exchanging this socioeconomic order for a better, more just, and more socialist one. The German reformers in the transatlantic network strove to close this traditional gap between theory and practice by adapting the theory to the political practice. Thus, the Germans themselves changed the political thought of the SPD and the DGB, but they used ideas, concepts, and solutions to their needs that they had encountered by meeting, and dealing with, labor movements from the United States and Great Britain. This new Westernized outlook fitted the trade unions and Social Democracy firmly into the social economy of the Federal Republic of Germany and opened the path to governmental power for the SPD. What happened to the (West) German labor movement during the 1940s and 1950s can best be described as a process of cultural transfer. This implies a transmission of ideas, goods, people, and institutions from one specific system of social behavior or interpretation to another.57 But cultural transfer does not mean the implantation of an original copy of foreign ideas or institutions into a society or a country, but rather a process of productive appropriation. It is closely related to the (anthropologically informed) notion of

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acculturation, which describes the encounter of two different national cultures and their mutual relations and mutual exchanges, and looks at the process of adoption, adaptation, or rejection. The term “intercultural transfer” would be even more appropriate to what we are looking at, as it is not a question of taking on aspects of high, or low, culture, but rather an interaction between different cultures as entities.58 It was the culture of an Anglo-American West that was appropriated by the West German labor movement. To say it was a transfer from the United States of America to West Germany, though, would be an oversimplification. For it was more complex than just a bilateral, one-way, and comprehensive takeover of specific American cultural features. For one thing, the emanating Western community of thought was not based on a true copy of specific U.S. concepts, but rather on a wider framework that also involved West European, for instance British, ideas, and that had the traditions of Western political thought as common denominator. Thus, even though the United States— government and trade unions alike—acted as a powerful advocate of their own conceptual framework, they did not procure American conditions in the labor movements of Western Europe. But they did achieve a convergence of the social, political, and economic circumstances in the West, and also of the underlying belief systems. Furthermore, as far as the West German labor movement was concerned, the United States was only one, albeit an influential one, of at least two contributors to a transformation that fundamentally altered the political thought, self-perception, and politics of trade unions and the Social Democratic Party alike. For, before the American labor movement became an active force in Germany, there had already been a strong influx of British ideas and concepts of society, by dint of the experiences of labor politicians in their exile years in London. The result of this intercultural transfer, of this amalgamation of values and conceptual frameworks experienced by contact with other societies, was not specifically American conditions but, rather, on a very fundamental level, common Western ones. And finally, the transfer did not go only in one direction. Rather, there also was a certain amount of mutual influence that came with long-standing and close contact. For, over the years, American labor had grown familiar with the foundations of German labor, and this had influenced its perspective as well.59 Therefore this chapter suggests taking both terms literally and using “Americanization” in cases of cultural transfer where specifically U.S. features are transmitted to another society, and where they remain recognizably “American”; where this transfer is bilateral in the sense of including two societies only, at least as for the analyzed topic; and where finally this transfer is going in a one-way direction, with a “source” and a “receiver” culture. Phenomena of mass culture in the 1950s could serve as examples, or, for the

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German labor movement, the “Americanization” of the electoral campaigns of the SPD from 1960 onward, where specific American techniques were taken over more or less unchanged and simply replaced former techniques. “Westernization” on the other hand would belong to a different type of cultural—or here indeed rather intercultural—transfer, where several societies mutually influence their respective cultures, where, by a process of approximation and mutual appropriation of the originally differing elements, a kind of synthesis results in cultural features that are, at least on a basic level, common to all societies involved, but not recognizably stemming from one single source alone. The constitution of a Western community of values or of political thought, with its common conceptual frameworks and socioeconomic order, was such a process. It took the better part of two centuries, from the age of Enlightenment until today, and included several different branches of Western thought. The ideas of the French as well as of the American Revolution contributed to the Western world of ideas. But in the twentieth century there emerged some basic features common to all branches of “the West.” Parliamentary democracy and party politics dominated the political system, the idea of pluralism formed the basis of society; the economic order was founded on the principle of private property, a free market, and equality of opportunity; and the individual stood at the center of society and culture. In the 1940s and 1960s, under the pressure of the Cold War, the cultures of the West, with their formerly more diverse features of Western traditions, were more strongly amalgamated. West Germany now was finally integrated into a “Western community of thought.” Although there were also numerous phenomena of “Americanization,” some parts of the development of West German society in the 1950s were of a different character, and are more appropriately described as “Westernization,” as in the process of transformation that could be observed in the West German labor movement. Notes 1. This is a revised version of a paper I presented at the conference on “The American Impact on Western Europe: Americanization and Westernization in Transatlantic Perspective,” at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., in March 1999. I am indebted to Prof. Michael Fichter for helpful comments on the first draft of this paper. The argument presented in this paper is dealt with in full detail in my doctoral thesis “Konsenskapitalismus und Sozialdemokratie. Zur ideellen Westorientierung der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 1945–1965,” diss. ms. (forthcoming). 2. For the notions of “Americanization” and “Westernization,” see Anselm DoeringManteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999); Anselm DoeringManteuffel, “Dimensionen von Amerikanisierung in der deutschen Gesellschaft,”

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4.

5.

6.

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in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995): 1–34; also Volker Berghahn, The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945–1973 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986). Kurt Klotzbach, Der Weg zur Staatspartei: Programmatik, praktische Politik und Organisation der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1945 bis 1965 (Berlin/Bonn: Dietz, 1982); Albrecht Kaden, Einheit oder Freiheit: Die Wiedergründung der SPD 1945/46 (Hannover: Dietz, 1964); Harold Hurwitz and Klaus Sühl, Autoritäre Tradierung und Demokratiepotential in der sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung (Demokratie und Antikommunismus in Berlin nach 1945, vol. II) (Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1984). See, for example, Franz L. Neumann, “Zur marxistischen Staatstheorie,” in Franz L. Neumann, Wirtschaft, Staat, Demokratie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 393–401, and Hubertus Buchstein, “Auf der gemeinsamen Suche nach einer ‘modernen Demokratietheorie’: Otto Suhr, Franz L. Neumann und Ernst Fraenkel,” in Gerhard Göhler and Bodo Zeuner (eds.), Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der deutschen Politikwissenschaft (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1991), 171–94. For the post-war history of the West German trade union movement, see for example Klaus Schönhoven, Die deutschen Gewerkschaften (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); Theo Pirker, Die blinde Macht: Die Gewerkschaftsbewegung in Westdeutschland 2 vols., (München: Mercator, 1960). For the mid-1950s and beyond, see Helga Grebing, “Gewerkschaften: Bewegung oder Dienstleistungsorganisation, 1955 bis 1965,” in Hans-Otto Hemmer and Kurt Thomas Schmitz (eds.), Geschichte der Gewerkschaften in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Von den Anfängen bis heute (Köln: Bund, 1990), 149–82. For the Christian Democratic wing of the West German trade union movement, see Wolfgang Schroeder, Katholizismus und Einheitsgewerkschaft. Der Streit um den DGB und der Niedergang des Sozialkatholizismus in der Bundesrepublik bis 1960 (Bonn: Dietz, 1992). Siegfried Mielke and Peter Rütters, “Einleitung,” in Gewerkschaften in Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 1945–1949: Quellen zur Geschichte der deutschen Gewerkschaftsbewegung, vol. 7 (Köln: Bund, 1991), 9–92, here 36; Eberhard Schmidt, Die verhinderte Neuordnung 1945–1952: Zur Auseinandersetzung um die Demokratisierung der Wirtschaft in den westlichen Besatzungszonen und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 7th ed., (Frankfurt/Main/Köln: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1977), 68. Hans Böckler, addressing the Rhein-Ruhr-Club, November 1, 1949, quoted in Ernst-Dieter Köpper, Gewerkschaften und Außenpolitik: Die Stellung der westdeutschen Gewerkschaften zur wirtschaftlichen und militärischen Integration der Bundesrepublik in die Europäische Gemeinschaft und in die NATO (Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus,1982), 44. See, for example, Kurt Schumacher, “Programmatische Erklärungen vom 5. Oktober 1945,” in Ossip K. Flechtheim (ed.), Dokumente zur parteipolitischen Entwicklung in Deutschland seit 1945, vol. 3, “Programmatik der deutschen Parteien,” part two (Berlin: Wendler, 1963), 4–8, here 5. Louis Dumont, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Richard Münch, Die

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12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

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Kultur der Moderne, vol. 2: “Ihre Ausprägung in Frankreich und Deutschland” (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993). For an overview of German self-perception and perception of Western Europe after 1870: Bernd Faulenbach, Ideologie des Deutschen Weges: Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historiographie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), 122–77; Ralf Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1965); Ernst Fraenkel, Deutschland und die westlichen Demokratien (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). For the contemporary German self-perception, see for instance Heinrich von Treitschke, “Das constitutionelle Königthum in Deutschland” [1869/71], in Treitschke, Historische und politische Aufsätze, 3. vols. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1915), 429–561; Ernst Troeltsch, “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” in Troeltsch, Die deutsche Freiheit: Fünf Vorträge, ed. Bund deutscher Gelehrter und Künstler (Gotha 1917), 79–113; Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit” [1916], in Troeltsch, Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa: Gesammelte kulturphilosophische Aufsätze und Reden, ed. Hans Baron (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925), 5–107. John Breuilly, “Liberalism or Social Democracy? Britain and Germany, 1850–1875,” in Breuilly, Labour and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Comparative History (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 115–59, quotation 148. Susanne Miller, Das Problem der Freiheit im Sozialismus (Bonn: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1974), 291–9. For a short history of German labor, see Roger Fletcher (ed.), Bernstein to Brandt: A Short History of German Social Democracy (London: Eward Arnold, 1987); Breuilly, Labour and Liberalism; for a European overview: Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1997). Especially in the DGB many functionaries had already been in office in the interwar years, as for instance Hans Böckler and most of the members of the DGB’s first executive committee. Selig Perlman, “Labor and the New Deal,” in Milton Derber and Edwin Young, Labor and the New Deal, 2d ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 367. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, Unionsparteien, Sozialdemokratie und Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika 1945–1966 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1983), 72. See for example Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining,” in Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 122–52; Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” in Fraser and Gerstle, New Deal Order, 185-211, esp. 190–2. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996); Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris, eds., American Exceptionalism: U.S. Working Class Formation in International Context (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Robert J. Fitrakis, The Idea of Democratic Socialism in America and the Decline of the Socialist Party (New York: Garland,

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19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

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1993); Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1988). John H. M. Laslett, “Samuel Gompers and the Rise of American Business Unionism,” in Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, eds., Labor Leaders in America (Urbana-Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 62–88, here 84. Harold C. Livesay, Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1993), 125. Irving Howe, Socialism and America (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985), 28. David Brody “The Course of the American Labor Movement,” in David Brody, In Labor’s Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43–80, here 57. Report: “The Trade Union Situation in Germany,” [Henry Rutz, 1950], George Meany Memorial Archive, Silver Spring, Md., [GMMA], RG 18-003, 037/18, 5–6. Patrick Renshaw, American Labour and Consensus Capitalism, 1935–1990 (London: Macmillan, 1991). Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); see also Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Fraser and Gerstle, New Deal Order. Michael Hochgeschwender, “Freiheit in der Offensive?” Der “Kongreß für Kulturelle Freiheit” und die Deutschen (München: Oldenbourg, 1998), 68–86; Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1898–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Bernhard Plé, Wissenschaft und säkulare Mission: “Amerikanische Sozialwissenschaft” im politischen Sendungsbewußtsein der USA und im geistigen Aufbau der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990); for pragmatism, see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison 1989); Hans Joas, Pragmatismus und Gesellschaftstheorie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1998). For a recent overview of this topic, see Geir Lundestad, “Empire” by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945–1997 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Irving Brown, AFL representative in Europe: speech at the American Club, February 17, 1949, GMMA, RG 18-003, 011/11, 6. Ibid., GMMA, RG 18-003, 011/11, 3.

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32. Dr. Stefan Osousky (Czech diplomat and visiting professor at Colgate University) addressing the Trade Union Advisory Committee, January 6, 1948, Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., GMMA, RG 2-006, 005/23. 33. Ibid. 34. Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1969); Roy Godson, American Labor and European Politics: The AFL as a Transnational Force (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1976); Philip Taft, The A. F. of L. from the Death of Gompers to the Merger (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959). 35. GMMA, RG 18-002, 008/23: CIO European Office, 1953; 012/1-16: Germany; 015/26: Reuther Delegation to Europe, 1950/51; 016/1-2. Victor G. Reuther. 36. Such as, for instance, the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) or the ERPTUAC, a similar setup concerned with questions concerning the role of labor in the Marshall Plan. 37. Irving Brown to Jay Lovestone, August 25, 1947, GMMA, RG18-003, 011/7. 38. For labor contacts, see Werner Link, Deutsche und amerikanische Gewerkschaften und Geschäftsleute 1944–1975: Eine Studie über transnationale Beziehungen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978); Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie: Der amerikanische Beitrag 1945–1952 (Opladen: Westdeuscher Verlag, 1993); Volker R. Berghahn, “West German Reconstruction and American Industrial Culture, 1945–1960,” in Reiner Pommerin (ed.), The American Impact on Postwar Germany (Providence/Oxford : Berghahn, 1995), 65–81. 39. See, for instance, GMMA, RG 18-003, 026/10-13: DGB; 037/12-30: Germany 1948–1965; 038/1-7: Germany; 056/12-19: Henry Rutz; 059/23-30 and 060/1-11: SPD; also Archiv der Sozialen Demokratie: Nachlaß Kuno Brandel; Nachlaß Willi Eichler; Nachlaß Werner Hansen (Willi Heidorn); Nachlaß Siegmund (Siggi) Neumann; Nachlaß Ludwig Rosenberg; Nachlaß Eduard (Edu) Wald; Bestand Internationale Transportarbeiterföderation (ITF); Sammlung Hans Jahn; Bestand IJB/ISK. 40. Jan Foitzik, Zwischen den Fronten: Zur Politik, Organisation und Funktion linker politischer Kleinorganisationen im Widerstand 1933 bis 1939/40 (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1986). Rosenberg had been a member of the liberal trade union organization. 41. Ludwig Eiber, Die Sozialdemokratie in der Emigration: Die “Union deutscher sozialistischer Organisationen in Großbritannien” 1941–1946 und ihre Mitglieder: Protokolle, Erklärungen, Materialien (Bonn: Dietz, 1998). 42. Manfred Briegel and Wolfgang Frühwald (eds.), Die Erfahrung der Fremde: Kolloquium des Schwerpunktprogramms “Exilforschung” der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, Forschungsbericht (Weinheim: VCH, 1988); Claus-Dieter Krohn, Patrik von zu Mühlen, Gerhard Paul, and Lutz Winkler (eds.), Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998). For Great Britain, see Werner Röder, Die deutschen sozialistischen Exilgruppen in Großbritannien: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Widerstandes gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1969).

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43. See for instance Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History, 3rd ed., (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), especially 3–16; 26–33; 144–82; 184–5. See also Ross I. McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); Ross I. McKibbin, “Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?” in Ross I. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1–41; Stefan Berger, The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats, 1900–1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 44. Claus-Dieter Krohn and Patrik von zur Mühlen, eds., Rückkehr und Aufbau nach 1945: Deutsche Remigranten im öffentlichen Leben Nachkriegsdeutschlands (Marburg: Metropolis, 1997). 45. For such a network between the SPD and DGB, see Julia Angster, “Der Zehnerkreis. Remigranten in der westdeutschen Arbeiterbewegung der 1950er Jahre,” in Exil 1 (1998), 26–47. 46. Michael Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften: Zur Entwicklung und Anwendung der US-Gewerkschaftspolitik in Deutschland 1944–1948 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1982). 47. [Irving Brown] to Jay Lovestone, August 3, 1950, GMMA, RG 18-003, 011/12. 48. Speech by Irving Brown, AFL representative in Europe, at the American Club, February 17, 1949, ms., GMMA, RG 18-003, 011/11, 6. 49. Victor G. Reuther to Mike Ross, memorandum, September 10, 1953, GMMA, RG 18-002, 016/02; Irving Brown to George Meany, September 8, 1953, GMMA, RG 18-003, 011/19; Jay Lovestone to Fritz Heine, June 26, 1952, GMMA, RG 18-003, 059/25. 50. GMMA, RG 18-003, 059/23-30; 060/1-11: SPD. 51. For an example, see Wenzel Jaksch to Henry Rutz (German representative of the AFL), September 30, 1957, GMMA, RG 18-001, 003/11. 52. Dieter Dowe and Kurt Klotzbach (eds.), Programmatische Dokumente der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Berlin/Bonn: Dietz, 2nd ed., 1984), 361–83; Susanne Miller, “Der Weg zum Godesberger Grundsatzprogramm” [1994], in Susanne Miller, Sozialdemokratie als Lebenssinn. Aufsätze zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der SPD, zum 80. Geburtstag hg. v. Bernd Faulenbach (Bonn: Dietz, 1995), 297–305. 53. Michael Held, Sozialdemokratie und Keynesianismus: Von der Weltwirtschaftskrise bis zum Godesberger Programm (Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus, 1982). 54. Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, 249–51, quotes 250. 55. For details, see the text of the Godesberg Program, in Dowe and Klotzbach (eds.), Programmatische Dokumente, 363; 364; 366. 56. Hans Otto Hemmer, “Stationen gewerkschaftlicher Programmatik. Zu den Grundsatzprogrammen des DGB und ihrer Vorgeschichte,” in Erich Matthias/Klaus Schönhoven (eds.), Solidarität und Menschenwürde. Etappen der deutschen Gewerkschaftsgeschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1984), 353–7. 57. Johannes Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 649–85, here: 680.

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58. Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer,” 673–81. 59. It was Jay Lovestone (AFL) who reminded the SPD after “Godesberg” of the importance of the Marxist tradition for the German labor movement. He was not happy to see them give up on it. Jay Lovestone to Fritz Heine, November 18, 1959, GMMA RG 18-003, 060/1.

PART TWO

Critical Theory and the Legacies of 1968

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CHAPTER 5

Post-War Ideologies and the Body Politics of 1968

Dagmar Herzog

W

e cannot make sense of the West German New Left’s conflicted relationship to the Nazi past and the Holocaust without understanding the New Left’s involvement in the sexual revolution of the 1960s–1970s. Most of the recent publications about 1968 as a historical watershed have ignored or downplayed the New Left’s sexual politics, but in so doing they have missed the opportunity to gain a deepened understanding of the original motive forces of the student upheaval and the sources of its very particular pathos and fury in West Germany. They have also missed a chance to understand the ways the student movement, while styling itself as antifascist, might more usefully be understood as an antipostfascist movement. Many of the transformations in personal politics engaged in by the 68ers— experiments in communal living, antiauthoritarian parenting, and renegotiated sexual mores and gender relations—were elaborated against the background of the perceived legacies of the fascist past. But what the 68ers were most directly rebelling against was the postfascist settlement in West Germany, and their own experiences coming of age in the claustrophobic and conservative later 1950s. The 68ers believed that the sexual conservatism in which they were raised was a watered-down continuation of Nazism’s sexual politics, and they built their own activism on behalf of sexual liberation on an interpretation of Nazism as fundamentally hostile to sex and pro-family. As it turns out, however, the 68ers based their convictions on misreadings both of the Third Reich and of the immediate post-Third Reich years.

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The relationship between the sexual revolution in West Germany and the New Left student movement is not reducible to a simple equation, even though in popular parlance “1968” is often used as a shorthand to refer to both. For one thing, although there was considerable voyeuristic public fascination with such flamboyantly provocative experiments on the Left as the (for a short time) dedicatedly promiscuous left-anarcho Kommune 1, the sexual revolution was manifestly a broader phenomenon than the New Left. From the increasing popularity of “the pill” to the explosion of pornography and peepshows to the ever-growing success of entrepreneur Beate Uhse’s sex aids shops and mainstream sex apostle Oswalt Kolle’s advice columns and sex enlightenment movies, the later sixties and early seventies saw the transformation of the sexual landscape in West Germany. Most retrospective accounts tend to give the students credit for either igniting or furthering the broader changes. At the 20-year anniversary of 1968, for example, psychoanalyst and former New Left leader Reimut Reiche remembered: “We shouted, ‘Destroy the bourgeois nuclear family!’—and became the avantgarde of a democratic modernization in the realm of child rearing, living arrangements, gender relations, marital forms, dress and table manners—and sexual mores. I am not saying: All that would not have happened without us. But without a doubt the student movement set this push for modernization in motion.”1 And sexologist Gunter Schmidt observed in 1998 that “thirty years ago, the students, or rather the student movement, had the sense for the socially possible, necessary, indeed overdue transformations of sexual relationships (they were the main actors of the liberal discourse).”2 An examination of the New Left writings on sex from the late 1960s and early 1970s reveals a somewhat more complicated story. Although the student movement was indeed strongly motivated by sexual rebellion against the conformist culture of post-war West Germany, fuelled by an intense desire for personal liberation and self-transformation, those within the student movement who thought seriously about sexual issues were also quickly repulsed by the mainstream sexualization of the culture booming all around them. (As cultural critic and former 68er Klaus Theweleit recently remembered it: “With repugnance we took cognizance of the partner-swapping tales of bourgeois couples,” as “the sex-wave spread in the so-called populace.”)3 The discomfort with the mainstream sexual revolution was strongly evident already in the earliest corpus of New Left publications on sex and family life: the texts produced by the Kinderladen movement for antiauthoritarian child rearing. The writings of this movement thematized adults’ sexuality as much as children’s. The texts repeatedly include scathing and anguished attempts to explain why the bourgeois sexual revolution was most definitely not the bodily and psychic liberation the students were

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yearning for. A classic sample of the typical tone—snatches of “materialist” analysis pasted together with inexpressible utopian longings—is provided by the 1970 anthology Berliner Kinderläden: “As long as the nuclear family survives—ultimately, for economic reasons—sexual freedom serves as a sad little palliative for daily surfeit and disgust.” And: “Even if people humped around ten times more than ever before, it would not add up to real sexual liberation. For merely to amass orgasms, even if man and woman arrive at them simultaneously, can not yet be seen as a satisfying form of sexuality.”4 As these remarks suggest, it was no coincidence that sex rights activists in the New Left within a few years would turn away from the early, and often quite melodramatic, Wilhelm Reich—inspired calls for complete sexual liberation as an antifascist imperative and toward more Herbert Marcuse—influenced analyses of the mainstream sexual revolution as just another aspect of repressive desublimation, while continuing to demand a form of sexual freedom linked to social criticism and social justice struggles. Yet despite the subsequent shift away from the innocent faith in sexual liberation as already in itself politically important and morally redemptive, it is worth dwelling a bit more on that early phase, which—depending on which texts and events one uses to periodize it—might be said to run from around 1966 to 1970. Although the first, so-called subjective or “antiauthoritarian” phase of the student movement was already over by 1968, when one looks at the student movement’s involvement in sexual politics, the periodization is different, and the first—one might call it strenuously emancipatory—phase ran a bit longer, only to be followed subsequently by more than a decade of melancholic introspection and mutual recrimination. What made the activist students’ perspective on sex unique, in short, was not their advocacy of greater liberality, but rather their insistence on connecting liberated sex with progressive politics. What we gain by focusing on the early years of the New Left is a greater sense of what drew young people into the student movement in the first place. It is important not to be reductionist here; the aim is not to suggest that political commitments were only derivative of or secondary to personal concerns, and it is certainly not to dispute either the sincerity or the significance of the political critiques and activist engagements of the New Left. What is needed is to move to a language that acknowledges the entanglements and reciprocal reinforcements, as well as mutual conflictedness, of political commitments and personal motivations, without ever assuming that personal motives were important to everyone.5 Keeping these caveats in mind, however, it does remain striking how many reminiscences about the early years remark that the personal was the spark for the political. In 1984, in an essay analyzing the sexual debates of the 1960s, Sabine Weissler (not a 68er but someone who had

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read many 68er materials) summarized it this way: “The flood of articles, lectures, discussion events, and reading circles on the question of sexual enlightenment as a part of political emancipation was incredible. There was no school or student newspaper in which this was not—long before Vietnam, emergency laws, university reform, etc.—topic number one, usually intensively combated and censured by parents and authorities.”6 68ers’ own retrospective observations confirm this sense and elaborate on it. Writer Peter Schneider, for example, confessed in 1977, “It was a new feeling for the body, a new way of moving, of speaking, and only then a new consciousness, that attracted me.”7 Journalist Götz Eisenberg put it like this in 1979: “The antiauthoritarian movement was also a revolt of identity, a mutiny against the more or less awful consequences of authoritarian education in parental home and school, a detonation of the drilled bodies, senses, and wishes … That which had been pushed aside and repressed by school and parental home broke open, exploded as it were, and combined itself with the protest against external coercions and inherited authorities into an amalgam that constituted the specific dynamite and radicality of the antiauthoritarian movement.”8 Filmmaker Edgar Reitz formulated it like this: “We spoke in intellectual terms, but we felt something different … The Left had an unending yearning for warmth.”9 And Theweleit in 1990 went so far as to suggest that a “special sort of sexual tension was the ‘driving force’ of 1968” in West Germany.10 To lend authority to their antiauthoritarianism, the New Left frequently invoked the Frankfurt School. In line with the present tendency to marginalize the New Left’s “private sphere” activism, one thing that appears to be missing in the recent spate of publications on the New Left’s relationship to the Frankfurt School is the ways in which student activists read Frankfurt School writings on the connections between the potential for fascism and childhood socialization within the family. Most of the recent analyses focus on the students’ disgust with the Critical Theorists’ refusal to turn theory into praxis and the professors’ anger and repugnance at the students’ mindless (and especially to Habermas’ and Adorno’s minds, potentially fascistic) actionism.11 Engaging with their former mentors on the tensions between theory and praxis was certainly crucial to New Left activism across a range of political issues, from antiwar protest to the redefinition of the purpose and structure of the university to the analysis of the media and of aesthetics. But this engagement was no less crucial in the realm of personal politics. Rereading early New Left texts now, and reading them against those writings on authority and the family by Horkheimer and Adorno that were most popular among the students and that they cited most frequently, it becomes apparent that 68ers read the Frankfurt School’s writings on sex, the family, and fascism above all through the lens of their reading of Wilhelm Reich.

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Whatever their other strengths or weaknesses, Horkheimer and Adorno’s essays on authority and the family contain quite nuanced assessments of the Third Reich’s contradictory sexual and familial politics, and of the connections between sexual conservatism and political conservatism. But what is evident in the New Left writings on sex and the family in the late 1960s and early 1970s is a rather selective appropriation of Frankfurt School ideas. While Horkheimer, for instance, expressly stressed that the Third Reich had tried to dispense with the family as the mediating link between the individual and the state, and argued that the appeal of fascism had lain in part in the growing weakness of fathers, New Leftists tended to invoke only his notions about the psychological power of parents, the ways the very structure of the nuclear family inculcated submissiveness, and the ways in which hatred of overpowering parents, that could not be expressed directly, got repressed but then also aggressively turned onto those more vulnerable.12 And while Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality, for example, explicitly noted that there is such a phenomenon as the politically reactionary but also sexually active person, 68ers drew exclusively on the study’s findings about the links between the potential for fascism and sexual repressedness.13 “Fascist developments are facilitated by authoritarian character structures,” one typical New Left text in 1970 put it in summarizing The Authoritarian Personality, after having just enumerated that those character structures had their roots in strict toilet training, the suppression of child sexuality, and “strong emotional ties to parents as the only relevant objects of identification.” And in their own eagerness to “Smash the bourgeois nuclear family!” as the sixties slogan went, the authors of the book ignored Horkheimer’s premises about the Nazis’ family-smashing aims and instead, in their concern to expose the damage done by liberal as well as conservative parents, quoted his remark from the 1930s that “whether parents are lenient or strict with the child is not important, for the child’s character is influenced far more by the family structure than by the father’s conscious aims and methods.”14 Another typical New Left child-rearing text invoked Adorno as it summarily asserted that “the authoritarian personality” was characterized by “hostility to sex,” cited Horkheimer to explain how insecure people could become both brutal and overly submissive to authority, and quoted Erich Fromm’s 1936 observations about parental authority being the mirror image of, not the model for, societal authority, only to conclude directly from there that “in the family the child is crushed, trained to be a subordinate, a faithful Christian, a sex-hostile future ‘Mr. and Mrs. Clean,’ an obedient worker.”15 The point is not that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Fromm did not say what they were quoted or summarized as saying; they did. The point is that the pieces of their work that got invoked sound a great deal like Wilhelm Reich.

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Wilhelm Reich’s influence on the early New Left in West Germany was unparalleled. No other intellectual so moved the student movement in its early days, and to a degree unmatched either in the United States or other Western European nations. This had everything to do with Reich’s central argument that sexual satisfaction and sadism were mutually exclusive, that “genitally satisfied people,” as he once put it, were notable for their “gentleness and goodness.”16 And it had a great deal to do with his insistence that child sexuality in particular needed to be not just tolerated, but actively celebrated, if fascism and neurosis alike were to be averted, an idea that was repeated like a mantra in dozens of early New Left writings. Reprints of Reich’s work from the 1920s–1940s, first in bootleg form, then formally published, circulated widely in the late 1960s. No book display table on a campus was complete without Reich’s The Sexual Revolution or The Function of the Orgasm, and as one former 68er wrote recently, The Mass Psychology of Fascism was read just as “breathlessly.”17 It is indicative, too, that for a time in 1968 the outside wall of the cafeteria at the University of Frankfurt carried a graffiti slogan exhorting all passersby to “read Wilhelm Reich and act accordingly.”18 While this was obviously a humorously and seriously meant incitement to engage in more “free love,” the issue that needs to be emphasized is the moral force of Reich’s arguments. In rediscovering Reich, activists saw themselves as rescuing an aspect of the anticapitalist and sexually radical tradition of Weimar that the Nazis had wiped out or driven into exile. But what they revered most about Reich was the way he helped them rewrite conventional wisdom about the relationship between pleasure and evil. Reich’s concepts seemed to lend additional legitimacy to that ubiquitous sixties slogan, Make Love Not War. For this slogan was not just a recommendation for a more pleasant activity than slogging through rice paddies risking one’s life and the lives of others; it was also a theory of human nature, a deeply held conviction that those who made a lot of love simply would not be interested in killing. The reasons for Reich’s tremendous appeal at the end of the 1960s lie in the complex conversations between the 1940s and 1950s, between the decade of mass murder and the decade in which the future 68ers began to come of age. Reich’s contention that the sexual repression of children within the family lay at the root of almost all-human cruelty showed up in countless ways in the left-leaning literature of the late 1960s. For in the 1960s and 1970s, leftists and liberals alike believed that both fascism in general and the Holocaust in particular were the perverted products of sexual repression. 68er mentor and Marxist theoretician Wolfgang Fritz Haug declared in 1965 that in the Third Reich there had clearly been a “connection between the suppression of sexual drives on the one hand and the anti-Jewish persecution

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mania and its raging in manifest cruelty on the other.”19 The sociologist Friedhelm Neidhardt in 1966 presumed as self-evident that “concentration camp murderers were in the rule ‘good family men.’ ”20 Philosophy Ph.D. Arno Plack, in his magnum opus of 1967 entitled Society and Evil: A Critique of the Reigning Morality, asserted matter-of-factly that “it would be wrong to hold the view that all of what happened in Auschwitz was typically German. It was typical for a society that suppresses sexuality.”21 And the journalist Hannes Schwenger, in his 1969 critique of “antisexual propaganda” in the post-war churches, identified Christian insistence on “premarital abstinence,” “self-control,” and “purity and cleanliness,” and the post-war churches’ attacks on “free love, premarital intercourse, adultery and divorce” as speaking “the language of fascism.”22 But really it was the post-war period, especially the mid-to-late 1950s and early 1960s, which the subsequent 68ers personally experienced as sexually repressive. This was an era of intensive rhetorical overvaluation of the family; of anxieties about the damage done to women by premarital sex; of worry about what the neighbors might say if a fiancé spent the night; and of constant warnings about the deleterious effects of masturbation (you will never win the battle against your own body, one prominent Protestant physician informed young men, if you lie around in a warm bed in the morning or listen to “steamy Negro music” at night; you may succumb occasionally to temptation, a leading pedagogue warned, but “afterward the revulsion at yourself returns in intensified form,” etc.).23 This is what the 68ers were rebelling against. There is a noticeable sense of a compensatory fervor at work especially in the ferocity of New Left activists’ projects on behalf of children. The antiauthoritarian Kinderläden do not just permit the children to run naked and freely touch their own and each other’s bodies; they vociferously celebrate this and publish elaborate reports on the most intimate details of the children’s touchings. Declaring the nuclear family to be “rotten to the core,” they not only rotate caregiving at the centers, but actively work to rupture what they call parent-child “fixations.”24 And, strikingly, they comment repeatedly on their sense of unhappiness with their own bodies: “None of the adults in our fundamentally antisexual and pleasurehostile society was able to develop an untroubled relationship to sexuality,” the Frankfurt Kinderladen collective moans in a typical passage, and: “Among adults, compulsive personalities are the rule and not the exception.”25 The Stuttgarters concur: Adults are all “socially crippled” beings.26 Indicatively, furthermore, the activists also invoke the Holocaust. In its rage, for example, at the tendency even of liberal sex education guides to downplay pleasure and emphasize the dangers of venereal disease, the BerlinCharlottenburg collective stingingly announced: “It is well known that the National Socialists combined their fascist racial theory with the irrational

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warning against the decadent Jews, because they were supposedly responsible for sexually transmitted diseases.”27 And a father working in the BerlinNeukölln center with coy insolence informed a reporter from Der Stern not only that the parents allowed the children to masturbate and play sex-games “in peace,” but that “many of the children were already toilet-trained. Now they shit in their pants again. They’re repeating the anal phase and that’s good. Did you know that most concentration camp guards had anal difficulties in their childhood?”28 Members of the Berlin-Lankwitz collective, meanwhile, put the anal phase at the very center of political theory: Punitive toilet training, they contended, led to authoritarian personalities with sadistic fantasies who oppressed minorities; preoccupation with cleanliness was part and parcel of a mindset that sent people “into the oven.”29 The relationship of the New Left to the fascist past is a problem which is being only unevenly engaged in the current scholarship on 1968—there has been an acute imbalance between the generalizations circulating in the 1990s and early 2000s about 1968 as the occasion for a reckoning with the elders compromised by Nazism and the more nuanced assessment of the 68ers’ actually rather ambiguous relationship to the Holocaust, which was more well established in the 1980s. From Henryk Broder’s signal piece in Die Zeit in 1981 to the articulate and thoughtful critiques and autocritiques produced in the course of the 1980s by Anson Rabinbach and Jessica Benjamin, Marion Kaplan, Andrei Markovits, Atina Grossmann, Michael Schneider, Peter Schneider, Klaus Hartung, and Claus Leggewie, among others, it was clear that there had been a problem with non-Jewish New Leftists’ overly eager criticisms of Israel, glib generalizations about Jews, simplistic labeling of various post-war phenomena as “fascistic,” and repeated marginalization of the Holocaust in a narrowly economistic reading of Nazism.30 At the very least, this more differentiated knowledge should be consistently integrated into the current retrospective assessments of 1968. But we can also move a step further toward explaining what otherwise seems rather inexplicable—that is, the 68ers’ coexisting tendencies to profound identification with and manifest insensitivity toward, the murdered Jews— by paying attention to the ways the 68ers’ antifascism was enmeshed in their antipostfascism because of the sexual politics of the post-war period and the particular sexual interpretations of Nazism prevalent in the 1960s. Explaining the 68ers’ contradictory relationship to the fascist past and the Holocaust thus requires a reconsideration of the sexual politics of both the Third Reich and the post-Third Reich era alike. The standard view among scholars at present, so pervasive that no one seems to feel the need to document it more fully but which instead serves as a sort of foundational backdrop to other inquiries, is that the Third Reich was at its core anti-sex. And indeed

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there were in the Third Reich countless profoundly repressive tendencies— from the torture and murder of homosexuals to the forced sterilization of proletarian women whose purported promiscuity was taken as a sign of mental deficiency to the incarceration of prostitutes to the prosecution of Jewish-gentile sex in the race defilement trials. And one need only think of the grotesque reproductive experiments and sexual sadism in the concentration camps to understand the centrality of sexual repressiveness and the most intimate of bodily invasions to the Holocaust itself. But none of these horrific facts justify the conclusion that the Third Reich was repressive for everyone. What has routinely been downplayed since the sixties is the evidence that the Third Reich, for regime-loyal or regime-indifferent nonproletarian heterosexual “Aryans,” was anything but sexually repressive. The regime’s brutality and the pleasures it promised to those it did not persecute were inextricably connected. The stepped-up persecution of homosexuals provided a crucial context for the injunction to heterosexual activity; the abuse and murder of those deemed unworthy of reproduction and life because of their purported behavioral or “racial” characteristics constituted the background against which those classed as superior were enjoined to enjoy their entitlements. Even a cursory glance at the early years of the SS journal Das schwarze Korps, for instance, testifies amply to the brazen self-confidence with which Nazi theorizers took on especially the Catholic Church’s antisexual attitude while elaborating in great detail on their own pro-sex position. Christian campaigns to turn the populace away from Nazism by documenting the Nazis’ incitements to premarital intercourse were a running joke for the journal, which reprinted—and repudiated—the Christian complaints only then, with slight twists emphasizing the grandeur of the Nazis’ racial aims, to confirm precisely the point that the party was in synch with the populace, especially its youth, on the matter of the benefits and pleasures of premarital encounters. As befits the mindset of a fundamentally opportunistic regime, the journal was carefully contradictory, placing defenses of marriage and critiques of “Jewish” free love side by side with amused diatribes against bourgeois prudery. But the overwhelming message was that although romantic activity needed to take racial concerns into account, heterosexuality was fun, and parents or religious authorities who doubted that were simply out of step with the new age.31 One of the most peculiar phenomena of the post-war decades, then, was the sea change evident by the 1960s in interpretations of Nazism’s sexual politics. For, in the literature of the later 1940s and the 1950s, Nazi incitements to heterosexual activity also outside of marriage were well remembered, and one is hard pressed to find anyone articulating the notion (that from the 1960s to the 1990s had come to seem like a largely uncontested truth) that the Third Reich represented some sort of sexually reactionary backlash against the

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experimentation and openness of the Weimar years. On the contrary, the most diverse observers in the early post-1945 period expressly remarked on what they saw as a steady liberalization of heterosexual sexual mores in the first half of the twentieth century, or even articulated directly their view that it was the Nazis who had spurred this liberalization. (This too constitutes a disavowal of the ways Nazi sexual incitements were imbricated with racism and genocide; nonetheless, the point stands that no one represented Nazis as particularly uptight.) Furthermore, liberal attitudes about premarital heterosexual activity continued for seven or eight years into the post-war period as well; the shift in mores that thus requires explanation is the move toward greater sexual conservatism that took place in the mid-1950s.32 Sociologist Ludwig von Friedeburg, for instance, in his 1953 analysis of a survey conducted in 1949 (which found that fully 71 percent of West Germans questioned approved of premarital sex, while only 16 percent disapproved), saw these results as confirmation that sexual mores had gradually loosened in the first half of the twentieth century.33 Similarly, in 1950, the jurist Karl Siegfried Bader also stressed the consistent trajectory toward sexual liberalization, emphasizing that the countryside had become just as liberal as the big cities, and that “the morals code of the bourgeois era is now strongly defended by an ever smaller residual group … the old strict order has acquired the taint of the obsolete, the ridiculous.”34 Meanwhile, West German Christian commentators in the 1940s and 1950s defensively lamented what they saw as Nazi-fostered clichés that the churches were hostile to desire, explicitly raged against popular denigration of virginity as just so much “hackneyed Goebbels claptrap,” or criticized the Nazi regime for having encouraged unmarried women into “libertinage.”35 And in the muchdiscussed memoirs of Himmler’s personal doctor Felix Kersten appearing in 1952, Hitler and Himmler were hardly the inhibited “sex critics” they would come to seem in the 1960s and 1970s; rather, both men were portrayed as enthusiastic advocates of extramarital and bigamous heterosexuality.36 Moreover, in his memoir published in 1958, the successful Nazi-era film director Arthur Maria Rabenalt emphasized that encouraging reproduction was not the Nazis’ only aim: “The National Socialist will to eroticism, the matter-of-fact embrace of sex manifested itself far beyond these functionalist necessities, in a very free-spirited, generous, unbourgeois way.” As long as sexual representations and practices stayed within the official racial guidelines, “the erotic” faced “no limit.” Rabenalt added that “marriage was encouraged and propagated as the cell of state formation, but it was anything but sacrosanct.” Adultery and free love—including indiscriminate promiscuity among youth—were openly tolerated. In sum, and repeatedly contrasting Nazi attitudes to the (in his view) far more prudish Stalinist ones, Rabenalt characterized the Nazis as vigorous defenders of the “all-powerful sexual drive.”37

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Meanwhile, although the 68ers could not have known this, it is noteworthy that Frankfurt School theorists too were well aware of Nazi attitudes. As has recently become clear, for example, due to the publication of Marcuse’s war-era writings (from the time he worked for the American Office of Strategic Services), Marcuse’s sense in the 1940s was that Nazi culture rested not on sexual repression but rather precisely on the abolition of taboos. In Marcuse’s view, the Nazis encouraged sexual release and license and worked to link that release and license to racism.38 And it is similarly relevant to note that when historian Martin Jay interviewed Fromm in New York in 1968, Fromm gave the Third Reich as an example of a society that combined political unfreedom with sexual freedom.39 Moreover, in an essay “On the Problem of the Family,” that was available to 68ers but that they did not cite, Adorno in 1955 made the case that Nazism was in fact not (despite the popularity of this view in the United States) the result of patriarchal German family structures but, rather, if anything, of the breakdown of such structures. And he went on to make remarks that, although elusive and iconoclastic in some ways, nonetheless provide insight into the confusing continuities between the Weimar and Nazi eras in sexual terms, despite the obviously stark political rupture of 1933. Adorno elaborated that “precisely in Germany taboos concerning such matters as virginity, legalization of cohabitation, monogamy were presumably shaken far more thoroughly after 1918 than in the Catholic-Romanist and the Puritanism- and Irish Jansenism-saturated Anglo-Saxon countries, perhaps”—he speculated with a flourish—“because in Germany the memory of an archaic promiscuity survived more stubbornly than in the through-and-through bourgeois Western world.”40 How, we might ask, did the 68ers get so misled? Because the parents were sexually conservative in the fifties, the 68ers assumed they had been sexually conservative in the thirties and forties as well.41 But the point is that the repressiveness of the 1950s appears not to have been inherited tradition, but rather a new invention. Indeed, it is notable that when a major survey on sexual attitudes was conducted again, in 1963, the views expressed had become considerably more conservative than they had been in 1949.42 By the mid-1960s, when the sexual revolution began, young people had no idea that there had been a moment at the turn from the 1940s to the 1950s when “frequently changing intercourse” [häufig wechselnder Geschlechtsverkehr] had been so common that there had been an official abbreviation, “HWG,” routinely used for designating it, or that the first post — Second World War years had self-evidently been considered an era of “erotic freedom.”43 What was the parents’ generation’s investment in fostering what appears to be a significant misunderstanding between the generations about Nazism and sex? An anecdote that former 68er Michael Schneider told in the 1980s usefully captures some of this misunderstanding. Schneider recounted: “One day an

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acquaintance of mine, who had suffered profoundly because of the bigotry in his Catholic home and who had grown up with many sexual taboos, discovered in his parents’ attic a dust-covered photo album.” One picture showed the acquaintance’s—purportedly apolitical—father dressed in an SS uniform. And another “showed his father and mother sunbathing on an ‘FKK’ beach [a nude beach] …, a beach decorated with brown Nazi banners.”44 Few things could have been as shocking and incomprehensible to the 68er mentality than this evidence of Nazism and ordinary sensual pleasure as fully compatible; few things, obviously, in this sexually strict post-war home had been so carefully kept from the children. Not all pleasure is about sexual pleasure, of course; the inability to acknowledge to one’s children that there had been good times during the Third Reich was a broader phenomenon. The majority of those who had been adults during the Third Reich worked on many fronts to present themselves to the world and to their children as victims of Nazism, rather than as beneficiaries and bystanders. But to stress the broader miscommunication between the generations about all kinds of pleasures is to miss the intensity— and hence also the significance—of the 1950s’ elaboration of sex-hostile attitudes. What a close reading of the sex advice literature of the immediate post-war years—from Christian marriage manuals to semipornographic publications to mainstream magazines and newspapers—makes clear is that the redomestication of sex in the course of the 1950s was bound up with a complex reaction against Nazism—and its defeat.45 The greater explicitness in sexual discourse and liberality in behavior in Germany in the “roaring twenties” in comparison with, say, Britain, is not the only peculiarity of German sexual history.46 The fact of the fascist past and the Holocaust made the intergenerational conflict of the 1960s more intense in West Germany than elsewhere in the Western world. In 1950s West Germany, a sexually conservative stance got aggressively and insistently represented as the essence of proper morality, even as the Nazi past was still palpably present (with perpetrator trials resoundingly unpopular and former Nazi Party members pursuing successful post-war careers). All Western countries had sexually conservative 1950s, but in no country but West Germany could such a narrow focus on sexual morality to the exclusion of other concerns come to seem so profoundly hypocritical. This displacement of the discourse of morality from murder to sex was clear to the 68ers. What they were not, could not have been, aware of was how very recent the shift to sexual conservatism had been. Notes 1. Reimut Reiche, “Sexuelle Revolution—Erinnerung an einen Mythos,” in Die Früchte der Revolte: Über die Veränderung der politischen Kultur durch die Studentenbewegung, ed. Lothar Baier et al. (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1988), 58.

