‘Eight Scenes from Sixty-Eight’—clipped reminiscences of that year: so many strobe-lit flashes of Dutschke and Krahl, Enzensberger and Adorno, Habermas and Meinhof—is sometimes acerbic, but for the most part unabashedly lyrical in its memories of the intellectual and sensual awakening of that year: ‘Who has not known those days and nights of psychological, and literal, masquerade and identity-switching, does not know what makes life exciting, to vary Talleyrand’s phrase’.55 Reitz’s Zweite Heimat offered an unforgettable re-creation of them. The worst that could be said of ’68-ers was that they destroyed what was left of symbolic form in Germany. The best, that they were never Spiesser. If they left a residue of fanaticism, today that had perhaps become most conspicuous in root-and-branch denunciations of ’68 by former participants in it. Bohrer had little time for such renegades. He was not Daniel Bell: the antinomian held no fears for him.
5
Looking back on Paeschke’s command at Merkur, Bohrer once remarked of it that though Schlegel’s Athenaeum was a much more original journal than Wieland’s Teutsche Merkur, it was the latter—which lasted so much longer—that marked its epoch; regularity and consistency requiring that eccentricity be curbed, if authority was to be gained. This was a lesson Paeschke had learnt. He himself, however, came out of the Romantic, not the Enlightenment tradition, and took some time to see it, before attempting to conjugate them.56 As Bohrer’s tenure moved towards its appointed end, the results of that effort were visible. In intention, at any rate, authority has increasingly materialized, in the shape of contributors from just those organs of opinion Bohrer had once castigated as the voices of a pious ennui: editors and columnists from Die Zeit, Die Welt, the FAZ, coming thick and fast in the pages of the journal. Here a genuinely neo-liberal front, excoriating the lame compromises of the Schröder–Merkel years, is on the attack, aggressively seeking to replace one ‘paradigm’ with another. Flanking it, if at a slight angle, is the journal’s theorist of geopolitics, Herfried Münkler, author of an ambitious body of writing on war and empire,57 whose recent essays in Merkur offer the most systematic prospectus for returning Germany, in the new century, to the theatre of Weltpolitik.
The logic of the inter-state system of today, Münkler suggests, may best be illustrated by an Athenian fable to be found in Aristotle. In an assembly of beasts, the hares demanded equal rights for all animals. The lions replied, but where are your claws and teeth? Whereupon the proposal was rejected, and the hares withdrew to the back rows again. Moral: for equal rights to obtain, there must be a reasonable equality of powers. In their reaction to the American lion’s attack on Iraq, countries like France and Germany protested like so many hares, earning only leonine contempt. Even united, Europe could not itself become a lion overnight, and should realize this. But what it could, and should, become is a continental fox in alliance with the lion, complementing—in Machiavelli’s formula—the force of the one with the cunning of the other; or in contemporary jargon American hard power with European soft power. The loyalty of the fox to the lion must be beyond question, and each must overcome current resentment against the other—the lion feeling betrayed, the fox humiliated, by what has happened in the Middle East. But once good relations are restored, the fox has a special role to play in the cooperation between them, as a beast more alert than the lion to another, increasingly prominent species in the animal kingdom—rats, now multiplying, and spreading the plague of terror. Such rodents do not belong to the diet of lions; but foxes, which have their own—lesser, but still sharp—teeth and claws, can devour them, and can halt their proliferation. That zoological duty will require of Europe, however, that it develop a will to fashion a world politics of its own—eine eigener weltpolitische Gestaltungswille. The necessary self-assertion of Europe demands nothing less.58
What of Germany? In contrast to the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, both deeply insecure, and the rabid attempt to over-compensate such insecurity in the Third Reich, the Berlin Republic exhibits a new and warranted self-confidence. Post-war Germany long sought to buy its way back into international respectability, simply with its cheque-book. Kohl, helping to defray the costs of the Gulf War without participating in it, was the last episode in that inglorious process. Since his departure, the Federal Republic has finally assumed its responsibilities, as a self-confident ‘medium power’ within the European Union: dispatching its armed forces to the Balkans, to Afghanistan and to Congo, not in any selfish pursuit of its own interests, but for the common good, to protect others. Such is the appropriate role for a medium power, which must rely more on prestige and reputation than repression for its position in the world, and has naturally sought a permanent seat in the Security Council commensurate with its contribution to the operations of the UN.59
