References
- Quoted in New York Times (NYT), November 11, 1989.
- Rodden , John . 2001 . Repainting the Little Red Scboolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-90 , Oxford : UP . See
- Zachary , G. Pascal . 1999 . "Letter from Magedeburg" . Washington Quarterly , 22 ( 2 ) : 152 Rightist attacks exceeded 650 in 1997, more than half of which were aimed at foreigners. The German government classifies about 50,000 people as far-right sympathizers, of which 7,600 are considered capable of violent acts. Nearly half of the far-rightists live in eastern Germany, where most of the attacks on foreigners have occurred even though foreigners comprise barely more than 1 percent of the local population.
- The figure is from a 1998 Allensbach Institute Survey. "Protest in Braun", Die Woche, 30 April 1998.
- Running on an anti-foreigner and anti-Euro platform, Gerhard Prey's German People's Union (DVU) captured 12.9 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt's state elections in April 1998. This included more than 30 percent of the youth vote, making it the most popular party among electors under 30. Prey freely confessed that he had targeted two age groups: those aged 18-29 and over 60. The DVU's success makes it the first far-Right party to enter a state parliament in the east. As one headline in the mainstream press uneasily put it: "Rechtsextrem ist 'in' im Osten", Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), 26 August 1998.
- 1998 . "Faustrecht macht Schule" . Focus , 21 March : 72 – 84 . On the Bochum study, see "Faustrecht macht Schule", Focus, 21 March 1998, 72-84. Nor is the reported violence by the Munich Institute merely rough play. The Institute defined "violence' as "hard bodily violence", including beating, tripping and punching, and bodily injury. This study was confirmed by a report by the Munich Institute for School Pedagogy, which concluded that Bavarian youth demonstrated a "generally aggressive attitude", "intolerance", "no sense of justice", and "a pleasure in exercising power over others".
- But some observers argue that the awards juries are administered by a "left-wing Thought Police". "Unwortler lassen nicht spassen", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 3 February 1999.
- Times Educational Supplement, September 11, 1992. See also Times Higher Educational Supplement, July 3, 1992, 10.
- 1992 . Reuters Library Report , June 23 At the first Education for Tolerance conference sponsored by UNESCO in June 1992, Rita Süssmuth, then president of the Bundestag, was one of the featured speakers.
- On specific initiatives in the schools, see Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 26, 1993. See also Deutsche Presse, April 11, 1995, which discusses the participation of 260 schools in a pilot project to incorporate "tolerance education' into German literature classes. See also Wilhelm Heitmeyer's 1995 study Die bedränge Toleranz.
- "UNESCO-Seminar zu Menschenrechten in Nürnberg eröffnet", AP Worldstream, 20 August 1998. Educators were instrumental in getting 1997 named as the "European Year Against Racism". But, as many commentators noted, the initiative seemed to do little to stem the rise of racist attitudes in the EU.
- Hasler , Barbara . 1998 . "Erziehung zur Toleranz" . Tages-Anzeiger (TA) , 27 May See
- On the latter, see SZ, October 7,1994.
- Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), March 30, 1994.
- SZ, June 28, 1993.
- SZ, June 24, 1993. See also AP Worldstream, 20 August 1999 and NZZ, l July 1999.
- Houston Chronicle, December 25, 1993. Its activities include sponsoring minority speakers in BRD schools, multicultural street fairs, and inter-ethnic hikes and soccer games.
- NZZ April 11, 1994. See also Der Standard, June 25, 1992, and September 15, 1990. The UNESCO-sponsored "Year of Tolerance" in 1995 culminated in the Paris Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, issued in November 1995. See SZ, January 15, 1996.
- Commenting on the "fanatics' who insist that German women in solidarity with Turkish residents wear the veil, an editorial in the SZ (November 11, 1993) declared: "One doesn't know who to fear more: the old order's conservatives or the politically correct thinkers,… who are praying for a new Götterdammerung…. Both the conservatives and the politically correct ones are still allowing in the swamp of the German past, even if their late birth has excluded their active participation in it."
- See SZ, December 12, 1992; June 26, 1993; November 11, 1993.
- Rodden , John . 2001 . Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-90 , Oxford : UP . forthcoming,
- On the general difficulties of creating a European political identity, see Anthony D. Smith, National Identity, 8-25, 71-177. Also Smith's "National Identity and the Idea of European Unity". Smith notes that national identification is the chief form of collective identification in the modern world, and he doubts whether the idea of the nation can be superseded by "Europe" or any continental allegiance. Indeed he warns that efforts to create a European identity may be leading to a racist "Euro-nationalism", a new form of ethnic exclusion that may ease discrimination against Eastern Europeans at the price of exacerbating violence against blacks, Asians, and other non-Europeans. He also notes, however, that substantial progress toward such an identity will not be achieved until education changes from national systems of education -- featuring national history and national literature -- to a pan-European system.