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2. Gunter Schmidt, Sexuelle Verhältnisse: Ueber das Verschwinden der Sexualmoral (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1998), 8. Or as Schmidt put it in another coauthored essay: “Students of both sexes had proved to be the avant-garde of sexual changes in the sixties and seventies.” Gunter Schmidt et al., “Changes in Students’ Sexual Behaviour: 1966–1981–1996,” Scandinavian Journal of Sexology 1/3 (1998), 158. 3. Klaus Theweleit, Ghosts: Drei leicht inkorrekte Vorträge (Frankfurt/Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1998), 129. Theweleit suggests that the spread of the sexual revolution to all social strata came in the wake of the student rebellions, but the evidence from the era indicates that the changes in popular sexual attitudes and behavior were already well under way before the student movement even emerged as a social force. See for example the cover story on “Sex in Deutschland” in Der Spiegel, May 2, 1966, 50–69. 4. Berliner Kinderläden: Antiautoritäre Erziehung und sozialistischer Kampf (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1970), 108–9. 5. On these matters more generally, see Peter Schneider, “Nicht der Egoismus verfälscht das politische Engagement, sondern der Versuch, ihn zu verheimlichen,” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 25, 1977, III. 6. Sabine Weissler, “Sexy Sixties,” in CheSchahShit: Die sechziger Jahre zwischen Cocktail und Molotov (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1984), 99. 7. Schneider, “Nicht der Egoismus.” Note also his remark that in 1968, “the personal and political needs, which later were split into mutually hostile camps, were not separated from each other, and therein lay the power of this eruption.” 8. Götz Eisenberg, “Auf der Suche nach Identität,” Frankfurter Hefte 34/4 (April 1979), 88. 9. “Edgar Reitz im Gespräch,” in Klaus Eder, Die Zweite Heimat: Chronik einer Jugend von Edgar Reitz (Cologne: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1993), 21. 10. Klaus Theweleit, … ein Aspirin von der Grösse der Sonne (Freiburg i.B.: Jos Fritz, 1990), 49. Note also Theweleit’s observation in 1998: “The interest in the political was manifest among many young people as an interest in the sexual. The bodies of young people in the early sixties were sexually charged in a wholly unusual way.” Theweleit, Ghosts, 106–7. 11. See esp. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “Kritische Theorie und Neue Linke,” in 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Gilcher-Holtey (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998); and Esther Leslie, “Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” in New Left Review 233 (Jan./Feb. 1999); as well as the recent work of Sabine von Dirke, Klaus Milich, and Wolfgang Kraushaar. On Habermas’ initial support for the students but then concern about the possibility of “left fascism” (a term he coined in June 1967), see Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “Krach in der Familie: Die Proteste von 1967/68 lösten Streit unter ihren eigenen Vordenkern aus,” Die Zeit, June 20, 1997, 38. On Adorno’s explicit comparison between his own students’ behavior and the Nazis, see his 1969 letters to Marcuse republished in the New Left Review 233 (Jan./Feb. 1999), 128, 131–2. 12. For example, see Max Horkheimer, “Theoretische Entwürfe über Autorität und Familie: Allgemeiner Teil,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie,

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14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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ed. Horkheimer (Paris, Félix Alcan, 1936); and Max Horkheimer, “Authoritarianism and the Family,” in The Family: Its Function and Destiny, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper and Bros., 1949, rev. ed. 1959). Adorno et al. were concerned to show that while it did appear that racially prejudiced and “potentially fascistic” personalities tended also to manifest a “moralistic rejection of instinctual tendencies” and that “it seems likely that this moral condemnation serves the purpose of externalization of, and defense against, temptation toward immoral and unconventional behavior,” “crude promiscuity” was also one of the frequent characteristics of prejudiced individuals. See Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950), esp. 1, 393, 395, and 420. See Berliner Kinderläden, 13–14, 90–1. See Hille Jan Breiteneicher et al., Kinderläden: Revolution der Erziehung oder Erziehung zur Revolution? (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1971), 13, 16–17. See Reich’s remarks qtd. in Karlheinz Deschner, Das Kreuz mit der Kirche: Eine Sexualgeschichte des Christentums (Düsseldorf: ECON, 1974), 385. G. S., personal correspondence, March 1999. On Reich’s extraordinary impact, see also Reiche, “Sexuelle Revolution,” 55–7; and Eckhard Siepmann, “Genital versus Prägenital: Die Grossväter der sexuellen Revolution,” in CheSchahShit, 101. See Peter Mosler, Was wir wollten, was wir wurden: Studentenrevolte—zehn Jahre danach (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1977), 159. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Vorbemerkung,” Das Argument 32 (1965), 30–31. Friedhelm Neidhardt, Die Familie in Deutschland (Opladen: Leske, 1966), 71. Arno Plack, Die Gesellschaft und das Böse: Eine Kritik der herrschenden Moral (Munich: Paul List, 1967), 309. Hannes Schwenger, Antisexuelle Propaganda: Sexualpolitik in der Kirche (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1969), 34–6. Along related lines, in his caustic evaluation of the Christian Democratic family politics of the Federal Republic, Dietrich Haensch in 1969—drawing extensively on Reich—asserted not only that “genital weakness” was the cause of both fascism and brutality in wartime, but also that Hitler had only needed to intensify already existing bourgeois practices, and that these, in turn, had outlived Hitler: “The tendency to sadism is maintained by diverting the libidinal energies away from the sexual drive and toward the drive for destruction and aggression.” Dietrich Haensch, Repressive Familienpolitik: Sexualunterdrückung als Mittel der Politik (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1969), 66–7. Theodor Bovet, Von Mann zu Mann: Eine Einführung ins Reifealter für junge Männer (Tübingen: Katzmann, 1954), 23; Eduard Spranger, Psychologie des Jugendalters (23 editions with over 100,000 copies sold by 1970), qtd. in Ernst Busche, “Sexualpädagogik als Disziplinierungsmittel: Eine negative Dokumentation über Richtlinien, Methodik und Lehrerverhalten,” Das Argument 56 (Feb. 1970), 28. It is indicative of the profundity of activists’ rage not only that Das Argument, a serious Marxist journal, in 1970 devoted an entire essay to the antimasturbation tendency of most sex education materials, but that the author could not resist taking a direct slap at Spranger: “Spranger too must have been an assiduous onanist.”

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24. Für die Befreiung der kindlichen Sexualität!: Kampf den falschen Erziehern! ed. Zentralrat der sozialistischen Kinderläden West-Berlins (Berlin: Sozialistischer Kinderladen Charlottenburg I, 1969), 88; “Kinderschule Frankfurt, Eschersheimer Landstrasse,” in Erziehung zum Ungehorsam, ed. Gerhard Bott (Frankfurt/Main: März, 1970), 55–6. 25. “Kinderschule Frankfurt,” 54 and 51. 26. “Kinderladen Stuttgart: Bericht über einen Prozess,” in ibid., 21. 27. Für die Befreiung, 35. Furthermore, anyone who insisted on the “hallowed” importance of the mother-child bond was “simply confirming what clerics, National Socialists, and Christian Democrats have already for a long time been preaching from their moral pulpits about ‘the smallest cell of the state—the family.’ ” Kinder im Kollektiv (Berlin: Sozialistischer Kinderladen Charlottenburg I, 1969), 79. 28. Jim Kruse, qtd. in Heiko Gebhart, “Kleine Linke mit grossen Rechten: Berliner APO-Mitglieder experimentieren mit ihren Kindern,” Der Stern, February 22, 1969. 29. See Kinderläden: Revolution, 9–16. 30. See Dagmar Herzog, “‘Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together’: PostHolocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998). 31. See for example “Offene Antwort auf eine katholische Kritik,” Das schwarze Korps, April 17, 1935, 1–2; “Ist das Nacktkultur? Her Stapel entrüstet sich!” Das schwarze Korps, April 24, 1935, 12; “ ‘. . . Unzucht in der Soldatenzeit,’ ” Das schwarze Korps, March 5, 1936, 6; “Das uneheliche Kind,” Das schwarze Korps, April 9, 1936, 6; “Anstössig?” Das schwarze Korps, April 16, 1936, 13. 32. See Dagmar Herzog, “Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of the War,” in Violence and Normality: Toward a Social and Cultural History of Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, eds. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), forthcoming. 33. See Ludwig von Friedeburg, Umfrage in der Intimsphäre (Stuttgart: Enke, 1953), 23–4. Note as well that the numbers endorsing—and admitting having engaged in—premarital sex in West Germany at this time, especially among the women, are considerably higher than the comparable figures from England or the United States. See L. R. England, “Little Kinsey: An Outline of Sex Attitudes in Britain,” Public Opinion Quarterly 13/4 (1949), 587–600; and for a concise summary of Kinsey’s findings for the United States, see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 286. 34. Karl Siegfried Bader, “Die Veränderung der Sexualordnung und die Konstanz der Sittlichkeitsdelikte,” Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 1/3-4 (1950), 217. 35. Franz Arnold, “Sinnlichkeit und Sexualität im Lichte von Theologie und Seelsorge,” Über das Wesen der Sexualität (Stuttgart: Enke, 1952), 1; Johannes Leppich, “Thema 1,” Pater Leppich Spricht, ed. Günther Mees and Günter Graf (Düsseldorf: Bastion, 1952), 44; Maria Jochum, “Frauenfrage 1946,” Frankfurter Hefte 1 (June 1946), 24–5.

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36. Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs, 1940–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1957; German orig. 1952). Contrast the later images of “sex-critic Hitler” in “Die gefallene Natur,” Der Spiegel, May 2, 1966, 58, and of the sexually shy and uptight Himmler in Dieter Duhm, Angst im Kapitalismus (Lampertheim: Kübler, 1972), 102. 37. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Film im Zwielicht (Munich, 1958), 26–9. 38. See Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 1, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1998). As Jeffrey Herf has recently summarized it in a review of these writings, “These are provocative ideas that deserve to be pursued further. Perhaps because the connection between Nazism and sexual repression seems so intuitively obvious, historians of German society and culture under the Nazis … have not yet taken up these bold notions proposed by Marcuse.” Jeffrey Herf, “One-Dimensional Man,” The New Republic, February 1, 1999, 39. 39. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 93, 318. 40. Theodor W. Adorno, “Zum Problem der Familie,” Gesammelte Schriften 20/1 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 305–6. 41. For a particularly direct articulation of this widely held view, see Ulrike Heider, “Freie Liebe und Liebesreligion: Zum Sexualitätsbegriff der 60er und 80er Jahre,” in Sadomasochisten, Keusche, Romantiker: Vom Mythos neuer Sinnlichkeit, ed. Heider (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1986), 93. 42. See “Erst die Liebe, dann die Moral? Alles über die Deutschen (15),” Der Stern 48 (1963), 43–52; and Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung 1958–1964, ed. Elisabeth Noelle and Erich Peter Neumann (Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag für Demoskopie, 1965), 589–90. 43. See Dermatologische Wochenschrift 122/49 (1950), 1180; “Diskussionsbemerkungen (Sexual-wissenschaftliche Arbeitstagung 12. bis 14. April 1950),” Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 1/3-4 (1950); Walter Dittmann, “Die Krisis der Ehe,” Nordwestdeutsche Hefte 2/10 (1947), 34. 44. Michael Schneider, “Fathers and Sons, Retrospectively: The Damaged Relationship Between Two Generations,” New German Critique 31 (1984), 9–10. 45. For the full argument, see Herzog, “Desperately Seeking Normality.” 46. To take just one example, compare the “unspeakability” of female pleasure in 1920s Britain with the prolix discussion of techniques for alleviating female frigidity in 1920s Germany. See Susan Pedersen, “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-making,” Journal of Modern History 63 (Dec. 1991); Sally Alexander, “The Mysteries and Secrets of Women’s Bodies: Sexual knowledge in the first half of the twentieth century,” in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, eds. Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (London: Routledge, 1996); and Atina Grossman, “The New Woman and the Rationalization of Sexuality in Weimar Germany,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

CHAPTER 6

1968 as Event, Milieu, and Ideology1

Jan-Werner Müller

Theorie?—Nein, danke! —Slogan of the alternative movement Philosophy’s sole aim is to become worthy of the event … —Gilles Deleuze

F

or more than three decades, 1968 has been an event in search of an interpretation.2 In Germany (and elsewhere), les événements remain shrouded in mystery—historians, with their fear of touching the “third rail of the present,” have only recently begun to undertake research into wie es eigentlich gewesen. In these still rather tentative forays, they have treaded on seemingly sacred ground and often become polemically opposed to the numerous protagonists whose accounts have tended to mythologize, demonize, or sometimes just neutralize ’68. While there have been a number of more or less illuminating controversies between “witnesses” and “historians” of ’68, both about the events as such and their wider historical meaning, one rather obvious aspect of ’68 has remained curiously neglected.3 This aspect is the actual political thought of the protagonists—or, to put it differently, an answer to the quasi-anthropological question, what did they think they were doing when they were doing politics?4 It has become a cliché that 1968 was a revolution without politics—and, in particular, without a political theory. The by now most common interpretation— that ’68 constituted a major cultural rebellion or at least the first battle in an

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ongoing “culture war”—holds that ’68 began with culture and ended with culture.5 ’68 is simply said to have been a cultural revolution, or a revolution in “lifestyles,” with history essentially acting behind the backs of the protagonists. The enragés, or so the most extreme version of this theory goes, were really the precursors of the “flexible” liberal bourgeoisie of the 1990s, with ’68 a “laboratory for postindustrial society.”6 In short, once the abstruse—and, in any case, irrelevant—theorizing had been subtracted, ’68ers were essentially (or at least practically) libertarians, with their “experiments in living” serving as a perfect preparation for a more fluid and informal kind of capitalism.7 And yet, almost every decade since the sixties has somehow seen the sixties as its precursor—all epochs seem to remain equally close to ’68. Even those, however, who reject such historicism and the cunning of liberal (or neo-liberal) reason and who remain incensed by the revolution on account of its supposed antiliberalism and utopianism, frequently argue that 1968 was in some sense “apolitical.” It was, in a famous phrase, a “romantic regression,” a reincarnation of the German Youth Movement, a reborn vitalism and voluntarism.8 It could then even be cast as a form of “left-wing fascism”—here understood mainly as a belief in direct action and the actioninducing power of myths, whether of the Third World guerrillero or the metropolitan general strike. Moreover, there can be no denying that the events were mostly driven by the media—and themselves drove the media. After all, one important origin of ’68 lies in political-cum-artistic movements such as the Situationists, bent on exposing the “society of the spectacle” through the curious mixture of neo-Marxism, Dada, and surrealism.9 To a politics that was no more than a spectacle, one had to respond with provocations—whose success in turn was measured by the very media which one held responsible for parts of the spectacle.10 Just as Vietnam was the first media war, so ’68 turned out to be the first “media revolution”—and a global one to boot. ’68, then, was driven by images and collective memories (and in turn largely survived as images and as a collective memory).11 Consequently, the “text” or even “texture” of ’68 is made up of much more than the then canonical, but now almost forgotten, political tracts of Johannes Agnoli, Oscar Negt, and Hans-Jürgen Krahl—the dramatic gestures of direct action, the unrecorded speeches, the lost flyers and torn-down affiches are as important for the text and context of 1968.12 Yet, ’68 was hardly the first (and not the last) political rebellion that was sustained by symbolism and that became absorbed into the “spectacle.” If anything, it only strengthened trends that were already there. Moreover, just as the students remained fixated on the past, so did their opponents. Collective myths and memories—referring to 1848, 1871, 1917,

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or 1936 in the French case, for instance—charged ’68, and ’68 in turn became a collective myth. However, it was the opponents of the student movement who have proven most eager to reduce ’68 to a historical farce, or at least an instance of an eternal recurrence of protest by the jeunesse dorée. Analysis, then and now, remains driven by analogy. Alternatively, a focus on political theory—or a lack thereof—has been displaced by sociological approaches. In recent scholarship, the student movement has been reconceptualized as a “new social movement” or even as a “single-issue movement,” with its distinctive “cognitive orientation,” “cognitive structure of ideas,” “frame,” or simply “ideology”—which then becomes merely one minor variable in a larger sociological theory.13 Again, the suspicion is not unjustified that the experiences of the 1970s and 1980s, with their rise of citizens’ initiatives, are projected back onto the 1960s. When generational conflict and demographic growth have been added as variables to such sociological explanations, it is striking how frequently and fervently the protagonists of ’68 have dismissed these factors.14 In itself, this is of course no reason to discard them—but the refusal of such sociological reductionism is valid insofar as the students did not initially see themselves as a social movement and failed precisely in their attempt to become a sustained movement. In their own perception, they were strong on ideas— and weak on organization. In the same vein, there have been many attempts to explain 1968 psychologically. There can be little doubt that the affective side of ’68 was indispensable in mobilizing intellectual energies for theory, even if theory and vitality (or vitalism) then also came to be seen by the students as incompatible.15 According to Dutschke, for instance, ’68 was not about “abstract theory,” but “existential disgust.”16 Arguably everywhere in the Western world, the student movement had its origins in such feelings of disgust in the face of obvious repression—whether of minorities (African-Americans in the United States), colonials (Algerians by France), or more indirectly, the crimes of the past (the Nazi legacy in West Germany). In every single instance, these clearly visible injustices led the students to theory—and theory eventually came to be seen as equally obvious as the concrete injustices. Again, already at the time, Alexander Mitscherlich and other psychiatrists diagnosed the students as “fatherless,” and many observers have followed Raymond Aron in dismissing ’68 as a “psychodrama.”17 In retrospect as well, the generational conflict between war and post-war generations appears as an ideological folie à deux.18 Yet, the focus on psychological and de facto biological factors presumes what it seeks to prove: that political theory was not an important part of ’68, and that its real significance, at the level of both causes and effects, was a matter of “the social,” not “the political.”19

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Finally, there is a theoretical (and normative) argument that makes the ’68ers apolitical. Since at least one strand of theory led them to be opposed to all hierarchies and bureaucracies, they thereby automatically became opposed to all institutions. Being anti-institutional, or so this line of reasoning goes, is then equivalent to being apolitical or even “antipolitical.” Any political thought that denies that modern societies are characterized by deep disagreements, and therefore downplays the importance of mediating political conflict through commonly agreed procedures, according to liberal reasoning, is not political at all. A utopian anarchism, then, not only left the students without a real political program—it also made them vulnerable to the temptations of substituting permanent direct action for the painstaking work of organizing a coalition of the dissatisfied within the universities, the schools, and the factories. Of course, ’68 itself called into question traditional (and particularly institutional) concepts of the political, tearing down the ideological barricades between the public and the private, and making culture and everyday experiences explicitly political. “Culture,” and “cultural inequality” in particular, were indispensable for the “oppressive structures” theorized by the leaders of ’68.20 In that sense, the retrospective dichotomy between politics and culture is one that cannot do justice to the students’ thought. Even from within the movement, however, has come the cry that the students had to face the Grand Coalition and other political challenges without a political theory. The students simply lacked an idea of how the domination of the bourgeoisie over the workers was politically mediated—and therefore also proved unable to understand actual political institutions.21 In short, then, friends and enemies (and academic observers) of 1968 have all taken it for granted that the political thought of the ’68ers could be safely neglected, dismissing the “Great Marxisant Fallacy” of the students and their supporters with nonchalance as being irrelevant to the actual unfolding of events.22 In this chapter, I would like to question the assumption that ’68 was a political event without political thought—although that political thought might well have become embarrassing for the protagonists. I concede at the outset that the relationship of the student leaders to theory was indeed altogether ambivalent. They sought theoretical superiority and cohesion vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie, but also wanted to conduct a revolution, not a seminar. ’68 was to a large degree constituted by spontaneous action, a self-declared permanent revolution which left little time for strategic thinking and was sustained by effervescent media such as the poster and the flyer. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit put it, the students and their leaders were “learning through action,” while Rudi Dutschke preached the “unity of action and reflection.”23 The strategy of “enlightenment through provocation” necessarily entailed an

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element of unpredictability, as events outran whatever theoretical premeditation there had been.24 To acknowledge the essential “eventness” of ’68, as well as its psychological dynamics, however, does not mean that the ’68ers cannot be understood in terms of how they thought about politics, or, even more narrowly, political institutions. Political thought took place in a shifting cultural context— but then again, it always does. Political ideology was a “group phenomenon,” full of inner contradictions, just as much as it was a matter of individual master thinkers—but then again, it always is. ’68 was centered on a political Gedankenmasse, a chaotic “mass of thought”—but so is any comparable political event.25 What made ’68 different is precisely the fact that the students themselves were constantly struggling with the question of how theory and event were to inform each other. The students, driven by what in retrospect has even been called Theoriewut [a fury of theory], were eager to revise Marxist theory, and to invent a tradition of “Western Marxism” to come to terms with the changes under way in “late capitalism.”26 Yet, they were also looking to events to reconstruct theory, and at the same time were afraid that events would somehow subvert theory for good. For some, theory was needed to give legitimacy to the programs of direct action and spontaneity—for, others it was merely another chapter in the history of Marxist frustrations about how to reconcile theory and praxis. Almost all of them, however, ultimately put their trust in events themselves to somehow “practically problematize”—as one of the most telling phrases went—the elements of theory which seemed doubtful. What has to be explained, then, is not so much why political thought became inspired by many different, often incompatible sources, not so much why it was enmeshed with different cultural contexts and subject to logical and cultural constraints, and not so much why it was disseminated in new and often ingenious ways, but why particular ideological fragments came to form the potent mix they did in 1968, why the students managed to loosen cultural constraints on political thought, and why certain ’68 values eventually came to pervade culture as a whole. After all, it is unlikely that 1968 would have become ’68 if it had simply been about taboo breaking. Taboo breaking might have been more effective than theorizing—but, at least to some extent, the former still depended on the latter. This essay seeks to do justice to both the aesthetic aspects of 1968, which have been the focus of influential recent analyses, and the essential “eventness” of ’68—but it focuses mainly on the theoretical elements which have almost completely fallen into oblivion, especially after 1989. In particular, I seek to uncover how theory and event were supposed to be related in the minds of the student leaders—and how core concepts of the movement evolved under the

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pressure of events. In the context of this essay, I shall only very briefly relate event and ideology to some of the large-scale historical interpretations—or myths—that have become prevalent in the decades since 1968. For now, I shall also postpone a discussion of how ’68 values became influential in German culture more generally. Before disentangling the various strands of political thought in the student movement, however, I want to briefly review the argument for seeing ’68 as, above all, an aesthetic “happening.” 1968 as Event: Surrealist Epiphanies It has become commonplace to distinguish between a “leftist–socialist” and an “antiauthoritarian” wing of the German New Left, and the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund [Socialist Student Association of Germany]) in particular.27 The latter, however, was in itself only one part of a much larger “extraparliamentarian” coalition of the Ostermarschbewegung (the peace movement directed primarily against rearmament in the 1950s and early 1960s), the opposition to the proposed Emergency Laws, and the student movement itself.28 However, there was arguably a “third way” of student protest, namely the radical “communards” who partly emerged from the German section of the Situationist International and who took the carnevalesque elements of 1968 to their extremes.29 They were eager to expose the workings of the “society of the spectacle” and create situations according to the principle of détournement. As selfdeclared “pariah-elites,” they sought to stage “events” which might or might not find an appropriate interpreter and which were free from all bourgeois concerns about “legitimacy.”30 Situationist action had to be direct and immediate, and ideally would inspire new passions and desires, redrawing the entire map of the “psycho-geography” of the modern city.31 As the German literary theorist and critic Karl Heinz Bohrer in particular has argued, they celebrated a kind of “political surrealism,” resolutely resistant to Critical Theory and the claims of intellectualized utopias.32 They relied on the surrealist “shock” as a seemingly non-instrumental political means and, in a deeper sense, fit the description of “romantics” most easily on various accounts.33 They thoroughly aestheticized everyday experience and, in a sense, treated political situations as mere “occasions” to exercise their creative imaginations. But they also affirmed the “suddenness” of aesthetic experience, and in particular the chaos as well as contingency of the experience of the modern city.34 Unlike the orthodox Marxist theorists of the movement—and unlike Guy Debord even—they were not truly interested in theories of alienation. What they cared about was the free play of the imagination and the creation of new structures of feeling. If there is any real connection between 1968 and romanticism, it can be found here.

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Conversely, those who dismissed 1968 as a psychodrama or a carnival were right—but this was not at all contrary to the intentions of the Situationist-cum-surrealist actors.35 Creating physical and psychological unrest, staging drama for its own sake, was part of a general strategy to subvert bourgeois patterns of everyday life. There was a vague sense that, ultimately, such “subversive actions” were supposed to awaken the masses in the repressive society from their slumber. The end might have conformed to some of Critical Theory’s tenets and been in line with the general aim of “consciousness-raising,” which Rudi Dutschke advocated—but the means were a mixture of Benjaminian Bilddenken [thinking-in-pictures] and a playful reveling in exercises of épater les bourgeois.36 Some theorists—and, once again, Bohrer in particular—have argued that the “situations” created by the German Situationists did indeed provoke “epiphanies,” which ultimately added up to a cultural revolution.37 Quite early on—and not surprisingly—there emerged a split between Situationist figures like Frank Böckelmann and Dieter Kunzelmann on the one hand and, on the other, the antiauthoritarian Rudi Dutschke as well as the more orthodox socialist theorists.38 The latter were all seriously devoted to the purity of Marxist theory—strongly flavored with a Protestant, even puritan, devotion to the revolutionary cause.39 Where the antiauthoritarians were struggling to reconcile the demands of provocative spontaneity in response to revolutionary occasions with the need to organize the movement, the members of Subversive Aktion boldly declared that the meaning of organization was its failure.40 Of course, the libertarian “experiments in living” were not nearly as liberating as the protagonists claimed—in fact, they often resulted in the worst kind of sectarianism and intense psychological terror for some of the participants. But ultimately they did provide a model that partially spawned Germany’s large “alternative milieu,” which in various diluted forms has persisted to this day.41 They also contributed to what Jürgen Habermas— 20 years after the events—called a “fundamental liberalization,” which included a revolution in life-styles, but also the formation of increasingly postmaterialist political attitudes.42 In Bohrer’s seminal interpretation, this romanticism was not a regression, but the true advance accomplished in 1968—a step toward a more modern liberal, ironic and aestheticized society.43 What made 1968 a “German ideology” was precisely the fact that it was so theory-laden—and impregnated with philosophies of history and almost apocalyptical expectations among the theory-crazed leaders. At the time, and from within the movement, however, things looked rather different. Ironically, the students were faced with the reproach that their theories were insufficient, or at least insufficiently sophisticated, for

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instance by Habermas. But in retrospect, the social movements as well as the intellectual Left of the 1970s and 1980s seemed to complain of a “loss of theory” after 1968. “Theory envy” became a defining feature of the post1968 Left—whereas the loss of theory became celebrated by those who emphasized the aesthetic and astheticizing elements of ’68.44 1968 as Legal Theory: Living Up to the Basic Law But what then was the political theory the ’68ers actually subscribed to? Of course, there was considerable internal pluralism, a variety of approaches held together not necessarily by any real ideological core, but by the feeling of being part of a common movement, of being driven by similar sorts of dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, there were a number of core concepts and ideas that remained by and large undisputed at least among the antiauthoritarians and the more traditional socialist wing of the movement. The left-socialists, however, were in turn split between orthodox “hardliners,” mostly based in Marburg and Cologne, and a majority of “democratic socialists,” who subscribed to the Basic Law. The hardliners followed an orthodox dialectical materialism, and, as has become clear in recent years, orders from East Berlin.45 The democratic socialists also believed that a genuine class struggle was being fought in the Federal Republic, but they explicitly sought to remain within the framework of the Basic Law. They diagnosed that the constitution was increasingly hollowed out and, in any case, had never been fully realized in its social and democratic aspirations. They largely followed Wolfgang Abendroth in his teachings from the 1950s that the Basic Law did not specify a particular economic system and that it left the option of a socialist economy open.46 In a famous controversy with conservative jurist Ernst Forsthoff, the socialist Partisanenprofessor [partisan professor] Abendroth had argued that the Federal Republic was primarily a Sozialstaat, i.e., a welfare state, rather than a pure Rechtsstaat, which guaranteed only the rule of law for a free-market society.47 The “legal road to socialism” implied a defense of legal norms already achieved and a continuous struggle for their realization.48 In line with Abendroth’s reasoning, the democratic socialists sought wide-ranging redistribution and a democratization of the economy.49 The core concept of this strand of ’68 theory remained a “socialist democracy,” which could be realized within the Basic Law. Like Jürgen Habermas, the democratic socialists argued that liberaldemocratic institutions had been increasingly hollowed out.50 Parliament in particular no longer reflected genuine conflict in society and no longer provided a forum for real deliberation, but had instead become a stage for corporatist compromise—an impression strongly reinforced by the formation of the Grand Coalition and the seeming disappearance of any effective parliamentary opposition after 1966.

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In addition, the theory of the formierte Gesellschaft [aligned society], first expounded by the conservative political theorist Rüdiger Altmann in 1965 and more or less officially adopted by then Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, seemed to hail the end of liberal democracy.51 It was seen as the first step from pluralism to a legally sanctioned corporatism in which parties, unions, and employers’ associations would form a harmonious whole. Such pluralism restrained from above could potentially be the first step on the road to a full-fledged authoritarianism. The “aligned society” seemed designed to eliminate whatever genuine socioeconomic (and potentially political) pluralism there was due to the power of the proletariat. Since the power of the unions had increased during the 1950s and early 1960s, or so the students thought, the state now found it necessary to reduce their room for maneuver. The prospect of the Emergency Laws then appeared to complete the picture of a society on the legal road to dictatorship, as they seemed designed for the case of a sudden increase in class conflict.52 Yet, the antidote to this threatening situation remained not the abolition of the actually existing state as such, but a strategy firmly contained within the parameters of “bourgeois legality,” which supposedly included an “extraparliamentary opposition” charged with the task of defending democracy. Yet, whether a defense of democracy was possible at all still depended above all on the level and development of class consciousness among the workers.53 In retrospect, Abendroth had to concede that, by and large, the workers had not been truly mobilized by the specter of dictatorship. It was only with the help of the students and the workers who defied the official decisions of the trade union leadership that West German parliamentary democracy had survived the Grand Coalition and the promulgation of the Emergency Laws. Therefore, the student movement had not moved the Federal Republic closer to the socialist democracy Abendroth and his followers envisaged—but it had at least served as a bulwark against dictatorship and a return to “post-liberal” fascism. Moreover, the hope went, it had set into motion learning processes at the end of which both students and workers should find novel ways for bringing about socialist democracy within the parameters of legality during the next capitalist crisis.54 For Abendroth and his students, the firm belief remained that only socialism could ultimately make society safe for democracy. 1968 as Political Theory: Johannes Agnoli and the Ambivalence of Parliamentarism Johannes Agnoli was arguably the political theorist of the German 1968, and his thoughts merit a longer exposition, not least because they have frequently been caricatured as a crude anti-parliamentarism similar to the one the radical Left and Right espoused during the Weimar Republic. In many ways,

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Agnoli’s theory merely mirrored that of Rüdiger Altmann. Altmann had praised the potential of pluralism for the purpose of social integration in the absence of a major external enemy, while warning at the same time that pluralism should always be tightly contained.55 Agnoli identified precisely this strategy as the latest “transformation” of bourgeois democracy, whose aim was to make actual democracy impossible. Agnoli (who had begun his intellectual career as a Trotskyist in Italy) and his followers started from the premise that the “bourgeois state” and capitalism were inextricably linked.56 Under the conditions of capitalism—whether early or late—no genuine, or “open” and “radical,” democracy could ever be realized. The bourgeois state systematically contained “the political,” i.e., the room for political maneuver, by limiting popular sovereignty and the autonomous articulation of the desires of the population. However, rather than reverting to fascism—which was, after all, a failed strategy for controlling and diverting the mass desire for political self-determination—the bourgeois state under the conditions of “organized capitalism” transformed the existing institutions of parliamentary democracy in such a way as to make revolutionary change impossible without resorting to open oppression. This “transformation of democracy” meant a “modernization of the state in the sense of an adjustment to the new forms of collective life (the so-called mass society) as well as an improvement in the sense of a modernization of the means of domination.”57 The need for modernization was caused by “technical–economic progress,” but was also driven by the “unified interests of the dominating groups.”58 These “dominating groups” had a collective interest in defusing democracy as a potential means of what Harold Laski had called “revolution by consent” and what Jakob Burckhardt had referred to as a potential “permanent revolution.”59 Parliamentary democracy was, after all, not the most secure guarantee for capitalism. It was by its nature ambivalent. Since parliament could in theory accurately reflect the basic social antagonism in society, and since it might be capable of overcoming it through majority decisions, it might become the springboard to socialism. Alternatively, it could be a highly effective means of preventing open terror and fascism by keeping up the facade of a pseudo-democracy to repress the popular will.60 Agnoli claimed that parliament and a plurality of parties were essential in transforming democracy into a more effective means of domination. The kind of “unification” or political uniformity that the fascist state could only impose by one-party rule was now achieved through what was called “aligned pluralism.” Society had not overcome the basic dualism (and antagonism) between capitalists and workers, but the pluralism on display in parliament veiled this fact most effectively. Through the negotiations between different

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parties and “social partners” such as employers’ associations and unions, social peace and the illusion of democratic participation for the masses could be maintained. Individuals would see only the “republic of the market”—not the “despotism of the factory.”61 The “parliamentarization” as well as the personalization of conflicts, making them a matter of individual moral and legal conduct of politicians, ensured the “blindness of the masses.” The twist of Agnoli’s theory, then, was that in fact parliamentarism constituted the most effective way of keeping the masses away from actual power. It presented a pseudo-pluralism in the “sphere of circulation,” while hiding the basic antagonism in the sphere of production. Only one pole of the basic socioeconomic opposition was represented in parliament, since the socialist parties had become integrated into the “oligarchy” and all parties had effectively evolved into “cartel parties,” which had fused with the state. In short, representation in parliament was the best means of repression. In addition, however, the institution of parliament had itself become thoroughly corrupted. What Hans Kelsen had called “the fiction of representation” ensured that it was not the people, but the state that was represented in parliament.62 Legislative and executive power became fused, and parliament served as a de facto transmission belt between the oligarchy and the people. Borrowing heavily from Michels and Ostrogorski, Agnoli argued that not only had parties become oligarchic, but parliament itself had developed an oligarchic structure. Publicity and public reasoning, the characteristics of nineteenth-century liberalism, had been replaced by a “representation,” which did not in fact reproduce, but repressed the fundamental social antagonism. Rational deliberation could never address actual social conflict, because conflict remained hidden from view—even though, of course, rational deliberation had become impossible in an oligarchic parliament in any case. Throughout this transformation into a democracy that kept the demos out of the doors of parliament, the official ideology of democracy was left intact—the only semantic change was that languages of humanism and technocratic necessities were supposed to supplant the language of class struggle among the workers’ representatives. Parties no longer knew workers and capitalists—only human beings as such. They no longer implemented platforms, they only observed economic and technological constraints. What a conservative politician had called “the abolition of the proletariat” only meant that class consciousness could be eroded through increasing mass consumption and other “grand attempts at collective corruption.”63 Class and other social cleavages were erased imperceptibly, and the language of humanism effaced socioeconomic difference. Thus, citizens were turned into consumers, and class consciousness was replaced by a mystified Staatsbürgerbewußtsein [civic consciousness].64

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As soon as the workers came to believe that “the state is us,” or to embrace the liberal illusion that the state stood above society as a neutral arbiter, the bourgeoisie had succeeded in defusing the ambivalent potential of parliamentarism. Ideologically tying the people to political institutions (and restricting their institutional imagination or “social imaginary”) was much more effective—and less dangerous—than open terror.65 Legality (through the “constitutionalizing function” of parliament) thereby produced legitimacy. Yet, while the means were humane and peaceful, the end of social integration was not. The priority of the means over the end was simply another bourgeois ruse and prevented the masses from perceiving the priority of real emancipation over pseudo-democratic procedures.66 Bread and circuses, after all, were more inhumane than violent revolution. And in any case, Agnoli argued, perpetual social peace inside the state was preserved not for humane reasons, but because it proved necessary for continuous capitalist expansion, both economic and political. Under a democratic veneer the state would then extend its rule over any part of society and declare a state of emergency wherever it saw fit.67 The “emergency state” was the necessary continuation and even “crowning” of the welfare state, and could be justified by the claim that emergency measures were necessary to preserve the “general welfare.”68 The state had a vital interest in repressing social conflict, and therefore had to extend its reign continuously—in fact, the line separating state and society, administration and economy, became increasingly blurred.69 Such a situation, however, already meant a de facto permanent state of exception. Consequently, there was no reason to stay within the limits of bourgeois legality, as Abendroth and his followers advocated, since bourgeois legality had de facto already been abolished. The recurrent breach of the constitution, it seemed, had itself become part of the real constitution of the “emergency state.” In short, then, the state had been transformed into an authoritarian one without any outward change—and parliament remained essential in legitimating this situation. Just as Pareto, the “Marx of the bourgeoisie,” had advised Mussolini to keep parliament as an “ornament” while transforming the Italian state into a fascist one, so the West German elite was engaged in a particularly perfidious game of antidemocratic deception.70 Thus arose what in retrospect appears like a full-fledged antiliberal antiparliamentarism, reminiscent indeed of the contempt a Sorel had for the socialists in parliament who only furthered their own interests.71 Like Sorel, Agnoli and his followers believed that left-wing parties had effectively abandoned the workers and become, in Léon Blum’s famous phrase, the “loyal stewards” of the bourgeoisie. They had become more invested in social control and the satisfaction of economic wants than any genuine transformation of society.