Yet Germany, politically integrated into the EU and militarily into NATO, still relies too much on its economic weight for its role as a sovereign state in the world. It needs to diversify its portfolio of power, above all by recovering the ideological and cultural attraction it formerly possessed, becoming once again the Kulturnation und Wissenschaftslandschaft of old. The attraction of the new Berlin as an international city, comparable to its radiance in Weimar days, will help. But soft power alone will not be enough. All Europe, and Germany within it, confronts resistance to the existing world order of capitalism, not from a China or India that are now sub-centres of it, but from the periphery of the system. There, terrorism remains the principal challenge to the post-heroic societies of the West, of which Germany is the deepest example. It would be naive to think it could be defeated by mere economic aid or moral exhortation.60
Propositions such as these, adjusting Prussian modes of thought to contemporary conditions, aim at making policy. Münkler, no figure of the right, but a frequenter of the SPD, is listened to within today’s Wilhelmstrasse, which has organized ambassadorial conclaves to discuss his ideas. German diplomats, he writes with satisfaction, are readier to play on the different keyboards of power he recommends than, so far, are politicians. Here is probably the closest interface between the review and the state to be found in Merkur. The influence of a journal of ideas is never easy to measure. Bohrer’s enterprise has certainly played a critical role in dethroning the comfortable left-liberalism of the post-war intellectual establishment. But its destructive capacity has not—or not yet—been equalled by an ability to construct a comparable new consensus. The kind of hegemony that a journal like Le Débat for a period achieved in France has been beyond it. In part, this has been a question of form: the essays in Merkur, closer to a still vigorous German tradition of belles lettres, remain less ‘modern’ than the more empirical, better documented, contributions to the French review. But it has also been a function of Bohrer’s own distinctive handling of his office. In the tension between Schlegel and Wieland, although he would respect the goal of authority, his own higher value has always been idiosyncrasy—that is, originality, of which the strange cocktail of themes and positions he developed out of Romantic and Surrealist materials in his own texts, effervescent and potent enough by any measure, was the presiding example. Editorially, even in its late neo-liberal moods, Merkur always comprised contrary opinions, in the spirit of Paeschke’s Gegenwirkung. But the underlying impulse was polarizing, not in his but in the avant-garde sense, inaugurated by the Athenaeum. To Bohrer’s credit, conventional authority was forfeited with it.
In this case, however, the distance between trenchancy and influence can be taken as the index of a wider disconnexion, between the political and cultural life of the Berlin Republic at large. Under the dispensation of Bonn, notwithstanding obvious contrasts between them, there was a basic accord between the two. In that sense, Lepenies’s thesis that in post-war Germany culture by and large ceased to be at odds with politics, as both became in the approved sense democratic, is sound. Habermas’s notion of a ‘constitutional patriotism’ peculiar to the Federal Republic can be read as a tacit celebration of that harmony. Since 1990, on the ot
her hand, the two have drifted apart. When, midway through the eighties, Claus Leggewie published his polemic Der Geist steht rechts, he was premature. Twenty years later, that such a shift had occurred was plain. Intellectual energy had passed to the right, no longer just a fronde, but a significant consensus in the media—a climate of opinion. The political class, however, was still tethered to its familiar habitat. Neither Red–Green nor Black–Red coalitions had much altered the juste milieu of Bonn descent. The equilibrium of the West German system of old, however, was broken. A series of torsions had twisted its components apart. The economic sphere has been displaced to the right. The political sphere has not yet drifted far from the centre. The social sphere has moved subterraneously to the left. The intellectual sphere has gravitated in the opposite direction.