- 1999 . "Sehnsucht nach der Mauer" . Focus , 19 July : 44 – 46 . These tensions have much to do with the ongoing economic disparity between the eastern and western regions. See Will Birgit, "Neue Bundesbürger ticken anders", Lebensmittel Zeitung, 9 July 1999, 37. Hans-Joachim Maaz, head of the Psychotherapeutic Clinic in Halle, has summarized German unification to date in a fitting metaphor: "A bad marriage between a crass, big-mouthed western man and a depressive eastern woman".
- 1999 . "Sehnsucht nach der Mauer" . Focus , 19 July : 44 – 46 . Gted in Heinrich August Winkler, "Rebuilding of a Nation: The Germans Before and After Unification", Daedalus, January 1994, 117. See also Anne-Marie Le Gloannec, "On German Identity", Daedalus, January, 1994, 142.Telling evidence of this gulf is that the Education for Tolerance initiatives have even encompassed attempts to bring youth together from east and west Berlin. One project begun in the mid 1990s, titled "Action against Hatred of Aliens", has regularly brought together ninth-graders from eastern and western Berlin. The director has observed: "Stereotypes and prejudices are extremely crude". In the eyes of the west Berliners, easterners are right-wingers and hostile to foreigners, wear weird cloths, and listen to strange music; east Berlin students considers "Wessis" arrogant, condescending, drug-addicted, and boastful. "Acceptance on both sides has dropped significantly" since 1990, a sociological study has confirmed. Amazingly, 17.5 percent of western Berlin youth and 9 percent of eastern Berlin youth "want the Wall back".
- 1999 . "Sehnsucht nach der Mauer" . Focus , 19 July : 44 – 46 . Other survey research concluded that "the mental divides between the East and the West are deeper than ever".
- Cited in Heinrich August Winkler, "Rebuilding", 112-13, 119-20.
- Berger , Michael . 1999 . "Patriotismus des Konsumenten" . Die Woche , 15 October Indeed, results were even worse when the same question was phrased positively. In a 1999 poll by the Ipsos Institute for Market Research, only 13 percent of Germans confessed to patriotic feelings.
- Birgit , Will . 1999 . "Neue Bundesbürger ticken anders" . Lebensmittel Zeitung , 9 July : 37 A June 1999 poll conducted by the Leipzig Institute for Market Research found that 85 percent of eastern Germans believed that it will require a minimum of 15 years before "Germany is really united'; one-third set the minimum at 25 years, with young easterners especially pessimistic.
- Boyes , Roger . 1998 . "Postwar Generation Seeks Release from Shackles of Nazi Guilt" . The Times (London) , 10 November
- Poll results of this Allensbach survey were published in "Die Zwei Seelen des Ostdeutschen", SZ, 13 April 1995.
- In surveys by the Allensbach Institute, the response "I don't know of any best qualities of Germans" increased from 4 percent in 1952 to 18-22 percent in the 1970s and 80s. In a 1987 poll, 11 advanced industrial nations, West Germany "came in last in national pride -- and showed the largest gap between parents' and children's values". Chancellor Kohl once referred to the "Gnade der späten Geburt" providentially bestowed on his generation, who bore no personal guilt for Nazi crimes and could thus move on to build a New Germany. But the polls suggest that younger generations of Germans do not seem to have recognized their fate as a similar "blessing of late birth". Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, "Do the Germans Have a 'National Character'?" Encounter, March 1987, 68.
- Political scientist DoIf Sternberger coined the word Verjassungspatriotismus in 1982. See his Staatsfreundscbaft (Frankfurt 1947), 9-34.
- Quoted in Heinrich August Winkler, "Rebuilding", 107.
- Heinrich August Winkler, "Rebuilding", 107.
- Walwei-Weigelmann , Hedwig . 1981 . Die Wunde Namens Deutschland: ein Lesebuch zur deutschen Teilung Freiburg See
- I am indebted in this paragraph to the excellent essay by Neil Postman, "My German Problem", esp. 47, 49.
- Rabinbach, "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past", 194. The Israeli historian Saul Friedlander calls this "the symmetric version of the past", whereby crimes of the Third Reich are compared to a series of other horrors, from the Gulag to the killing fields of Cambodia, in a chain of equivalences that reduces the scale of the Nazi terror. Quoted in Nancy Wood, "The Holocaust: Historical Memories and Contemporary Identities", Media, Culture, and Society, vol. 13 (1991), 360.
- Wood . "The Holocaust" ” . 375 Habermas referred to the conservatives' "identificatory grab at national history". Quoted in
- Rabinbach, "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past", 196. Habermas, "Apologetic Tendencies in German Historiography". Habermas' "post-conventional identity" remained abstract and was not elaborated in detail. Chancellor Schröder broadly endorses these sentiments, though he sees them as the condition for Germany becoming a "normal" nation.
- Unlike the Historikerstreit or the Goldhagen controversy, the Walser-Bubis debate did not centre on fundamental historical and philosophical questions, i.e., on the Nazi past or comparative evil, but rather on allegedly misunderstood formulations and personal sensitivities. See E. Gujer, "Kein Schlusstrich unter Deutschlands Geschichte", NZZ, 5 December 1998.