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Like Carl Schmitt and Habermas, Agnoli and his followers believed that in the nineteenth century, the notables in parliament had been devoted to open and rational discussion, and that there had indeed once been free political competition (which, of course, had been restricted to a narrow franchise).72 Like Schmitt and Habermas, they told a story of decline in which parliament had become a site of backroom dealings, in which powerful social interests brokered secret, undemocratic agreements. In other words, like Schmitt and Habermas, Agnoli and his followers diagnosed a “refeudalization” of representation: representation had become representation before, rather than for, the people.73 Elections did not present a choice, and parliament did not represent the actual complexity of society. And Habermas, Schmitt, and Agnoli all shared a roughly Rousseauean definition of democracy—even if none of them felt that an ideal of complete direct democracy was realizable in complex commercial societies.74 They also, to varying degrees, clung to what Bernard Manin has called the “ideal of resemblance,” in which the representatives should resemble the represented as much as possible—even though Agnoli did not hold that such a homogeneity would necessarily produce a proper defense of the workers’ interests.75 Agnoli, however, went further than either Schmitt or Habermas in claiming that representation had actually become repression. Whereas Schmitt prophesied the necessary disintegration of parliamentarism and the return of a sovereign decision-maker, Agnoli saw a steady state of manipulation and repression through parliamentarism, against which one had to intervene politically. It would not even be sufficient, if the representatives came to resemble the represented—above all, representatives had to represent the repressed pole of the social antagonism, and, crucially, the real interests of the workers. In the back of Agnoli’s theory operated a rather traditional Marxist theory of ideology, in which the reproduction of bourgeois society required the persistence of false beliefs.76 A diagnosis of a crisis of representation, then, could lead in many different theoretical (and practical) directions—and neither dictatorship nor direct action necessarily followed as remedies. Yet, according to Agnoli, what was the remedy for this situation? The answers to this question remained not only vague, but often contradictory. On the one hand, Agnoli hinted that societies that had not completely disintegrated were essentially beyond reform. On the other hand, he argued, in line with Kant’s “Perpetual Peace,” that international peace slightly increased the chances of “liberation.”77 Bernd Rabehl agreed that with the erection of the Berlin Wall, the GDR had come to be seen as less of a threat, and that the weakening of anticommunist ideology had been a vital precondition for the rise of the student movement.78 But then again, the presence of communist parties in some Western European countries also might alleviate a few of

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the problems posed by the transformation of democracy. Ultimately, however, the process seemed essentially unstoppable within the current parameters of legality.79 Clearly, then, the bourgeois state had to be abolished, including the institutions of parliamentarism which were controlled by the oligarchy. Yet, Agnoli insisted that this had to be brought about through a “peaceful revolutionary process”—without much further specification.80 Democracy, then, was possible only under the conditions of socialism. Agnoli and his fellow theorists never wavered in making two assumptions, namely that liberalism had brought about fascism and could do so again anytime, and that advanced capitalist societies had reached an age of abundance in which the abolition of “irrational domination” had in practice become possible.81 Yet a further background belief held that post-fascist liberalism had learnt its lesson in manipulating the masses to such an extent that the transformation of democracy actually appeared to be in their interest. For the proponents of this view, then, ’68 had to be about a genuine “change of political form”—any integration into existing institutions was condemned to failure, and only a complete political break could be counted as an adequate answer to the covert transformation of democracy.82 Yet, the potential agents of such a change remained unaware of its necessity. After all, a revolutionary subject that does not recognize that it is a revolutionary subject is no revolutionary subject at all.83 Fascism had caused a practical and theoretical caesura for the workers’ movement, and attempts at reconstructing a proper class consciousness seemed to take the students into waters largely uncharted by theory.84 At the same time, theory seemed to prohibit the students from seeing themselves as simply students. Rather arbitrarily, they began to search for other potential revolutionary subjects. At one point, it was prisoners, racial minorities, then schoolchildren, and, of course, for some, the students themselves.85 The more sober leaders of the movement, however, recognized that the students would not do as a revolutionary subject and sought to “practically problematize” the “traditional theories of the workers’ movement”—without much success, though.86 After all, Agnoli’s theory, while highly influential among radicals, provided few specific guidelines on how to halt the “involution” of democracy. If anything, it made the students dismiss the promises of “more democracy” made by the Social Democratic government elected in 1969.87 Taking Agnoli’s ideas a step further, the more radicalized students would revert to old communist arguments about the Social Democrats as “social fascists” who were already integrated into the system. In that sense, while of little direct impact, Agnoli’s ideas helped to set in motion an ultimately self-sustaining radicalization among the activists who became increasingly immune to the real transformations of West German democracy.

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Not surprisingly, Agnoli and others in retrospect came to see the passivity of the proletariat as the “most tragic aspect” of the German ’68.88 A mobilized proletariat would have been the obvious agent for changing the “political form.” Yet at the time, one of the fateful ideas of some student leaders was that the workers would understand only the language of violence.89 While there had indeed been a few defectors of the proletariat to the rebelling bourgeoisie (to reverse an old Marxist dictum), such figures remained few and far between, and, in some cases, ultimately resorted to terrorism. The real tragedy, then, was not one of the proletariat, but of a theory that could not find a real foothold in society and seemed to remain immune to events. The Ambivalence of Antiauthoritarianism: The Great Refusal Revisited Both hardliners and democratic socialists stood to varying degrees in opposition to the antiauthoritarian part of the movement. In Berlin, the antiauthoritarians were centered around Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl; while in Frankfurt, Hans-Jürgen Krahl emerged as the theoretical leader of a movement that saw itself in theory as leaderless. What united them—and provided a link with the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School as well as Herbert Marcuse— was the firm belief that the working class could no longer be regarded as an even potentially revolutionary subject. As for Agnoli and his followers, the working class had become conservative, even counterrevolutionary. Instead, for a while even the antiauthoritarian theorists put their trust in the students as a possible “vanguard”—even though hardly anybody dared to put it that way—and supported various Third World liberation movements. They used a concept of “totality” to draw metropolitan struggles and Third World movements together. The concepts of partisanship and totality were supposed to support each other and both be grounded in a conception of world history.90 Moreover, Third World struggles also taught them the morality of an uncompromising kind of politics.91 Where in the metropolis they could only witness oppression, the Third World suffered from actual, direct exploitation (although it was never explained how this Sartrean distinction was to be compatible with actual Marxism).92 Ultimately, or so a common assumption went, it was in the Third World that “new men” were to be born.93 Dutschke and his allies adopted Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” and other elements of the older Critical Theory—with a decidedly Marcusian twist. Marcuse also added to the movement’s libertarian, selfconsciously hedonistic and antiauthoritarian flavor. It was the mixture of Marxism and psychoanalysis that constituted the ideological core for ’68

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antiauthoritarianism—and at the same time a symbolic surplus, as the two theories, which the National Socialists had persecuted, and which found it difficult to reestablish themselves in West Germany after 1945 were also a potent weapon vis-à-vis the parents. The adoration of the Third World in turn provided a safe outlet for anti-Americanism and resentment vis-à-vis the victors of the Second World War. Like their French counterparts, the German antiauthoritarians diagnosed the bureaucratization of both state and economy—in both West and East.94 Autonomy became the core concept of the movement and was to be realized in all areas of social life. Direct democracy, direct administration or selfmanagement, and antiauthoritarian education (or “education to disobey”) went together. The theoretically sanctioned alternative to a sham parliamentarism was a vision of direct democracy in politics and self-management in the economy. Yet, unlike French theorists such as Claude Lefort and other members of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, German thinkers never had a full-fledged theory of autogestion.95 Neither did they have a real theory of anti-totalitarianism, in the way that the French had in the works of Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis.96 Part of the problem was clearly that if there was any use of the concept at all, capitalism became the main instance of totalitarianism—especially in Marcuse’s theorizing about “repressive tolerance.”97 German student leaders were also likely to assign greater autonomy to the state than, for instance, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and most French thinkers did. And, on the whole, they were less likely to put their hope in the general strike as the moment of the transformation of capitalism (or the transformation of democracy). It was no accident that the Germans were likely to give more credence to the autonomy of the state and the need for direct action—in fact, an inverted étatisme and Aktionismus (a belief in direct action) came to depend on each other. For the metropolis, the student theorists reapplied a diagnosis that Max Horkheimer had first made in the darkest decades of the 1930s and 1940s.98 According to Dutschke and Krahl, the West German system could best be described with the label of “integral etatism”—a concept applied to a state in which manipulation from above was so pervasive that open state violence was no longer necessary.99 Not surprisingly, the remedy for such a situation proved difficult to find. At their more peaceful moments, Dutschke and Krahl seemed to put their faith in a kind of council democracy slowly built up from below. Berlin, as a strategic revolutionary flash point between East and West, was supposed to be the site of such a council republic opposed to both Western imperialism and Eastern Stalinism. The “Free State of WestBerlin” as an “association of free individuals” was to become a “Hong Kong” in central Europe, or even a giant “civic university” for teaching the world

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a lesson in direct democracy.100 Such a city would combine central planning and automation, that is production planned by computers, with individual civic autonomy. But, if nothing else, West-Berlin, as an “international center of subversion,” could house an ever-expanding, self-organizing “countermilieu,” which one day might serve as the basis of a more stringent organization of the movement.101 Increasingly, however, such central European utopias were displaced by more violent solutions to the problem of integral etatism. According to Dutschke’s ultimate assessment, only an urban guerrilla, modeled on South American terrorists, might disrupt such an all-pervasive social control.102 Such a guerrilla would operate from within the “safe havens” of the universities and form part of a European front against the U.S. and the Eastern bloc.103 These ideas became more and more attractive, not least because attempts at organizing the movement as a whole into a party or even just a small vanguard party were failing. Eventually, the aversion to parliamentary procedures and the perceived need to reconstruct theory through praxis would tie in with a call to direct action, which in turn seemed guided by the maxim “l’idée vient en parlant.”104 “Enlightenment through action” seemed to promise a shortcut out of the theory-praxis dilemma under the conditions of late capitalism.105 As Cohn-Bendit put it, “We could not guess what turn the events were going to take, but that did not bother us—all that mattered was that, at long last, we were all united in action.”106 In the same vein, for the German antiauthoritarian leaders, the classical theorists came to seem like “rusty armor” who gave nothing more than illusionary strength. Given the need for immediate action, the uses of theory became increasingly tactical, and claims about “practical theory” appeared as mere euphemisms to legitimate the latest turn of events—as critics from within the movement already recognized.107 Dutschke, Krahl, and Marcuse eventually all advocated open violence gegen Sachen [against objects].108 Violence could be justified as long as it was supposed to end all violence. Such direct action then led many liberals, Social Democrats, and even democratic socialists to disown the antiauthoritarian radicals—most prominently Habermas, who charged the students with “left fascism” in 1967.109 What he meant by that was largely a Sorelian “fascism of direct action,” a belief in an action-inducing myth of the bourgeois or fascist enemy. A voluntarist identification with Third World movements seemed to short-circuit theory—and to leave behind the melancholy about having lost the “bourgeois subject” and not being able to replace it with a liberated proletariat.110 In such circumstances, expressive and symbolic action became a proof of radicalness—and, in addition, politics and violence became thoroughly

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aestheticized.111 This made politics also more concrete and led to what one might call a left-wing personalization of politics. On the one hand, this applied to the movement itself: As it became increasingly difficult to solve the question of organization, organizational deficits had to be made up by charismatic leadership, even what Krahl called “irrational authorities.”112 On the other hand, personalization also applied to the enemy outside. Because they did not believe in institutions, violence against persons seemed justified, since it would bring about the collapse of institutions that rested on personalities more than on principles. Institutions, in any case, had lost their legitimacy, even if they retained their legality.113 Since “situations” always seemed to require some spontaneous, expressive action, there was ultimately a path from the seemingly harmless Situationism of the early 1960s to the direct political action and decisionism that came to characterize the terrorism of the 1970s.114 A situation, after all, requires a decision—and conceptually, the situation understood as a “break” of normality (and legality) came to be associated with the “groundless” decision that immediately leads to direct, expressive action. Consequently, the movement increasingly came to depend on what Frank Böckelmann called a “succession of occasions”—in short, occasionalism and decisionism went hand in hand.115 It was also no accident, then, that Dutschke increasingly resorted to the thought of the early Lukács, in which he found the very decisionism he himself came to favor.116 Occasionalism, existentialism, decisionism— such approaches did not in any direct sense cause the ultimate resort to terrorism with its radical “suspension of the ethical”—but they made for a constellation in which the move toward terrorism had a coherent inner logic.117 In the end, the students gave in to the temptation of collapsing violence, domination, power, and authority into each other.118 There was simply nothing between the authoritarian state and the antiauthoritarian movement— and the movement needed momentum, even at the price of irrational direct action.119 In such a polarized situation, the state had to be pushed to the extreme, all mediation of conflict had to be resisted, social relations had to be stripped naked—until the state came to be seen for what it was, power founded on violence. Conflict should never be mediated, but always escalated. Thus, the students came to subscribe to a decisionism that always asked the ultimate question of quis iudicabit? The state should reveal its true face, declare the state of emergency, and admit that authority was nothing but violence. Political symbolism and political immediacy allowed the activists to circumvent the questions of representation and the revolutionary subject altogether—but at the price of ultimate political ineffectiveness and a very real loss in human lives.

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Conclusion: Political Thought between Irony and Praxis It seems a significant simplification to understand 1968 as a social movement or “single-purpose movement” avant la lettre. The sheer diversity of theoretical (and practical) concerns and its sheer eventness rebel against such an interpretation. Rather, 1968 was, above all, itself a situation, which led to a new configuration of logical and cultural constraints on political thought. ’68, one might say, was not about a movement, but political thought on the move.120 And many times, moving and mobilization came to make up for the deficits in legitimation. The student movement rose and fell with the dilemmas of representation and organization. While the diagnosis of a genuine crisis of representation seemed rather plausible with the formation of the Grand Coalition, the idea that representation actually equaled repression came to be more and more questionable as West German democracy proved capable of a change of government in 1969 and, in subsequent decades, of integrating citizens’ initiatives and, eventually, the Greens. Yet, of course, from the perspective of the proponents of the transformation thesis, such integration only seemed further proof of the perfidious nature of the system. On the other hand, the inability of the students to find ways of forming a coalition with the “representative of a liberated humanity,” i.e., the proletariat, could be seen as evidence that theory had not kept up with the demands of the present stage of capitalism. According to Krahl, the intelligentsia had to serve as the “collective theorist of the proletariat.” In other words, “theory was compelled to constitute itself anew as practical consciousness without a given organizational base.”121 One might say that the ’68ers dealt with this lack of theory under new conditions creatively.122 Yet, or so a common melancholic glance back often suggested, rather than undertaking the painstaking labor of theory for the sake of finding new ways of organization, action came to substitute for organization. And quoting the Marxist classics and other authorities (or antiauthorities) came to substitute for actual empirical work, while the ever more pressing Organisationsfrage was never solved.123 The various experiments of organization and representation undertaken by the numerous groupuscules into which the movement split after 1969 seemed to indicate that no mediation between theory and praxis was to be found— no matter which items were picked up in what has been called the “Great Bazaar” of ideologies.124 The K-Gruppen, for instance, were an attempt at direct worker representation, yet none of the groups realized the ideals of free communication, solidarity, and “freedom from domination” which Krahl had once outlined as the goals of the organizations.125 These goals were supposed

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to be implemented in the organizations before they could be practiced in society at large—yet, they failed even at the local level. What persisted was the hope that the real presence of the people (even if the people were no more than a few radicals)—for instance in the frequent clashes with the police in the alternative milieu of Berlin—would acquire a political quality. As representation proved impossible, real presence came to be seen as a substitute. Yet, quantity never turned into quality, as the quantity in question remained relatively negligible. The lack of an actual praxis of class struggle proved fatal in every case, no matter how much direct action there was. And so the initial concentration on liberating subjectivity became a matter of private subcultures, in which the goal of transforming democracy was replaced by the goal of transforming the self, or “revolutionizing the revolutionaries,” as a famous Dutschkean slogan went. Theory, driven by an insatiable “hunger for concepts” and leftwing classics, turned more academic again, while politics became a matter of essentially private confessions.126 At the same time, the useless “existential engagement” or mystical overcoming of the fixation on authority became the norm, rather than the exception.127 In such contexts, the slogan “Theory— no thanks!” turned into an intellectual badge of honor. Against the bourgeois weapons of irony and utility, left-wing theorists eventually set the power of irony (or counter-irony)—and patience.128 Bourgeois democracy became “ironized” through ultimately harmless gestures of nonconformism and apolitical provocation. Alternatively, the radicals marched through the institutions, as Dutschke had told them (although he had meant a much less harmless “marching” than it turned out to be); they established a “counter-milieu” of left-wing experiments in living; and they built up a “counter public sphere.”129 One might even say that for a while, they managed to establish a “dual power,” to use a concept by Ostrogorski.130 What Jürgen Habermas was later to theorize as the forces of civil society laying a siege to parliament and other political institutions in fact described the modus operandi (and the actual effects) of the citizens’ movements and other organizations that came out of ’68.131 This siege mentality was hardly a solution to the crisis of representation as conceptualized by Agnoli—yet, this development did signify an important change in the nature of representation, even if it fell short of the claims for radical democracy. Above all, however, it meant a turn to indirect action and therefore a liberalization. Liberalism, after all, is the supreme expression of a trust in indirect action.132 Indirect action, in turn, comes to change the mentality—if not the official ideology—in a given milieu. Ultimately, however, the “the dialectic of events” came to impose its own program on the students.133 As radical supporters of individual autonomy and the self-instituting society, they left a legacy of libertarianism that came

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to be appropriated by a Right eager to dismantle bureaucracies and the welfare state. As opponents of the United States and the Western powers, they took a large step in the direction of a Westernization—or even Americanization—of the Federal Republic.134 And as the principal actors laying siege to parliament, they eventually succumbed to parliamentarization, when the Greens became part of the established party democracy. Yet, with or against such events—some of which seemed to disprove theory conclusively—’68 has lived on as milieu and ideology. Notes 1. I take this felicitous formulation from Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), 9. 2. Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale UP 1993), 122. 3. Konrad H. Jarausch, “1968 and 1989: Caesuras, Comparisons, and Connections,” in Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (eds.), 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 461–77. For a fullfledged controversy over the conflict between “witnesses” and “historians” of ’68, see the illuminating exchange between Wolfgang Kraushaar and Axel Schildt. Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Der Zeitzeuge als Feind des Historikers? Ein Literaturüberblick zur 68er-Bewegung,” in Wolfgang Kraushaar, 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 253–347. Curiously, however, the topos that the history of ’68 cannot be written at all is as old as ’68 itself. See Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 12. 4. For a stimulating, but also very misleading, interpretation of the French case, see Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La pensée 68: Essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). There is as yet no comparable German account. 5. See Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001), and D. Roberts, “Narratives of Modernization: The Student Movement and Social and Cultural Change in West Germany,” in Thesis Eleven, vol. 63, no. 1 (2000), 38–52. 6. See for instance Claus Leggewie, “A Laboratory of Postindustrial Society: Reassessing the 1960s in Germany,” in Fink, Gassert, and Junker (eds.), 1968: The World Transformed, 277–94, and Cora Stephan, Der Betroffenheitskult: Eine politische Sittengeschichte (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994), 96–102. 7. For the most sustained and sophisticated argument in this direction, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 8. Richard Löwenthal, Romantischer Rückfall (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1970). 9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. David Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), and Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1990).

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10. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 15. 11. Etienne François, “Annäherungsversuche an ein außergewöhnliches Jahr,” in Etienne François, Matthias Middell, Emmanuel Terray, and Dorothee Wierling (eds.), 1968—ein europäisches Jahr? (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997), 11–17; here 12–13. 12. For one of the largest collection of these, see the “Archiv für alternatives Schrifttum” at www.ub.uni-duisburg.de/afas. 13. In particular, Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die Phantasie an die Macht: Mai 68 in Frankreich (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), and Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (ed.), 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998). 14. For instance, Bernd Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung zur sozialistischen Opposition,” in Uwe Bergmann, Rudi Dutschke, Wolfgang Lefèvre, and Bernd Rabehl (eds.), Rebellion der Studenten oder Die neue Opposition (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1968), 151–78; here 151. And in retrospect, Johannes Agnoli, “Das deutsche ’68: Theoretische Grundlagen und historische Entwicklung einer Revolte,” in 1968 und die Folgen, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 (Freiburg: Ça ira, 1998). 15. Jörg Bopp, “Geliebt und doch gehaßt: Über den Umgang der Studentenbewegung mit Theorie,” in Kursbuch, no. 78 (1984), 121–42; here 123. 16. Dutschke quoted by Gérard Sandoz, “Etre Revolutionnaire,” in Rudi Dutschke, Ecrits Politiques (1967–1968) (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1968), 7–35; here 31. 17. “Vaterlose Gesellen: Alexander Mitscherlich über den Frankfurter SDS-Kongreß und die Studentenrebellion,” in Der Spiegel, April 8, 1968. 18. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 29. 19. Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung zur sozialistischen Opposition,” 151. For the locus classicus of the distinction between the social and the political, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 20. Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism, 14. 21. Ulrich K. Preuß in Siegward Lönnendonker (ed.), Linksintellektueller Aufbruch zwischen “Kulturrevolution” und “Kultureller Zerstörung”: Der SDS in der Nachkriegsgeschichte (1946–1969): Ein Symposium (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), 257. 22. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998). 23. Cohn-Bendit and Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism, 60. 24. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 36. 25. Wolfgang Kraushaar in Lönnendonker (ed.), Linksintellektueller Aufbruch, 286. 26. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 20. 27. On the SDS, see Tilman Fichter and Siegward Lönnendonker, Kleine Geschichte des SDS: Der Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund von 1946 bis zur Selbstauflösung (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1977), and Tilman Fichter, SDS und SPD: Parteilichkeit jenseits der Partei (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988). 28. Pavel A. Richter, “Die Außerparlamentarische Opposition in den Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1966 bis 1968,” in Gilcher-Holtey (ed.), 1968, 35–55. On the Emergency Laws, see Helmut Shauer (ed.), Notstand und Demokratie: Referate,

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29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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Diskussionsbeiträge und Materialien vom Kongreß am 30. Oktober 1966 in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1967). On the Situationist International, see Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992), Peter Wollen, “The Situationist International,” in New Left Review, no. 174 (1989), 67–95, and Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). It would be tempting to think ’68 together with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival. Frank Böckelmann, “Anfänge: Situationisten, Subversive und ihre Vorgänger,” in Die Emanzipation ins Leere: Beiträge zur Gesinnungsgeschichte 1960–2000 (Berlin: Philo, 2000), 21–43; here 26–7. Ibid., 41. Bohrer made these observations already during the “events” and has consistently defended this approach ever since, as his “phenomenological” reading of the student movement has yielded surrealism as the primary interpretation time and again. See for example Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Die mißverstandene Rebellion,” in Merkur, vol. 22 (1968), 33–44 and “1968: Die Phantasie an die Macht? Studentenbewegung—Walter Benjamin—Surrealismus,” in Gilcher-Holtey (ed.), 1968, 288–300. One might say that the German Situationists sought to realize Walter Benjamin’s program of a “pure means”—which, precisely because of their non-instrumental character, would bring about the end of a utopia of a violence-free future. See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996), 236–52. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, trans. Ruth Crowley (New York: Columbia UP, 1994). 1968 was most famously denigrated as a “carnival” and “psychodrama” by Raymond Aron. See Raymond Aron, Mémoires (Paris: Julliard, 1993), 471–97. On Benjamin’s Bilddenken, see Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987). Bohrer, “Die Phantasie an die Macht?” 291. Ulrich Chaussy, Die drei Leben des Rudi Dutschke: Eine Biographie (Zürich: Pendo, 1999), 44–53. Johannes Agnoli later observed that the Catholic parts of West Germany had remained immune to radical theory and radical action. See “Das deutsche ’68.” Frank Böckelmann and Herbert Nagel (eds.), Subversive Aktion: Der Sinn der Organisation ist ihr Scheitern (Frankfurt/Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1976). On this milieu, see also Sabine von Dirke, “All Power to the Imagination!”: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Jürgen Habermas, “Political Culture in Germany since 1968: An Interview with Dr. Rainer Erd for the Frankfurter Rundschau,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. and ed. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 183–95.

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43. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik: Der Verdacht der Philosophie gegen die literarische Moderne (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). 44. Bopp, “Geliebt und doch gehaßt.” 45. Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Von der Totalitarismus—zur Faschismustheorie: Zu einem Paradigmenwechsel in der Theoriepolitik der bundesdeutschen Studentenbewegung,” in Claudia Keller (ed.), Die Nacht hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommt schon der Tag: Antifaschismus: Geschichte und Neubewertung (Berlin: Aufbau, 1996), 234–51, and Hubertus Knabe, Die unterwanderte Republik: Stasi im Westen (Berlin: Propyläen, 1999), 182–233. 46. Part of Abendroth’s “Marburg School,” under the leadership of Frank Deppe, also turned into hardliners and effectively became a “party institute” for the DKP in the 1970s. 47. See in particular Herbert Sultan and Wolfgang Abendroth, Bürokratischer Verwaltungsstaat und soziale Demokratie: Beiträge zu Staatslehre und Staatsrecht der Bundesrepublik (Hannover: O. Goedel, 1955), and Wolfgang Abendroth, Antagonistische Gesellschaft und politische Demokratie: Aufsätze zur politschen Soziologie (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1967). 48. Agnoli, “Das deutsche ’68,” 256–7. 49. On Abendroth’s “Marburg School,” see Christoph Hüttig and Lutz Raphael, “Die ‘Marburger Schule(n)’ im Umfeld der westdeutschen Politikwissenschaft 1951–1975,” in Wilhelm Bleek and Hans J. Lietzmann (eds.), Schulen in der deutschen Politikwissenschaft (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 1999), 293–318. 50. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). See also Jürgen Habermas et al., Student und Politik: Eine soziologische Untersuchung zum politischen Bewußtsein Frankfurter Studenten (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961). 51. Rüdiger Altmann, “Die formierte Gesellschaft,” reprinted in Abschied vom Staat: Politische Essays (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1998), 61–70. Ironically, Altmann had been Abendroth’s assistant when Abendroth was professor at Wilhelmshaven. See Barbara Dietrich and Joachim Perels (eds.), Wolfgang Abendroth: Ein Leben in der Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 208. 52. Ibid., 269. 53. Ibid., 271. 54. Ibid., 278. 55. Altmann, “Die formierte Gesellschaft,” 46. 56. Wilhlem Bleek, Geschichte der Politikwissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 355, and Agnoli, “Das deutsche ’68,” 258–9. 57. Johannes Agnoli and Peter Brückner, Die Transformation der Demokratie (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), 10. 58. Ibid., 17. 59. Ibid., 26. 60. Ibid., 25. 61. Ibid., 24.

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62. Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (1929; Tübingen: Mohr, 1981), 30–1. 63. Ibid., 18 and 21. 64. Ibid., 48. 65. See also Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). 66. Agnoli, Die Transformation, 29. 67. Ibid., 53. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 20. 70. Agnoli and Brückner, Die Transformation, 11. 71. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: Peter Smith, 1941). 72. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), and Habermas, Structural Transformation. In retrospect, Habermas as well as German political scientists and schoolteachers were blamed for having corrupted the youth through such an idealized image of democracy. See for instance Kurt L. Schell, “Repressive Toleranz, strukturelle Gewalt: Vordenker von ’68,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 6, 2001. 73. See also Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972). 74. Agnoli and Brückner, Die Transformation, 48–9. 75. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 208. 76. On the problems of this position, see Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). 77. Ibid., 21. 78. Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung zur sozialistischen Opposition,” 156. 79. Agnoli and Brückner, Die Transformation, 16. 80. Ibid., 13. 81. Ibid., 154. This thesis was, above all, advanced by Herbert Marcuse. 82. Agnoli, “Das deutsche ’68,” 261. 83. Ibid., 263. 84. “Einleitung,” 7. 85. Ulrich K. Preuß, in Linksintellektueller Aufbruch, 255. 86. Detlev Claussen, Bernd Leineweber, Ronny Loewy, Oskar Negt, and Udo Riechmann, “Einleitung,” in Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Konstitution und Klassenkampf: Zur historischen Dialektik von bürgerlicher Emanzipation und proletarischer Revolution: Schriften, Reden und Entwürfe aus den Jahren 1966–1970 (Frankfurt/Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1971). 87. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 185–6. 88. Agnoli, “Das deutsche ’68,” 263. 89. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 128. 90. Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung,” 159.

142 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109.

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Krahl, “Angaben zur Person,” in Konstitution und Klassenkampf, 19–30; here 23. Ibid., 22. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 48. Flechtheim had diagnosed the bureaucratization of the workers’ movement in the early 1960s. See “Presentation of Socialisme ou Barbarie. An Organ of Critique and Revolutionary Orientation (1949),” in David Ames Curtis (ed.), The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 35–9. Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, 128–36. For a forgotten strand of antitotalitarianism, see William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). See also Wolfgang Kraushaar, Linke Geisterfahrer: Denkanstöße für eine antitotalitäre Linke (Frankfurt/Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 2001). Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 51. See for instance Max Horkheimer, Dämmerung: Notizen in Deutschland (Zürich: Oprecht & Helbing, 1934). On integral etatism, see also Friedrich Pollock, Stadien des Kapitalismus, ed. Helmut Dubiel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1975). Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 41. Ibid., 52–4. Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Autoritärer Staat und Antiautoritäre Bewegung: Zum Organisationsreferat von Rudi Dutschke und Hans-Jürgen Krahl auf der 22. Delegiertenkonferenz des SDS in Frankfurt (September 4–8, 1967),” in Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946–1995, vol. 3 (Hamburg: Rogner und Bernhard, 1998), 15–33. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 50. Kraushaar, “Autoritärer Staat und Antiautoritäre Bewegung.” Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung,” 164. Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism, 63. Frank Böckelmann, “Thesen zum Selbstverständnis der antiautoritären Opposition,” in Die Emanzipation ins Leere, 45–84. The text was written in 1967. Oskar Negt, “Rechtsordnung, Öffentlichkeit und Gewalt,” in Heinz Grossmann and Oskar Negt, Die Auferstehung der Gewalt: Springerblockade und politische Reaktion in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). Jürgen Habermas, Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 148. See also Frank Wolff and Eberhard Windaus (eds.), Studentenbewegung 1967–69: Protokolle und Materialien (Frankfurt/Main: Roter Stern, 1977), 120. The Left’s response can be found in Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969). For a discussion of the twists and turns in Habermas’ position, see Martin Beck Matuˇstik, Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 45–63. Krahl, “Angaben zur Person,” 25.

1968 as Event, Milieu, and Ideology 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130.

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Preuß, in Linksintellektueller Aufbruch, 260. Krahl quoted by Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 123. Krahl, “Angaben zur Person,” 26. Kraushaar, in Linksintellektueller Aufbruch, 286, and Böckelmann, “Anfänge,” 39. Böckelmann quoted in Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 56. Ibid., 50. See Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 174–82. The point is that a certain kind of decisionism and Aktionismus were among the “origins and elements,” to coin a phrase, of terrorism—not, in any way, its direct “causes.” For the relation of terrorism to modern thought in general, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989), 450–5. See also Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouwi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 36–40. Wolfgang Kraushaar, 1968: Das Jahr, das alles verändert hat (Munich: Piper, 1998), 317. See also Frank Böckelmann, “Bewegung,” in Die Emanzipation ins Leere, 91–136. “Einleitung,” 11. Lönnendonker (ed.), Linksintellektueller Aufbruch zwischen “Kulturrevolution” und “Kultureller Zerstörung.” Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung,” 164. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 70. The best account of the many twists and turns of the post-68 Left is Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). Krahl, “Angaben zur Person,” 28. Urs Widmer quoted in Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 117. Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung,” 157. For irony and utility as features of liberal modernity, see Benjamin Constant, “The spirit of conquest,” in Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamara Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 51–83; here 55. For patience and irony as left-wing responses, see Joachim Bruhn, Manfred Dahlmann, and Clemens Nachtmann (eds.), Geduld und Ironie: Johannes Agnoli zum 70. Geburtstag (Freiburg: Ça ira, 1995). Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung,” 167 and 173. See also Gaetano Quagliariello, Politics without Parties: Moisei Ostrogorski and the Debate on Political Parties on the Eve of the Twentieth Century, trans. Hugo Bowles (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996). Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure (1989),” in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 463–90. For a provocative formulation of this argument, see José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957), 74–7. Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism, 62. Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen: Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1999), 178.

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PART THREE

German Conservatism: From Technocratic Conservatism to the New Right

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CHAPTER 7

From the Conservative Revolution to Technocratic Conservatism

Dirk van Laak

L

ooking backward from the end of our century, the course of European history can now finally be qualified. The question of historical continuities, changes, and chances has never been put forward more fervently than in the German case. Assessments of German history were obsessed with stating peculiarities or Sonderwege, to use one of the most prominent terms. From a distance, however, it becomes obvious that political and social developments in Germany were indeed extreme, but not as exceptional as had been assumed for a long time. Also, the well-known caesuras of 1914 and 1945 have been relativized significantly. For, if one does not merely take political turning points into account but economic, social, and cultural events as well, one cannot but state that for many developments the main thresholds have been the 1920s and the 1960s. This also holds true for German conservatism. It experienced a fundamental reorientation after the First World War and underwent another momentous change during the 1960s. For conservatives, this period is marked by the attempt to find an affirmative position vis-à-vis the social and technological changes that modern society had brought about since the nineteenth century. In my opinion the most interesting continuity within this political field can be traced between some members of the Conservative Revolution of the 1920s and members of the so-called technocratic conservatism, which experienced its high tide during the late 1950s and early 1960s.1

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The term “reactionary modernism”—as Jeffrey Herf has called some aspects of the Conservative Revolution2—may be appropriate for the 1920s and 1930s, when some writers cheered technology just as a temporary means for reestablishing a premodern political order. But most of the Conservative Revolutionary writers were not reactionary at all. They were in search of an alternative and a specific “German way” to modernity that should embrace all the potentials of modern society and technology.3 This idea of a “third way,” which sought to avoid Soviet socialism and American liberal capitalism, was maintained and revitalized after the Second World War. It helped to reorganize conservative positions, which were largely discredited after their alleged collaboration with National Socialism to establish the Third Reich. Post-war German conservatism split into two major currents: a pragmatic one stressing the importance of institutions and denying the relevance of ideologies, and a Christian current stressing the importance of eternal values against the repercussions of modernity and secularization. At first sight, the second current succeeded in dominating the cultural debates during the 1950s and added to the impression of “restoration” that many leftist intellectuals nourished. In the long run, however, the pragmatic course finally embracing modern technology and centralized planning was much more successful. It has probably left much deeper imprints on German history since 1945 than any other derivation of conservatism. These allegations require explaining and specifying. I will do so by illustrating the situation that German conservative thought was in after 1945. And I will focus on some of the most influential writers of its profession— Arnold Gehlen, Ernst Forsthoff, and Helmut Schelsky. But before I turn to the post-war period, let me first make some remarks on what is understood by “conservatism.” Some authors, like Panajotis Kondylis, have recently argued that conservatism has to be connected to its social basis. With the decline of the traditional aristocracy, conservatism would have disappeared.4 There are several good reasons for this argument, but nevertheless I would like to support the view of a majority of authors arguing that conservatism has been an answer to the experiences of a dynamized history since the Enlightenment and draws much of its intellectual energy from its opposition to the French Revolution.5 Since its beginning as a distinguishable political force, with authors like Justus Möser and Edmund Burke, conservative thinking always had to adapt to new historical developments, such as the Industrial Revolution or the rise of liberalism. With reference to Samuel Huntington, Jerry Muller recently most convincingly stated that conservatism is best understood as a positional ideology, not as an essential theory or a set of certain coherent values.6 But one

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would nevertheless be able to make out some basic features that almost all conservatives share: – – – – – – – – –

stating human imperfection recognizing the limits of human knowledge stressing the need for institutions emphasizing customs, habits, duty, and prejudice advocating historicism and particularism maintaining anti-contractualism supporting the utility of religion criticizing abstract “theory” pointing at the unanticipated and mostly negative consequences and latent functions of social actions – nurturing anti-humanitarianism – backing political authority – opposing an unveiling that would make everything “transparent.”7 As one of the conservative fundamentals, Muller has pointed toward the motif of a “second nature,” a term already coined by Edmund Burke.8 For traditional conservatism throughout the nineteenth century this meant the elaborate “culture” and social habits surrounding men, and moreover a political order that acknowledged private initiative and personal property. As main features to stabilize human culture, conservatives identified education, historical traditions, and the well-tried institutions of the nation-state. It was exactly these assumptions that were challenged and became questionable after the First World War. This event marked a turning point of traditional conservatism. The war had proved that there was no way of “conserving” pre-war traditions. Many young European conservatives, deeply marked by totalized warfare, considered the romantic traditions of classical conservatism inappropriate for the twentieth century. Instead, they set out for a “third way” between bourgeois liberalism and Bolshevik communism. This approach combined a self-assured nationalism with an affirmative stance toward national peculiarities on the one hand, and socialism and conceptions of a completely integrated society on the other. Italian Fascism served as a widely recognized and acclaimed case study for many right-wing movements, not only in unstable settings like Weimar Germany, but in France, Great Britain, and other democracies as well.9 Consequently it was one of the main motives of the Conservative Revolution not to accept the post-war order. Most of its concepts aimed at overcoming the fragmentation of German society and establishing a new political entity. Creating a leveled and homogenized nation, Volk, or state was its

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prime target. This, however, necessarily meant integrating the vast majority of the people, the working classes, however authoritarian and elitist the political concepts of the conservative revolutionaries might have been.10 A new political mythology should combine nationalism with socialism. But at the same time it should reject rationalism, individualism, liberalism, and also humanitarianism; in short: everything the Weimar Republic wanted to represent. Defining the political for Conservative Revolutionaries meant stating the “laws of life” and liberating the political from restrictions that would be detrimental for the survival of the German people. Political theories searched for different forms of legitimacy than mere “tradition.” Many theories referred to scientific findings, and very often they very prematurely mixed them up with prejudiced political assumptions. The best known example was social Darwinism, but the same could be said for geopolitics, social hygiene, or eugenics. They attributed natural categories to cultural phenomena and stated an organic order with people competitively seeking for living space and resources of survival.11 It was not very surprising that those systems of thought almost as a rule verified the assumption that German existence was in serious danger and that some kind of reaction would be urgently necessary. The Weimar Republic, of course, was not believed to be capable of reacting properly to these challenges. National Socialism could build on these widespread political dispositions and expectations. During the course of the Third Reich, however, this unrestricted understanding of the political turned to one of aggression. It was no longer meant to refer to self-determination but to hegemony and expansion. And not to be misunderstood: Hitler himself of course had exactly this in mind from the very beginning of his political career. However, not every former Conservative Revolutionary followed Hitler in the expansionist course he pursued in foreign policy, but most of them applauded the surprising amount of integration he achieved. And some of the most successful approaches which technocratic conservatives would later on refer to originated from a situation the Third Reich created. Let me exemplify that thesis with Ernst Forsthoff, a disciple of Carl Schmitt and, from 1933, successor of the exiled Hermann Heller as professor of law in Frankfurt. In 1938 Forsthoff published a small but highly influential text entitled “Die Verwaltung als Leistungsträger,” in which he designed a new understanding of civil administration as a carrier of public services.12 Forsthoff stated that in the Third Reich the fragmentation of a liberal and pluralist society finally had come to an end. The “total state”—a concept to which he had already dedicated another pamphlet in 193313—would be able to substitute an antagonistic policy by a centralized administration. The homogenized German people would be cared for by strictly neutral civil servants representing a state that increasingly assumed the task to provide for

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its citizens. Forsthoff called this Daseinsvorsorge, or “making provisions for everyday existence.” This term Daseinsvorsorge made a fervent career not only in public and administrative law but in intellectual debates as well. It was a suitable term for a development that actually had taken place: the creation of an artificial “second nature” that rested on a network of infrastructures and other public utilities.14 It also indicated a shift away from the former understanding of public welfare in cases of need or emergency to a more modern understanding of public administration as a generous planning for the future. One might recall that defining the political during the 1930s as centralized planning was far from being a German peculiarity. It was an international obsession for making modern societies and the interplay of private and public sectors of the economy more efficient—just think of the New Deal.15 Forsthoff ’s part-time colleague at the University of Königsberg, Arnold Gehlen, went even further. Since his study of 1940, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, his social theory, as Jerry Muller put it, was “arguably the most sophisticated attempt in the twentieth century to explain the significance of ‘second nature’.”16 Gehlen also abstained from referring to transcendent ordering principles and argued that men’s culture primarily consisted of man-made institutions, which would take care of and stabilize human existence. Man was a deficient creature lacking instinct and unfit to survive in nature without actively developing it. Man would be forced to transcend his natural environment, and in his need for cooperation and easing of his everyday burdens, he eventually created a “second nature” around him that primarily consisted of technological precautions. Gehlen offered an anthropology that was not only open to technology and industrial society, it even praised it. The traditional conservative fixation on a given living space was modified here to a space which actually was utilized and actively inhabited. Forsthoff also distinguished between living space, which man effectively inhabits, and living space he actually is in control of. Modern man, Forsthoff asserted, by means of traffic, had been able to extend his effective living space dramatically. But the space he actively was in control of was reduced at the same time. Consequently it was the task of an administration to “make provisions for everyday existence,” which individuals alienated from nature no longer would be able to do.17 This creation of a new tradition was conservative in nature. Different, however, from former approaches was the total absence of metaphysical legitimation. Instead, it was based on proven and tested institutions and was fundamentally secular in nature. National Socialism supported a climate in which conservatives could rid themselves of traditional convictions rooted in some eternal values of metaphysical origin.