What the eventual outcome of these different tectonic shifts might be remains beyond prediction. The crash of the global economy, wrecking German export orders, has forced the country into a downward spiral as the coalition in Berlin enters its final year, amid mounting tension between its partners. If the CDU maintains the large lead it currently enjoys over the SPD in the opinion polls, and the FDP holds up sufficiently, a Black–Yellow government could emerge that, till yesterday, would have had a freer hand to deregulate the social market economy more radically, according to neo-liberal prescriptions. The slump will put these on hold. But since the FDP’s identity depends on an assertive anti-statism, a drift back to older forms of corporatism, beyond emergency measures, would not be easy. If, on the other hand, electoral dislike of growing inequality and social insecurity combines with widespread fear of any kind of instability, the vote could tilt back to the dead-point of another Grand Coalition. Changes in intellectual climate must affect the working-through of either formula, though the extent of their incidence could be another matter. A few years ago, the international soccer championship was promoted with billboards across the country proclaiming ‘Germany—the Land of Ideas’. Where there is sport, infantilism is rarely far away. The country’s traditions of thought have, fortunately, not yet sunk to the reductio ad abiectum of an advertising slogan for football. But that their specific weight in society has declined is certain.
Viewed comparatively, indeed, German culture in the past third of a century has been distinguished as a matrix less of ideas than of images. In that respect, one might say that it exchanged roles with France, philosophy migrating west across the Rhine, while painting, photography, cinema travelled east. It is in the visual arts that German culture has been most productive, often preeminent. In their different ways: Beuys, Richter, Trockel, Kiefer; the Bechers, Struth, Gursky, Ruff; Fassbinder, Syberberg, Reitz—no other European society of the period has had quite this palette. More of it, too, has touched on the history of the country and its transformations than anywhere else, and more explosively. The cinema, as one might expect, has been the most direct site of this. Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun, with the immolation of its heroine as the bellowing commentary on the World Cup final of 1954 reaches a crescendo, closes with a pallid, reversed-out image of Helmut Schmidt filling the screen, as the grey death’s-head of the Wirtschaftswunder. Reitz’s Heimat trilogy, the first part of which was released in 1984, just as Kohl was consolidating his power, ends in the prosperous, united Germany of the new century with the destruction by financial predators of the family firm of one brother, the crash of the plane of another into the cliffs above the Rhine, the suicide of a Yugoslav orphan in the river below, the burial of a fabled trove of paintings by an earthquake: settings and intimations of a modern Ring Cycle. Its final image is of the youngest female survivor, looking out into the darkness, her features slowly resembling, as the camera closes in, the mask of a haunted animal. Art has its premonitions, though they are not always right.
1. For breakdowns of the vote, see ‘Wahlsonderheft’, Der Spiegel, 29 September 1998.
2. Baptisms had dropped from 77 per cent in 1950 to 17 per cent by 1989: Hartmut Kaelble, Jürgen Kocka and Hartmut Zwahr (eds), Sozialgeschichte der DDR, Stuttgart 1994, p. 272.
3. For this incident, airbrushed out of other accounts of Fischer in these years, see Christian Schmidt, ‘Wir sind die Wahnsinnigen . . .’, Munich 1998, pp. 89–94.
4. Letter of 10 November 1938: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, Frankfurt 1994, pp. 373–4. The passages came from Jean Paul’s Herbst-Blumine of 1820.
5. For the early days of the party, see Werner Hülsberg, The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile, London 1988, pp. 64–139.
6. For the political and financial operation required to secure the decision for Bonn, see Henning Köhler, Adenauer: Eine politische Biographie, Frankfurt 1994, pp. 495–509, which makes it fairly clear that it included bribes to purchase the votes of various deputies.
7. Brandt’s intervention can be found in Helmut Herles (ed.), Die Haupstadt-Debatte. Der Stenographische Bericht des Bundestages, Bonn 1991, pp. 36–40. The collection edited by Alois Rummel, Bonn: Sinnbild der deutscher Demokratie, Bonn 1990, gives some idea of the prior campaign to keep the capital on the Rhine.
8. For succinct comparative reflections, see Gerhard Brunn, ‘Europäische Hauptstädte im Vergleich’, in Werner Süss (ed.), Hauptstadt Berlin, Vol. 1, Berlin 1995, pp. 193–213.