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National Socialism eventually embarked on the enterprise of aggressive expansion in almost every respect, and more and more conservatives eventually withdrew from these targets, because their positions aimed at neutral and stabilizing institutions and did not necessarily support the ideologized and flexible policy the Nazis pursued. Traditional conservatism had its foundation in space, it was “rooted” in earth and its property. But for conservatives like Forsthoff and Gehlen, “blood and soil” were no longer relevant criteria. After the Second World War the situation for Conservative Revolutionary positions was very unfavorable. For many good reasons they were labeled as collaborators and as völkisch. In general, nationalist notions were largely discredited. Most of the surviving conservative revolutionaries withdrew from politics, but some of them got back into the game in a different way. Reinhard Höhn very successfully founded an academy for economic management in Bad Harzburg (of all places).18 Max Hildebert Boehm was used as an expert for refugees and expellees.19 Hans Zehrer and Giselher Wirsing became influential journalists in conservative newspapers.20 Hans Freyer returned to an academic chair in sociology and became one of the most frequently invited speakers at German academic conferences.21 Many of them took opportunities to present their cause in publications. Obviously Hitler was not defended, though certain exaggerations of Allied war propaganda were pointed at and dramatized, and recourse was taken to concepts like “international law” and “self-determination.”22 This was particularly pronounced in the post-war texts of Carl Schmitt.23 Here Americans were accused of intervening in a space that was defined as a legal sphere. In defining this sphere as one of the fundamental features of international law, Schmitt and others pretended to defend a tradition of balanced peace. Many right-wing intellectuals even tried to portray Germany as a victim of American interventionism. This attitude implied strong opposition to Adenauer’s project of tying West Germany closely to Western traditions. For the first 10 to 15 years after the war, German conservatives sought to gain a profile in bitterly or ironically commenting on the Allied efforts to instruct the Germans in Western liberalism and democracy. The most prominent example of that strategy was Ernst von Salomon’s novel The Questionnaire, in which he mocked a formalized denazification as an inappropriate tool for reeducation.24 Instead, it was a common conservative cause either to save as many German traditions and continuities as possible25 or to remind the German people of the everlasting Christian values. Here, the rise of Nazism was attributed to secularization, modern mass culture, or having carried the Enlightenment too far. During the late 1940s and early 1950s confessional academies did have huge audiences. In the late fifties, however, this Christian renaissance seemed to disappear almost into nothing.26

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This was due to the same reasons that the second post-war era in Germany turned out to be rather different from the first. No stab-in-theback myth appeared because this time the German defeat was total. There was no convincing way to justify waging a war like this one. Secondly, Germany remained an occupied nation, with Allied forces prepared to intercept any neo-fascist action and no threatening ultra-right-wing movement able to develop. Thirdly and most importantly, there was virtually no established social order left that conservatives could rely on or restore.27 Instead, the influx of refugees and expellees from eastern Europe, economic competition, and the rising importance of education began to almost neutralize any class division. Prussia disappeared in 1947, and the East Elbian junkers had lost their manors. With the economic recovery of West Germany, the effects of modernization were accepted by the vast majority of its citizens. And more and more of these positive effects were credited to liberal democracy. Every attempt to mobilize for radical political action failed.28 An apolitical individualism and the concentration on privacy prevailed. Any urgent impulse to revise the status quo weakened. The traditional social stratifications were completely shaken up and never settled again. A deep longing for security and stability within this permanent change dominated all political options. A majority of West Germans thought that only a conservative government could guarantee this and voted for Konrad Adenauer, who forcefully tackled the problems that post-war Germany was facing. And with the success of this policy, that branch of German conservatism got another chance that was open to the changes in social reality that were actually taking place. Adequate institutions that worked had to be established. And this was exactly what the former radical conservatives were mentally tested and experienced in. No other academic took a closer look at that altered situation than Helmut Schelsky. A disciple of Hans Freyer and Arnold Gehlen, he was a sociologist of highest influence in post-war Germany. He represented a kind of modern conservative with a Conservative-Revolutionary background who employed sociology and social psychology in order to get a matter-of-fact picture of the surrounding social reality. And he coined some of the key terms that permeated West German cultural debates during the 1950s and 1960s, such as “the skeptical generation” and “leveled middle class society.” In Schelsky a model of a conservative can be made out, who shared most of the basic conservative assumptions but defined the political in a dramatically different way than traditional conservatives did. Schelsky did this on solid grounds—he accompanied post-war German history with many empirical studies on West German youth, on marriage and sexuality, and on the relations between workers and employers.

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Like Hans Freyer, Schelsky entertained the notion of a social scientist strictly keeping to the facts, and he very strongly promoted the idea that the age of political ideologies had passed.29 With social sciences assessing the bare facts of social reality, so Schelsky argued, the main prerequisites for political decision making would be offered. In modern societies with their scientific complexity in almost every respect, this decision making would more or less be reduced to acknowledging practical necessities and the forces of circumstance. Man himself as a social and psychological being finally had become a scientific and technological exercise. This idea Schelsky implicitly contrasted with the Marxist model of a socialist society, which at the same time was being implemented in East Germany. Schelsky’s thesis of a leveled middle class society challenged the Marxist claim to have overcome class divisions. But the idea of a technical state, which Schelsky proposed, differed from Marxist conceptions in including a positive notion of alienation. In a Hegelian understanding, Gehlen and Schelsky believed that freedom eventually would result in the acknowledgment of necessity, and this necessity would be realized and executed by institutions. Policy would be reduced to gaining acceptance for the one best way to finally become superfluous altogether.30 This definition of the political was strongly suggestive of Forsthoff ’s definition developed in 1938. Infrastructures and superstructures would eventually replace political antagonism and would leave not much more than administrative tasks.31 In a widely recognized speech on “Man in Scientific Civilization,” Schelsky in 1961 even went so far as to vary Carl Schmitt’s notorious definition of political sovereignty as being able to define the state of emergency: “Sovereign may be called,” Schelsky alternatively proposed, “whoever in a given society achieves highest efficiency in the application of scientific and technological measures.”32 This definition initiated a lasting discussion about technocracy as the prospective future of West German democracy.33 Policy here was scaled down to an anti-utopian and matter-of-fact enterprise, in which political participation was reduced to a minimum, for the majority of the people was not credited with being capable of making appropriate decisions meeting the demands of a scientific civilization.34 No wonder that during the course of the 1960s this definition of the political very passionately was challenged by the young generation, which urgently demanded the extension of political participation. More than any other conservative author, Schelsky was blamed for veiling and obscuring existing power structures.35 This suspicion was backed by those academics and intellectuals who, during the 1950s, had been defeated in a debate which had originated with a disagreement about the proper interpretation of the West German Basic

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Law. This discussion among constitutional lawyers became known as the “Rechtsstaat debate.”36 The Basic Law had defined West Germany as “a social and democratic federal state” (Article 20, paragraph 1). After its proclamation, two conflicting interpretations began to emerge: Should this definition be understood as an assignment to shape the Federal Republic’s character in a socialist direction, as some disciples of Hermann Heller, like Wolfgang Abendroth, argued? Or should the rule of law in a very restrictive and formal understanding be stressed, as some disciples of Carl Schmitt, like Werner Weber and Ernst Forsthoff, argued? To see Forsthoff defending the rule of law at first sight appears to be contradictory. During the 1930s he had dismissed the Rechtsstaat the same way he in 1938 had dismissed human rights.37 Why did he, the inventor of the term Daseinsvorsorge, oppose a definition of Sozialstaat that stressed the administrative tasks of “making provisions for everyday existence”? Because he foresaw these interpretations as a possible legitimation to move the Federal Republic in a socialist direction. And he deplored an understanding of a constitution that fostered social demands and material expectations to be fulfilled by the state. For him, a constitution had to guarantee peace, freedom, and stability, and the administration should be a neutral institution distributing proper chances to every citizen. Forsthoff did not wish to emphasize the social components of the West German constitution, for he feared that citizens would expect public services as a legal right. This, he feared, would bring public administration into a defensive position. Forsthoff also strongly opposed all efforts to redistribute existing property. And although he and Gehlen advocated institutions servicing the people, both became passionate critics of a mentality taking such services for granted. Forsthoff in 1971 acknowledged the dilemma himself: “In West Germany’s post-war situation the existing order of personal property could be exempted from nationalizing just because of the extraordinary growth rates of the West German economic miracle. They not only allowed for a settlement of the disruptures the war had left. But Germany also could come up to the widespread expectations of prosperity by just redistributing taxes.”38 Forsthoff, Gehlen, and Schelsky had paved the way for a conservative position open to technology and industry. Moreover, they had to rely on permanent economic growth rates and technological progress to avoid class struggles for distributions. They also were open to constitutional democracy as long as it rested upon institutions whose authority would be respected. The people appeared rather as an object than as a subject of democracy. Functional elites, they assumed, would administer society and plan ahead with highest efficiency and integrity. Administration and infrastructure appeared as “neutral” means of social integration. They clearly disapproved

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of a more antagonistic and pluralistic understanding of democracy encompassing political parties, trade unions, or other interest groups competing for recognition of their demands and seeking socioeconomic compromises. Their verdict also applied to intellectuals who did not share this definition of the political. However, during the 1960s these intellectuals, together with a younger generation, began to ask for more political participation and a more value-based definition of democracy. Forsthoff ’s definition was dismissed as an ideology of a formal state supporting authoritarian mentalities.39 Ironically, it was exactly those intellectuals who more and more began to refer to German history. During the 1960s they developed a position of being fundamentally skeptical toward the past and argued that advocating moderate reforms simply would disguise a fateful German traditionalism. Now it became a conservative feature to defend the present not only against utopian claims, but against the obtrusiveness of the German past as well. Forsthoff, Gehlen, Schelsky, and the historian of the Conservative Revolution, Armin Mohler, now passionately opposed the efforts to come to terms with the German past, for they thought Vergangenheitsbewältigung was merely a strategy to discredit existing institutions in favor of more utopian political visions.40 Jerry Muller has labeled “historical utilitarianism” one of the most salient features of modern conservatism.41 When the former conservative revolutionaries finally returned to a conservatism rejecting all revolutionary changes, this feature once more was proved. With a modern welfare state, technocratic conservatives had hoped to have created “things that are worth conserving,” as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck had once defined the task of a Conservative Revolution.42 Now they were challenged from the left with definitions of the political demanding institutions to also have democratic content and be open for participation and also criticism. Fortunately most of the conservatives did not respond like the functional elites during the Weimar Republic. They no longer questioned modernity, but with antagonistic political currents they began to debate the question of which side effects of modernization should be tolerated.

Notes 1. Axel Schildt, Konservatismus in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997), 237: “It is striking that many of the most salient advocates of this new conservative current [technocratic conservatism] had fostered Conservative-Revolutionary thoughts between the wars.” 2. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984).

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3. This was most convincingly pointed out by Rolf-Peter Sieferle, Die Konservative Revolution: Fünf biographische Skizzen (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1995). 4. Panajotis Kondylis, Konservativismus: Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986). 5. Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1966). Schildt, Konservatismus. 6. See also Michael Oakshott’s definition of 1956: Conservatism would be a matter of disposition, not doctrine, “a delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be” (cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Is ‘Conservative Revolution’ an Oxymoron?” in The Weekly Standard, December 18, 1995, 33). 7. Jerry Z. Muller (ed.), Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), 9–18. 8. Muller (ed.), Conservatism, 19, in referring to a speech of Edmund Burke of 1794. 9. Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: Piper, 1963). Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche: L’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1983). 10. See for instance several contributions to Andreas Göbel, Dirk van Laak, and Ingeborg Villinger (eds.), Metamorphosen des Politischen: Grundfragen politischer Einheitsbildung seit den 20er Jahren (Berlin: Akademie, 1995). 11. Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (New York: Macmillan, 1996). 12. Ernst Forsthoff, Die Verwaltung als Leistungsträger (Stuttgart/Berlin: Kohlhammer 1938). It may be worthwhile to compare Forsthoff ’s conceptions with what Ernst Fraenkel a little later would analyze in his Dual State (1941). 13. Ernst Forsthoff, Der totale Staat (Hamburg: Hamburger Verlagsanstalt, 1933, 2nd ed. 1934). 14. Dieter Scheidemann, Der Begriff der Daseinsvorsorge: Ursprung, Funktion und Wandlungen der Konzeption Ernst Forsthoffs (Göttingen/Zürich: Muster-Schmidt, 1991). 15. Very illuminating is Charles Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy,” in Journal of Contemporary History 5 (1970), 27–61. 16. Muller (ed.), Conservatism, 401. 17. Forsthoff, Verwaltung, 6: “Der Nationalsozialismus hat diese kollektive Daseinssicherung durch die Solidarität sozialer Gruppen, aus der sich eine klare Daseinsverantwortung nicht entwickelte, überwunden, indem er die Daseinsverantwortung der Träger der politischen Gewalt (Staat und Partei) herstellte. Die Entwicklung ist also von der individuellen über die kollektive zur politischen Daseinssicherung und Verantwortung gegangen.” 18. Rudolf Hickel, “Eine Kaderschmiede bundesrepublikanischer Restauration. Ideologie und Praxis der Harzburger Akademie für Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft,” in Martin Greiffenhagen (ed.), Der neue Konservatismus der siebziger Jahre (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1974), 108–54. 19. See his contributions to Eugen Lemberg and Friedrich Edding (eds.), Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland, ihre Eingliederung und ihr Einfluß auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistesleben, 3 vols (Kiel: Ferdinand Hirt, 1959).

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20. Axel Schildt, “Deutschlands Platz in einem ‘christlichen Abendland.’ Konservative Publizisten aus dem Tat-Kreis in der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit,” in Thomas Köbner, Gert Sautermeister, and Sigrid Schneider (eds.), Deutschland nach Hitler (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987), 344–69. 21. Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987). 22. Dirk van Laak, “Trotz und Nachurteil. Rechtsintellektuelle im Anschluß an das ‘Dritte Reich’,” in Wilfried Loth and Bernd-A. Rusinek (eds.), Verwandlungspolitik: NS-Eliten in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 1998), 55–77. 23. Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Cologne: Greven, 1950). 24. Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1951). 25. Dirk van Laak, Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens: Carl Schmitt in der politischen Geistesgeschichte der frühen Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Akademie, 1993). Jürgen Habermas, “Carl Schmitt in der politischen Geistesgeschichte der Bundesrepublik,” in Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 112–22. 26. Axel Schildt, Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur westdeutschen Ideenlandschaft der 50er Jahre (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999). 27. For German post-war conservatism, see Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) 1st ed. 1971, 302ff. Helga Grebing, Konservative gegen die Demokratie: Konservative Kritik an der Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik nach 1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971). Kurt Lenk, Deutscher Konservatismus (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 1989). 28. However, even during the “peaceful” 1950s there was a lot of political opposition from the Right and from the Left; see Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Die Protest-Chronik 1949–1959: Eine illustrierte Geschichte von Bewegung, Widerstand und Utopie, 4 vols. (Hamburg: Rogner und Bernhard, 1996). 29. Schelsky’s sociological favorites from the United States were James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941) and David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950, the German edition of this book was introduced by him). Schelsky later was labeled an “Anti-Soziologe” and he took this up in his personal recollections, Rückblicke eines “Anti-Soziologen,” (Opladen, 1981). See also Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Deutungswissen der Moderne oder ‘administrative Hilfswissenschaft.’ Konservative Schwierigkeiten mit der Soziologie,” in Sven Papcke (ed.), Ordnung und Theorie: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Soziologie in Deutschland (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986), 7–47. 30. This technocratic vision of Sachzwang eventually dominating political decision making was criticized by Hermann Lübbe, “Zur politischen Theorie der Technokratie,” in Der Staat, vol. 1, no. 1 (1961), 19–38. Lübbe, who would become one of the philosophical figureheads of German neo-conservatism, as early as 1959 noted the continuity between the Conservative Revolution and technocratic conservatism; see Hermann Lübbe, “Die resignierte konservative

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32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

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Revolution,” in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, vol. 115 (1959), 131–38. For a comparative reading of Freyer, Gehlen, and Schelsky see Elfriede Üner, “Hans Freyer und Arnold Gehlen: Zwei Wege auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit,” in Helmut Klages and Helmut Quaritsch (eds.), Zur geisteswissenschaftlichen Bedeutung Arnold Gehlens (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1994), 123–62. Helmut Schelsky, “Der Mensch in der wissenschaftlichen Zivilisation (1961),” in Auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Düsseldorf: Diederichs, 1965), 455. See also Schelsky’s discussion of Schmitt’s definition of the political: Helmut Schelsky, “Der ‘Begriff des Politischen’ und politische Erfahrung der Gegenwart. Überlegungen zur Aktualität von Carl Schmitt,” in Der Staat, vol. 22, no 3. (1983), 321–45. Klaus Koch and Dieter Senghaas (eds.), Texte zur Technokratiediskussion (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970). Hans Lenk (ed.), Technokratie als Ideologie: Sozialphilosophische Beiträge zu einem politischen Dilemma (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973). See Jürgen Feick, “Der angebliche Sachzwang. Schelskys konservativer Rückzug aus der Demokratie,” in Greiffenhagen (ed.), Der neue Konservatismus (1974), 39–56. Eventually even Armin Mohler began to track down the history of technocracy: Armin Mohler, “Der Weg der ‘Technokratie’ von Amerika nach Frankreich,” in Hans Barion et al. (eds.), Epirrhosis: Festgabe für Carl Schmitt, vol. 2 (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1968), 579–96. Armin Mohler, “Howard Scott und die ‘Technocracy.’ Zur Geschichte der technokratischen Bewegung II,” in Ernst Forsthoff and Reinhard Hörstel (eds.), Standorte im Zeitstrom: Festschrift f ür Arnold Gehlen zum 70. Geburtstag am 29. January 1974 (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1974), 249–97. Stefan Willeke, Die Technokratiebewegung in Nordamerika und Deutschland zwischen den Weltkriegen: Eine vergleichende Analyse (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1995). See for instance Dieter Senghaas, “Sachzwang und Herrschaft. Nachtrag zu einer Diskussion,” in Atomzeitalter, 12 (December 1966), 366–70. See Ernst Forsthoff (ed.), Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Sozialstaatlichkeit: Aufsätze und Essays (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968). Werner Skuhr, “Die Stellung zur Demokratie in der deutschen Nachkriegsdiskussion über den ‘demokratischen und sozialen Rechtsstaat,’ dargestellt unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Beiträge Ernst Forsthoffs,” Ph.D. thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 1961. Forsthoff, Verwaltung, 1, 43, 46. Ernst Forsthoff, Der Staat der Industriegesellschaft (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1971), 81. See also Horst Firsching, “Am Ausgang der Epoche der Staatlichkeit? Ernst Forsthoffs Sicht der Bundesrepublik Deutschland als paradigmatischer Staat der Industriegesellschaft,” in Göbel, van Laak, and Villinger (eds.), Metamorphosen, 203–18. See Wilhelm Hennis, “Zum Problem der deutschen Staatsanschauung,” in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 7, no. 1 (1959), 1–23; Dolf Sternberger, Begriff des Politischen (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1961); Hans Maier, “Zur Lage der

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politischen Wissenschaft in Deutschland,” in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 10, no. 3 (1962), 225–49; Kurt Sontheimer, Politische Wissenschaft und Staatsrechtslehre (Freiburg: Rombach, 1963); Martin Greiffenhagen, “Staatsgesinnung oder rechtsstaatliches Bewußtsein?” in Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte, vol. 15, no. 12 (1964), 705–13; Christian Graf von Krockow, “Staatsideologie oder demokratisches Bewußtsein,” in Politische Vierteljahrsschrift, vol. 6 (1965), 118–31. 40. Arnold Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral: Eine pluralistische Ethik (Königstein: Athenäum, 1969). Helmut Schelsky, Die Arbeit tun die anderen: Klassenkampf und Priesterherrschaft der Intellektuellen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975). Armin Mohler, Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Von der Läuterung zur Manipulation (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1968). 41. Muller (ed.), Conservatism, 8. 42. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das Recht der jungen Völker: Sammlung politischer Aufsätze, ed. Hans Schwarz (Berlin: Der Nahe Osten, 1932), 170.

CHAPTER 8

German Neo-Conservatism, ca. 1968–1985: Hermann Lübbe and Others

Jerry Z. Muller

Introduction

G

erman neo-conservatism was primarily a reactive phenomenon, in which those who had been the reformist but loyal opposition were transformed into defenders of the existing order, in the face of a radical challenge.1 That is hardly surprising: Most intellectual conservatism has been neo-conservatism, since the rationale for existing institutions comes to require articulation only when those institutions are under attack.2 The institutions that conservatives defend do, of course, change over time, which is one reason for the neo- in neo-conservatism. What was the existing order that the German neo-conservatives set out to defend, and what were the forces challenging that order? The challenge came primarily from the German New Left, its academic Nestors and fellow travelers; by the New (neo-Marxist) Left I mean a range of movements, from the SDS to the KGruppen and the APO to the Red Army Faction. The existing order, on the broadest level, was “bourgeois democracy,” or if you prefer, the liberaldemocratic, parliamentary, capitalist, welfare-statist Rechtsstaat. The major challenges to which the neo-conservatives responded included the neo-Marxist interpretation according to which the relationship between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic was one of fundamental continuity, not least since both were capitalist societies. A correlate was that anticommunism was

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illegitimate and nothing but a tool for the preservation of bourgeois hegemony and the creation of false consciousness through the production of Feindbilder. Parliamentary democracy too was a sham that prevented fundamental democratization. One site of that fundamental democratization was to be the university, in which decision-making power was to be removed from the hands of senior faculty and put into the hands of students and junior faculty. Primary and secondary education, it was claimed, ought to focus on liberating pupils from the false consciousness imposed by their society, by religion, and not least by their parents; to which end they should be taught not history but emancipatory social theory. Cultural norms valuing “achievement” [Leistung ] were oppressive, and the existence of differential levels of achievement was both suspect and a cause for radical pedagogic reform. In the early 1980s, the New Left—by then ensconced in parts of the SPD—had become a player in defense policy. Its claims were that the use of force in international relations was superannuated and that the notion of the need for military defense was not only a tool of false consciousness, but in the form of NATO’s decision to station new intermediate range missiles, created an immediate threat to the physical existence of Germans. It was these challenges that stimulated neo-conservative intellectuals to articulate the rationale for existing institutions. In part, they simply re-articulated liberal, bourgeois arguments of long standing. In part, they reformulated the logic of such institutions in new ways that were a direct response to the neoMarxist Kulturkritik of the age. In addition they reasserted classic conservative arguments for cautious reform rather than radical institutional transformation. Like previous conservatives, they believed that an emotional attachment to institutions was requisite for their preservation, and that a sense of historical continuity enhanced the emotional hold of institutions. But the past for which they sought greater respect was less the German past as a whole than the liberaldemocratic Germany of the Bundesrepublik during its first two decades. First, some terminological and definitional matters. The term “neoconservative” can be used in three senses. The first is positional, when a shift leftward occurs in the political culture such that positions once denominated as “liberal” come to be deemed “conservative.” The second is biographical, in which individuals who at one time had not been conservative become conservative. The third is substantive, a description of a variety of conservatism different from existing varieties. In the case of most German neo-conservatives, all three of these apply. That is to say they were people who for the most part had regarded themselves as reformist supporters of the institutions of the Bundesrepublik; many had belonged to the SPD without being particularly socialistic (not least because in an era in which the CDU was regarded as Catholic and the FDP

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as nationalist, the SPD provided the most plausible alternative for Kulturprotestanten). In articulating the defense of liberal institutions, they developed a position that was distinct from earlier forms of conservative or right-wing thought, at least in Germany. Who are we talking about? Defining German neo-conservatives presents a range of problems, which I will note without fully resolving. As in the United States—where the term “neo-conservative” was coined as an epithet by critics from the Left on the assumption that there were few designations more wounding to a self-respecting intellectual—the term “neo-conservative” came into West German usage as an epithet hurled from the Left (Peter Glotz is said to have coined the term). There was a difference in connotative burden of the term, however: In a nutshell, in the mind of American intellectuals, “conservative” connoted Nixon, while in the mind of German intellectuals, the label “conservative” was sullied by its association with those who had supported Hitler. It is hardly surprising, then, that some of those intellectuals whose positions were entirely congruent with German neoconservatism disavowed the label. A second problem is that there was no single journal or publicistic outlet particularly identified with neo-conservatism, and it had few institutional embodiments. Most German neo-conservatives were primarily academics in the humanities and social sciences who were moved to become public intellectuals, most of them reluctantly and temporarily. Then there is the question of timing: Some of those who can be said to have moved toward a more conservative form of liberalism moved away from it again once the crisis had passed; while other erstwhile liberals went through a neo-conservative phase on their way to yet more conservative positions. It might make sense, then, for some purposes, to speak of a “neo-conservative moment.”3 In part to obviate some of these difficulties, I plan to focus on Hermann Lübbe. He was one of the few German intellectuals to actually embrace the term “neo-conservative.”4 Most analysts of German neo-conservatism, whether friendly or hostile, regard him as its most outstanding representative, both because of the topical range of his writings and because of his ubiquity in public life as a lecturer and essayist whose works appeared in a wide variety of forums.5 He also had a talent for coining memorable phrases and formulae—an important qualification for a public intellectual. Lübbe was deeply involved in most of the few institutional embodiments of German neo-conservatism, including the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft, of which he was founding chairman in 1970; the “Tendenzwende?” conference in Munich in 1974; and the “Mut zur Erziehung” conference in Bad Godesberg in 1978. Moreover, Lübbe is the closest empirical exemplification of the ideal-type of a German neo-conservative in the sense of those who came to

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enunciate a historically distinct understanding and rationale for existing institutions. That is to say, he was not merely a liberal who moved temporarily toward and then away from a new position (as was the case, perhaps, with Kurt Sontheimer), nor was he someone who moved through neoconservatism toward some other, more traditional, form of conservatism. Because the German neo-conservatives were intellectuals whose concerns and emphases overlapped, rather than a coherent group with a shared project, it might be useful to conceive of them in terms of core and periphery. By the core I mean those who were most closely identified as neo-conservatives and who adhered most consistently to a distinctly neo-conservative position. Lübbe is the figure at the center; and close to him would be his philosophical comrade-in-arms, Odo Marquard. Also part of this center would be the political scientists Kurt Sontheimer, Richard Löwenthal, Wilhelm Hennis, and Hans Maier; the historians Thomas Nipperdey, Karl Dietrich Bracher, HansPeter Schwarz, and Michael Stürmer. One might profitably distinguish a left wing, a centrist wing, and a right wing among these figures. Other figures who are often mentioned in this context include Martin Kriele, Alexander Schwan, Friedrich Tenbruck, and Nicholas Lobkowicz. Then there are important transitional figures in a generational sense, such as Helmut Schelsky in the older generation or Michael Zöller in the younger. Generationally too, Lübbe, born in 1926, stood at the center. Any static classification, however useful for heuristic purposes, is at odds with the fact that intellectual and political life is dynamic. That means that individuals change their minds or change their emphases in keeping with changing political constellations and with their own developing experience. I do not mean to suggest that there was a consensus among these figures at any point, much less a party line; in fact, they often criticized one another’s positions, albeit in a respectful fashion. As the better German analysts of German neo-conservatism have recognized, the neo-conservatives could be distinguished from other tendencies on the right with which they were sometimes equated, especially by their opponents. They were distinct from nationalists, such as Hans-Joachim Arndt, Bernard Willms, or the writers associated with the journal Criticon, who opposed the integration of West Germany into “the West.”6 They were also distinct from the leading figures of an older tradition of radical conservative cultural criticism of liberal-capitalist democracy, such as Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer, or Arnold Gehlen. And they were different from conservative Christian critics, such as Robert Spaemann, who saw the liberal state as a decline from Christian or universal natural-law norms (like those whom Jacob Heilbrunn, writing about the more recent American context, has dubbed “theo-cons”). In contrast to all of these, the core of neo-conservatism was a position which some have dubbed Modernisierungstraditionalismus,7—the

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embrace of modern liberal—capitalist democracy, together with an awareness that its institutions did not, on their own, provide a sense of individual meaning and purpose, which would come, in part at least, from older attachments and traditions.8 It was the emphasis upon the ongoing function of such nonmodern or premodern sources of attachment and identity, together with a principled defense of the institutions of liberal-capitalist democracy, that was perhaps the hallmark of German neo-conservatism. A bit about Lübbe’s biography. He was born in 1926 in Ostfriesland, a region with its own cultural distinctiveness. As a child he was in the Jungvolk (“Pimpfen”); as a very young man he served in the German army and spent some time in a Russian POW camp before returning to civil life in 1945. He studied philosophy, history, sociology, and theology, and in 1963 published an important book on German intellectual history, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland. From 1963 to 1969 he was professor of philosophy at the Ruhr University in Bochum, from 1969 to 1973 professor of social philosophy at Bielefeld. A member of the SPD since the early 1950s, he served from 1966 to 1969 as Staatssekretär in the Kultusministerium of Nordrhein-Westfalen; during 1969–70, he was Staatssekretär to Heinz Kühn, the Ministerpresident. At odds with the university policy of the government, which favored the Gruppenuniversität, he left government service and in 1971 accepted a chair of philosophy and political theory at the University of Zürich, not least because Switzerland was relatively untouched by the trends that he thought were harming German universities.9 But he remained very active in academic life and public debate in the Bundesrepublik. On the upper reaches of the battles among German intellectuals in the 1970s and early 1980s, Jürgen Habermas became the standard-bearer of the center-left view and Lübbe the standard-bearer of the center-right view over the role of political intellectuals in a liberal democracy. Both men were deeply steeped in the history of German philosophy. Habermas was a leftHegelian, who saw his role as articulating an idealized view of democracy developed from first principles, which would act as standard against which to measure and criticize existing West German reality. Lübbe, more of a right-Hegelian in this regard,10 seemed to regard the proper role of the political philosopher as reflecting upon recent and current experience, to try to examine the actual workings of liberal democracy and its totalitarian opposite, and to try to make explicit the implicit assumptions upon which existing liberal democracies actually function. A major barrier to understanding German neo-conservatives is that Habermas—an advocate in theory of undistorted communication—has in fact frequently misrepresented their positions, and has frequently resorted to the smear tactic of guilt-by-association with National Socialism. When, for

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example, he edited a collection of essays devoted largely to a critique of neoconservative intellectuals, he characterized the contributors to his volume as “those who stand committed to the traditions against which a German regime established itself in 1933”—with the clear implication that their neoconservative opponents stood for the traditions of the regime that established itself in 1933.11 For the most part, Lübbe and those closest to him regarded themselves as sober and skeptical defenders of real existing liberal institutions against the vague hope of a “post-liberal superdemocracy” associated with Habermas and other proponents of Critical Theory.12 Odo Marquard has characterized the “Ritter Schule” of practical philosophy of which he and Lübbe were members as part of a sober tradition of Aufklärung, “more Montaigne than Descartes; more Locke than Turgot; more Montesquieu than Fichte; more Tocqueville than Marx; more Max Weber than Lukács; more Aron and Sperber than the later Sartre; more Lübbe than Habermas.”13 Part of their conservatism lay in their assumption that since existing liberal institutions were reasonably morally beneficial, and given the difficulty of the unanticipated negative consequences, the burden of proof in intellectual political argument lay with advocates of radical reform.14 As Lübbe has noted, they had relatively little in common with historical German conservatism, in the sense in which the term was used for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.15 Universities and Schools as Battlegrounds A major focus of neo-conservative concern and critique was the situation of the German universities. Many neo-conservatives had, like Lübbe, been actively involved in plans for the expansion and reform of the German university system. It was in the universities that most of them made their home, and they were increasingly alarmed by the radicalization of the universities through the use of violence, coercion, and denunciation and through the mechanisms of the Gruppenuniversität, which gave ideologically motivated minorities of students and junior faculty a de facto veto over faculty appointments and curriculum. Incidents of violence, threats, and intimidation of professors at German universities by groups on the radical left began in the late 1960s and picked up steam in the early 1970s. In a survey of 3,000 West German university professors taken by the Allensbach Institute in 1977, one in ten professors reported being personally attacked in leaflets and posters, while one in five had had their teaching and/or research hindered by interference or attacks from the radical left.16 At the same time, state governments, especially those

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governed by the SPD, tried to “democratize” the university by instituting decision-making processes based upon one or another degree of parity among senior professors, junior professors, students, and service personnel. The first of these schemes to be implemented, at the Free University in Berlin, created Quadruple Parity—actually, a ratio of 7-4-3-1 of professors (which now included C-2 and C-3 levels as well as C-4, the Ordinarien), Mittelbau (junior faculty), students, and service personnel.17 Shortly thereafter, Thomas Nipperdey, one of the most distinguished German historians of his generation, left the Free University in protest.18 He and others argued that such measures allowed a minority of radical activists to attain power in the face of the relative apathy of the mass of students.19 In 1974, an appellate judge in Berlin (an SPD appointee) ruled in favor of a defendant who claimed that only persons of left-wing political persuasions were considered for jobs at the Free University.20 The major organizational reaction against these developments was the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft, founded in November 1970 at a conference that brought together 1,500 people, most of them academics, but also some politicians and journalists. Among the speakers were Hans Maier, and Ernst Nolte, and the keynote address was by Hermann Lübbe. He outlined the organizations tasks as publicizing the intimidation of professors and students by the radical left; offering solidarity to threatened colleagues; calling upon politicians to maintain order and to resist the demands for the “democratization” of the university; and interesting voters in the threat faced by the universities in order to put electoral pressure on politicians.21 The partial success of the BFW, such as it was, came through the courts. In May 1973, the Bundesverfassungsgericht declared the triple-parity laws unconstitutional, and a new federal law adopted shortly thereafter gave professors a voting majority.22 Another milestone on the road to German neo-conservatism came in 1974, with the debate over the guidelines for high-school curricula issued by the ministries of education in the state of Hesse. As the culture of the New Left came to influence government policy in the field of primary education, the reaction against that influence took on a larger dimension, affecting electoral politics itself, and leading to what critics of the New Left came to call the Tendenzwende, the reversal of trends. The Hesse educational reforms marked the percolation and attempted institutionalization of key tenets of the academic New Left into the public schools. In the early 1970s the Minister of Education in the SPD-governed state of Hesse was Ludwig von Friedeburg, a professor of sociology at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and a collaborator of Jürgen Habermas. A series of commissions convened under Friedeburg’s auspices were charged with developing basic principles of instruction and

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broad curricular goals, which reflected the ideals of “emancipatory education.” Students were to become aware of their true interests in ending “domination,” to look for ideological distortion, to recognize the conflict-laden nature of their society. Just what this meant remained vague, but it carried an air of the need to challenge all authority or “domination” in the interests of “emancipation.” The most controversial recommendation of the Hesse educational guidelines was that the teaching of history be eliminated, and replaced by the teaching of “social studies” [Gesellschaftskunde].23 Opposition to the plan came first and foremost from parents in Hesse, who objected to what they regarded as the replacement of knowledge by indoctrination. Outrage at this attempt to mobilize the schools for systematic radicalization contributed to a major setback for the SPD in the state elections of 1974, and led to Friedeburg’s resignation. Supporting the parents through reports submitted to the government were three men whose political and intellectual development were representative of the Tendenzwende.24 Together with Lübbe, also involved in the critique of the Hessian educational reforms was Thomas Nipperdey, who had pioneered the use of social scientific perspectives in the writing of interpretive history.25 Nipperdey, who like Lübbe had identified with the Social Democrats, became an eloquent critic of attempts to harness historiography to unduly teleological schemes, which he claimed did violence to the selfunderstanding of past ages. Michael Stürmer, then a young professor of modern social history at a new university in Hesse, was led in part through his disillusionment with the new educational reforms into opposition to the SPD.26 All three men were liberal intellectuals who had once sympathized with the SPD but became dissatisfied by what they saw as the politicization of education and scholarship in what they regarded as utopian directions. It was the institutionalization of what Lübbe called the “silent cultural revolution” that made them into critics of the cultural policy of the SPD, which they regarded as having caved in to the New Left. They objected to replacing the study of history and geography with Gesellschaftskunde, which in turn was devoted to “emancipation.” Such a program, they argued, left students without the factual basis by which to test the plausibility of broadranging social theories, left students without a sense of the complexity and contingency of history and the unanticipated consequences of deliberate action, and gave them no sense of how particular societies—including their own—had arrived at their present circumstances. And by beginning with the assumption that young pupils should learn to call everything into question before they had developed any sense of identification with the existing institutions of society, emancipatory education cultivated those very “legitimation problems of late capitalism,” which critical social theorists then

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attributed to liberal capitalist democracy itself.27 Several years later, in June 1978, Lübbe participated in the publication of Mut zur Erziehung, a critique of progressive pedagogy that championed the ongoing validity of bourgeois virtues such as industry, self-discipline, and pride in achievement. As Kurt Sontheimer put it, there was too much criticism of LeistungsDRUCK, too little recognition of LeistungsGLÜCK.28 For urging teachers not to neglect the inculcation of such bourgeois virtues, the authors of Mut zur Erziehung were accused by their leftist critics of promoting those “secondary virtues” which had produced Eichmann and concentration camp guards.29 The Defense of Liberal Democracy To a degree perhaps minimized in subsequent memory, the New Left was an attack on liberal democracy, often in the name of “direct democracy.” In his seminal introduction to his 1961 work on students and politics (written with von Friedeburg and others), Jürgen Habermas declared that the Germans were a people “being held in the shackles of bourgeois society by a liberal constitution.”30 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he encouraged the development of the SDS as it drew away from the SPD,31 and looked to it as well as to subsequent “social movements” (not including parents in Hesse) as a focus for his radical democratic hopes. By contrast, neo-conservatives like Lübbe followed the lead of Richard Löwenthal, who dismissed the extraparliamentary opposition, the APO, and its notion of direct democracy, or Rätedemokratie, as a “romantic regression.”32 In the face of the stimulus of challenges from the left—both intellectual and political—Lübbe was led to re-articulate the logic of liberal, bourgeois, capitalist democracy. He devoted himself to the intellectual defense of the liberal aspect of liberal democracy, against the threats he perceived from the demands to democratize all areas of life or to replace the institutionally protected cultural and social pluralism of a liberal society with enforced communitarianism and egalitarianism. What is striking about his defense is the degree to which he borrowed his analysis from critics of liberal democracy on the radical right and radical left, while reversing their valuations.33 Take, for example, his definition of political liberalism as “the system of institutionalized non-identity of individual and collective interests. It assumes ongoing alienation. The rule according to which its institutions are structured is the limitation of general claims to bare necessities, rather than increasing the possibilities of collective action. It thus preserves the separation between the private and public spheres of life … and limits the politicization of social life. Experiences of unlimited solidarity remain particular, and in the first instance familial, and the range of experiences of universal

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brotherhood based on collective interests is kept narrow.”34 Here Lübbe borrows from the Marxist critique of liberalism (especially Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage,” a text to which Lübbe frequently recurs), but reverses its normative valuations. He goes on to insist—again turning Marx on his head—that it is precisely the lack of governmentally enforced collective, altruistic goals that creates the possibility of the preservation of differences, and that it is the lack of collective purpose in liberal societies (i.e., alienation) that means that individuals will look to the preservation of their regional, religious, familial, and other particularities for meaning. Liberal societies are thus characterized by “incomplete emancipation” from inherited particularities.35 In contrast to those who regarded existing social institutions and cultural norms as barriers to human freedom or vocational life-chances, Lübbe insisted that there came a point at which the costs of social and cultural “emancipation” outweighed its benefits. Ralf Dahrendorf had famously argued that upward social mobility was limited not only by formal barriers but by the invisible barriers created by social expectations linked to class, gender, religion, and traditionalist culture.36 Such demands for full cultural emancipation, Lübbe contended, meant the elimination of all inherited cultural particularity that might in any way inhibit the individual’s willingness and ability to consider new ideas. Taken to its logical conclusion, Lübbe argued, the demand for full emancipation would mean the self-destruction of a pluralist society based on multiple sources of identity, leaving only culturally homogeneous individuals “emancipated” from any past ties that gave their lives meaning. Here too, Lübbe articulated a frequent assertion among neo-conservatives, that individual and collective identity came at least in part from identification with past traditions, without which the pace of technological and social change would leave individuals disoriented, or dependent for direction upon utopian social scientific theories that promised to replace older moral traditions but could not. But in contrast to much of twentieth-century German conservatism (especially of the radical variety), the neo-conservatives placed relatively little emphasis on the nation as the entity with which individuals ought to identify. Lübbe proposed the criterion of “as much commonality as necessary based on the recognition of inalienable, universally valid claims; as much diversity as possible, based on the effective influence of contingent origins.”37 Lübbe also borrowed from the analysis of the radical right critic of liberal democracy Carl Schmitt (whom he had known in the 1950s and 1960s), but here too reversed the valuations. Schmitt, Lübbe wrote, had plausibly described the genesis of liberalism; all that needed to be corrected was to affirm what Schmitt had condemned.38 He found useful Schmitt’s description of liberalism’s tendency to continually expand the religious, cultural, and

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moral spheres which were to be removed from governmental control.39 And he defended this propensity against the desire of radical democrats to transform social life by political means. Lübbe accepts from Schmitt (and others) the notion that liberal democracy is based on technique and neutralization, i.e., a minimum of ideological consensus and common purpose. But his response is: “That’s liberalism all right, and that’s what is so good about it.” Lübbe also used criteria drawn from Schmitt to defend liberalism from the radical democratic theories of Jürgen Habermas. In his works of the Weimar era, Schmitt had famously insisted that liberal systems were so devoted to discussion that they were incapable of making decisions. Habermas had borrowed from Schmitt’s analysis, but took as normative the belief in rational debate that Schmitt had regarded as one of liberalism’s flaws. Lübbe noted that to make Habermas’ conception of decision-making through consensual attainment of truth the criterion of legitimate politics was to delegitimate the actual working of all known parliamentary governments. He defended liberal-democratic parliamentary institutions precisely for their ability to reach decisions by majority vote, without necessarily reaching agreement on the truth, for their “separation of truth from validity” [Trennung von Wahrheit und Geltung]. In other words, Lübbe defended liberal parliamentary democracy as an effective form of conflict reduction. Actual parliamentary government requires both discussion and decision, he noted, and to embrace one at the expense of the other is a form of political romanticism, i.e., a style of politics that aims primarily at the heightening of the subjective experience of individuals.40 Lübbe set out to defend other elements of the contemporary order from radical critics. He pointed out that the Kulturkritik of modern society, which he and others had criticized in its right-wing form, was now reappearing on the left.41 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he (like many other subsequent neo-conservatives) had been skeptical of the belief in technocratic approaches to politics.42 By the 1970s, in the face of attacks on “technique” or “instrumental reason,” he insisted that specialists in technology are indispensable to develop techniques against the dangers created by technology itself, and warned that while ecological problems were real, their solution would come only from technical professions, such as engineering, which were vital to improving the quality of life.43 Lübbe supported the expansion of the educational system in an attempt to provide greater equality of opportunity. Yet even as access to education was being extended, the content of that education was being called into question and at times transformed. In the early 1970s, Claus Offe, a political scientist associated with the Frankfurt School, offered a critique of contemporary society which resonated with the student New Left, insisting that the orientation

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of the educational system, and the social system to which it contributed, toward “achievement” or “performance” was intrinsically oppressive.44 Here too, Lübbe came to the defense of Leistung as a necessary prerequisite of modern, bourgeois existence. When leftist pedagogues, including leading figures in the teachers’ union, portrayed unequal educational outcomes as a cause for dismay, Lübbe argued that the liberal attempt to create equality of opportunity must be coupled with the acceptance of unequal outcomes based on unequal abilities, indeed that greater equality of opportunity made the reality of unequal abilities more conspicuous.45 Neo-conservatives defended the market economy and private property as intrinsic to and inextricable from what was best about modern society.46 Lübbe characterized the notion of the identity of individual and collective interests as the Lebenslüge of Marxism, and pointed out time and again that what bothered political moralists about capitalism was the notion that the common good can often be achieved through the pursuit of private goods, through Entmoralisierung.47 Yet the intellectual defense of the market remained comparatively underplayed among German neo-conservatives, especially compared to their American or British counterparts. Economists and those interested in economics were marginal to German neo-conservatism, and those with a more classically liberal or libertarian orientation rarer still. Totalitarianism and Fascism It is no wonder then that the neo-conservatives reacted so vociferously to the frequent contention of the New Left that the legacy of National Socialism would be overcome only with the supercession of capitalism, a claim that was enshrined in the SPD’s 1985 Nürnberg manifesto, which declared that the SPD worked for “democratic socialism and thereby for the elimination of the social basis of fascism.” Divergences over the conceptual and historical relationship between National Socialism, communism, and the liberal-capitalist social market economy of the Bundesrepublik were central to the conflicts between the New Left and the neo-conservative intellectuals. One barometer of these conflicts was the changing semantics with which the National Socialist past was discussed. The theory of totalitarianism, which focused upon the commonalities between communism and National Socialism, served several functions, one of which was as a tool for historical research. The notion that the two movements shared certain structural similarities despite their overt antagonism was suggested even before 1933 by the German political scientists Sigmund Neumann and Waldemar Gurian. Franz Neumann, in his classic Marxist study Behemoth, first published in 1942, referred to the National Socialist

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regime as totalitarian, even as he stressed the pluralist structure of power within the regime. In 1951, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism emphasized the pairing of an all-encompassing ideological view of history with the use of terror—not merely to coerce obedience, as in all dictatorships, but to enact the ideologically prescribed laws of history through mass murder—as the distinguishing feature of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism. As with other concepts, totalitarianism is like a flashlight, which illuminates some aspects of historical reality and leaves others in the shadows. Whether to employ one concept or another will depend in part on its ability to explain the dynamics of the historical phenomenon under investigation. Yet what is considered most significant about the phenomenon to be investigated is often linked to the values of the investigator. There is no doubt that the use of the term “totalitarian” to describe National Socialism and the Soviet Union during (and sometimes after) Stalin’s era was linked to the liberal values of those who used the term. The most significant, ground-breaking, empirical work on the conditions that led to Hitler’s success and on the nature of the National Socialist regime was begun by Karl Dietrich Bracher, whose works, beginning with Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik of 1955 and continuing through the synoptic Die deutsche Diktatur: Entstehung, Struktur, Folgen des Nationalsozialismus of 1969, were informed by the concept of totalitarianism. The use of the term “totalitarianism” implied that liberal democracy had enemies on the left as well as the right. West German political culture in the early post-war decades was marked by what Richard Löwenthal termed “the anti-totalitarian consensus,” a consensus shared by all three major parties and most public intellectuals. As a political mood, anti-totalitarianism expressed the notion that the new Federal Republic was founded upon constitutional and moral principles in opposition to those of the former, National Socialist regime, and also to the communist regime in East Germany. The terms “totalitarian” and “fascist” are by no means mutually exclusive, and many historians regarded both of them as useful for the analysis of the Third Reich. Yet the decline of the use of the term “totalitarian” beginning in the 1960s reflected the influence of a New Left, which, unlike the SPD of the late 1950s and 1960s, now emphasized the purported link between National Socialism and capitalism, and regarded anticommunism as intrinsically or incipiently fascist. The term “totalitarianism” was excoriated first by communist intellectuals such as Reinhard Kühnl, who spoke not of National Socialism but of “German fascism.” In the political semantics of West German intellectual life, use of the term “German fascism” to describe the National Socialist regime connoted the shift from anti-totalitarianism (which was of course anticommunist) to an antifascism loath to see enemies

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on the Left or friends on the Right. The decline of the use of the term “totalitarianism” in political and scholarly discourse and the rising use of “German fascism” was therefore a barometer of the shift in German intellectual life away from the old anti-totalitarian consensus.48 On both the organizational and intellectual levels, this change was reflected in a tendency to play down the differences among liberals, social democrats, and communists, all of whom were portrayed as representatives of a vaguely defined “Enlightenment.” In terms of foreign policy, this antifascism did not involve sympathy with the Soviet Union or with its role in international affairs. It did mean, however, that the Soviet Union was no longer regarded as a threat to West Germany or Western Europe. Since the Soviet Union was assumed to present no threat to the Federal Republic, it was necessary to explain why so many of one’s fellow citizens remained suspicious of it. The answer was offered in terms of Feindbilder—images of the enemy; with the connotation that the very notion of an enemy was a specter, based upon prejudice or cultivated by conservative politicians for purposes of social integration. The demolition of such Feindbilder was defined as a central task of “Enlightenment.” Among the implications of antifascism commonly expressed on the West German new left was the ongoing obligation to oppose those values and institutions connected with the Third Reich. As George Mosse has noted, National Socialist racism “annexed” various elements of previous bourgeois culture, and as Martin Broszat has described, the National Socialist regime was “parasitic” in that it made use of existing German political and economic structures to reach its own goals. Given these historical realities, it became possible for the left marching under the banner of antifascism to chastise and condemn much of previous bourgeois culture as Nazi or incipiently fascist. In schools, teachers who campaigned against nuclear power and in favor of unilateral disarmament accused students who took issue with them of a “quasi-fascist political mentality.”49 Carried over into the present, the identification of existing objects of criticism with fascism led to a new use of the term “resistance.” Civil disobedience in protest against everything from the Shah of Iran to nuclear power plants to runways at the Frankfurt Airport was now characterized as “belated resistance.” The (il)logic of this mindset was characterized by Odo Marquard: “Because fascism was the target against which a revolt did not materialize then, today the target of the compensatory revolt must also be fascism.”50 Those who regarded the distinction between liberal democracy and totalitarianism as fundamental were dismissed as conservative relics of a discredited Cold War mentality.51 One theme of neo-conservatism, under these circumstances, was the relegitimation of anticommunism. Karl Dietrich Bracher, the doyen of historians of the Third Reich, turned in this direction, stressing that the

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preservation of liberal democracy demanded an awareness of dangers from radical movements of both the left and right, each motivated to capture political power in order to reorganize society in keeping with some comprehensive ideology.52 The Peace Movement and Its Critics The next wave of intellectual neo-conservatism was a response to the increasing political influence of neutralist and pacifist currents in the early 1980s. These burst onto the public stage in the massive demonstrations against the installation of intermediate range nuclear weapons, a policy adopted by NATO in 1979 at the urging of the Social Democratic Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, to counter the buildup of comparable weapons by the Warsaw Pact. The demonstrations were striking both for their size (the largest brought 300,000 protesters from across the country to Bonn in October 1981) and for their apocalyptic tone. The peace movement developed out of an atmosphere of anxiety, nurtured by the depiction of the new Reagan administration in influential German weeklies like Der Spiegel as content to regard central Europe as a battle zone. In a speech entitled “The Destruction of Mankind Has Already Begun,” Günter Grass spoke of an “atomic Auschwitz,” and the Greens’ Joschka Fischer equated nuclear deterrence with Auschwitz. It became the fashion to promote a sense of anxiety, then to call upon politicians to do something about it. To sport one’s angst became a badge of right thinking on the left.53 Some of the young protesters no doubt took earnestly the predictions of some “peace researchers” that the stationing of the missiles would soon lead to a war of which the Germans would be the first victims. Among the peace advocates and anti-nuclear power activists, the National Socialist past was often invoked: To prevent a “nuclear Holocaust,” the Germans must now engage in Widerstand against the state, as their fathers had failed to do. While the peace movement was by no means communist-dominated, close cooperation with those affiliated with the small but well-organized German Communist Party was taken for granted. Thus the West German DKP played a leading role in the Krefelder Appeal, a manifesto against the stationing of new weapons signed by hundreds of thousands of Germans, which launched the new peace movement. The concrete political goals of the peace movement ran parallel to those of the Soviet Union, even without communist dominance of the movement.54 The neo-conservative response to the peace movement came above all from two historians with ties to the CDU, Hans-Peter Schwarz and Michael Stürmer. Hans-Peter Schwarz, who succeeded Bracher to the chair of contemporary history and political science in Bonn, had published scholarly works on

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the origins of the Federal Republic, Adenauer and his era, and West German foreign policy. In 1985 he published a short, topical book entitled The Tamed Germans: From Power Obsession to Power Amnesia.55 He set out to write a primer on what he called “responsible power politics,” which he regarded as indispensable for the self-defense of liberal democracy. Schwarz lamented the fact that so many Germans seemed incapable of conceiving of international power in terms that were moderate and responsible. From the Kaiserreich until the collapse of 1945, they had fallen prey to an irrational fascination with power, with a power-state that was oriented toward a limitless, brutal use of force (Machtstaatdenken). The opposite of this view was a more or less pacifistic internationalism, oriented toward the fellowship of peoples and the community of nations. Schwarz wrote on behalf of a more skeptical approach, oriented toward the idea of a balance of power, which accepts the need for power in international relations but retains an orientation toward international order and humanistic ideals. Those who became the country’s leaders after 1945, Schwarz wrote, had a realistic attitude toward international power, which recognized that while policy had a moral dimension, it could not be made on purely moralistic grounds. But the successor generation had come to believe that after Adolf Hitler the very notion of power politics was taboo, and the possibility of a morally legitimate use of power was increasingly dismissed. In recent years, Schwarz claimed, German public opinion had become increasingly moralistic: It regarded the seeming lack of power of the Federal Republic as both fortunate and a model for others, forgetting that there was such a thing as the responsible deployment of power, without which the international order might sink into chaos. Having been led into catastrophe by power politics, Germans were increasingly inclined to ignore and underrate the role of power in international relations. While their ancestors had been intoxicated by power, younger Germans were more often intoxicated by peace, Schwarz wrote. Schwarz, then, was a proponent of “realism” in international relations, along the lines of Raymond Aron, whom he admired—a position, which, as he noted, was articulated in the United States by German refugees from Hitler. The defense of West Germany’s liberal polity, of NATO and the European Community, and the preservation of international order—these, he held, were the criteria of responsible power politics. The catastrophist tone of the anti-missile demonstrations Schwarz attributed to the gradual sinking from public consciousness of the reality of power in international relations, not least the reality that West German security depended upon NATO’s military strength. When it was discussed, it was with a bad conscience. The language of West German politics was distorted, Schwarz claimed: for example, the tendency “to describe the relationship with the enemy who threatens us with weapons of annihilation and holds eighteen

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million Germans in the status of vassals as a ‘security partnership.’… Often this terminology disguises the fact that international relations are characterized by a complex juxtaposition of power politics and cooperation.” The Politics of the Past The notion articulated by Schwarz that the defense of the nation depended on a sober realism about the role of power in international affairs was one of the major themes of Michael Stürmer, a historian who emerged as the most salient and engagé of the neo-conservative intellectuals. In the early 1980s, Stürmer increasingly moved into the arena of public opinion, becoming a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He also lectured to a wide range of nonacademic audiences, and was a sometime adviser to Chancellor Kohl. A writer of allusive, literary prose in a profession whose works were increasingly jargon-laden, Stürmer now made a deliberate attempt to convey what he took to be the lessons of the German past to a larger audience.56 Stürmer repeatedly voiced his concern that “in a land without memory, the future is nothing but a black hole. It has no certainty, no identity, no continuity of internal politics, no reliability in foreign affairs. … In a land without history, the future is won by those who coin concepts and interpret the past.” The main messages that his essays on the German past conveyed to the German present were that the preservation of liberal democracy ought not to be taken for granted; that liberal democracy had roots in German history, but that it was above all the response to the disastrous experience of the Germans with totalitarian regimes of the right and left; that the creation of a sovereign, independent West Germany was a product of clever maneuvering by Adenauer amid the geopolitical realities of the post-war period; that Germany’s geographical position in the center of Europe had always played a role (often disastrous) in its political options, and that in the present this meant that national unification based upon a Swedish-style neutralism was a chimera. The hero of Stürmer’s vision of German history was not Frederick the Great, not Bismarck, but Adenauer. “The most important attempt by the Germans to learn from their history,” he wrote, “is the Basic Constitution of the Federal Republic.” The historical “consensus” that Stürmer aimed to restore was one in which the rules of the liberal-democratic game were accepted, in which Germany’s ties (including its military ties) to the West were unequivocal, and in which the achievements of West German democracy were regarded as the basis of a justified patriotism. The real historical Streit about the German past was neither about the Prussian past nor about the Nazi era: It was about the Adenauer and Erhard

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period, the two decades after the end of the war. In the hard left version of the past, bourgeois democracy and fascism were two forms of bürgerliche Herrschaft, with the former constantly in danger of developing into the latter. In the soft left version, real political democratization and a real confrontation with the Nazi past had begun only in late 1960s. By the 1980s, this had become a veritable generational ideology of the, ’68ers, who modestly declared themselves the first generation of truly democratic Germans.57 As Thomas Nipperdey, a critic of this mentality, put it, the “inability to mourn” was followed not by the ability to mourn, but by the ability to accuse.58 In 1983, two journalists close to Habermas, Helmut Dubiel and Günter Frankenberg, coined a phrase that Habermas was to put to use in the Historikerstreit, namely Entsorgung der Vergangenheit.59 Their ire was directed at Hermann Lübbe, not for what he had said about the place of Nazism in the German past, but for having presented a more favorable evaluation of the Adenauer era. In an address on “National Socialism in Post-War German Consciousness,” delivered to an international conference held in Berlin in 1983 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi attainment of power and published shortly thereafter in the FAZ and the Historische Zeitschrift, Lübbe attacked the portrait of the post-war era popular on the Left, according to which the Adenauer era was a “missed opportunity” to overcome the legacy of National Socialism.60 Lübbe argued that while it was true that the public coming-to-terms with National Socialism had indeed increased in more recent decades, it was time to recognize the democratic achievements of the 1950s. “The question is how after the definitive collapse of National Socialism the citizenry of a renewed democracy developed out of a people that only a few years before had in its majority cheered Hitler.” The answer, as Lübbe formulated it, was that former Nazis were integrated into a democratic polity while National Socialism itself was delegitimated. The Nazi past was not publicly repressed, Lübbe pointed out; and although direct, public confrontation with the specifics of the Nazi past had been limited in the immediate post-war decades, Lübbe argued that “this relative silence was the social-psychological and politically necessary medium for the transformation of our post-war populace into the citizenry of the Federal Republic of Germany.” Since a majority of the population had at one time supported National Socialism, it was impossible to create a viable German state that excluded a majority of Germans on account of their past. Lübbe, like Schwarz and Stürmer, stressed the achievement of the founders of the Federal Republic in general and of Adenauer in particular in turning Germany definitively toward liberal democracy and toward the West. Far from having opened the way to liberal democracy, Lübbe argued, the New Left had tended to delegitimate it, by stressing the continuity between the Third Reich and its liberal-democratic successor.

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Behind Lübbe’s objection to the notion of the Adenauer era as a “lost opportunity” for coming to terms with the Nazi past was an experience shared by many of his generation of intellectuals. For them the institutions of the Federal Republic were in themselves the most important answer to the National Socialist disaster, which they had experienced at first hand.61 Having experienced a polity without the rule of law, intellectual freedom, or a legally protected private sphere, they did not take such institutions for granted. And having built their lives on the principle of combating totalitarianism, they were genuinely appalled to hear themselves and their institutions spoken of as a kind of pale aftermath of National Socialism.62 Such was the state of political discourse among leading intellectuals on the present implications of the past on the eve of the Historikerstreit. Neoconservatives such as Lübbe, Stürmer, Schwarz, and Bracher adhered to the anti-totalitarian consensus, which saw enemies to liberal democracy on the Left as well as on the Right. For many (though not all) on the West German liberal Left, opposition to the National Socialist past had come to mean anti-anticommunism, and a focus on the evils of the Stalinist past or the communist present was seen as a threat to peace and Entspannung. The neo-conservatives were the most vital force on the intellectual non-Left during the era I have discussed here. But they were not the only intellectuals who stood right of center. There were, to be sure, more traditional nationalists, Schlußstrichler, dyspeptic right-Schmittians, Christian cultural critics, and idiosyncratic figures, the most intellectually brilliant, politically outrageous, and morally callous of which was Ernst Nolte. The Historikerstreit of 1986 was about many things. One of them was a masterstroke of intellectualpolitical tactics, by which Jürgen Habermas tried to yoke the neo-conservatives to the rock of Nolte in an attempt to discredit the neo-conservatives by associating them with Nolte’s views. The English language commentary on the Historikerstreit—in which one will find none of the intellectual context I have just sketched—is a measure of Habermas’ success, a monument, one might say, to interest-led distorted communication.63 The political influence of the neo-conservatives and their net contribution to the political culture of the Federal Republic is hard to measure. A minimalist view is that they made it possible to believe that one could be an intellectual without being on the left; that they made the CDU salonfähig for Kulturprotestanten; and that they contributed to the modernization of German conservatism by creating a brand of conservatism no longer confined by region and confession or defined by nationalism.64 In part, and in keeping with their own self-understanding, they offered an intellectual articulation of what many Bürger knew in their hearts, that the institutions of the Bundesrepublik were worth defending. In so doing, they slowed down the pace of reform in an era of intellectual and cultural radicalism, perhaps the most that conservatives could do.

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Notes 1. Dirk van Laak makes a similar point about Lübbe in Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens: Carl Schmitt in der politischen Geistesgeschichte der frühen Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Akademie, 1993), 279. 2. See Jerry Z. Muller, Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), Introduction. 3. I owe this formulation to Dirk Moses. 4. Lübbe, “ ‘Neokonservative’ in der Kritik. Eine Metakritik,” first published in Merkur, vol. 37, no. 6 (September 1983), 622–32; and reprinted in abridged form in Lübbe, Fortschritts-Reaktionen: Über konservative und destruktive Modernität (Graz: Styria, 1987). 5. Such is the evaluation, for example, of Claus Leggewie, quoted in Norbert Hilger, Deutscher Neokonservatismus—das Beispiel Hermann Lübbes (BadenBaden: Nomos, 1995), 13. 6. See for example Hans-Joachim Arndt, Die Besiegten von 1945 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1978), and Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, Charakterwäsche: Die Politik der amerikanischen Umerziehung in Deutschland (Munich: LangenMüller, 1981). 7. Hilger, 11, 45, uses this term to denote a variety of intellectual conservatism, typified by Lübbe and Marquard, “freed of cultural-critical complaint.” He takes the term from Claus Leggewie in “Die Konservativen und die Zukunft,” in Das Argument 30 (1988), 639–51, quoted 45. Similarly, Wolfgang H. Lorig, Neokonservatives Denken in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Oplanden: Leske und Budrich, 1988), 9. Lorig’s is the best book on German neo-conservatism I have come across, knowledgeable and fair, neither a hagiography nor a study in Ideologiekritik. While of some value, Hilger’s book is less concise and adds little of substance to Lorig’s analysis, aside from additional Ideologiekritik. 8. One of Lübbe’s most interesting themes, which I cannot explore here, is his notion of the Selbsthistorisierung of contemporary civilization: the notion that given the rapidity of change, the “present” becomes ever shorter, and the cultural demand for the appropriation of elements of the historical past ever greater. These themes are explored most extensively in Lübbe, Der Lebenssinn der Industriegesellschaft (Berlin: Springer, 1990), and Im Zug der Zeit: Verkürzter Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart (Berlin: Springer, 1992). 9. These biographical details are drawn largely from Hilger, 10–12. 10. See his explication of the Hegelian Right in Politische Philosophie in Deutschland; and Lübbe “Wer kann sich Aufklärung leisten?” Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 23 (1976), 64–72, 65. 11. Jürgen Habermas, “Introduction” to Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age” (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1984, German original 1979), 3. Lorig shows time and again how Habermas has mischaracterized the positions of the German neo-conservatives.

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12. “ ‘Neokonservative’ in der Kritik,” 35. 13. In “Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts—eine Bilanz,” in Der Traum der Vernunft—vom Elend der Aufklärung (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985), quoted in Heinz Kleger and Georg Kohler, “Einleitung: Ein Kapitel politischer Philosophie in Deutschland nach 1945,” 11–32, in George Kohler and Heinz Kleger (eds.), Diskurs und Dezision: Politische Vernunft in der wissenschaftlich-technischen Zivilisation; Hermann Lübbe in der Diskussion (Wien: Passagen, 1990), 23. 14. Lübbe, Fortschrittsreaktionen, 31. 15. Lübbe, “Konservatismus in Deutschland—gestern und heute” (1982), reprinted in Fortschittsreaktionen, 12. 16. See Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles (New York: Free Press, 1991), 102ff, and James F. Tent, The Free University of Berlin: A Political History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), passim, especially 419ff. 17. See Tent, 350–3 for details. 18. Tent, 374. 19. Herf, 103. 20. Tent, 400. 21. See Lübbe’s keynote address, “Bund ‘Freiheit der Wissenschaft’: Was zu tun ist,” reprinted in Lübbe, Hochschulreform und Gegenaufklärung (Freiburg: Herder, 1972), 93–104, as well as the related essays on 57–108. On the BFW see Herf, 101–7. 22. See Tent, 400, and Nicholas Lobkowicz, “The German University Since World War II,” History of European Ideas, vol. 8, no. 2 (1987), 147–54. 23. On the controversy and its significance see Guenter Lewy, “The Persisting Heritage of the 1960s in West German Higher Education,” Minerva (Spring 1980), 1–28; Walter Ruegg, “The Intellectual Situation in German Higher Education,” Minerva (Spring 1975), 107; Jürgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte, 2nd edition (Göttingen, 1986), 112–13; Kurt Sontheimer, Zeitenwende? Die Bundesrepublik zwischen alter und alternativer Politik (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1983), 175–87. 24. A term coined by the organizers of a conference held in Munich shortly after the defeat of the Hessian SPD in provincial elections, and published as Clemens Graf Podewils (ed.), Tendenzwende? Zur geistigen Situation der Bundesrepublik (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), 24. 25. Thomas Nipperdey, Hermann Lübbe, Gutachten zu den Hessischen Rahmenrichtlinien Gesellschaftslehre. Heft 1 der Schriftenreihe des Hessischen Elternvereins e.V (Bad Homburg, 1973). 26. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der Vergangenheit? (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 30. 27. Lübbe, “Schulkampf in Hessen und Anderswo,” in Herman Lübbe, Unsere stille Kulturrevolution (Zürich: Edition Interfrom, 1976), 7–33, summarizes his critique, as well as those put forward by historians such as Thomas Nipperdey. 28. See Lorig, 101–11. 29. Martin and Sylvia Greiffenhagen, Ein schwieriges Vaterland: Zur Politischen Kultur Deutschlands (Frankfurt: List, 1981), 177–80.

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30. Quoted from Horkheimer’s critique of Habermas in a letter to Adorno published in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 554. 31. Wiggershaus, 561–2. 32. Richard Löwenthal, Der romantische Rückfall (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1970). 33. For another example of this, see Lübbe’s analysis of how Schelsky was able to distinguish the analytic content of Gehlen’s theory of institutions from its evaluative Kulturkritik and, on the basis of such an analysis, develop mechanisms intended to bolster a modern, liberal society. Hermann Lübbe, “Die Institutionalierung der Reflexion: Helmut Schelsky als Kritiker Arnold Gehlens,” in Lübbe, Die Aufdringlichkeit der Geschichte (Graz: Styria, 1989). 34. “Zur Philosophie des Liberalismus und seines Gegenteils,” in Lübbe, Fortschrittsreaktionen, 46–7; first published in Liberalismus, nach wie vor: Grundgedanken und Zukunftsfragen (Zürich: Buchverlag der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung, 1979). 35. Ibid., 49, and Lübbe, “Politische Gleichheitspostulate und ihre sozialen Folgen,” in Robert Kopp (ed.), Solidarität in der Welt der 80er Jahre (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1984), 64–77; English translation in Muller, Conservatism, 393–400. 36. Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: Anchor Books, 1969; German original 1965), 100–12. 37. Lübbe, Fortschrittsreaktionen, 49. 38. Hermann Lübbe, “Carl Schmitt Liberal Rezipiert,” in Helmut Quaritsch (ed.), Complexio Oppositorum: Über Carl Schmitt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986), 427–40, 432. 39. Ibid., 433. 40. This argument was spelled out in “Dezisionismus—eine kompromittierte politische Theorie,” in Lübbe, Praxis der Philosophie, Praktische Philosophie, Geschichtstheorie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978), 61–77, and is repeated in Complexio, 433–5, and Fortschrittsreaktionen, 34. 41. “Lebensqualität oder Fortschrittskritik von Links” (1973), in Lübbe, Fortschritt als Orientierungsproblem: Aufklärung in der Gegenwart (Freiburg: Rombach, 1975), esp. 71. Lübbe’s earlier critiques of right-wing Kulturkritik included “Die resignierte konservative Revolution,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 115 (1959), 131–8; and Politische Philosophie in Deutschland, especially the last section, “Die philosophischen Ideen von 1914.” 42. Lübbe, “Zur politischen Theorie der Technokratie,” Der Staat, vol. 1, no. 1 (1961), 19–38. Most of the liberal critics of technocracy cited in the chapter by Dirk van Laak for this volume, note 39, also went on to become neo-conservatives. 43. Lübbe, “Fortschitt als Orientierungsproblem im Spiegel politischer Gegenwartssprache,” 2–24, in Podewils (ed.), Tendenzwende?, 24; and the essays “Intstrumentelle Vernunft: Zur Kritik eines kritischen Begriffs” and “Ideologie der Technokratie-Kritik” (1973), both in Lübbe, Fortschritt als Orientierungsproblem. In

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44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

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the latter essay, he suggested that the term Technokratie was primarily a polemical term, laden with negative emotional connotations, and that the key issue was “whether one seeks to change the ‘dominant’ system in order to preserve and stabilize it, or whether one wants to do away with the existing system and hence has so desire to cure its ills” (121–2). Claus Offe, Industry and Inequality (London: Edward Arnold, 1976; German original 1967). The intellectual progenitor of this critique was Herbert Marcuse, who coined the term “performance principle” in his Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon, 1955). Lübbe, “Politische Gleichheitspostulate,” 64–77; English translation in Muller, Conservatism, 393–400. For an excellent example, see Knut Borchardt, “Plädoyer für eine offensive Verteidigung marktwirtschaftlicher Ordnungen,” in Hans Rössner (ed.), Rükblick in die Zukunft: Beiträge zur Lage in den achtziger Jahren (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1981), 97–126. Lübbe, “Zur Philosophie des Liberalismus und seines Gegenteils,” and Lübbe, “Konservatismus in Deutschland—gestern und heute,” 23–4; also Lübbe, Politischer Moralismus: Die Triumph der Gesinnung über die Urteilskraft (Berlin: Siedler, 1987), 103–7. See Kurt Sontheimer, Das Elend userer Intellektuellen: Linke Theorie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1976), 187–91. Peter Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 163. Odo Marquard, Farewell to Matters of Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 10. The German original reads, “Weil das, gegen das die Revolte unterblieb, Faschismus war, soll nun das, gegen das sie nachgeholt wurde, auch Faschismus sein.” Odo Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 11. Hans Mommsen, “The Burden of the Past,” in Habermas (ed.), Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age,” 272. See for example Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen um Faschismus, Totalitarismus, Demokratie (Munich: Piper, 1976), and Die totalitäre Erfahrung (Munich: Piper, 1987), especially the essay “ ‘Antikommunismus’ als intellektuelles Problem.” See the critical response by Helmut Schmidt, “Fürchtet Euch Nicht,” Die Zeit, December 30, 1983, and more generally Kurt Sontheimer, Zeitenwende?, 214–15, and Herf, War by Other Means. Sontheimer, Zeitenwende?, 220–1. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die gezähmten Deutschen. Von der Machtbesessenheit zur Machtvergessenheit, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1985). These essays and lectures of the early 1980s were collected in Michael Stürmer, Dissonanzen des Fortschritts (Munich: Piper, 1986). See the valuable review article by A. D. Moses, “The Forty-Fivers: A Generation Between Fascism and Democracy,” German Politics and Society, vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 95–127.

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58. Nipperdey in Martin Broszat et al. (eds.), Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur: Internationale Konferenz zur nationalsozialistische Machtübernahme im Reichstagsgebäude zu Berlin. Referate und Diskussionen (Berlin: Siedler, 1983), 370. 59. Die Zeit, March 18, 1983, 44. 60. It was published in full in two slightly different versions, as “Abschlußvortrag: Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewußtsein der Gegenwart,” in Broszat et al., Deutschlands Weg, 329–49; and “Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewußtsein,” in Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 236, no. 3 (June 1983), 579–99. 61. See for example Lübbe, “Verdrängung, oder die Heilmethoden kritischer Nationaltherapeuten,” 29, in Lübbe, Zwischen Trend und Tradition (Zurich: Edition Interfrom, 1981). 62. Moses makes a similar point in “The Forty-Fivers,” 105. 63. See Jerry Z. Muller, “German Historians at War,” Commentary, May 1989, 33–41. 64. I owe these observations to conversations with Michael Zöller.

CHAPTER 9

From National Identity to National Interest: The Rise (and Fall) of Germany’s New Right*

Jan-Werner Müller

M

uch has been written about the so-called New Right in Germany in recent years. Its rise in the early 1990s caused alarm both within the country and abroad, particularly in the United States, where, arguably, alarmism catered well to a local audience.1 Some observers have gone so far as to see it as a “structural feature” of the transition to a unified Germany, while others have drawn a suggestive parallel with post-Bismarckian cultural despair and the rise of nationalism after unification in 1871.2 This chapter analyzes the rise (and, I argue, fall) of the New Right. I shall first present an overview of New Right thinking, drawing on its two main manifestos, the volume Westbindung for foreign policy and Die Selbstbewußte Nation for domestic policy and cultural criticism. A genealogy of the New Right will then be followed by a conceptual anatomy of New Right ideology. Finally, I suggest a range of reasons why the movement failed in its selfconscious quest for “cultural hegemony.” Die Selbstbewußte Nation: Inventing a New German Right Three years after unification, when, arguably, the German Left was on the defensive and still caught off balance by the supposed “return of the nationstate” after 1989, a clarion call was sounded on the German “intellectual

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field.” In early 1993, the playwright Botho Strauß published his highly controversial essay Anschwellender Bocksgesang in, of all German magazines, Der Spiegel.3 For some interpreters, the piece combined effectively all the elements that had constituted the ideology of the interwar intellectuals of the Conservative Revolution: a tragic view of history, xenophobia, an idealization of asceticism and duty, as well as the distinction between the “leaders” and the “masses.”4 More accurately, Strauß’s essay was seen as a mixture of René Girard’s anthropology of sacrifice and the “sacred,” and topoi that had in fact long been part of Strauß’s literary work.5 In any case, Anschwellender Bocksgesang remained a reference point for voices that warned of an impending Conservative Revolution as much as the representatives of the self-styled “New Democratic Right.” Quoting extensively from Strauß’s essay—as well as including it as the opening chapter—New Right intellectuals launched their own collection of essays entitled Die Selbstbewußte Nation in 1994. The book and its foreign policy counterpart, Westbindung, published one year earlier, contained a great number of essays of varying quality, although none of them could be called scholarly in a strict sense. Some observers rightly pointed to the diversity of approaches and differences in the degree of conservatism, arguing that the New Right’s publicists had failed “to find authors who could agree on what the New Right was Right about.”6 However, the suspicion remained that this very heterogeneity constituted a conscious ideological strategy to liberate the Right from the intellectual ghetto to which it saw itself so often confined after 1945. Even so, there were a number of common strands and reference points that make it possible to speak of a unified ideological program, or even a “conservative manifesto.” Therefore, a distinct conceptual anatomy of the New Right can be scrutinized. The New Right’s interpretation of the state of Germany had three elements: a fundamental critique of contemporary culture and in particular the media; criticism of the political establishment; and criticism of foreign policy making, with the latter two derived from the first. Overall, however, it was the mixture—and mutual support of—cultural and political arguments that gave the New Right’s analysis its inner logic and its distinctive flavor. Since Germany was in the grip of a feminine, excessively caring Binnenmoral [internal family morality] and a hedonistic liberalism, relentlessly enforced by a totalitarian leftist media, Germany failed to project power and become a “militant democracy” both inside and outside. Consequently, it was in danger of losing inner security due to its lax stance on crime, and outer security due to its pervasive pacifism. The editors of Westbindung posited that the identification with Western liberal values had taken on “an almost totalitarian character,” with the cultural connection to the West as a new secular utopia.7 Germany’s public

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sphere was dominated by a left-liberal media, which, in its zeal for “political correctness,” had set up a “discursive prison,” even a form of “discourse apartheid,” through which members of the Right were systematically silenced and excluded.8 Representatives of the New Right not too subtly equated the supposed leftist dictators of public discourse with the “National Socialists” “directing of consciousness.”9 Consequently, the New Right could present itself as automatically anti-totalitarian. Moreover, since the Left’s dogmatic dealing with the Nazi past had supposedly started to resemble National Socialism in its method, i.e., its fanatical will to destroy the ideological enemy, it was the New Right that not only did justice to the victims of Nazism, but, in a sense, was also itself among the victims. Members of the New Right, therefore presented themselves as defending the authenticity of Auschwitz against the “consciousness manipulators” who used the Holocaust to enforce their discursive power, thereby also contributing to a more open, pluralistic, even liberal intellectual climate in Germany.10 Breaking “taboos” could then be presented as brave and even progressive qua transgressive.11 Thus, the New Right first sought to redefine the intellectual field in its favor by presenting itself as a victim in a discursive battle with a left media, thereby taking on the appearance of the true liberal only to aim at gaining the very antiliberal cultural hegemony that they claimed to suffer from. Thus, from the very start, the New Right project was a highly self-conscious one. Now that the scene of ideological battle had been set, a specific interpretation of culture and politics was presented. For the New Right, West Germany was above all dominated by a hedonistic, American-inspired liberalism “of maritime origins,” a foreign imposition that in its universalist thrust destroyed all difference: Specific merits of German culture such as inwardness and irrationalism were eradicated, and the sublime banished from the arts. The New Right appropriated the concept of difference from the anti-imperialist and anti-racist theories of the Left, setting itself up as the defender of “difference and particularity.” In an ideological maneuver that Pierre-André Taguieff has termed “retorsion,” the Right appropriated a concept of the ideological opposition in order to turn the concept against the very intellectual “camp” that had invented it.12 However, unlike the Left, they interpreted difference as referring first and foremost to national difference.13 This postmodern defense of the national as a form of particularity worth preserving was designed to avoid charges of racism by substituting “culture” for “race” as the substance of a differential ideology. But it was then also mixed with older anti-universalist arguments advanced by CounterEnlightenment thinkers like Joseph de Maistre. In the Right’s interpretation, the hedonistic culture of the Federal Republic entailed a loss of a sense of tragedy and of the value of suffering,

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claims that echoed Strauß’s cultural criticism. This loss of a sense of tragedy was brought about by an “insurance” and “security mentality,” which had led to the “infantilization” of the Germans. Institutionally, this mentality was supported by the welfare state, and ideologically fostered by an Americaninspired addiction to the “pursuit of happiness.” Germans, deluded by liberalism, conceived the state as an enlarged family, a charge that Arnold Gehlen had first leveled against the old Federal Republic. At the same time, this Binnenmoral did not afford any real security, as social cohesion and authority were weakened. At the heart of this diagnosis was a particular philosophical anthropology found throughout Die Selbstbewußte Nation that was heavily indebted to Gehlen’s thought. Gehlen, sometimes portrayed as a “German Hobbes,” saw a “deficiency” in instincts and therefore behavioral indeterminacy as constitutive of human beings, who consequently were in desperate need of authority and strong institutions to provide orientation.14 The rather crude image that then emerged was one of a Germany that, excessively security-oriented, had lost all sense of the political, of power and the necessity of projecting it. Its internal Hypermoral, its legalism and addiction to security, were shared by an elite that lacked self-confidence.15 On a metaphorical level, democracy had led to the infantilization of Germans because they tried to avoid the recognition of—and the confrontation with—evil.16 In this “psycho-social logic,” Germany, like an adolescent, needed to grow out of its neurotic fixation on the past and become “self-confident.” A self-confident elite was needed to lead a country in which “identity, social cohesion, and transcendence”—in one word, Gemeinschaft—were reinforced. The supposedly utopian ideal of a civil society had to be abandoned in favor of the homogeneous nation, which was always and everywhere a “community of fate and mutual protection.”17 Only such a self-confident nation could then project power, engage in geopolitics, and meet new international challenges by making sovereign decisions. This also meant putting an end to “the mystical idealization” and “fetishization” of ties to the West. After what they hoped was the “fall of the Federal Republic,” the New Right explicitly called for a “new foundation” that entailed establishing continuities with the pre-war past. Consequently, the contributors of Westbindung also had to dismantle the historiographical concept of a German Sonderweg, which was attacked as epistemologically flawed and historically untenable, and yet polemically applied to the Federal Republic itself, arguing that the postnational West Germany had been yet another historical aberration. These scholars took seriously the Left’s dictum that “whoever denies the thesis of the Sonderweg breaks the back of the political consciousness of the Federal Republic.”18 While Germany was not necessarily to sever all ties to the West, it should seize on unification as a

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new beginning, and shed its childlike dependence on an idealized West. In foreign policy, this meant above all overcoming the Germans” supposed “fear of power,” instead “normally” pursuing a realistically defined “national interest” and establishing a clear national scope of action.19 Intellectually, it also amounted to a call to rediscover “realist” thinkers in the German tradition, such as Ludwig Dehio and Gerhard Ritter.20 Parallel to these directly cultural-cum-political claims, a “meta-discussion” on strategy ran throughout both Westbindung and Die Selbstbewußte Nation. New Right intellectuals openly claimed that they had to learn from the Left, and in particular the generation of 1968, one central lesson, namely the need to capture public discourse in a systematic way, to rely on a “capillary diffusion” of their ideology, and “march through the institutions.”21 They sought to replicate the attempt by the French Nouvelle Droite, inspired by Antonio Gramsci, to gain cultural hegemony, and then, in Gramscian terms, turn from a war of position to a war of movement. Defining themselves selfconsciously as “young” and as “the generation of 1989,” they developed scholarly and journalistic strategies to move public discourse to the right.22 This is not to suggest that their stance merely amounted to a generational rebellion, but it is quite clear that many of their essays that detailed ways of gaining discursive power also served as career manuals. However, where for the Nouvelle Droite biology and, to some extent, ancient history had been the academic disciplines—and therefore the cultural or “meta”-level—on which they advanced their political claims, the prime task of the New Right was to chart a new historiographical path for the Third Reich. They attacked the historical claims that constituted the backbone of West German “constitutional patriotism” and the political ethos of most of the political class of the old Federal Republic.23 From the start, the New Right sought political legitimacy through the struggle over “culture,” which primarily came to mean “history,” rather than staking out present constitutional positions or policy prescriptions. A Detour via History Most members of the New Right were young historians who grew up during the years of the Tendenzwende in the 1970s and experienced the Historikerstreit during their early academic careers. Mostly, they perceived the dispute as a witch-hunt of academics who dared to utter unorthodox historical opinions. They also came to strongly believe that any change in the present and future self-understanding of Germany was to be effected through changing perceptions of the past. In other words, they fully subscribed to Michael Stürmer’s claim that “in a country without history, he who fills the memory, defines

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the concepts, and interprets the past wins the future.” Karlheinz Weißmann, for instance, argued that “the necessary integration of the Germans will be accomplished through a common national history or it will not be accomplished at all.”24 Therefore, while publishing polemical political essays, members of the New Right also continued the parallel project of “historicizing,” or rather “normalizing,” National Socialism in their scholarly work.25 Not surprisingly, Ernst Nolte came to be a crucial reference point for this movement. But in a rather insidious move, New Right historians also claimed the legacy of Martin Broszat and historians such as Tim Mason and Detlev Peukert, who had died relatively young and left unfinished oeuvres. Like these historians, they were interested in the possible modernizing effects of National Socialism as well as its “historicization.”26 Broszat had initially given credibility to the idea of historicization, while Peukert, from a quasi-Foucauldian perspective, had cast National Socialism as a pathological part of modernity, and of the human and social sciences in particular.27 By claiming that National Socialism had simply been an extreme expression of the “totalitarian aspect” of modernity, New Right historians could link the project of historicization with the totalitarianism paradigm and the postmodernism debate, so that their theses would also resonate with leftists turned right-wing under the influence of poststructuralism.28 Moreover, historical reinterpretation had to extend to the early years of the Federal Republic, and particularly to the common view of West Germany as a foreign policy “success story” due to Adenauer’s option for the West. Rainer Zitelmann, for instance, sought to rehabilitate the role of “Adenauer’s opponents” who had fought for German unity, and, so the historiographical subtext went, had been vindicated by unification vis-à-vis Adenauer’s blind followers, who had bound themselves with “fetishistic” ties to the West.29 Other than the stress on German sovereignty, such studies also implied that after communism’s defeat, conservatism should end its temporary anticommunist alliance with liberalism and the West and return to its central pre-1945 beliefs. Moreover, against Ralph Giordano’s thesis of the “second guilt” that the Germans had incurred through repressing the past in the postwar period, a different reading had to be established, according to which the 1950s were actually characterized by an adequate Vergangenheitsbewältigung.30 Finally, moving into the more immediate past, the 1968 student movement had to be historically discredited in a single historiographical stroke with the discrediting of the idea of antifascism.31 Where the ’68 Left had interpreted antifascist as necessarily antinationalist, the New Right equated antifascist with anti-German per se. Taken together, New Right historians, widely represented in the Ullstein publishing house, could then offer a complete alternative reading of the history of the Federal Republic, from the heroic role of Adenauer’s opponents to the negative effects of 1968.32