9. By formation an industrial architect, politically once a member of the ’68 generation, now a stalwart of the SPD, Stimmann has stood in general for a ‘critical reconstruction’ of pre-divided Berlin, preserving a relatively low sky-line, while yielding to claims of a more contemporary ambition, under the rubric of a ‘European city’, where war and division had left wastelands: Hans Stimmann (ed.), Babylon, Berlin etc.: Das Vokabular der Europäischen Stadt, Basel 1995, pp. 9–10.
10. Michael Wise’s Capital Dilemma, Princeton 1998, offers a fine, historically informed, overview of both the construction of the new government district in the West, and the preservation of the Nazi ministries in the East.
11. For images of the position of Berlin at the time, see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture, New York 1968, pp. 127–36.
12. Statistisches Bundesamt (ed.), Datenreport 1997: Zahlen und Fakten über die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Mannheim 1998.
13. For its origins in the late seventies, see Sabine Von Dirke, ‘All Power to the Imagination’: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens, Lincoln 1997, pp. 120–42.
14. By the late eighties, the functionaries of the Ministry of State Security numbered 100,000 and informants some 250,000: David Childs and Richard Popplewell, The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service, London 1996, pp. 82, 86.
15. Die SPD und die Nation. Vier sozialdemokratische Generationen zwischen nationaler Selbsbestimmung und Zweistaatlichkeit, Frankfurt 1993, pp. 167ff.
16. For this exchange, see Julian Nida-Rümelin and Wolfgang Thierse (eds),Jürgen Habermas und Gerhard Schröder über die ‘Einbeziehung des Anderen’, Essen 1998.
17. ‘Confronting Defeat: the German Communist Party’, New Left Review I/61, May–June 1970, p. 92.
18. The immediate background to Lafontaine’s exit lay in a violent, national and international, press campaign against him: Joachim Hoell, Oskar Lafontaine: Eine Biographie, Braunschweig 2004, pp. 197–205.
19. For financial and political details of Kohl’s malfeasance, see Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 477–8.
20. While traditional contrasts in former West Germany between an SPD north and a CDU/CSU south were accentuated, the principal novelty of the vote was its gender distribution, women for the first time favouring the SPD over the CDU/CSU by virtually the same margin—some 4 per cent—as men preferred Christian to Social Democrats. For the data, see Dieter Roth, ‘A Last Minute Success of the Red-Green Coalition’, German Politics and Society, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 49–50.
21. The standard view, expressed as an incontrovertible—foreign and domestic—consensus, could be found in the Econ
omist: ‘Most analysts readily agree on what is wrong with the German economy. First and foremost, the labour market is far too sticky. Second, taxes and social-security contributions are too high and profits too low. Third, and not unconnected, social security payments, pensions and health-care arrangements are too generous. And fourth, there is far too much red tape’. See ‘A Survey of Germany’, 7 December 2002, p. 10.
22. The Economist, 22 December 2007.
23. For Schröder’s sense of the priorities of a statesman, see the self-portrait in his mistitled Entscheidungen, Hamburg 2006: ‘For me an electoral campaign is the most interesting time in the life of a politician. I have taken part in countless campaigns, spoken in hundreds of town squares, shaken thousands of hands, given innumerable autographs. Certainly doing and shaping politics, reaching decisions, is the central task of a politician, his duty so to speak. But for me the elixir is the electoral campaign, the direct encounter with voters, the competition and struggle for votes, the exchange of argument. Technocrats can make decisions too, journalists can also be know-alls; but politicians alone can and should conduct electoral campaigns’: p. 496.
24. By 2003–4, the number of those who identified themselves with the East still far outnumbered those who did so with Germany as a whole: Katja Neller, ‘Getrennt vereint? Ost-West Identitäten, Stereotypen und Fremdheitsgefühle nach 15 Jahren deutscher Einheit’, in Jürgen Falter et al., Sind wir ein Volk? Ost-und Westdeutschland im Vergleich, Munich 2006, pp. 23–5. For some comparative observations on the outcome of unification in the ex-DDR, see Claus Offe, Varieties of Transition. The East European and East German Experience, Cambridge, MA 1997, pp. 148–58.
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