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This alternative reading of history was presented with a particular habitus of Gelassenheit, i.e., “coolness,” against the supposed volkspädagogische [popular pedagogical] intentions of left-wing historians. Previous historians were criticized for having imposed themselves as judges, while New Right historians could assume a tone of sobriety and “realism,” which was in turn linked with a self-consciously “realist” position in foreign policy. Foreign policy intellectuals like Gregor Schöllgen played on the double meaning of sovereignty, both as national sovereignty and as a superior attitude of calmness, which allowed the sober calculation of interests.33 “History,” as a Rankean exploration of the authentic history of National Socialism and as a guide to the national future, was then seen as superior to the quintessentially West German disciplines such as sociology or political science, a repository of unchanging and politically untainted truths. It was also played off against utopian thought, and fitted with Strauß’s desire to reconnect with the lange Zeit [a mythical longue durée].34 Consequently, the post-unification period was above all “the chance of the German historians.”35 However, while some of the early works of Zitelmann and his followers were well received across the historical profession, it became clear relatively soon that emphasizing the modernizing aspects of National Socialism was to some extent a renewed effort to relativize National Socialism after the Historikerstreit had been won by the Left.36 Especially when Ullstein, where Zitelmann had gained an important position, began publishing a whole battery of books with the double aim of attacking the Left and advancing historicization, the impression was reinforced that contemporary history was being instrumentalized by an academic-cum-political network of New Right intellectuals. While some leftwing commentators clearly went too far in demonizing this supposed “conspiracy,” there could be little doubt that what Dirk van Laak aptly named a “circle” (of reviewing, citing, and promoting each other’s work) had formed, with the open ambition of conquering “cultural hegemony.”37 However, while this detour via history was clearly seen as a precondition for future policy change, “history” on its own could not answer the demand for conservative policy substance. What patterns of conservative thought, and particularly post-war West German right-wing thought, did the New Right attempt to draw on and renew for the 1990s? Or did it in fact reach back even further and seek connections to the antiliberal and antiparliamentarian thought of the Conservative Revolution, precisely because earlier attempts to establish a “democratic Right” in West Germany had foundered? To fully understand the New Right, one needs to understand the history of post-war conservatism—and its dilemmas, of which representatives of the New Right were highly aware. Therefore I now construct two clusters of right-wing conservative thought in the old Federal Republic.38

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The Statist Tradition: The Specter of Schmitt In post-war conservatism, the etatist tradition was by far the most important ideological cluster both in terms of academic reputation and in terms of actual influence on policy. It was pervasive in a substantial number of law departments—most notably Speyer—and some of the lawyers influenced by it, most prominently the Social Democrat Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, sat on the Constitutional Court. Representatives of this tradition mostly took as their starting point the teachings of Carl Schmitt. But where Schmitt had certified the death of the Leviathan, i.e., the end of modern European statehood at the hands of organized interest groups, and resigned himself to the failure of its replacement through a Reich as the new form of political unity, Schmitt’s followers tried to come to terms with what they saw as a structural change of modern statehood—into modern industrial society and the Verwaltungsstaat [administrative state].39 But like Schmitt, they preserved a suspicion of the “selforganizing society” based on a negative philosophical anthropology and a Hobbesian view of the axiomatic relationship of state protection and citizen obedience. Thus Schmitt, despite many anachronisms and much mythical baggage, could remain the inspiration of etatist thought in post-war Germany, because during every “legitimation crisis,” real, imagined, or even wished for, his basic arguments against “excessive pluralism” could be resurrected. They were reiterated against the emancipatory claims of social movements and individuals as undermining the unity and security that only the state guaranteed. Already in the 1950s, during the debate over whether the constitution mandated primarily a Rechtsstaat or a Sozialstaat, Schmitt’s pupils, above all Ernst Forsthoff, drew on Schmittian thought to fight the establishment of an extensive welfare state, since it was an “iron law” that more Sozialstaatlichkeit [welfare stateness] meant less Staatlichkeit [stateness].40 Moreover, initially part of a rather secretive network of “circles” and private “academies” that defined themselves against the intellectual climate in the 1950s Federal Republic, the Schmittians increasingly came out into the open in the 1960s.41 On the one hand, Böckenförde and the “neo-conservative” Hermann Lübbe tried to “liberalize” Schmitt’s teachings and appropriate his decisionism to strengthen the underpinnings of a “militant” liberal democracy.42 On the other hand, neoFichtean nationalist Bernard Willms drew on the nationalist strands in Schmitt’s thought, and polemically played off his agonal concept of the political against the supposedly apolitical tenets of Critical Theory. Conservatives outside public law circles also took up prominent Schmittian themes such as the critique of liberal institutions to deal with “the exception.” Most of these thinkers were united by an aversion to the democratic political science of the

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post-war period, which they perceived as apolitical and as simply reflecting the Allies’ reeducation efforts.43 They claimed that for a proper political science, the question of “identity,” established through friend-enemy decisions, had to be primary. However, while the right-wing intellectuals focusing on recasting identity through attacks on reeducation and the national victimization of the Germans remained marginal both in the academy and in the public sphere at large, intellectuals employing Schmitt’s conceptual tools in thinking about institutions had considerably more influence. Rüdiger Altmann’s concept of the formierte Gesellschaft [aligned society] came close to being declared government policy in the early 1960s, whereas Lübbe’s decisionism and his ideas on education were widely discussed in the 1970s, as the state had to defend itself against the terrorist exception and as education reforms were foundering. Finally, the Tendenzwende [shift to the right] of the early 1970s was led by conservative figures who sought to modernize conservatism but still took Schmitt as a guiding political spirit. Already then the logic of breaking “taboos” was at the center of conservative strategies. And Schmitt, both as the enigmatic éminence grise residing in his “internal exile” in his hometown of Plettenberg and as author of notorious critiques of the then “hegemonic” liberalism, was supposedly one of the greatest taboos of all. The Nationalist Tradition: Left and Right The statist position often shaded into a nationalist tradition that drew its intellectual resources from German Idealism and increasingly came to unite sections of the Right and the Left. While nationalism was largely discredited after the Second World War, from at least the mid-1960s, a standard claim of the Right became that the Germans had lost a sense of their own history, and that a “recovery of history” was a precondition of national self-confidence. Armin Mohler, the “secretary” of post-war West German conservatism and the crucial figure in harmonizing various strands of right-wing thought, already argued in 1966 that “a nation is sure of itself if it lives in accordance with its history.”44 And already then, the “psycho-social” condition of the Germans was described as one of being “afraid of power” and being “afraid of history,” while conservatives claimed to have properly recognized “reality.”45 With this conceptual structure in place, conservatives first went on the offensive again in the late 1960s, taking Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing’s Charakterwäsche and Arnold Gehlen’s Moral und Hypermoral as two foundational texts to overcome the “overcoming of the past.”46 They criticized earlier West German conservatism for having been fenced in by anticommunism and for the lack of a positive relation to the nation.47 Instead, conservatives needed to become self-consciously theoretical— and “ideological”—again to win the future. At the same time, they had to learn

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lessons from the Nouvelle Droite’s Gramscian strategy of concentrating on conquering cultural hegemony, rather than direct party-political success. However, while Mohler and Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, as the apprentices of the Nouvelle Droite and the spiritual masters of a “reconstruction of conservatism,” decisively influenced the Tendenzwende of the 1970s, they never managed the transition from cultural influence to actual political power. Nationalism, however, also experienced a revival on the Left, and in the late 1970s, a neo-nationalism that sought to distance itself from the NPD and attract young Germans, in particular students, fed into the Green movement.48 Other sectarian groups, which specifically aimed to bridge left and right, sought to establish a “national revolutionary tradition,” in which the situation of the Germans was presented as parallel to that of Third World liberation movements. In this scenario, Germany was a militarily—and psychologically— colonized country, culturally oppressed by the United States and the Soviet Union and in danger of losing its identity. A sympathy for the victims of world history, a desire to preserve the particular, and an often crude anticapitalism coalesced into a vague ideological sentiment that proved appealing to both Right and Left. While the self-proclaimed national revolutionary splinter groups disappeared by the beginning of the 1980s, their ideological protagonists had set the scene for the unprecedented flowering of the peace movement and the high tide of nationalist-cum-neutralist sentiments during the life of the Federal Republic. In an exceptionally successful ideological move, one of the national revolutionary intellectuals, Henning Eichberg, had first introduced the concept of “national identity,” which was to be at the center of numerous debates of the 1980s.49 Eichberg’s original defense of national identity had been the preservation of particularity through decentralization and regionalism. He had borrowed the notion of “ethnopluralism” from the Nouvelle Droite, to describe—and prescribe—a differential plurality of primordial collective identities. In the wake of the disappointment of many left-wing hopes during the 1970s, conservative publicists increasingly seized on the theme of “identity,” linked it to the rising interest in German history at the end of the decade, and for once achieved the prime goal of post-war West German conservative strategists: “Identity” entered mainstream discourse, as the theme was picked up by respectable academics and publicists.50 However, German nationalism received its real boost in the wake of the NATO twin-track decision. In the shadow of what seemed like an impending “nuclear Holocaust,” arguments about all Germans as victims of superpower imperialism could now be linked successfully with the concept that German unification or at least German neutrality was a precondition for world peace.51 In this spirit, the Left rediscovered its nationalist roots, while the Right stressed its stance in favor of defending particularity, rather than the axiomatic agonal belief in man as a “dynamic and dangerous being” (Schmitt).

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Subsequently, this neo-nationalist discourse spread out through journals and conferences, although its initiators remained largely outside the mainstream of academia and publishing.52 However, their diagnosis of a West Germany “psychologically unbalanced” and “in need of identity” became increasingly current among CDU thinkers and conservative intellectuals. Identity, by way of a more “normal” relationship to history, was to lead to increased “selfconfidence.”53 These issues then became the substance of the Historikerstreit. Finally, a related strand of nationalist thought was a particular form of postmodern cultural pessimism, which was almost unconcerned with national sovereignty but espoused the need to preserve cultural particularity. This aesthetic nationalism was composed of a strong romanticism, antiAmericanism, and even antisemitism. It was also capable of combining the heroization of figures such as the urban terrorist and Jünger’s “Anarch,” with the adulation of the German Volk.54 Younger cultural pessimists were often influenced by French poststructuralism, while both older and younger representatives of this strand, such as Gerd Bergfleth and Hans Jürgen Syberberg, were able to link their cultural pessimism with environmental concerns.55 In that sense, cultural pessimism, like nationalism at large, allowed the lines between Left and Right to become fluid, and enabled a number of disillusioned members of the generation of 68 to join the ranks of the Right. In sum, German conservatism in the post-war period remained defensive, fixated on overcoming the “overcoming of the past” and eager to reestablish a strong, sovereign state capable of casting out the enemy and maintaining a clear demarcation between itself and the “self-organizing society” within. It regularly failed in its resentment-driven attempts to inscribe a narrative of German victimization in public discourse, but met with considerable success when it drew on powerful German etatist traditions to describe—and prescribe—institutions. In general, conservatism, even when trying to present itself as truly avant-garde and nonconformist, had only a delaying effect, rather than a truly reactionary one. To put it another way, institutionally, conservatism often at least partially succeeded in its attempt at “containing” the “liberalization” sought by the Left, but in its “psycho-social” approach, designed specifically as a revisionist “rollback” of reeducation, it was generally much less influential. The main reason for the overall failure of post-war conservatism was the dilemma that Martin Greiffenhagen identified almost 30 years ago: How could conservatism escape the fact that it had been tainted by its ideological (and personal) association with National Socialism?56 There was, however, a further dilemma, in the question of how conservatism was to define—and distance—itself vis-à-vis the antinationalist Rheinland Catholicism of Adenauer and the CDU, which had so successfully recast the conservatism of the Weimar Zentrum, made the CDU into a people’s party, and advocated the Westernization of Germany. A typically conservative

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insistence on gradual change and antirationalism would not suffice, given that—supposedly—so much of reeducation had penetrated German society and was pushed further by the Left. One strategy was the insistence on national identity and unification, represented in the nationalist-neutralist strand of conservatism. Another was the reassertion of a strong state against the “CDU state,” which had accommodated far too many special interests. The former resource of the Right, i.e., the insistence on national identity and unification, had disappeared after 1990—thereby cutting away a major concrete policy plank and presenting both the Old and the New Right with a kind of “melancholy of fulfillment.” Consequently, the ideological challenge for the New Right became how it would face this double dilemma—and, further, whether and how it would define itself vis-à-vis the post-war conservatism just described. Or would it attempt to primarily connect with current thinkers such as Strauß, thereby avoiding a doubly tainted genealogy? Reclaiming Conservatism: A Conceptual Anatomy of the New Right The common conceptual core of the New Right was the nation—linked to the notion of normality through the claim that the nation-state remained the essential and “normal” subject in history. The nation-state was not defended as a framework for civil rights, as liberals might have done, but as a homogeneous community of protection and fate. Most New Right intellectuals did not advance a peculiar definition of nationalism, whether voluntarist, ethnic, or even racist, but this very emptiness of the conceptual core could itself be seen as an attempt to keep the movement open to a number of ideological persuasions, and avoid charges of racism. The ideological peculiarity of the New Right consisted of its defense of pure, almost contentless particularity, coupled with a narrative of ongoing German victimization. In that sense, the New Right could link up with the neo-nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s without a commitment to completely compromised fringe figures. It could also build bridges to—and form a Querfront cutting across party lines with—new or old “left-wing patriots” like Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt and Tilman Fichter.57 The centrality of the nation as undefined but homogeneous particularity was underpinned by a perspective on the political as being of an irreducibly agonal, even tragic, nature; and by a philosophical anthropology that posited the human being as both weak and aggressive. While in that respect their political program was relatively coherent, members of the New Right found it difficult to give a theoretically sophisticated account of it—or to offer any theoretical innovation at all, for that matter. Partly this was due to their selfappointed role as defenders of “common sense,” with the goal of capturing

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public discourse rather of than convincing an academic audience. But there was also a larger ideological problem, in that nationalism—in the absence of any further claims about institutions and identity—would not yield ideas that could be operationalized, i.e., incorporated into party political programs. Members of the New Right linked their advocacy of the nation with the reinterpretation of the Nazi past already described above, on the one hand, and, on the other, with claims retrieved from the major thinkers of post-war conservatism. However, with regard to the latter, they mainly used fragments that were essentially part of a resentment-driven cultural critique, rather than the statist theories that thinkers like Forsthoff, Altmann, and Lübbe had advanced. For instance, representatives of the New Right tried to retrieve only standard cultural arguments from Gehlen’s and Schelsky’s complaints against an excessive pluralism, the supposed hegemony of left-wing intellectual “priests,” and “citizens” “insurance mentality.” In that sense, they failed to achieve their explicit aim of taking on the legacy of “cold conservatism,” which provided a realist political analysis, rather than sentimental “Toryism.”58 Given its relative weakness in addressing social questions, the New Right could not find much in the diagnoses of industrial society advanced by sociologists such as Hans Freyer. Also, the celebration of technocratic capitalism by Freyer, Gehlen, and Forsthoff became an obstacle to appropriating their concepts and patterns of thought, as long as the Right sought to link up with ecological and anti-Western segments of the Left, which espoused a critique of technology. Instead, the New Right associated technology with liberalism, individualism, and hedonism, all of which—in a bow to ecological conservatives—were held responsible for leading to an ecological apocalypse. Moreover, where Gehlen had perceived a “crystallized modernity,” in which all fundamental historical options had been played out and society had entered a state of posthistoire, members of the New Right asserted that Germany was “called back into history.” True, posthistoire and Rückruf in die Geschichte were on entirely different levels of analysis, but, if anything, this attested to the poverty of more abstract thought in New Right ideology and its difficulties in finding elective affinities with more substantial forms of conservative thinking. Instead, they marshaled many of the vague, general concepts that had been central to Mohler’s post-war conservatism (and, in fact, most kinds of conservatism): the defense of the “concrete” and the “particular” against the abstract; the emphasis on the irreducible nature of power; and the irrational, unpredictable nature of reality. Even their selfpresentation as an avant-garde and as authentically “liberal” was familiar from previous conservative thought in the Federal Republic. And finally, just as the old Right had attacked their predecessors as Gärtnerkonservative, the New Right now dismissed the old Right as Nischenkonservative.

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In short, the New Right drew on the cultural criticism of thinkers like Gehlen, largely subscribed to a psycho-social approach inspired by previous opponents of reeducation, concentrated much of their energies on rewriting German history, and largely left institutional questions to the side. They generally took an ecumenical approach by uniting “cultural pessimists,” “normalization nationalists,” and Schmittian statists, and were above all concerned to alter the mood of foreign policy making in favor of normalization, i.e., nationalization, and a new self-confidence.59 But essentially, the New Right’s difficulty lay not so much in defining what it was Right about, as some observers have claimed—but in being New. Why the Right Failed (Again) 1994 was arguably the high watermark of the ideological tide of the New Right. The movement had gained momentum with Strauß’s essay, still controlled strategic positions at Ullstein and Die Welt, and was benefiting from the fact that the government had adopted a number of policies previously seen as outside the political mainstream (most notably, the change of the asylum law). However, by 1995, the tide was turning. Indicative of the fact that the reinterpretation of the past had failed to take hold was the initial success but ultimate failure of the advertisement “Against Forgetting” on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, which recast 1945 as the beginning of suffering for East Germans and expellees, rather than “liberation.” This campaign had sought to bring the narrative of German victimization into the mainstream by uniting New Right with more established, including SPD, public figures.60 New Right members also lost some of their positions at Ullstein, and, in early 1996, the national-liberal wing of the FDP failed to carry out the much publicized plan to take over the party in Berlin. Why, then, did the New Right fail? One of the primary causes was arguably a fixation on their chosen ideological opponent, the generation of 1968. By painting a picture of a vast leftwing conspiracy, they ultimately fell victim to their own creation. As much as the New Right claimed to represent the pays réel, public against published opinion, there were actually very few people in Germany who felt oppressed by members of the generation of ’68. But the New Right spent most of its energy on lashing out against Habermas and his followers, rather than providing any concrete policy prescriptions. Consequently, members of the New Right often came off as petty and resentful, as members of a “generation in-between” who were too young for ‘68, still steeped in the sometimes nasty radical student politics of the 1970s, and too old for the relatively apolitical mid-to-late 1980s. In short, they came off as academic “angry

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white males,” clearly uncomfortable with the gains feminism—and simply women in general—had made during the 1970s and 80s in the Federal Republic. While the self-portrayal as victims was also to resonate with Germans who supposedly had been the victims of Allied reeducation efforts and, by extension, even the Second World War, this meta-narrative of victimization ended up sounding more like self-pity (and led to the fact that the Right’s own failures in the 1990s were immediately incorporated into this ongoing double narrative of victimization). And just as the victimization narrative failed to capture the public imagination, the choice of 1989 as a reference point for a generational-cum-political movement proved to be a mixed blessing. While it was both obvious and tempting to refer to 1989 as shorthand for a substantial break in German history, the simple truth remained that most members of the New Right had spent the late 1980s not engaging with the police on the streets of Leipzig or Berlin, but engaging left-wing professors in German seminar rooms. In the same vein that a fixation on the ‘68ers replaced future-oriented prescriptions, taboo breaking seemed to take the place of theorizing. If the lesson of the Nouvelle Droite really had been the importance of conquering cultural hegemony, then it was only half applied: as Mohler kept pointing out, theoretical innovation, which then trickled down into “culture,” had accounted for the success of de Benoist and his allies, whereas the old German Right had remained fixated on the “consciousness of national wounds,” instead of establishing a “school of thought.”61 But theoretical innovation was clearly missing from the thinking of the New Right. Nationalism in itself was simply not enough, and the “metapolitical” strategy failed precisely because it was not sufficiently political.62 While the young historians polemically played off “history” against the social sciences dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, they in fact found it exceedingly difficult to find a usable past, or even enlightening historical analogies. They clearly were tempted by ideas of Mitteleuropa, by geopolitical and realist thought in international relations—but for all their self-consciously sober talk about the world being risky and dangerous, they in fact never defined the national interest, or formulated strategies that would have been significantly different from the policies pursued by the Kohl government—with the important exception of European integration.63 Moving away from the West and possibly playing the role of bridge or balance between East and West were often hinted at, but never spelled out in any coherent fashion. “National interest” and “normalization” never failed to provoke, but ultimately remained vacuous terms, or rather provocative signals pointing in no direction in particular. Part of the problem was that the New Right remained caught in the very psycho-social language of “self-confidence” and “growing up.” Consequently, what would have seemed like a logical move

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from “national identity” to “national interest,” linking the old neo-nationalist discourse of the 1980s with more “realist” and assertive foreign policy making in the 1990s, remained at the level of “identity” due to the lack of sufficiently appealing alternative “interests.” In the end then, a self-consciously Gramscian strategy of gaining cultural hegemony largely failed due to a lack of ideological innovation. For all their negative fixation on the supposed “left-wing media” and their desire to emulate the success of a left-wing conquest of hegemony, they seemed to ignore a basic, important observation that Habermas had made in the late 1970s with regard to the ideological leaders of the Tendenzwende: They declare their interest … in reconquering the power to define, in short, in the planning of ideology with the means of the politics of language. But I have never understood how one can seriously believe that in the long run political-theoretical basic concepts can change other than through absorbing complex forms of argumentation, that they reflect innovations and processes of learning.64

The second major reason for the failure of the New Right, apart from a lack of ideological innovation, was its lack of institutional support. While it is true that the New Right for a time gained considerable influence at Ullstein and Die Welt, efforts to capture a party-political vehicle failed. The main attempt here had been a takeover of the Berlin FDP with a national-liberal program harking back to the much more conservative FDP of the 1950s, and ever since its failure, there have been sporadic attempts to subvert parts of the FDP in other states. So, just as on the ideological level there was no Leo Strauss and no Hayek, on the party-political side no German Jörg Haider emerged either. It was arguably, however, yet again the structural dilemma of German (and, to some extent, any) conservatism that was at the heart of the New Right’s failure. It remained negatively fixated on the present (and on the Nazi past, which it tried to “normalize” qua modernization) and, in the absence of ideological innovation and institutional support, was unable to create or re-create the institutions that then would have been worth preserving. All of this is not to say that one should be complacent about the threat of right-wing violence in Germany, or that extreme right-wing parties do not have the chance of capturing a protest vote or the vote of Germans with genuinely authoritarian beliefs. But it is to say that for now any right-wing ideological shifts engineered from above, with the spirit of Schmitt and Gramsci hovering, so to speak, have little chance of success. Those genuinely worried about the resurgence of right-wing sentiments in Germany should probably look toward East German youth culture, rather than at Ullstein history books and the cultural pages of West German newspapers.

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Notes * Thanks to Peter Pulzer and Richard Wolin, as well as audiences at Rice, Harvard, and Columbia. 1. For domestic alarmism, Wolfgang Gessenharter, Kippt die Republik? Die Neue Rechte und ihre Unterstützung durch Politik und Medien (Munich: Knaur, 1995); for a scare story in the United States, see Jacob Heilbrunn, “Germany’s New Right,” in Foreign Affairs, vol. 76, no. 6 (1996), 80–98. 2. John D. Ely, “The ‘Black-Brown Hazelnut’ in a Bigger Germany: The Rise of a Radical Right as a Structural Feature,” in Michael G. Huelshoff, Andrei S. Markovits, and Simon Reich (eds.), From Bundesrepublik to Deutschland: German Politics after Unification (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 235–68. 3. Botho Strauß, “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” in Der Spiegel, February 8, 1993. 4. M. and S. Greiffenhagen, Ein schwieriges Vaterland: Zur politischen Kultur im vereinigten Deutschland (Munich: List, 1993), 281–2, and Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993). 5. Richard Herzinger and Hannes Stein, Endzeit-Propheten oder die Offensive der Antiwestler: Fundamentalismus, Antiamerikanismus und Neue Rechte (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1995), 190–200. 6. David Schoenbaum and Elizabeth Pond, The German Question and other German Questions (London: Macmillan, 1996), 45. 7. Introduction, “Wir Deutschen und der Westen,” in Rainer Zitelmann, Karlheinz Weißmann, and Michael Großheim (eds.), Westbindung (Berlin: Propyläen, 1992), 9–17; here 10. 8. Ulrich Schacht, “Stigma und Sorge. Über deutsche Identität nach Auschwitz,” in Die Selbstbewußte Nation (Berlin: Ullstein, 1994), 57–68. Henceforth DSN. 9. Ronald Bubik, “Herrschaft und Medien. Über den Kampf gegen die linke Meinungsdominanz,” in DSN, 182–94; here 183–4. 10. Rainer Zitelmann, Wohin treibt unsere Republik? (Berlin: Ullstein, 1994), 185. 11. Bubik, “Herrschaft,” 183. 12. Pierre-André Taguieff, La République menacée (Paris: textuel, 1996). 13. Ernst Nolte, “Links und Rechts. Über Geschichte und Aktualität einer politischen Alternative,” in DSN, 145–62; here 160. 14. Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer (New York: Columbia UP, 1988). 15. This charge was also first made by Gehlen in Moral und Hypermoral (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1969), where Gehlen differentiated between Binnenmoral and other forms of ethics, criticizing their supposed conflation by the Left. 16. Rüdiger Safranski, “Destruktion und Lust. Über die Wiederkehr des Bösen,” in DSN, 237–48; here 238–9. 17. Michael J. Inacker, “Macht und Moralität. Über eine neue deutsche Sicherheitspolitik,” in DSN, 346–89; here 368.

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18. Kurt Sontheimer, Von Deutschlands Republik (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1991), 62. 19. Gregor Schöllgen, Angst vor der Macht: Die Deutschen und ihre Außenpolitik (Berlin: Ullstein, 1993). For links to the discourse of Mitteleuropa and geopolitics, see Heinz Brill, Geopolitik heute: Deutschlands Chance? (Berlin: Ullstein, 1994). 20. Ibid., 102. 21. As Dieter Stein, editor of the primary New Right publication, Junge Freiheit, claimed: “It is often conveniently forgotten that conservatism was grouped not around parties, but around journals, circles, and courageous personalities. … the center cannot be a party, but has to be a diverse political, cultural, and media ‘capillary system’.” Dieter Stein, “Niederwerfung der Konservativen,” in Junge Freiheit, no. 4 (1992). 22. Roland Bubik, Wir 89er: Wer wir sind–was wir wollen (Berlin: Ullstein, 1995). 23. Not surprisingly, the French Nouvelle Droite chose biology and ancient history, and not contemporary history, at a time when the “Vichy syndrome” was finally coming into the open in the early 1970s, while the German Right launched its revisionism when a negative reading of German history was coming under attack in the early to mid-1980s. See Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991). 24. Karlheinz Weißmann, Rückruf in die Geschichte: Die deutsche Herausforderung: Alte Gefahren - neue Chancen (Berlin: Ullstein, 1993), 49–50. 25. Most notable in this context was Zitelmann’s redefinition of Hitler as a modern social revolutionary, in Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990). 26. Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann (eds.), Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994). 27. Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” in New German Critique, no. 44 (1988), 85–126, and Detlev J. K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (eds.), Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1993), 234-52. 28. Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse, and Rainer Zitelmann (eds.), Die Schatten der Vergangenheit: Impulse zur Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Propyläen, 1990). See also the excellent essay by Dirk van Laak, “Nicht West, nicht Ost oder Zaungäste auf Bindungssuche,” in Hans-Martin Lohmann (ed.), Extremismus der Mitte: Vom rechten Verständnis deutscher Nation (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1994), 88–104; here 90. 29. Rainer Zitelmann, Adenauers Gegner: Streiter für die Einheit (Erlangen: Straube, 1991). 30. Manfred Kittel, Die Legende von der “Zweiten Schuld”: Vergangenheitsbewältigung in der Ara Adenauer (Berlin: Ullstein, 1993). 31. Criticism of 1968 was clearly bound up with a larger critique of antifascism in the case of Klaus Rainer Röhl, Linke Lebenslügen: Eine überfällige Abrechnung

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32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

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(Berlin: Ullstein, 1994), and Hans-Helmuth Knütter, Die Faschismus-Keule: Das letzte Aufgebot der deutschen Linken (Berlin: Ullstein, 1993). Maria Zens, “Vergangenheit verlegen: Zur Wiederherstellung nationaler Größe im Hause Ullstein,” in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, vol. 38 (1993), 1364–75. Schöllgen, Angst, 33–4. Claudia Mayer-Iswandy, “Ästhetik und Macht: Zur diskursiven Unordnung im vereinten Deutschland,” in German Studies Review, vol. 19 (1996), 501–23; here 510. Schöllgen, Angst, 118. Zitelmann’s Hitler book was well received, while the co-edited book on the “brown elite” was even widely acclaimed. See Roland Smelser and Rainer Zitelmann (eds.), Die braune Elite: 22 biographische Skizzen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990). Van Laak, “Nicht West nicht Ost,” 92–3. This exercise will necessarily remain schematic and incomplete. In particular, I have to leave out a Christian conservatism best embodied by Robert Spaemann; the technocratic conservatism associated with thinkers like Helmut Schelsky; the “culture as compensation school” founded by Joachim Ritter; and what is often called the “racist fringe.” See also the chapter by Dirk van Laak for the second and the chapter by Jerry Z. Muller on the third. Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 1992), 13–30. Ernst Forsthoff, “Verfassung und Verfassungswirklichkeit der Bundesrepublik,” in Merkur, vol. 22 (1968), 401–14. Dirk van Laak, Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens: Carl Schmitt in der Geistesgeschichte der frühen Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Akademie, 1993). For instance Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Recht, Staat, Freiheit: Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie, Staatstheorie und Verfassungsgeschichte (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). See also Norbert Hilger, Deutscher Neokonservatismus: Das Beispiel Hermann Lübbes (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1995). The foundational text of right-wing political science was Hans-Joachim Arndt, Die Besiegten von 1945: Versuch einer Politologie für Deutsche samt Würdigung der Politischen Wissenschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1978). Armin Mohler, Was die Deutschen fürchten: Angst vor der Politik - Angst vor der Geschichte - Angst vor der Macht (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1966), 130. Ibid., 171. Armin Mohler, “Deutscher Konservatismus seit 1945,” in Tendenzwende für Fortgeschrittene (Munich: Criticón, 1978), 67–80; here 76 and 79. Also Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, Charakterwäsche: Die amerikanische Besatzung in Deutschland und ihre Folgen (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1965). Ibid., 67. Mohler claimed that after 1945, there had been only two varieties of conservatism: Gärtnerkonservatismus à la Burke in the North, and Catholic

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49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

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Demutskonservatismus in the South, both oriented toward preserving the status quo, instead of actively shaping politics like the Conservative Revolutionaries. Hans-Georg Betz, “Deutschlandpolitik on the Margins: On the Evolution of Contemporary New Right Nationalism in the Federal Republic,” in New German Critique, no. 44 (1988), 127–57; here 129–33. Henning Eichberg, Nationale Identität: Entfremdung und nationale Frage in der Industriegesellschaft (Munich: Langen Müller, 1978). “Identity,” as a fashionable concept, dated only from the work of Erik Erikson and symbolic interactionism in the 1950s. See for instance Peter Berglar, Hans Filbinger et al., Deutsche Identität heute (Stuttgart: von Hase und Koehler, 1983), which united Stürmer, Nolte, and von Krockow with Willms and Rohrmoser. “Identity” then entered the mainstream with the numerous works by Werner Weidenfeld. See for instance Wolfgang Venohr (ed.), Die deutsche Einheit kommt bestimmt (Bergisch-Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe, 1982), with contributions by Venohr on a German confederation and by the leftists Peter Brandt and Herbert Ammon on “patriotism from the Left.” Bernard Willms (ed.), Handbuch der Deutschen Nation, 4 vols. (Tübingen: Hohenrain, 1988). Karl Lamers, (ed.), Suche nach Deutschland: Deutsche Identität und die Deutschlandpolitik (Bonn: Europa Union Verlag, 1983). Diederich Diederichsen, “Der Anarch, der Solitär und die Revolte: Rechte Poststrukturalismus-Rezeption in der BRD,” in Richard Faber, Hajo Funke, and Gerhard Schoenberner (eds.), Rechtsextremismus: Ideologie und Gewalt (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1995), 241–58. Gerd Bergfleth, Zur Kritik der palavernden Aufklärung (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1984), and Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1990). Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1971). Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt, Politik im Rücken, Zeitgeist im Sinn (Berlin: Ullstein, 1995), and Tilman Fichter, Die SPD und die Nation: Vier sozialdemokratische Generationen zwischen nationaler Selbstbestimmung und Zweistaatlichkeit (Berlin: Ullstein, 1993). Karlheinz Weißmann, “Arnold Gehlen: Von der Aktualität eines zu Unrecht Vergessenen,” in Criticón, no. 153 (1997), 31–6. For a classification of schools of foreign policy thinking in Germany after 1989, see Gunther Hellmann, “Goodbye Bismarck? The Foreign Policy of Contemporary Germany,” in Mershon International Review, no. 40 (1996), 1–39. See “8. Mai 1945—Gegen das Vergessen,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 7, 1995. Armin Mohler, “Gleichheit und Differenz,” in Criticón, no. 129 (1992), 22–3; here 23. This was belatedly recognized by the New Right, for instance Dieter Stein, “Der metapolitische Holzweg der Rechten,” in Junge Freiheit, February 14, 1997. On

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nationalism’s need for a further host ideology, see Michael Freeden, “Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?” in Political Studies, vol. 46 (1998), 748–65. 63. For an effort to distance an explicitly nationalist, but at the same time proEuropean, CDU position from the New Right and its “anti-Western” Sonderweg, see Wolfgang Schäuble, “Der Platz in der Mitte: Sonderwege und Staatsräson,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 6, 1994. 64. Jürgen Habermas, “Einleitung,” in Jürgen Habermas (ed.), Stichworte zur “Geistigen Situation der Zeit.” Band 1: Nation und Republik (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 21.

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PART FOUR

German Republicanism and the Politics of Recognition

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CHAPTER 10

A Tolerant Republic?

Rainer Forst

T

here are several reasons that account for the difficulty of giving a clear and sufficient answer to the broad question of whether the Federal Republic of Germany is a “tolerant republic.” One problem is that the very concept of toleration is elusive and open to a number of—at times even contradictory—interpretations. Furthermore, an answer to that question very much depends on what one primarily looks at: constitutional principles, legal and political practice, public discourse, general social and cultural attitudes, etc. And finally, the question could refer to the present situation only, but it could also call for a complex overall assessment of the historical development of tolerant attitudes and practices. Given these difficulties, in my following brief remarks I nevertheless want to try to give an answer or, better, the outline of an answer to the question I pose in my title. First, I explain what I mean by toleration and distinguish between two conceptions of toleration (I). Second, I put forward the thesis that in public discourse as well as in legal and political practice in the Federal Republic, we find a struggle between these two conceptions of toleration, and I highlight this by using a by now famous, recent example, the so-called crucifix-case of 1995 (II). Third, I point out what I take to be the deeper reason for debates, such as the crucifix one, and what this tells us about the paradoxical character of the German “republic” (III).

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I. Toleration: Concept and Conceptions As one can quickly see by looking at the way the concept of toleration is used in political controversies, its meaning is far from being clear. Whereas some regard toleration as a desirable goal of a multicultural society, others see it as a sign of empty indifference or as a pragmatic and potentially repressive practice. Everybody understands something by toleration, but there is no shared understanding of the concept. Thus an attempt at conceptual clarification is called for.1 The general concept of toleration is marked by six essential characteristics: (1) The “context of toleration” needs to be specified: What is the relation between tolerator and tolerated (e.g., parents and children, friends, citizens); what are the subjects (individuals, groups, the state) or objects (beliefs, actions, practices) of toleration? (2) Toleration always implies an “objection component”2: The beliefs or practices that are the objects of toleration are considered to be objectionable and in a certain sense wrong—for otherwise there would be no need to tolerate them. Then we would speak either of indifference or of affirmation. (3) On the other hand, toleration implies an “acceptance component” according to which the tolerated beliefs or practices are wrong, but not totally, not absolutely or “intolerably” wrong. There are certain reasons that make them acceptable. (4) Based on the relation between objection and acceptance, the “limits of toleration” have to be specified. (5) The exercise of toleration must not be compelled such that the tolerators have no possibility of uttering and exercising their objections. Toleration cannot be the result of social powerlessness. (6) One needs to distinguish between “toleration” as a practice and “tolerance” as a personal attitude. Toleration can, for example, be a virtue of a political regime and its laws even though a large part of its citizens may not exhibit the virtue of tolerance. Based on these six characteristics, one can furthermore spell out a variety of conceptions of toleration, depending on how they interpret and determine these characteristics. Of the plurality of possible conceptions, I want to mention the two that I think are most important for the German context. The first one I call the permission conception. According to it, toleration is a relation between an authority or a majority and a dissenting, “different” minority (or various minorities). Toleration then means that the authority

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gives qualified permission to the minority to live according to its beliefs on the condition that the minority accepts the dominant position of the authority or majority. As long as its being different remains within limits, that is, is a purely “private” matter, and as long as the minority does not claim equal public and political status, it can be tolerated on both pragmatic and principled grounds—on pragmatic grounds because this form of toleration is regarded as the least costly of all possible alternatives and does not disturb civil peace and order as the dominant party defines it; and on principled grounds because one thinks it illegitimate and, in any case, fruitless to force people to give up certain deep-seated beliefs. This conception is a classic one that we find in many historical writings on, and in instances of, a politics of toleration and one that still informs our understanding of the term. Here toleration means that the authority or majority, which has the power to interfere with the practices of a minority, nevertheless tolerates it. The situation or “terms of toleration” are non-reciprocal: One party allows another party certain things on conditions specified by the first one. Toleration means “putting up with something,” “letting something be” from the perspective of the majority, whereas from the standpoint of the minority it means “suffering,” “coping with” a situation you cannot change (in German dulden vs erdulden). It is this conception that Goethe was referring to when he wrote: “Toleranz sollte eigentlich nur eine vorübergehende Gesinnung sein: sie muß zur Anerkennung führen. Dulden heißt beleidigen.”3 As opposed to this, the second conception of toleration—the respect conception—is one in which the parties tolerating each other respect each other in a more reciprocal sense: They regard themselves and others as citizens of a state in which members of all groups, majority or minorities, should have equal legal and political status. Even though their ethical beliefs about the good and true way of life and their cultural practices are in many ways incompatible, the citizens respect each other as moral-political equals in the sense that their common framework of social life—as far as fundamental rights and liberties and the distribution of basic resources are concerned— should be guided by norms that all parties can equally accept.4 One can further distinguish two models of the respect conception of toleration, that of “formal equality” and that of “qualitative equality.” The former operates on a strict separation between the public and the private realm, according to which ethical (i.e., cultural or religious) differences among citizens should be confined to the private sphere, not leading to conflicts in the political realm. As citizens, all are equal, and as equals, they are “beyond” their more narrow ethical beliefs. This version can properly be called a “secular republican” one, and it was exhibited most clearly by the

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position of French authorities who held that headscarves with a religious meaning had no place in public schools.5 But it is also present in German political discourse, where similar cases have been discussed.6 The model of qualitative equality, on the other hand, recognizes that formal equality tends to favor those ethical-cultural life forms whose beliefs and practices make it easier to accommodate the public/private distinction as it is understood and formed by a social and cultural majority. Thus, on the qualitative equality model, persons respect each other as political equals with a certain distinct ethical-cultural identity that needs to be tolerated as something that (a) is especially important for a person and (b) can provide good reasons for certain exceptions from or changes in existing legal and social structures. Social and political equality and integration are seen to be compatible with cultural difference, within certain limits of reciprocity and mutual respect. II. The Crux of the Crucifix Case To illustrate my thesis that in contemporary political discourse on toleration we find a conflict between the permission conception and the respect conception, let me turn to the “crucifix decision” of the Federal Constitutional Court [Bundesverfassungsgericht] in May 1995. In a unique way, the case (including the public reactions) shows the many dimensions and problems of the understanding of toleration in Germany. The story, very briefly, goes like this.7 In the Federal Republic, questions of education for the most part fall under the legislative power of the individual states. The Bavarian General School Law [Volksschulordnung] (§13, section 1) reads: “The school supports the parents in the religious education of children. School prayer, religious service in school, and worship are possibilities of this support. In each classroom a cross is to be put up [In jedem Klassenzimmer ist ein Kreuz anzubringen].”8 In most classrooms, crucifixes were put up accordingly—in the case at hand, the crucifix was (at first) almost three feet high. Ever since the first of their three daughters went to school in 1986, a couple (who were followers of Rudolf Steiner’s “anthroposophic doctrine”) objected to the crucifix in the classroom. According to them, it violated their constitutional right to freedom of conscience and religion and the principle of state neutrality in religious matters. More specifically, being confronted daily with the frightening image of a suffering body, said the plaintiffs, would result in psychological damage to their children. Between the parents and the school authorities no compromise could be found; so the case went to a lower administrative court and then to the

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Bavarian High Administrative Court [Verwaltungsgerichtshof ] in 1991. Both courts denied that the school law was a violation of the right to religious freedom and of the state’s religious neutrality as demanded by the Constitution. The reasons were the following. The German Basic Law—the Grundgesetz—gives legislative authority over education to the states, which therefore have the right to determine the ethical [weltanschaulich] character of the schools. Thus the Bavarian constitution provides (Article 131): “The highest goals of education are reverence for God [Ehrfurcht vor Gott], respect for religious belief and for human dignity … ” And Article 135 reads: “The public schools … teach and educate students according to the principles of Christian faith.” Since—according to the court—the school not only imparts substantive knowledge but also educates “heart and character,” it is not required to be fully neutral in religious matters. It must not be missionary, and it cannot coerce anybody to participate in religious practices and adopt certain beliefs, yet it may still teach Christian values. Connected with this is a further argument according to which the cross is not necessarily a symbol for a particular faith or denomination; rather, it represents the “Christian-Occidental” tradition common to every member of Western culture: “Representations of the cross in the form in question here ( … ) are not an expression of the declaration of one’s belief in a certain denomination. They are an essential part of the Christian-Occidental tradition and a common value of the Christian-Occidental culture. Given the obligation of tolerance that applies to [everyone], a non-Christian or a person with different ethical beliefs can be required to tolerate them according to the demanded respect for the beliefs of others, even if [he or she] rejects these representations.”9 Finally, the court presented an important argument according to which the right to religious liberty has two sides, a negative and a positive one. The negative right consists in the freedom from religion or religious indoctrination, i.e., in not being forced to adopt or give up certain beliefs. The positive Bekenntnisfreiheit means that one has a right to express one’s beliefs publicly (i.e., by using certain symbols). The way the court applied this distinction in the crucifix case was the following: What one finds here is a conflict between the negative right of a minority to be free from religion and from being confronted with religious symbols, on the one hand, and the positive right of a majority to express and declare its religious beliefs publicly with certain symbols like the cross, on the other hand. Thus the court concluded: “The claim of the plaintiffs based on their basic right to negative religious liberty must therefore—if we try to achieve a balance with respect to the demand of tolerance—yield to the state’s right of school organization that here corresponds to the positive freedom of

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religion of the other students and parents.”10 Affirming and supporting this decision in the proceedings before the Bundesverfassungsgericht later on, representatives of the church (but also of the Bavarian government) stated that a minority cannot claim an “absolute priority” for its negative right to freedom, thereby “leaving no room” for the exercise of the positive liberty of faith by the majority.11 In this interpretation of the “obligation of tolerance” [Toleranzgebot ] and of the right to religious liberty—which is far from being unusual in German legal discourse—we find the central characteristics of the permission conception. It is claimed that the majority’s tolerance consists in not forcing the minority to give up its beliefs, while the tolerance required of the minority consists in its willingness to accept the positive right of the majority to express its beliefs not just publicly, but by law. The minority is tolerated as different (from what the majority and the state rightly believe and express), and the minority has to tolerate [hinnehmen] the majority’s legal self-expression. The point of view of the plaintiffs is constructed in a purely “negative” way, and it is even presented as an intolerant point of view that forces the religious believers to refrain from the expression of their religious beliefs and restricts their positive liberty. As the Bavarian Verwaltungsgerichtshof said, one should not give priority to claims based on such an “extremely exaggerated subjectivism” [extrem übersteigerter Subjektivismus].12 The case finally went to the Bundesverfassungsgericht, which reversed the decisions of the Bavarian courts and ruled that the law requiring a cross or crucifix in the classroom is unconstitutional. Its reasons were the following. Even though the Constitutional Court agreed that there is no general negative right not to be confronted with religious symbols in public, it made it clear that there is a difference between the public expression of a particular faith and its expression by law. The right to religious liberty requires the state to exercise religious neutrality in the form of treating religions and beliefs equally, thus a state cannot force students to be taught “under the cross.”13 The Court, however, did not hold that strict religious neutrality is required of the state, even though it may not explicitly support a particular denomination. Since Christian values are an essential part of the “cultural basis of society,” they need to be taught in school in a general sense.14 Furthermore, the Court found the interpretation of the Toleranzgebot by the lower courts contradictory, for it required non-believers to respect the cross in the classroom as both an expression of the positive right of the Christian majority to declare its faith and as an expression of general values and thus not as an expression of a particular faith. The Court then held that the cross is clearly an expression of Christian faith and one of its main symbols; even worse, it was always a symbol of the “missionary expansion” of

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Christianity.15 Thus one cannot expect non-Christians to regard it as a neutral, almost secular symbol of Western culture. Finally, the Court disputed the way the distinction between negative and positive religious liberty had been applied by the Bavarian courts. Both minorities and majorities can equally claim a “positive” liberty of religious expression, and there is no reason why the majority should prevail. And again, the positive right does not include legal assistance like the one offered by the law on crucifixes. The decision was reached by a close 5-3 vote, with dissenting opinions stressing that the negative right to religious liberty is not a “special liberty” [Obergrundrecht], nor is it a “right to prevent religion.”16 Again the judges called for tolerance on the side of the minority to “put up” with the cross. The various courts’ decisions and the dissenting opinions show the struggle between the two conceptions of toleration I sketched above: between a conception that leaves it to the majority to grant permission to a minority to be different as long as the dominant values and social forms are not being questioned, and a conception which grants equal status—at least in important constitutional respects—to all citizens, be they a minority or a majority, and which stresses the principle of neutrality as a principle of justice, not of pragmatic accommodation. But more than the legal dispute, the general public outrage about this decision shows us something more with regard to how tolerant the Federal Republic is.17 The negative reactions against the Constitutional Court’s decision were unprecedented in the legal history of the Federal Republic. Catholic bishops called for civil disobedience; Chancellor Kohl declared that the decision was “incomprehensible” and anti-religious, and he furthermore held the view, as many others did, that “the cross is a sign of tolerance,” and that to be against it would therefore be a sign of intolerance.18 Leading Bavarian politicians of the governing party (the Christian Social Union, CSU) and representatives of the church even compared the Court’s decision to the—failed—attempt of the Nazi government in 1941 to remove the crucifixes from the classrooms.19 Some held that the decision itself was unconstitutional. Openly seeking confrontation, the Bavarian government issued a new law again ordering the cross to be on the wall with certain provisions for dealing with conflicts. The reactions to the decision are too manifold and complex in their expressions and motivations to be discussed here in full, but they do show how the term “toleration” is used by both sides of the political-ethical dispute and how important it is to start from a clear understanding of that concept—and from a normative perspective that helps to decide which of the two conceptions is adequate for a just and democratic republic.20 So to give a provisional answer

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to my main question: If one thinks that the “permission conception” is sufficient for a tolerant republic, as many Germans do, then the Federal Republic can by and large be called a tolerant republic. But if one thinks that the “respect conception” is the appropriate conception for a democratic republic, a number of legal and political practices—the crucifix law being just one vivid, symbolic example21—appear as intolerant, exclusionary, and unjust. And debates such as the one about the crucifix show that political discourse about such matters in the Federal Republic is characterized by a struggle between these two conceptions of toleration and, ultimately, of justice. III. The Paradox of the Freiheitliche Republic Looking at this struggle in a historical perspective in order to find its roots, one has to go back to the beginning of the Federal Republic and the birth of its self-understanding as a “republic.” For the debate about toleration shows something very peculiar about this self-understanding. It needs no further explanation that the experience of the fate of the Weimar Republic and of the 12 years of Nazi rule present the background for the commitment to the establishment of a democratic order in which the value of human dignity and the basic rights of citizens are considered to be paramount and inalienable. But it needs a closer look at which lessons of that experience were most importantly drawn and at the way the supreme validity of these values and rights was understood. For it was a widespread and influential belief that it was as a result of value relativism, positivism, nihilism, and voluntarist majoritarianism that the Weimar Republic fell prey to Hitler’s party—and that due to a liberal weakness of value convictions, the democratic substance was too thin to resist. The extremes had eaten up the little ethical-political substance that there was in these times of conflict and strife; and authoritarianism became possible only because the very “ethical ground” of the democratic order had been lost. But, according to this story, such a ground could then not be established in a purely secular way: What was needed was a “higher” form of norms and laws, values that were untouchable by human beings because they emanated from a non-human source and authority. And this, to be more than brief, was one of the fundamental rationales for the appeal to God in the Grundgesetz and for its understanding of human dignity: a dignity given to men by— a Christian—God. This was for many an essential component of the “antitotalitarian consensus” on which the new democracy was founded.22 Only by considering this “foundational story” can one see why the conviction that the liberal and democratic values that constitute the constitution are thought to be immanently tied to Christian values. Only seeing this makes the reactions to the Court’s decision intelligible; one can even see the connection

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between the cross and tolerance, and even the way in which the Court’s decision could be compared to the Nazi attempt to remove the cross. For the basic idea is that once this ethical-religious substance of the republic is taken away, the democratic order is no longer stable and the whole liberal-democratic order [ freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung ] may be in danger. There is, then, a paradox built into the very peculiar idea of a freiheitliche (“liberal” only in a very specific sense) republic: It can remain a liberal and democratic, and tolerant, order only if it rests on a religious—and in that respect non-tolerant—foundation that limits the exercise of personal liberty as well as the range of social and ethical pluralism and that is not at the disposal of democratic majorities.23 There are many ways to illuminate this foundational paradox, but a very appropriate one is a (brief ) look at the extremely influential essay from 1967 by (former judge of the Bundesverfassungsgericht) Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde entitled “The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularization.”24 His central question is what the “moral substance” of the state can be in a secular society,25 and the answer Böckenförde gives is that in a purely secular society, such a substance cannot exist. The sittliche Substanz, to use Hegel’s term, which binds the citizens, limits the exercise of their liberty, and secures the “homogeneity of society,” cannot be constituted by a “natural morality” or by the “eudaemonistic expectations” of atomistic citizens which harbor the dangers of arbitrariness and endless plurality. And furthermore, such a substance cannot be reproduced by the state itself: “The liberal, secularized state is nourished by presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee.”26 Given all that, the secular state needs the “inner impulses and bonding forces” that only religious—Christian—faith can establish.27 For otherwise—and again one can see the particular historical background of that understanding of what makes a liberal state viable—the republic is defenseless in a time of crisis: “On what will that state base itself in time of crisis?”28 Thus one finds that the peculiar combination of liberal and democratic values with religious, Christian faith that leads to the permission conception of toleration is not just a contingent expression of the beliefs of a majority in Bavaria; more than that, it lies at the very basis of a certain, very influential, and maybe still dominant understanding of the “essence” of the Federal Republic. This is what provides the background for the conflicts about toleration and the recognition of difference, about state neutrality and equal rights; and this is what makes them so intense and fierce. To struggle, then, for an understanding of toleration in terms of the respect conception actually means to struggle for a different understanding of the “substance” of the Federal Republic—ultimately, for a different understanding of what a “republic” is.29 Only if such a struggle succeeds will there be a chance for a “multicultural” society that is tolerant in the right way.

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Notes 1. For the following, see in more detail Rainer Forst, “Toleranz, Gerechtigkeit und Vernunft,” in Rainer Forst (ed.), Toleranz: Philosophische Grundlagen und gesellschaftliche Praxis einer umstrittenen Tugend (Frankfurt/Main and New York: Campus, 2000), where I analyze four and not just two conceptions of toleration. 2. The terms “objection component” and “acceptance component” I take from Preston King, Toleration (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 21pp. 3. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, in Werke, vol. 6 (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1981), 507 (“Tolerance should be a temporary attitude only: It must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to insult”). 4. For an analysis of the notion of “neutrality” implied here, see Rainer Forst, Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, forthcoming) ch. 2. 5. Cf. Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, “Citizenship and Equality: The Place for Toleration,” in Political Theory 21 (1993), 585–605. 6. Cf. Johannes Hellermann, “Der Grundrechtsschutz der Religionsfreiheit ethnisch-kultureller Minderheiten,” in Wilhelm Heitmeyer and Rainer Dollase (eds.), Die bedrängte Toleranz (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 382–400. 7. Of the many publications on the case, see esp. Peter Pappert (ed.), Den Nerv getroffen: Engagierte Stimmen zum Kruzifix-Urteil von Karlsruhe (Aachen: Bergmoser and Höller, 1995); Heinrich Basilius Streithofen (ed.), Das Kruzifixurteil: Deutschland vor einem neuen Kulturkampf? ( Frankfurt/Main and Berlin: Ullstein, 1995); Alexander Hollerbach et al., Das Kreuz im Widerspruch (Freiburg: Herder, 1996). The political-legal dimension of the case is best discussed in the valuable collection edited by Winfried Brugger and Stefan Huster, Der Streit um das Kreuz in der Schule: Zur religiös-weltanschaulichen Neutralität des Staates (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998). See also Günter Frankenberg, Die Verfassung der Republik (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1997), ch. 7. 8. Quoted after the decision of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (1 BvR 1087/91; May 16, 1995), published in Europäische Grundrechte-Zeitschrift (EuGRZ) 22, Sept. 4, 1995, 359. All translations from the decisions of the various courts are mine. 9. “Kreuzesdarstellungen der hier in Betracht kommenden Art sind–ebenso wie das überkonfessionelle Schulgebet–nicht Ausdruck des Bekenntnisses zu einem konfessionell gebundenen Glauben. Sie sind ein wesentlicher Bestandteil der allgemeinen christlich-abendländischen Tradition und Gemeingut des christlichabendländischen Kulturkreises. Einem Nichtchristen oder sonst weltanschaulich anders Gesinnten ist es unter dem Gebot der auch für ihn geltenden Toleranz zumutbar, sie unter dem Gesichtspunkt der gebotenen Achtung vor der Weltanschauung anderer hinzunehmen, auch wenn sie solche Darstellungen ablehnen.” From the decision of the Verwaltungsgerichtshof München (7 CE 91.1014; June 3, 1991), published in Neue Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsrecht (NVwZ) 1991, no. 11, 1101. 10. “Der Anspruch der Ast. aus ihrem Grundrecht der negativen Religionsfreiheit muß daher bei der gebotenen Abwägung unter Beachtung des Toleranzgebots

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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gegenüber dem staatlichen Schulorganisationsrecht, das hier mit der positiven Religionsfreiheit der übrigen Schüler und Eltern in Einklang steht, zurücktreten.” (Ibid.) Quoted in EuGRZ 1995, 361. NVwZ, 1101. EuGRZ, 363. “Auch ein Staat, der die Glaubensfreiheit umfassend gewährleistet und sich damit selber zu religiös-weltanschaulicher Neutralität verpflichtet, kann die kulturell vermittelten und historisch verwurzelten Wertüberzeugungen und Einstellungen nicht abstreifen, auf denen der gesellschaftliche Zusammenhalt beruht und von denen auch die Erfüllung seiner eigenen Aufgaben abhängt.” In EuGRZ, 365. Ibid., 364. Ibid., 368. Cf. the material collected in Pappert (ed.), Den Nerv getroffen, and Streithofen (ed.), Das Kruzifixurteil. Quoted in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 12, 1995, 1. Cf. Der Spiegel 33, August 14, 1995, 22–34. Cf. my argument in “Toleranz, Gerechtigkeit und Vernunft.” One could think of other, more severe cases, like policies of immigration and citizenship laws. Cf. the chapter by William A. Barbieri, “The Many Faces of the Republic: Or, What’s in a Name?” in this volume. Cf. John Ford Golay, The Founding of the Federal Republic of Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 113–23 and 175–98, on the discussions in the Parliamentary Council. For the legal-theoretical debates about the understanding of the constitution, see Werner Maihofer (ed.), Naturrecht oder Positivismus? (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966). I thank Jeff Seitzer for valuable suggestions concerning this point. Note that this makes for a paradox not only concerning toleration but also with respect to liberty and democracy. In State, Society and Liberty: Studies in Political Theory and Constitutional Law, tr. J. A. Underwood (New York: Berg, 1991), 26–46. German in Recht, Staat, Freiheit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1992), 92–114. For an argument in the crucifix case that uses Böckenförde’s essay, see Thomas Würtenberger, “Zu den Voraussetzungen des freiheitlichen, säkularen Staates,” in Brugger and Huster (eds.), Der Streit um das Kreuz in der Schule, 277–98. “What is the state’s lifeblood, where does it find the strength to sustain it and guarantee its homogeneity and the inner regulatory forces of liberty that it must have, once the bonding power of religion is no longer and can no longer be essential to it?” (Ibid., 44). Ibid., 45. (“Der freiheitliche, säkulare Staat lebt von Voraussetzungen, die er selbst nicht garantieren kann.” German ed., 112.) Ibid., 46. Ibid.

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29. This is where the following question arises: What does the “cultural substance” of such a republic consist of—i.e., will it be constituted only by abstract political principles? An answer that wants to avoid this “thin” option starts from the assumption that a political identity of a democratic and egalitarian tolerant— “multicultural”—republic is as much (and in a certain sense even more so) a product of a historical learning process of a political community as any other identity. It just draws the right lesson from its history, one that does not perpetuate reified, traditional, and exclusionary notions of a political “substance,” but that surely is a substantive and “thick” conviction on the side of the citizens. I thank Jean Cohen for raising this as well as other important questions in her comments on this paper.

CHAPTER 11

The Many Faces of the Republic: Or, What’s in a Name?

William A. Barbieri, Jr.

I. Introduction

T

he newcomers to the Federal Republic of Germany, the Ausländer, have slowly made their mark on their adopted society, beginning with their contributions to the economy and expanding gradually to the cuisine, the urban landscape, and even the literary and cinematic scene. It was only a matter of time before they would become a presence—if a largely mute one—in the rough and tumble of politics and even in the saturnine world of political theory. And so it has come to pass. Today, those who concern themselves with the theory and practice of German politics can, in their pleas, proposals, critiques, and apologia, no longer avoid the challenge posed by the presence of ethnic and cultural plurality in the bosom of the body politic. Politicians and pundits alike have been obliged to confront the problems posed by diversity and to integrate their responses into their broader political perspectives and platforms. An important venue in which this shift has occurred has been in talk of the republic. Since the founding, 53 years ago, of two modern, selfproclaimed German republics, and especially in the decade since the two merged into one, a persistent feature of German political discourse has been debate about the meaning of this central term in the historical political lexicon. Much of the discussion has centered on the relative merits of republicanism,1 understood as a normative program for realizing, or maintaining,

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the republic. This is not to say, however, that there is a single established doctrine or position in contemporary debates that might justly lay claim to the mantle of republicanism, for the diversity of stances that are associated with the republican ideal is striking. Jürgen Habermas, for example, criticizes one genre of republicanism thus: … [C]ontemporary republicans tend to give [political discourse] a communitarian reading. It is precisely this move toward an ethical constriction of political discourse that I call into question. Politics may not be assimilated to a hermeneutical process of self-explication of a shared form of life or collective identity.2

Here, striking an opposing note, is Dieter Oberndörfer: Nation stands for the particular, by way of which states distinguish themselves from one another; Republic, by contrast, for the cosmopolitan foundations of the modern constitutional state, for universally valid human rights, and for the derivation of the rights of citizens from the nature of the human being … In the republic, cultural values are interpreted, accepted, or rejected by each individual. The culture of the republic is thus unavoidably a mixture of diverse and frequently conflicting goods and values. The pluralism of the republic is limited only by the norms of the constitution and their legal and political order.3

As these statements, with their contrasting emphases on substance and form, suggest, “republic” and “republicanism” are flexible terms that function as loci for a range of normative interpretations of political life in Germany. In this respect they are akin to other such elusive terms as “citizenship,” “democracy,” and “nation”; also like these terms, however, their meaning is by no means infinitely malleable. While both labels are applied in more or less official settings, with greater or lesser precision, cynically or hopefully, and bearing more or less theoretical freight, they retain, all the same, a modicum of solidity and specificity. How the republic is conceptualized in German debates reflects, in the first place, the received contexts of historical traditions and ongoing debates. At the same time, theorizing about the republic constitutes a distinctive framework for creative thought in response to new issues, whether they be posed by globalization, technological shifts, evolving patterns of social organization, or, as in the present case, increasing cultural diversity. In this forward-looking sense, the notion of the republic is a tool for elaborating, discussing, and evaluating theses about how common life should be shaped. Of the manifold arenas in which the language of the republic has been marshaled, none perhaps has been so prominent as the debate about diversity. The unplanned crystallization of ethnically non-German minorities has

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caused a political furor in a land that had come to take for granted the heightened homogeneity attained through a history of nationalist consolidation and, ultimately, genocide. The presence of the new groups has spurred reconsideration of a number of basic features of political life, from citizenship and naturalization policy to regulations concerning religion and other cultural phenomena. At the same time, these concrete issues are naturally bound up with questions of political theory. How does Germany’s political identity as a constitutional democracy with a strong, if ambivalent, nationalist tradition square with its rapidly diversifying populace? What implications does diversity carry for the notion of a German republic? Can the ideal of republicanism still be serviceable in an environment characterized by a plurality of communal forms of life and shifting patterns of transnational organization? If so, how? Republican discourse in Germany is shot through with often conflicting references—to the German Democratic as well as the Federal German Republic, to the “Bonn” as well as the “Berlin Republic,” to the republic envisioned by advocates of Verfassungspatriotismus as well as that dreamt of by the self-proclaimed Republikaner. In what follows, I consider the symbol of the republic under the sign of diversity, with a mind to some methodological questions regarding the ethical character of republican rhetoric. My presumption is that debate over the meaning of the republic provides, at least potentially, a fruitful theater for mediating among the various normative models of political organization—universalist, group-related, and individualist—that compete for dominance in the German political context. II. Republican Rhetoric What is a republic, and what does republicanism entail? In the progression of usages ranging from the banal to the illuminating, the initial two stops for “republic” these days are, first, the generic sense in which the term simply denotes a modern state—the Czech Republic, the People’s Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran—and, second, the time-honored designation of a political entity that is emphatically not a monarchy. These applications, of course, far from expend the intellectual capital of the term. In the shared treasury of the Western political legacy, the notion of the republic is invested with a wealth of associations.4 These have arisen in a picaresque arc of development that has taken the ancient term for the common affairs of the citizens of Rome, res publica, and extended it in turn to a designation for that community itself (“the Roman Republic”), then for polities in general, and then for the abstract subject of political life, before attaching it more specifically to certain types of states, certain varieties of political ethics, and certain

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governmental institutions. In the face of this rich and convoluted history, we are forced to dispense with the idea of presenting a simple definition of the republic that might do justice to our subject. What I wish to propose, instead, is a critical framework for interpreting contemporary republican discourse in Germany with special reference to the problematic of diversity. This framework has three parts. Family Resemblances In the broad lineage of conceptions of the republic, there are, in the first place, a few family features that are widely shared. To begin with, talk of the republic has, from Cicero on down, consistently focused not on one or the other but on the totality constituted by a specific collectivity and its form of government. Usually, this perspective has included in its purview the notions of self-government and public, as opposed to private, goods. Secondly, the idea of the republic evinces a strong connection with the rule of law. This link has habitually taken the form of an affirmation of the crucial role played by the constitution in any republican order; beyond this, more abstract formulations have sought to locate the wellsprings of the notion of the republic in the very character of law itself. A third feature is more subtle: The republican idea has most often been articulated in terms of a balancing process—whether in Polybius’ sense of an equilibrium among the elements of a constitution, or in the preoccupation of the natural-law lawyers with matching republican forms to the material requirements of a given people, or in Montesquieu’s prescription of a separation of powers, or in Madison’s efforts to cope with the issue of faction. This aspect lends an almost aesthetic character to the idea of the republic and helps account for the sense of fragility that has accompanied it for much of its career. Republican Antitheses These very general resemblances quickly give way, however, to a host of distinct, at times diametrically opposed characteristics associated with various versions of the republic. Thus we may juxtapose the martial ethos of the ancient and early modern city-states with the Enlightenment projection of the republic as the foundation of perpetual peace; or Kant’s notion of the republic as a requirement of reason with the Romantic location of republican spirit in the passions; or, for that matter, Robespierre’s equation of republic and democracy with Madison’s clear opposition of the two in The Federalist. The conclusion beckons, in light of these apparent contradictions, that we should forgo attempting to portray the notion of the republic as

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anything more than a cipher. What we in fact have in such contrasts, however, are indications of the conceptual bounds within which interpretations of the republic are appropriately contested. Taken together, such antitheses constitute part of a hermeneutical matrix within which conversation takes place regarding what might best be called—to pinch a phrase from Dewey—the republic and its problems. The master list of bipolar qualifiers for the republic is long, but in the confrontation with diversity, five in particular are worth mention. 1. Program vs. principle Is the republic in essence an empirical project or a case for the moralists? On the first view, establishing civic freedom is a matter of pragmatically seeking out those institutions and methods that best facilitate stable self-government; on the second, the republic is an ethical proposition rooted in a philosophical anthropology, most often framed in terms of virtue and human flourishing.5 2. Community vs. individual Is the core concern of republicanism with a social entity that is larger than the sum of its parts, or should individual citizens be seen as the normative fount and end of the republic? Where the first view, which privileges ideas such as the common good and positive freedom, conduces to a discourse of structural ethics,6 the second typically incorporates conceptions of voluntarism and negative freedom into a theory of individual rights.7 3. Caesura vs. continuity Does a republic depend for its survival on radical institutional change and a conversion of the masses, or does its success depend on painstakingly maintaining the traditional moral resources or “social capital” of the people? The classic republican theme of an epochal break with the past—culminating in an act of founding and the promulgation of a constitution—here stands in tension with a conservative strand of republican thought that places great weight on the need for carefully preserving the cultural roots of political agency and virtue.8 4. Homogeneity vs. pluralism Does republican government presuppose an exclusivist community of culturally similar and like-minded members, or do the checks, balances, and other structural innovations of the republic make it precisely the form of self-rule best suited to a diverse and inclusive society? If the experience of free citystates has held up the value of a deep-seated matrix of ethnocultural commonality and fellow feeling—a matrix deemed threatened by the presence

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of too many “outsiders”—heirs of the Age of Revolution have placed their emphasis on the centrality of a common democratic ethos capable of uniting a diverse nation.9 5. Particularism vs. cosmopolitanism Is the republic inherently local in inspiration and limited in scale, or is it an idea with universal application that aspires, ultimately, to global dimensions? In opposition to the view that the republic depends perforce on the concrete ethical culture and relative intimacy of a particular community, we may identify a more expansive thesis positing the republic as the mandate of a moral law that is universal in scope.10 These—to some extent overlapping—conceptual oppositions help constitute what we may think of as a complex dialectical framework for contemporary republican discourse about diversity. These antitheses, in other words, serve to delineate the bounds and provide the content for meaningful arguments about how the boundaries and arrangements of the republic are to be revised in the face of ethnic and cultural change. It is important to note that they encompass ethical elements as well as more properly social scientific concerns, as befits an issue in which the descriptive and normative elements stubbornly resist any attempts to separate them. Our analysis thus far has been composed at the level of contemporary democracies in general. Before we can employ this apparatus in a contextualization of republican rhetoric in present-day Germany, it is necessary to draw in a third component: an account, however brief, of some staples of German republican thought. Notes on the German Context Republican traditions in Germany date from the early modern period, when small self-governed communities developed in the shadow of the Alps under the influence of the Swiss republican experience, giving rise to a German “free state” tradition understanding itself primarily in terms of opposition to despotism.11 This movement stood over against the absolutist conception of the republic sanctioned by the official political Aristotelianism of the day. Both of these versions, however, were largely engulfed by the rise of modern states and the accompanying propagation of theories of natural right across Europe. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, German conceptions of the republic distinguished themselves from those elsewhere in Europe mainly in regard to the length of time it took them to establish themselves. This changed, though, beginning with the revolutionary era, and since then it has been the prickly relationship with France that has borne the greatest impact on the idiom of the republic in German culture.12 The resulting catalogue of

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republican associations may be usefully organized from the more universalist to the more particularistic. A towering figure in this history is, of course, Immanuel Kant, in whose philosophy of history and political ethics the notion of republican government takes a central role.13 Writing with Plato in the background and Rousseau hovering over his desk, Kant lent the weight of his idealist system to a vision of a world of republics understood as constitutional states featuring a separation of powers, structures of representation, and, preferably, a monarchical basis. In its logic, Kant’s account of the form of government required for a perpetual peace militates in the direction of a global republic (Weltrepublik),14 and although he himself stopped short of drawing out this implication, the young Friedrich Schlegel, in his own rejoinder to Kant, had no such qualms.15 The issue of these considerations, in any event, has a distinguished role in German letters for a cosmopolitan conception of the republic as a mandate of universal reason powered—arguably at least—by a teleology of (rational) nature.16 Another source for more expansive German interpretations of the republic is the web of associations, absorbed for the most part from France, that stamped the character of the Vormärz. Inspired by the French Revolution as well as by the writings of Thomas Paine, a radically democratic interpretation of the republican idea began to percolate as the nineteenth century got under way, slowly establishing a contrast to the constitutional-monarchical interpretation endorsed by liberals calling on Kant’s authority.17 The democratic view insisted not only on the transfer of power to the citizens, but also on the limitation of government through regular elections. In spirit, it tended toward a vision of a free German state within a federation of European republics.18 As ongoing social changes produced increasing class tensions, the democratic version of republicanism began to take on an egalitarian social cast. By the time of the Revolution of 1848, the dominant sense of the term was “social” and “democratic,” while alongside this, a socialist version—that of the “Red Republic”—had also come into use.19 The legacy of this period, bound up in the origins of today’s party landscape and recalled periodically in periods of crisis—most notably that surrounding the birth of the Weimar Republic20—is an egalitarian version of the republic wedded to the ideals of radical democracy and social justice. What of the more particularist aspects of the republic in its classical, Aristotelian outlines? Perhaps surprisingly, the neoclassical genre of theories expounding republicanism in terms of virtue has held relatively little currency in modern Germany. This may well be attributable to the sobering impact of the excesses of the culture of republican virtue in the French Terror; in any case, since the revolutionary era, the ethical variant of republicanism has by

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and large remained dormant.21 This is not to say that the affective dimension of republicanism has been entirely ignored, as Novalis’ romantic formula, “Wo junge Leute sind, ist Republik,” or the battle songs of 1848 attest. To a certain extent, the republicanism of the Vormärz aimed at promoting a feeling of national unity and belonging. In the period of nation-building and Germanization that eventually followed, however, nation—or Reich—and republic became increasingly opposed notions, with normatively freighted republican references becoming ever rarer. Only in the last decade or so, in conjunction with the rediscovery of Hannah Arendt’s political thought and the burgeoning interest in the communitarian critique of liberalism, has republicanism in a “thick” sense found its way back into the German political vocabulary.22 These associations with idealist reason, egalitarian social democracy, and, to a lesser degree, romantic affectivity and communal unity help define the context of meanings for references to the republic in contemporary German political culture. Together with the family resemblances and conceptual antitheses examined above, they make up an overarching apparatus for developing a critical understanding of arguments about republican conceptions and their relation to the problem of diversity in today’s Germany. Before we look at some specific theses advanced in the name of the republic, though, it is necessary to sketch what is at stake in the debate over diversity. III. The Challenge of Diversity For today’s Germany, poised in the midst of an integrating Europe and thrust, following reunification, into a particularly intense period of economic and cultural relocation, the question of the status of the ever-growing nonethnic German segments of society is but one interlocking part of a broader, ongoing process of self-definition. There are two distinct, if overlapping, constellations of questions regarding the prospect of diversity from the standpoint of republican rhetoric. The first revolves around the matter of admissions, while the second is constructed around the issue of inclusion. One of the hallmarks of modern political organizations is their ability to control, or at least steer, the process of entry into the various classes of membership—resident, worker, citizen—at their disposal. This ability underwrites an ongoing discourse in which political actors present competing policy perspectives which, in their grasp of economic interests and their coloration of empirical data—not to mention in their undergirding political visions—exhibit an irreducibly normative dimension. And so it is that Germany, even as it edges in the direction of transferring much of its power to control mobility to the European Union, continues to find itself

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embroiled in an ethical debate regarding admissions. This debate, in its particulars, encompasses three major moments. Who should be admitted, to what degree, and on what terms? The initial question concerns whom to let into German territory in the first place. Germany, for all its economic stresses and flashes of xenophobic violence, remains the destination of choice for a broad clientele of potential immigrants, including members of the German diaspora, relatives of already established migrants, victims of political persecution, and other refugees from disasters natural and unnatural. What criteria should be used to distinguish among such candidates? Indeed, on what grounds may any immigrants justifiably be excluded? What measures should be taken against illicit immigration? Placing these questions in a republican framework lends a certain spin to the accompanying possibilities. One can make, for example, a republican case for a political community’s right to limit entry generally, and, beyond this, for a republic’s interest in favoring prospective citizens who are in various ways bound to, politically aligned with, or at least culturally similar to the present populace.23 On the other hand, a human rights-based interpretation of the republic would likely place greater emphasis on the criterion of need, thus assigning a higher priority to refugees in the immigration process. The second moment occurs once migrants have gained territorial admission. To what degree should they be admitted? The options here draw on the factors of duration of residence, permission to work, economic and social integration, and political enfranchisement to define a hierarchy of statuses, ranging from temporary resident to temporary worker to permanent resident to full citizen. Here, a central question for republican theories is to what extent intermediate statuses should be accepted, given the traditional centrality of citizenship in republicanism generally. Of course, historically, various republicanisms—beginning with the Greeks—have tolerated a range of subordinate statuses for women, children, slaves, and aliens. One of the moral dynamisms of republican thought, however, has been the observable tension between the practice of the day and more inclusive interpretations of the ideal.24 Accompanying the notion of a hierarchy of classes of entry is a final moment concerning the terms of admission to each respective status. Should, for example, longer residence be contingent on some degree of integration into the society at large? Should social and economic membership be attached to strict observance of the law? What is a fair price for citizenship? In such matters it is first and foremost the moral dimension of republican thought that comes into play: the facet, that is, that emphasizes the importance of sacrifice, the centrality of participation, the imperative of civic virtue. Another aspect of republicanism is involved here as well, however: namely, the notion of communal identity. Is a bond of commitment to the

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constitutional order of the Federal Republic a sufficient basis for admission to citizenship, or is something more—even, potentially, assimilation into the ethnic Schicksalsgemeinschaft—called for? The second constellation of questions picks up where the first leaves off. Somehow, even without an official immigration policy, reunited Germany has become home to substantial populations of migrants from around the world.25 The presence of these new groups naturally raises the question of how to respond to the differences they introduce into German society. While there are some who would prefer to expel the newcomers, violently if necessary, for the democratic majority the issue naturally tends to focus on terms for their inclusion26—a matter made all the more pressing by their subordinate social, political, and economic status. The question thus becomes how society’s institutions should be rearranged to take account of the new face— or faces—of the populace. Should, for example, a policy of multiculturalism be adopted, which tolerates, protects, or even promotes distinct cultural or ethnic identities; or should assimilation to the majority culture be the goal? In the social and economic sphere, should measures such as quotas or preferences be adopted in order to counter discrimination and foster greater equality? Politically, should limited voting rights or special forms of representation for national minorities be instituted? Behind these possibilities rest competing conceptions of how political and cultural components should interact in the organization of common life.27 In this contest the rhetoric of the republic may be enlisted in different ways. The weight of much of classical republican thought is to suggest a strong connection between cultural unity and effective political participation. This premise cuts two ways with respect to the problematic of inclusion. First, it tends to cast doubt on the feasibility of a democratic politics founded on a multicultural order. Second, it offers at least some support for the view that the full political membership of citizenship should be limited on a cultural basis. Whether this basis is constituted by the “nation” or by some other cultural unit remains an open question. By way of contrast, the modern, revolutionary view of the republic may readily be construed as coming down on the side of support for the human right of all de facto members of a society to equal citizenship.28 Equality in this sense may entail, in addition to a commitment to equality of opportunity in the socioeconomic realm, equal respect for cultural identity, and hence some form of multicultural politics. It is this view that one sees at work in the arguments of some contemporary political theorists for drawing a thick line between the institutions of democratic citizenship and any sort of cultural or ethnic identities, in such a way as to be able to advocate at once respect for diversity and a strongly shared political ethos.29 An obvious motive for this strategy is the desire, which has an

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obvious appeal in the German context, to establish a bulkhead between the basis for democratic politics and the specter of ethnonationalism. A look at a pair of recent debates over concrete issues may help illuminate the sorts of values at stake for republican perspectives on diversity. One such debate involves the case of Fereshta Ludin, an Afghani Muslim and naturalized German citizen barred in 1998 from pursuing her profession as a public school teacher because of her insistence on wearing a headscarf in the classroom. Although they involved a complex set of considerations touching on gender equality, children’s and parents’ rights, and individual freedom of expression, the specific issue on which the proceedings hinged was the conflict between religious liberty and the liberal principle of neutrality that applies to civil servants, including public school teachers.30 At the same time, the case inevitably invoked broader questions regarding both the place of members of the new minorities in Germany’s public life—especially since careers as public servants are open only to citizens—and the place of Islam in Germany’s cultural life, given that Islam does not share the privileged status of a “body of public law” enjoyed by the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities. In this context one could find support for the official stance in republican arguments that, following the American tradition, insist on a firmly humanistic basis for politics; that disavow, that is, any confessional supports, choosing instead to rely on a robust indigenous civic religion. At the same time, though, a republican critique of the government’s decision is readily imaginable. This would emphasize the centrality of the protection of basic constitutional rights including the free exercise of religion; moreover, it would, in an egalitarian spirit, lend support to the cause of greater socioeconomic and cultural inclusion for members of the Muslim minority. A second debate surrounds the issue of dual citizenship. The past few years have seen a “paradigm shift” in German immigration and naturalization policy, signaled most prominently in three events: first, the adoption of a new citizenship law in 1999 providing for the awarding of citizenship on a ius soli basis to children born to settled foreign residents; second, the introduction in 2000 of a “Green Card” program designed to facilitate the recruitment of foreign specialists in information technology for limited stays; and third, the appearance in July 2001 of the report of a non-partisan government commission on migration endorsing a broad array of policies embracing the goals of controlled immigration and improved integration. Of the various dimensions of citizenship touched on by these developments, the prospect of allowing dual citizenship has emerged as easily the most contentious. For its proponents, toleration of additional citizenships appears to be the only way to ensure the political inclusion of immigrants who otherwise find themselves unable to take the step of repudiating their native citizenship that has heretofore been demanded as

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a precondition for naturalization. Opponents, however, arguing that accepting plural loyalties is both unfair and harmful to the national political culture, have thus far succeeded in limiting dual citizenship to a temporary or exceptional basis, and the recent commission’s report continues to subscribe to the aim of avoiding multiple citizenship where possible.31 Since the debate turns on normative arguments about nothing less than the meaning of citizenship, it is, of course, obvious grist for republican theories, but once again several possible interpretations present themselves. For one, there is a muscular strand of republicanism that, in emphasizing the importance of consent to one’s citizenship status, arrays itself against any proposals to enfranchise long-term foreign residents by bypassing the voluntary tradeoffs of naturalization in favor of a wholesale award of German citizenship.32 Support for this critical stance may also be drawn from the related republican thesis that citizenship must be linked with a wholehearted commitment to serve only one master. On the other side, one could argue that a republican sensibility is offended by the presence of large numbers of residents without political rights, and that it therefore requires active steps to include such members and, beyond this, to draw them into political engagement—even if this means accepting that they retain ties with other polities or cultural communities.33 IV. Interpreting the Republic In the public struggle over how to respond to the “facts on the ground” regarding diversity, the republic is contested verbal territory. The strategic value of the term is certainly due in part to the measure of authority it carries in virtue of its privileged place in the nomenclature of the state. At the same time, the idea of the republic bears a peculiar attraction in virtue of the critical bite and rhetorical power that stems, at least potentially, from its distinctive synthesis of normative and descriptive components.34 And so its meaning becomes the object of legal arguments and op-ed pieces, campaign flyers and philosophical tracts. An initial impetus for this struggle comes from the sphere of jurisprudence. Among jurists, there is, at first glance, a striking reticence in regard to the legal denotation of a term, which, by convention, has simply referred to a non-monarchical state. It is a curiosity that in the century that greeted the first official German republics, political events rapidly stripped this traditional meaning of its relevance. This very development, however, opens the term to legal speculation. To what extent does the special construction Bundesrepublik carry additional sorts of meanings? One view is that “republic” in this context is more properly understood to stipulate an opposition to all forms of autocracy, whether of a person, a party, or an ideology.35 Another

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interpretation goes even further, emphasizing that the expression locates the basis of the constitution’s legitimacy in human reason, thereby ruling out any competing, metaphysical grounds, including the idea of the German Volk.36 Both of these readings appear plausible in light of the deliberations of the Parliamentary Council that drafted the Basic Law. In that process, Republik was settled on both because of the unsuitability of Reich in light of recent history (Heuss/FDP) and in order to underline that the organization being created was not the German nation-state, but rather the governmental apparatus of one particular group of Germans (Süsterhenn/CDU); moreover, it was specifically linked with the ideas of community [Gemeinwesen ], democracy, and social egalitarianism (Schmid/SPD).37 In the end, the net effect of the paucity of legal content for such a central term—in addition to prompting such constitutional sallies—has been to render the republic fair game for normative political interpretation and public debate.38 A prime example of the resulting discourse has been the media controversy over the past several years pitting the ideals of the Bonn Republic against those of the Berlin Republic. Sparked by the decision to move the capital to Berlin, and orienting itself around issues such as the renaming of the Reichstag, the rehabilitation of the Stadtschloss, and the question of a national Holocaust memorial, this discussion has taken the shape of a dispute over both the meaning of the history of the Bundesrepublik and the best future course for a reunited Germany. By and large, the debate pits a democratic, egalitarian conception of the republic against a nationalist one.39 Sketched in the broadest of strokes, critics of the Bonn Republic condemn what they portray as its apolitical, antinationalist nature; its postmodern culture; its submission to Western, and hence non-German, values; and its fixation on the economic. They hold up in contrast a vision of a new, unified German republic freed from the hegemonic control of the Cold War adversaries, in which a return to national traditions gives birth to a cultural renewal allowing civic virtue and love of the fatherland to once again flourish. Their opponents, meanwhile, celebrate the heritage of the Bonn Republic’s liberal, pragmatic political culture, its commitments against fascism and to human rights, its inclusive spirit, and its clear prioritization of freedom ahead of national unity. They view with skepticism what they see as the prospect of a Berlin Republic marked by strident nationalism and xenophobia, a retreat from egalitarianism, a turn to an aggressive international Realpolitik, and a case of amnesia with regard to the Holocaust. With respect to diversity, the crucial issue at stake is whether the new capital will bring with it a shift in the direction of a national identity hostile to both universal values and difference, or whether it will maintain the Federal Republic’s core dedication—won, as Jürgen Habermas has noted, only via Auschwitz—to the principle that “no one be excluded

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from the political community and that everyone in his or her otherness be respected equally.”40 Another attempt to appropriate the cachet of the republic has, of course, been that of the far-right party Die Republikaner. Orienting themselves around a particular idealized version of the German Volk with deep roots in the cultural and political movements that also produced National Socialism, the Republikaner’s central themes—German reunification, the reduction of immigration and minorities, and the fight against crime—reflect the image of a purified, homogeneous German nation-state.41 In their talk of “German virtue” and the common good, they deploy time-honored republican concepts filtered through an ideology conceiving of the people as an organic, ontological unity. For them, as they were for Carl Schmitt, universalistic conceptions of the republic are an invasive, alien notion. The party’s use of republican rhetoric may be located, rather, in the affective tradition, inspired by German Romanticism, that interprets the republic in terms of emotional, even religious engagement. In virtue of their focus on the integrity of the German Volk, the Republikaner are able, with some consistency, to portray their movement as tolerant with respect to cultural diversity.42 This tolerance, however, does not extend to multiculturalism, understood as the structured acceptance of difference within a political community. Instead, it assumes a fundamental political separation of cultures within a global context. For German political theorists, meanwhile, there appear to be two basic accounts of the republic in the field. These I will call communitarian republicanism and constitutional republicanism.43 Where the former view, inspired by Aristotle and a certain nationalistic reading of Rousseau, emphasizes the importance of the cultural underpinnings of republican citizenship, the latter view, drawing on Kant and an alternative, political reading of Rousseau, sees the key to the life of the republic as lying in a strict separation of the realm of politics from the cultural forms of life of the citizens. Communitarian republicanism hails from Anglo-American debates, where its provenance owes a great deal to Hans Baron’s and J. G. A. Pocock’s work on the tradition linking the civic humanism of Machiavelli and the Florentine republic to the founding period in the United States.44 Representatives of this approach—chief among them Hannah Arendt, Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor—focus on the problem of the conditions required to cultivate deep attachments to the political community and to motivate sustained participation on the part of citizens. In advancing the thesis that an effective political culture must draw on the cultural resources of historical communities, they tend not to shy away from providing lists of civic virtues or invoking such notions as the common good and love of country. Precisely these sorts of conceptions, however, with their

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overtones of cultural homogeneity and, potentially, the suppression of difference, render this strain of republicanism suspect in the German context, with its strong sensitivity to the excesses of nationalism and its skepticism about theories of the good.45 As a result, the communitarian variant of republicanism has served primarily as a foil to a more chastened version that has gained prominence in Germany over the last decade, largely as a response to the questions of admissions and inclusion posed by the country’s new cultural diversity.46 This view, which has been championed by Dieter Oberndörfer, Lutz Hoffmann, and Jürgen Habermas, counters what it sees as the excesses of communitarianism with a political conception of the republic premised on Dolf Sternberger’s notion of constitutional patriotism [Verfassungspatriotismus].47 At the heart of this approach lies the conceptual opposition between nation and republic. For too long, in this view, the republic has been planted in the soil of the ethnonation, with disastrous results; if a viable, democratic Germany is to be salvaged, the republic must loose itself from its dependence on national identity and seek to root itself in a culture conceived of in strictly political terms. Tolerance and respect for human rights are primary values in this vision, and the approach is linked politically with support for generous policies of both admission and inclusion. As a political theory, constitutional republicanism exhibits a number of distinguishing characteristics. To begin with, it is universalistic in its moral compass—which is not, however, to say that its proponents agree on the character of its foundations. Thus for Oberndörfer, “Republic [stands] for … the derivation of the rights of citizens from the nature of the human being.”48 Hoffmann, for his part, stands on Kant’s authority in stating: “In the republic … there is no other justification for the power of the state than the freedom and dignity of the individual.”49 Habermas, in his “communications-theoretical version of republicanism,” conceives of the republican constitution as grounded in a proceduralist ethics upon which he confers the title of Moralität—as opposed to the Sittlichkeit of the value complexes of particular ethnic or cultural communities.50 This universalism does not, in principle, stand in the way of a recognition of pluralism. Oberndörfer speaks, for example, of the cultural freedom enjoyed by individuals in the republic, while for Hoffmann the postmodern republic is properly a multiethnic—though not multicultural—society.51 Habermas, too, insists that a republican political culture maintain a strict neutrality toward the different forms of life exhibited by the various ethical communities making up society.52 For all three thinkers, however, the amount of pluralism that a republic can underwrite has its limits, and religious fundamentalism, to take a prime example, is not to be tolerated.53

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True to its Kantian lineage, constitutional republicanism combines a faith in reason with a voluntaristic streak mandating that citizenship rest, insofar as possible, upon a foundation of consent. In addition, this view insists that the republic is, in Hoffmann’s words, “cosmopolitan [weltbürgerlich] in design.”54 This has two consequences. First, it means that a republican sensibility includes—in contrast to a nationalist mindset—an awareness of the contingency of borders and of the “us vs. them” mentality that often accompanies them.55 Second, and more concretely, it means that the republican model also naturally provides a template for Europe as a whole, and perhaps even beyond.56 The main innovation of the constitutional republican perspective, and the source of its rhetorical power, lies in the integrative logic of its response to the classic question regarding the priority of institutions or virtues in securing the stability of the political community. For the answer it provides is that the two are in the end inseparable. This relation is most pronounced in Habermas’ account: for him, the constitution is both the beginning and the end of a republican order. To begin with, it establishes the institutions required to put in place the structures of communication that are indispensable for developing a democratic political culture. Apart from the guarantee of various individual freedoms, a crucial objective here is to enhance the status of cultural minorities by dissolving any institutional connections between the political order and the majority culture. Hence, “the level of the common political culture must be decoupled from the level of subcultures and their prepolitically formed identities.”57 At this point, however, the question arises as to whether such a denatured conception of the political can sustain the loyalty and participation of the citizenry.58 In response, “the trick of republicanism” [der Witz des Republikanismus], according to Habermas, lies in its penchant for creating social bonds through a program of social and economic inclusion.59 Insofar as this overall institutional program succeeds, there then exists a basis for fostering a constitutional patriotism founded on the solidarity of citizens linked in a common political culture.60 V. Some Questions for Constitutional Patriots Of the various contending conceptions of the republic in circulation in the German discourse, the one advanced by constitutional republicans offers the most attractive prospects to Germany’s newly established minorities. This view’s central ideal of Verfassungspatriotismus must be defended, nonetheless, against some probing questions. First of all, there is the critique brought by, among others, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and Ralf Dahrendorf, to the effect that constitutional patriotism remains, at the end of the day, too

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abstract and thin a notion to replace the nation as the glue that holds a polity together.61 Habermas’ plausible response is formulated in terms of the classic republican motif of balance: Constitutional patriotism must take the form of an ongoing, pragmatic attempt to find a happy medium between the overweening demands of national identity and the ascetic principles of democratic governance and the rule of law. In this way, it may successfully master the tension between the centrifugal force of respect for diversity and the political need to keep society from becoming fragmented. The United States, in Habermas’ historical narrative, has arrived at a republican accommodation of difference rooted not in an ethnonational identity but rather in American civil religion.62 This raises a second question: Is constitutional patriotism itself a species of civil religion? The question is a sticky one, given the efforts of constitutional republicans to establish clear divisions between political and other forms of culture and to eschew any reliance on specific worldviews, especially religious ones. It points, in the end, to a deep problem in the theory of constitutional republicanism, namely the ultimate incoherence of the stark, hierarchical distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit required to establish the primacy of the constitution vis-a-vis more strongly contextualized value systems. If, as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre insist,63 the proceduralist basis of a republican constitution necessarily rests on a particular conception of the good—whatever its religious status—then a third question follows: To what extent can constitutional patriotism—as an expression of a particular form of life itself—vouch for the cultural and especially the religious freedom of minority communities? A central aspect of the problem here is that the neo-Kantian version of republicanism is strongly committed to a philosophical anthropology that is either deeply individualistic or, at best, as in the case of Habermas’ theory, intersubjectivist in inspiration. In either case the result is a methodological individualism that obscures the theorist’s view of the specifically communal dimension of human experience, which, among other things, gives rise to claims of corporate human rights.64 Consequently, it is not surprising that constitutional republicans tend to be opposed to the notion of group rights.65 Because of this bias, the theory of constitutional republicanism is ill-equipped to deal with the very real conflicts that can arise between individual and group rights. This remains an area in which further work must be done. A fourth question for advocates of Verfassungspatriotismus is of a more practical nature. How are the institutional and moral conditions for this sort of political culture to be put into place in a society experiencing the stresses of globalization, tightened international markets, and the aftershocks of reunification? Due to their socialization in an autocratic state and their present socioeconomic deficits, the former citizens of the German

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Democratic Republic, in particular, present a challenge in this respect. It is clear that any solutions that are essayed in this connection will also have to take into account a fifth question, namely: What are the prospects for a German constitutional patriotism in the context of European political integration? The problem is built into the very warp and weave of constitutional republicanism’s cosmopolitan logic. If, for example, the European Union adopts, as Germany’s recently elected president Johannes Rau has urged, a constitution of its own, what then will be the status of the patriotic culture of tolerance built at the level of German society? It seems likely that an answer will lie not in the progressive overcoming of smaller versions of the republic, but rather in the development of a schema of overlapping political cultures modeled on some version of the principle of subsidiarity.66 Arguably, the notion of a Bundesrepublik pioneered by the begetters of the German Basic Law already contains the seeds of a response to this challenge. VI. The Many Faces of the Republic For the Turks and Kurds, Serbs and Croats, Vietnamese and Cambodians, Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims, and ethnic Germans from Russia and Romania who have made Germany their home, much rides on the meaning that attaches to the republic in which they live. The idea of the republic itself does not, however, weigh unequivocally in favor of generous policies of either admission or inclusion for these newcomers to the German polity. Rather, it constitutes the core of a conceptual framework within which the impact of diversity on the trinitarian nexus of citizenry, constitution, and democratic practice can be debated and, to a certain extent, shaped. In this process, various interpretations of the republic vie for normative influence in the public deliberations over issues ranging from immigration and naturalization requirements to anti-discrimination laws, from permits for public prayer calls to guidelines for bilingual education. The goal of the discursive negotiation of the meaning of the republic is a synthesis that mediates between the interpretations embedded in German history and the continually unfolding social realities of diversity, between the values of the German populace and the existential requirements of a postmodern era. It is, in short, a shared understanding about a social good,67 one that can be forged only through ongoing normative debate in a communal setting. To the extent that such a synthesis is attained, the result is likely to bode well for proponents of inclusion; for German republican traditions strongly support both a Kantian emphasis on individual rights and a social democratic emphasis on egalitarianism, while offering only a tenuous basis for narrower cultural or nationalist conceptions. An understanding that gives

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pride of place to what I have termed constitutional republicanism can count, in addition, on a solid footing in the institutions that have grown up in the half-century of the Federal Republic’s tenure. In the future, however, as in the past, the meaning of the republic and the demands it is understood to place on citizens will need to evolve if they are to remain viable. Two challenges in particular are already beginning to make themselves felt in German republican discourse. On the one hand, members of the new minorities are finally, haltingly, beginning to find a voice of their own in the public arena, a development likely, over time, to strengthen claims for recognition in the form of collective and corporate human rights. On the other hand, the process of European integration continues apace, with even larger forms of organization looming on the horizon, all of which will eventually serve to sharpen the question of the interrelations of constitutional orders of various scopes and at various political levels. As a result of these trends, the theory of the republic will in all likelihood be pressed to incorporate, sooner rather than later, both a principled respect for group rights and a detailed account of subsidiarity. Thus, it is to be hoped, will German republicanism take on a new, postnational face. Notes 1. In describing how Kant came to use the new expression Republikanismus, Reinhart Koselleck writes, “Republicanism indicated a principle of historical movement whose promotion was a political and moral imperative. … It served to anticipate the forthcoming historical movement and to influence it in practice.” “Time and Revolutionary Language,” in Reiner Schürmann, ed., The Public Realm: Essays on Discursive Types in Political Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 300. 2. Jürgen Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 23–4. The italics are his. 3. Dieter Oberndörfer, “Integration oder Abschottung? Auf dem Weg zur postnationalen Republik,” Zeitschrift für Ausländerrecht und Ausländerpolitik 18 (1998), 3–4. 4. Particularly helpful on this topic is Wolfgang Mager, “Republik,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), vol. 5, 549–651. 5. The tradition of republican utopias such as Plato’s Republic or Harrington’s Oceana stands here as representative of the concern with principle, while we might take Bentham’s utilitarian formulation as an instance of the pragmatic approach. 6. Influential tropes in this tradition, which traces much of its inspiration to the Hellenistic polis, present the republic in organistic terms or using the image of the body. For a contemporary examination of the notion of structural ethics,

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see Louis Dupré and William O’Neill, “Social Structures and Structural Ethics,” The Review of Politics 51 (1989), 327–44. Closely allied with the tradition of the social contract, this distinctively modern perspective favors metaphors, such as association and linkage/bondage, that emphasize the ontological primacy and sovereignty of the individual. Republican devotees of social renovation differ further among themselves as to whether the requisite changes are to be attained through reform (as Kant thought possible) or revolution (as Jefferson thought necessary). A testament to the inclusivist implications of this idea was the extremely liberal naturalization policy envisioned by the Jacobins, under which employed males over the age of twenty-one became eligible for citizenship after only one year of residence in France. A contemporary example of inclusive republicanism from the American context is Frank Michelman, “Law’s Republic,” Yale Law Journal 97 (1988), 1493–537. For an Australian counterpart, see Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). While the former perspective is deeply Aristotelian, the pedigree of the latter includes the later Stoa. The cosmopolitan approach has, at various points—for example, in Wolff ’s conception of a civitas maxima—oriented itself toward a telos that takes the form of a world republic. See Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, “Imagined Republics,” Alternatives 19 (1994), 321. Peter Blickle, “Kommunalismus und Republikanismus in Oberdeutschland,” in Helmut G. Königsberger, ed., Republiken und Republikanismus im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), 57–75. This tradition is still maintained, in part, in the lore of the Freistaat Bavaria. The analytical approach contrasting French and German modes of political organization pioneered by Friedrich Meinecke in his Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1907) has been updated in Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Brubaker has recently been accused, however, of exaggerating the differences between the two. See Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 43–6. See especially “Zum ewigen Frieden” (1795), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1912), 341–86; but also “Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis” (1793), GS 8, 273–313; and “Der Streit der Facultäten” (1798), GS 7, 1–116. Kant calls the idea of a global republic “in thesi richtig” (“Zum ewigen Frieden,” 357), but recognizes substantial obstacles to the realization of what he elsewhere calls a Platonic ideal, the “res publica noumenon” (“Streit der Facultäten,” 91). See also Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, “Kant’s Idea of Peace and the Philosophical Conception of a World Republic,” in James Bohman and Matthias LutzBachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 59–77.

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15. “Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus” (1796), in Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 7, Ernst Behler, ed. (Munich: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 1966), 11–25. 16. Although the connection is not difficult to establish in many of Kant’s contemporaries, whether or not or to what extent Kant subscribed to a teleological view remains a vexed question. See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” in Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann, Perpetual Peace, 25–57. 17. An account emphasizing the indigenous and other non-French sources of German republicanism at the turn of the nineteenth century is Renate Dopheide, Republikanismus in Deutschland: Studie zur Theorie der Republik in der deutschen Publizistik des späten 18. Jahrhunderts (Bochum: Ruhr-Universität, 1980). On the interplay of nationalist and constitutional ideas during the ensuing decades, see Reinhard Blänkner, “Die Idee der Verfassung in der politischen Kultur des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland,” in Herfried Münkler, ed., Bürgerreligion und Bürgertugend: Debatten über die vorpolitischen Grundlagen politischer Ordnung (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996), 309–41. For an overview, see Hans Renk, Der republikanische Gedanke in der deutschen Geschichte (Jena: Zwing, 1930). 18. Mager, “Republik,” 628–9. 19. Ibid., 632–4. 20. See, e.g., Ernst Cassirer, Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung: Rede zur Verfassungsfeier 1928 (Hamburg: Friederichsen Verlag, 1929). 21. Josef Isensee, “Republik—Sinnpotential eines Begriffs,” Juristenzeitung 36 (1981), 1–8, at 7. 22. For an influential discussion of the contemporary relevance of republican ideas in the German milieu, see Herfried Münkler, “Politische Tugend: Bedarf die Demokratie einer sozio-moralischen Grundlegung?” in Herfried Münkler, ed., Die Chancen der Freiheit: Grundprobleme der Demokratie (München: Piper Verlag, 1992), 25–47. On communitarianism, see Axel Honneth, ed., Kommunitarismus: Eine Debatte über die moralischen Grundlagen moderner Gesellschaften (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1993); Michael J. Sandel, Liberalismus oder Republikanismus: Von der Notwendigkeit der Bürgertugend (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1995); Winfried Brugger, “Kommunitarismus als Verfassungstheorie des Grundgesetzes,” Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts 123 (1998), 337–74. 23. This is the strategy of Michael Walzer in Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 31–63. 24. On the vicissitudes of this dynamic in France and the United States, see Peter Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition: Plato to Rousseau (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1992), 267–73. 25. On how this process has occurred, see for example Klaus J. Bade, “Immigration and Social Peace in United Germany,” Daedalus 123 (1994), 85–106; Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Thomas Schmid, Heimat Babylon: Das Wagnis der multikulturellen Demokratie (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 1992), 116–75; and Michelle Mattson, “Refugees in Germany: Invasion or Invention?” New German Critique 64 (1995), 61–85.

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26. This term seems to me preferable to other concepts such as “acceptance,” “integration,” or, to cite a popular alternative, “recognition,” which, despite its rich Hegelian overtones, does not strongly enough suggest the sorts of institutional action involved in the process I wish to describe. 27. For a detailed discussion of these conceptions, see my Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 72–111. For an in some ways comparable analysis carried out in terms of “ideologies,” see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 28. Kenneth L. Karst, Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 29. One well-developed version of this theory is Veit Bader, “The Cultural Conditions of Transnational Citizenship: On the Interpenetration of Political and Ethnic Cultures,” Political Theory 25 (1997), 771–813. See also Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 30. I discuss this case more fully in “Group Rights and the Muslim Diaspora,” Human Rights Quarterly 21 (1999), 907–26; see also Katherine Pratt Ewing, “Legislating Religious Freedom: Muslim Challenges to the Relationship between ‘Church’ and ‘State’ in Germany and France,” Daedalus 129 (2000), 31–54. On the related issue of crucifixes in public schools, see Rainer Forst’s essay in this volume, and Winfried Brugger and Stefan Huster, eds., Der Streit um das Kreuz in der Schule: Zur religiös-weltanschaulichen Neutralität des Staates (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998). 31. Zuwanderung gestalten, Integration fördern: Bericht der Unabhängigen Kommission “Zuwanderung” (Berlin: Bundesministerium des Innern, 2001), 245–9. The so-called option model included in the 1999 citizenship law, which establishes the norm that children receiving dual citizenship must relinquish one by the age of twenty-three, is laid out in Bundestags-Drucksache 14/533. For some assessments by leading jurists, see Zeitschrift für Ausländerrecht und Ausländerpolitik 19 (1999), 98, 147. 32. The connection between admission to citizenship and consent is explored in Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 33. For a strong defense of dual citizenship along these lines, see Ruth Rubio Marín, Immigration as a Democratic Challenge: Citizenship and Inclusion in Germany and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 34. Cf. the account of citizenship as a place of struggle in Friedrich Kratochwil, “Citizenship: On the Border of Order,” Alternatives 19 (1994), 500. 35. Konrad Löw, “Was bedeutet ‘Republik’ in der Bezeichnung ‘Bundesrepublik Deutschland’?” Die Öffentliche Verwaltung 22 (1979), 819–22. 36. Wilhelm Henke, “Die Republik,” in Josef Isensee and Paul Kirchhof, eds., Handbuch des Staatsrechts der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 1, (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1987), 863–86, quoted in Lutz Hoffmann, Die

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37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

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unvollendete Republik: Zwischen Einwanderungsland und deutschem Nationalstaat (Cologne: PapyRossa, 1990), 128. Klaus-Berto von Dömming, Rudolf Werner Füsslein, and Werner Matz, “Entstehungsgeschichte der Artikel des Grundgesetzes,” Jahrbuch des Öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart 1 (1951), 16–20. As Josef Isensee notes, “Unter der Asche des gegenwärtigen Republikverständnisses glimmt eine Traditionsglut, die jederzeit Flamme werden kann” (“Sinnpotential eines Begriffs,” 3). See also Dieter Langewiesche, Republik und Republikaner: Von der historischen Entwertung eines politischen Begriffs (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 1993). Representative portrayals are Thomas Assheuer, “Das Deutschlandspiel—Viel Abschied, wenig Ankunft—Der Streit um die Deutung einer Berliner Republik,” Die Zeit, September 3, 1998; and Klaus Hartung, “Aufbruch ins Zentrum—Berlin ist nicht das Symbol der Vereinigungsmisere, sondern das Ort eines neuen Anfangs,” Die Zeit, September 10, 1998. Jürgen Habermas, “1989 im Schatten von 1945: Zum Normalität einer künftigen Berliner Republik,” in Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 170. See, e.g., Manfred Behrend and Monika Prenzel, Die Republikaner: Neue Rechte oder 1000 Jahre und kein Ende (Berlin: Urania-Verlag, 1990); Claus Leggewie, Die Republikaner, 3rd. ed. (Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag, 1989); Bernhard Schelenz, Der politische Sprachgebrauch der “Republikaner” (Frankfurt: Lang, 1992). Hans-Georg Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe (London: Macmillan, 1994), 183. On the roots of this attitude toward national cultures in Herder’s thought, see Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 113–32. Cf. the partially overlapping distinction, made in reference to the North American debate, between “substantial communitarianism” and “republican communitarianism” in Rainer Forst, Kontexte der Gerechtigkeit: Politische Philosophie jenseits von Liberalismus und Kommunitarismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 161–77. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Witness the recent highly charged public exchange about the importance of maintaining a Leitkultur in the face of immigration; see, e.g., Gustav Seibt, “Kein schöner Land,” Die Zeit 45/2000. Thus Habermas, who elsewhere endorses a neo-Kantian version of republicanism, criticizes a republicanism he portrays in communitarian terms in “Three Normative Models of Democracy.” Other presentations of republicanism as a foil are Hauke Brunkhorst, Demokratie und Differenz: Vom klassischen zum modernen Begriff des Politischen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), 97–132; Axel

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47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

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Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today,” Political Theory 26 (1998), 763–83; and Walter ReeseSchäfer, Grenzgötter der Moral: Der neuere europäisch-amerikanische Diskurs zur politischen Ethik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 323–61. Dolf Sternberger, “Verfassungspatriotismus: Rede bei der 25-Jahr-Feier der ‘Akademie für Politische Bildung’ ” [1982] in Schriften 10 (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1990), 17–31. Oberndörfer, “Integration oder Abschottung,” 3. For other statements of his position, see Dieter Oberndörfer, Die offene Republik: Zur Zukunft Deutschlands und Europas (Freiburg: Herder, 1991); and Dieter Oberndörfer, Der Wahn des Nationalen: Die Alternative der offenen Republik (Freiburg: Herder, 1993). Hoffmann, Die unvollendete Republik, 128–9. In his translated work, the terms are rendered with “morality” and “ethics.” See Jürgen Habermas, “Inklusion—Einbeziehen oder Einschliessen? Zum Verhältnis von Nation, Rechtsstaat und Demokratie,” in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, 172–173; “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 122–8; and “Three Normative Models,” 23–24. Oberndörfer, “Integration oder Abschottung?” 4; Hoffmann, Die unvollendete Republik, 52. Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition,” 134–7. See, e.g., Hoffmann, Die unvollendete Republik, 157; Habermas, “Zur Legitimation durch Menschenrechte,” in Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 189–90. Hoffmann, Die unvollendete Republik, 129. Habermas, “Inklusion,” 168; Oberndörfer, “Integration oder Abschottung?” 13, n. 32. Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 279; Antje Wiener, “European” Citizenship Practice: Building Institutions of a Non-State (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1998). Jürgen Habermas, “Der europäische Nationalstaat—Zu Vergangenheit und Zukunft von Souveränität und Staatsbürgerschaft,” in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, 142. See for example Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss, “Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources,” in David Held, ed., Political Theory Today (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 143–71. The phrase appears in a number of Habermas’ writings. See, e.g., “Braucht Europa eine Verfassung? Eine Bemerkung zu Dieter Grimm,” in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, 189. Jürgen Habermas, “Die postnationale Konstellation und die Zukunft der Demokratie,” in Die postnationale Konstellation, 114. For a thoroughgoing reflection on the program of democratization implied by Habermas’ interpretation of

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61.

62. 63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

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republicanism, see Rainer Schmalz-Bruns, Reflexive Demokratie: Die demokratische Transformation moderner Politik (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1995). Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “Die Nation,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 30, 1995; Ralf Dahrendorf, “Die Zukunft des Nationalstaates,” Merkur 48 (1994), 757–8. Habermas, “Der europäische Nationalstaat,” 137. Charles Taylor, “Die Motive einer Verfahrensethik,” in Wolfgang Kuhlmann, ed., Moralität und Sittlichkeit: Das Problem Hegels und die Diskursethik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 101–35; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 326–48. For an intriguing attempt to synthesize the perspectives of methodological individualism and methodological holism in an account integrating individual, interpersonal, and social ethics, see Christian Kissling, Gemeinwohl und Gerechtigkeit: Ein Vergleich von traditioneller Naturrechtsethik und kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie (Freiburg: Herder, 1993). Oberndörfer, “Integration oder Abschottung?” 7; Claus Offe, “ ‘Homogeneity’ and Constitutional Democracy: Coping with Identity Conflicts through Group Rights,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998), 113–41; Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition,” 130–32. In more recent writings, however, Habermas has shown a greater openness to various sorts of group rights. See, e.g., “Inklusion,” 174. Such an approach would mirror a similar development in discourse concerning the related notion of the common good, observable above all in Catholic social thought over the last two decades. See Otfried Höffe, Vernunft und Recht: Bausteine zu einem interkulturellen Rechtsdiskurs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 220–39. In the sense of Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 6–10.

Index

Abendroth, Wolfgang, 124–125, 128, 155 Abusch, Alexander, 34 Ackermann, Konrad, 33 Adenauer, Konrad, 176, 177 and integration into the West, 152, 178, 190 and post-war conservatism, 24, 153, 195 and the welfare state, 10 Adorno, Theodor W., 58, 104–105, 111, 131 Agnoli, Johannes, 118, 125–131, 136 Altmann, Rüdiger, 125, 126, 193, 197 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 80–90 Americanization, 5–6, 55–58, 77, 90–92, 137 Anarchism, 120 Andersch, Alfred, 25 Anti-Americanism, 1, 57, 132 Anticommunism, 1, 83, 87, 129, 161, 174 Anti-etatism, 81 Antifascism, 26, 28, 101, 173–174 Anti-imperialism, 187 Anti-racism, 187 Antirationalism, 196 Anti-Semitism, 36 Anti-totalitarianism, 1, 24, 85, 132, 173–174, 179, 187 Arendt, Hannah, 14, 173, 228, 234 Aristotelianism, 226–227, 234 Arndt, Hans-Joachim, 164

Aron, Raymond, 119, 166, 176 Auschwitz, 107, 175, 187 Bader, Karl Siegfried, 110 Baron, Hans, 234 Basic Law, 3, 8, 42, 177, 213, 238 socio-economic implications, 124–125, 154–155 Becher, Johannes R., 24, 28, 34 Bellah, Robert, 234 Benjamin, Jessica, 108 Benjamin, Walter, 123 Benn, Gottfried, 26, 32 Benoist, Alain de, 199 Bergfleth, Gerd, 195 Bergstraesser, Arnold, 46–54, 57 Bildung, 34, 36 Bismarck, Otto von, 5, 10, 177, 185 Blum, Léon, 128 Böckelmann, Frank, 123, 134 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 14, 192, 217, 236 Böckler, Hans, 78 Boehm, Max Hildebert, 152 Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 122–123 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 24, 164, 173, 174, 179 Brandel, Kuno, 89 Brecht, Bertolt, 29 Breuilly, John, 79 Broder, Henryk, 108 Broszat, Martin, 174, 190 Brown, Irving, 84, 89 Brüning, Heinrich, 46

Index Bude, Heinz, 8 Burckhardt, Jacob, 50, 126 Burke, Edmund, 148, 149 Capitalism, 40, 80–83, 87, 121, 135 and democracy, 77–78, 126, 132 legitimation problems of, 168–169 and morality, 172 and National Socialism, 173 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 132 Catholicism, 12, 23, 32, 109, 111–112, 195, 231 Christian Democratic Party (CDU), 162, 195–196, 233 Christianity, 34, 35, 112, 213–217 and conservatism, 148, 152, 164 and National Socialism, 31, 107, 109–110 Christian Social Union (CSU), 215 Cicero, 224 Clay, General Lucius D., 87 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 120, 132–133 Cold War, 3, 25, 35, 57, 92, 233 and conservatism, 24, 174 and liberalism, 83, 84–85 Communism, 24, 78, 83, 85, 87, 149, 172 Communist International, 86 Communitarianism, 169, 222, 228, 234–235 Conservative Revolution, 26, 29, 32, 147–149, 186, 191 Constant, Benjamin, 9 Constitutional Patriotism, 13, 223, 235–238 Corporatism, 15, 125 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 24, 33, 36, 50 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 6–7, 24, 170, 236 Debord, Guy, 122 Dehio, Ludwig, 189 de-Marxification, 89 denazification, 28, 152 Derrida, Jacques, 33

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Descartes, 166 Dewey, John, 225 Dirks, Walter, 23–24, 34, 37 Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm, 55–56 Dubiel, Helmut, 178 Dutschke, Rudi, 119, 120, 123, 131–134, 136 Dworkin, Ronald, 65, 69 East Germany, 172, 200 Egalitarianism, 169 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 35 Eichberg, Henning, 194 Eichler, Willi, 85, 88–89 Eichmann, Adolf, 169 Eisenberg, Götz, 104 Elias, Norbert, 14 Eliot, T. S., 28 Engels, Friedrich, 28 Erhard, Ludwig, 125, 177 Ethnopluralism, 194 European Community, 176 European Court of Justice, 72 European Integration, 33–34, 199, 239 European Union, 71–73, 228, 238 Fabian Society, 86 Fascism, 35, 105–107, 173–174, 178 left-wing version of, 118, 133 and liberalism, 130 and parliamentarism, 126, 128 Feminism, 199 Fichte, 166, 192 Fichter, Tilman, 196 Fischer, Joschka, 175 Flake, Otto, 30, 32 Flechtheim, Ossip, 46 Foitzik, Jan, 56 Fordism, 71–72 Forsthoff, Ernst, 9, 150–152, 192, 197 and the Basic Law, 124, 155–156 and public administration, 150–152, 154

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Index

Fraenkel, Ernst, 46, 47, 58 Frankenberg, Günter, 178 Frankfurt School, 104–105, 111, 112, 131, 171 Free Democratic Party (FDP), 162–163, 198, 200, 233 Freyer, Hans, 9, 152–154, 164, 197 Friedeburg, Ludwig von, 110, 167–169 Friedrich I., 177 Fromm, Erich, 105, 111 Furtwängler, Wilhlem, 28 Gehlen, Arnold on industrial society, 9, 151–156 and post-war conservatism, 11, 164, 188, 193, 197–198 Gemeinschaft, 4, 9, 79, 188 Generations, 24–25, 119, 198–199 Geopolitics, 150 German Communist Party (DKP), 86, 175 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 3, 28, 36, 55, 129, 237–238 German Trade Union Federation (DGB), 76–90 Gesellschaft, 4, 9, 79 Gide, André, 28 Giordano, Ralph, 190 Girard, René, 186 Glotz, Peter, 163 Goebbels, Joseph, 110 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 23–24, 35, 48, 49, 54, 211 Gompers, Samuel, 81 Gramsci, Antonio, 189, 194, 200 Grass, Günter, 175 Greens, 135, 137, 194 Greiffenhagen, Martin, 195 Gross, Johannes, 10 Grossmann, Atina, 108 Guehénno, Jean, 35 Gurian, Waldemar, 172 Gurland, Arcadius, 46 Gysi, Klaus, 34

Habe, Hans, 31 Habermas, Jürgen, 1, 4, 6–7, 9, 24, 178, 233 and the Basic Law, 62–73 and neo-conservatism, 165–166, 179, 200 and the New Right, 198 and parliamentary democracy, 129, 136, 169, 171 and postnationalism, 13 and republicanism, 222, 235–236 and ’68, 104, 123–124, 133 Haider, Jörg, 200 Hansen, Werner, 85, 88 Hartung, Klaus, 108 Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 106 Hayek, Friedrich von, 200 Hegelianism, 4, 11, 35, 78, 154, 165, 217 Heidegger, Martin, 26, 29, 32–33, 49 Heilbrunn, Jacob, 164 Heine, Fritz, 85 Heller, Hermann, 150, 155 Hennis, Wilhelm, 164 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 54 Herf, Jeffrey, 29, 148 Hermens, Ferdinand A., 43, 46 Heuss, Theodor, 233 Himmler, Heinrich, 110 Historikerstreit, 179, 189, 191, 195 Hitler, Adolf, 110, 150, 152 Hobbes, Thomas, 188 Hoffmann, Lutz, 235–236 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 49, 54 Holborn, Hajo, 41 Holocaust, 101, 106–108, 112, 175, 187, 233 Horkheimer, Max, 9, 104–105, 132 Huchel, Peter, 26 Huntington, Samuel, 148 Individualism, 65, 79, 150, 153 Islam, 12, 231

Index Jahn, Hans, 85 Jaspers, Karl, 24, 25, 29–36 Jay, Martin, 111 Joas, Hans, 9 Jünger, Ernst, 26, 32, 195 Jünger, Friedrich Georg, 29 Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaus, 194 Kant, Immanuel, see Kantianism Kantianism, 78, 129, 224, 227, 234–238 Kaplan, Marion, 108 Kelsen, Hans, 5, 127 Kersten, Felix, 110 Keynesianism, 77, 82, 89 Kierkegaard, 35 Kohl, Helmut, 177, 199, 215 Kolle, Oswalt, 102 Kondylis, Panajotis, 148 Krahl, Hans-Jürgen, 118, 131–135 Krauss, Werner, 26, 30 Kriele, Martin, 164 Kühn, Heinz, 165 Kühnl, Reinhard, 173 Kunzelmann, Dieter, 123 Labour Party (Britain), 86 Landshut, Siegfried, 46 Laski, Harold, 126 Lefort, Claude, 132 Leggewie, Claus, 108 Lepsius, M. Rainer, 7, 45 Liberalism, 1, 5, 7, 10, 136, 149 consensus, 80–85 critique of, 150, 170, 186 defense of, 166, 169, 175, 176 and education, 172 and fascism, 130 and religion, 217 Liberalization, 7, 123, 136 of sexuality, 110 Libertarianism, 1, 118, 123, 136, 172 Lobkowicz, Nicholas, 164 Locke, John, 166

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Loewenstein, Karl, 42–43 Lovestone, Jay, 84, 89 Löwenthal, Richard, 46, 164, 169, 173 Lübbe, Hermann, 163–172, 178, 192–193 Luhmann, Niklas, 6, 9, 10–11 Lukács, Georg, 24, 25, 35, 134, 166 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 234 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 237 Madison, James, 224 Maier, Hans, 51, 164, 167 Maistre, Joseph de, 187 Malraux, André, 27 Manin, Bernard, 129 Mann, Thomas, 9, 10, 26, 28, 31 Marcuse, Herbert, 103, 111, 131–133 Maritain, Jacques, 29 Markovits, Andrei S., 108 Marquard, Odo, 164, 166, 174 Marx, Karl, 28, 35, 128, 166, 170 Marxism, 79, 154, 162, 172 and the critique of liberalism, 170 and cultural criticism, 29, 34–35, 162 and ’68, 118, 120–121, 123, 131–132, 135 Mason, Tim, 190 Meinecke, Friedrich, 5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 35 Meyer, Ernst Wilhelm, 41 Michels, Roberto, 127 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 119 Mitteleuropa, 199 Modernization, 5–6, 55–58, 126, 153, 156, 179, 200 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 156 Mohler, Armin, 156, 194, 197, 199 Molo, Walter von, 31 Montaigne, Michel de, 166 Montesquieu, Charles de, 166, 224 Moras, Joachim, 26 Morstein-Marx, Fritz, 46 Möser, Justus, 148

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Index

Mosse, George, 174 Mounier, Emmanuel, 29 Mussolini, Benito, 128 Naas, Josef, 34 National Democratic Party (NPD), 194 National Socialism, 9–10, 11, 83, 150, 234 and the Basic Law, 216 coming to terms with, 25–27, 41, 156, 165, 177–179, 187 and conservatism, 151–152, 163 intellectuals associated with, 26, 32 interpretations of, 34, 85, 101, 172–175, 189–191 Nationalism, 149, 150, 163, 179, 193–199; völkisch, 29, 152 NATO, 162, 175, 176 Negt, Oskar, 118 Neidhardt, Friedhelm, 107 Neo-Kantianism, 237 Neoliberalism, 8, 118 Neumann, Franz L., 43–44, 172 Neumann, Sigmund, 172 New Deal, 81, 151 New Left, 25, 101–112, 122, 161, 167–168, 171–172, 178 Niekisch, Ernst, 34 Niemöller, Martin, 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34, 35 Nipperdey, Thomas, 10, 164, 167, 168, 178 Nixon, Richard, 163 Nolte, Ernst, 167, 179, 190 Nouvelle Droite, 189, 194 Novalis, 228 Oberndörfer, Dieter, 222, 235 Offe, Claus, 171 Ostrogorski, Moisei, 127, 136 Pacifism, 175 Paeschke, Hans, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33, 34 Paine, Thomas, 227 Pareto, Vilfredo, 128

Parsons, Talcott, 11 Peukert, Detlev, 190 Pieck, Wilhelm, 28 Pike, David, 36 Plack, Arno, 107 Plato, 29, 227 Pluralism, 89, 125–127, 155–156, 169, 192, 235 Pocock, J. G. A., 234 Polybius, 224 posthistoire, 197 Postmodernism, 187, 190, 195, 235 Poststructuralism, 190, 195 Pound, Ezra, 28 Protestantism, 12, 32, 78, 163, 179, 231 Prussia, 153, 177 Psychoanalysis, 131 Rabehl, Bernd, 129, 131 Rabenalt, Arthur Maria, 110 Racism, 35, 187, 196 Rajk, Laszlo, 36 Ranke, Leopold von, 30, 191 Rationalism, 150 Rau, Johannes, 238 Rawls, John, 15 Reagan, Ronald, 175 Rechtsstaat, 8, 61–73, 125, 155, 161, 192 Reeducation, 4, 7, 41, 152, 193, 198, 199 Reich, Wilhelm, 103, 104–106 Reiche, Reimut, 102 Reitz, Edgar, 104 Reuther, Victor, 84 Ritter, Gerhard, 27, 189 Ritter, Joachim, 166 Robespierre, 224 Rosenberg, Ludwig, 85, 88 Ross, Mike, 84 Rougement, Denis de, 27 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 79, 129, 227, 234 Rupieper, Hermann-Josef, 40

Index Rüstow, Alexander, 43 Rutz, Henry, 84 Salomon, Ernst von, 152 Sandel, Michael, 234 Sartre, Jean Paul, 131, 166 Schelsky, Helmut, 148, 153, 164, 197 Schlegel, Friedrich, 227 Schmid, Carlo, 233 Schmidt, Gunter, 102 Schmidt, Helmut, 175 Schmitt, Carl and critique of liberal democracy, 129, 170–171, 193 and post-war conservatism, 26, 32–33, 150, 152, 154–155, 164, 192, 198, 234 Schneider, Michael, 108, 111 Schneider, Peter, 104, 108 Schoenstedt, Walter, 25 Schöllgen, Gregor, 191 Schrenck-Notzing, Caspar von, 193 Schumacher, Kurt, 77–78, 87 Schwan, Alexander, 164 Schwarz, Hans-Peter, 51, 164, 175–179 Schwenger, Hannes, 107 Seebacher-Brandt, Brigitte, 196 Situationism, 118, 122–123, 134 Slansky, Rudolf, 36 Social Darwinism, 150 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 76–92, 198, 162–163, 165, 167–169, 198 Socialism, 35, 78, 150, 126 British conception of, 86–87 democratic, 34, 87, 124–125, 130, 133 Socialist Unity Party (SED), 28 Sonderweg [special German path], 5–6, 147, 188 Sontheimer, Kurt, 164, 169 Sorel, Georges, 128, 133 Sovietization, 55 Sozialstaat, 8, 61–73, 124, 155, 192 Spaemann, Robert, 164 Sperber, Manès, 166

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Stalin, 36, 173 Stalinism, 85, 87, 110, 132, 173 Steiner, Rudolf, 212 Sternberger, Dolf, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 235 Strauß, Botho, 186, 191, 196, 198 Strauss, Leo, 200 Stürmer, Michael, 164, 168, 175, 177–179, 189 Suhr, Otto, 42, 44 Surrealism, 118, 122–123 Süsterhenn, Adolf, 233 Syberberg, Hans Jürgen, 195 Sywottek, Arnold, 55 Taguieff, Pierre-André, 187 Taylor, Charles, 234, 237 Technology, 35, 49, 127, 148, 153–156, 171, 197 Tenbruck, Friedrich, 164 Terrorism, 12, 134, 193 Theweleit, Klaus, 102, 104 Thiess, Frank, 26, 28, 31 Third Reich, see National Socialism Tocqueville, 166 Toryism, 197 Totalitarianism, 132, 165, 172–174, 179, 190 Tulpanov, Sergei, 28 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 166 Ulbricht, Walter, 28 Undset, Sigrid, 31 Universities, 133, 162, 166–169 Valéry, Paul, 27, 29 Vernunftrepublikaner, 4 Vitalism, 118 Voegelin, Eric, 46 Volk, 29, 149, 234 Vollrath, Ernst, 14 Weber, Alfred, 24, 30, 31, 47–48, 50 Weber, Marianne, 24

252

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Index

Weber, Max, 11, 30, 166 Weber, Werner, 155 Weissler, Sabine, 103 Werfel, Franz, 31 Westernization, 5–6, 55–58, 77, 88, 90–92, 137, 195 Willms, Bernard, 164, 192

Wirsing, Giselher, 152 Wolfers, Arnold, 41 Zehrer, Hans, 152 Zionism, 36 Zitelmann, Rainer, 190 Zöller, Michael, 164