- Rodden , John . 2000 . "It should have been written here': Germany and The Black Book" . Human Rights Review , 2 ( 2 ) : 144 – 63 . In Livre noir du communisme (The Black Book of Communism), published in German translation in 1998, Stephane Courtois accused the Western intellectual establishment of using a double standard to measure degrees of totalitarian evil, demonizing the Nazis but refusing to judge --and even remaining silent about -- the crimes of communists around the world. Courtois charged the European Left with complicity in those crimes. The Black Book should have been written in Germany, Courtois added, because Germans have a fuller perspective to understand totalitarianism, given that they were both the victimizers and victims of both Nazism and Stalinism. See
- Rabinbach . "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past" ” . 195
- James . 1989 . A German Identity London Harold James argues provocatively that the absence of durable national institutions -- an absence due to wars and changes of political systems -- has generated and frustrated the search for German identity. James considers these distinctive features of Germany's history the real character of its Sondemeg. As a result, the Germans have relied primarily on economic success for their identity and political legitimation. But when the economy grows weak -- as in the 1930s -- both identity and government totter. Economic upheaval always produces political instability, but as the German recession of 1991-94 proved, this may be a special problem in Germany. See
- Rabinbach . "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past" ” . 198
- As Christian Meier, the then chairman of the German Historical Association, put it in December 1986: "With all due sympathy for a postnational identity, can it suffice when we live among nations?" Meier questioned whether Habermas' notions of constitutional patriotism and post-conventional identity were sufficient for inspiring collective loyalty and a strong consciousness of community. Quoted in Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterabk Past, 55.
- Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterabk Past, 12-34. Maier defines "Birburg history" as the "multiple muddying of moral categories and historical agents" (13).
- Maier , Charles S. The Unmasterable Past 161 Lothar Kettenacker, The Independent, May 1, 1992. Kettenacker is a staff member of the German Historical Institute in London. The thought echoes Nietzsche's warning against an excess of historical memory in "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life", that "we are suffering from a destructive historical fever… ". Quoted in
- Le Gloannec . "On German Identity" ” . 144 – 45 . See
- Fulbrook , Mary . 1994 . "Aspects of Society and Identity in the New Germany" . Daedalus , January : 232 See
- Cited in Heinrich August Winkler, "Rebuilding", 120-21.
- The New Republic, April 3, 1989.
- Heinrich August Winkler, "Rebuilding" 110.
- Fulbrook . "Aspects of Society and Identity" ” . 211
- Quoted in Rabinbach, "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past", 194. Chancellor Schröder shares these sentiments. As he said in February 1999, in a much-quoted interview in Die Zeit: "People who don't have their own memories -- my generation and younger -- should be able to live without a guilt complex" about the Nazi years. Schröder was a toddler during World War II; his father was a Wehrmacht soldier killed in action in Romania.
- Indeed Stürmer believed that the future of Germany lay in wresting control of the "interpretation monopoly" over history wielded by the Left. But as Habermas warned, "Historical scholarship degenerates easily into historians' politics" -- and Habermas himself was not above this tendency. "Die Leere der Geschichte", SZ, 12 March 1997.
- Rabinbach . "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past" ” . 194 Just as Gorbachev had called upon Soviet scholars to fill in the "blank spots of our history", Stürmer was in effect calling on fellow German scholars to tone down the luminous dark brown spots of their history. But to some ears such pleas have Orwellian overtones: they smack of ideologues exploiting the mutability of the past to paper over the memory holes of history
- Joyce Marie Mushaben, "A Search for Identity: The 'German Question' in Atlantic Alliance Relations", World Politics, vol. 50, #3 (1988), 400. Stürmer's position has more supporters among German intellectuals today than it did in the 1980s. The German intellectual landscape shifted rightward in the 1990s, with writers such as Strauss and Walser joined by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, political scientist Hans-Peter Schwarz, Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt (widow of Willy Brandt), and the historian Michael Wolffsohn all expressing various degrees of patriotic sentiment and/or contempt for the perceived domination of the left-wing '68 generation' over German intellectual life. Among the leading members of this leftish group are Gznter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, and the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who are accused of wielding a "fascism cudgel" and enforcing a moralistic, "politically correct" version of history that stresses the uniqueness of Nazi crimes so as to suppress German national pride.
- Geitner , Paul . 1998 . "German Holocaust Debate Seeks New Language" . The Jerusalem Post , 15 December Or as Michel Friedman, a Frankfurt lawyer and member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, put it during the course of comments about the 1998 Bubis-Walser debate: "If you want to remember Goethe, you have to remember Hitler".But such an assertion sounds like just another brand of the "fascism cudgel" to many Germans. They acknowledge that the Holocaust is a dreadful chapter in Germany history. But is it -- should it be -- a measure of all things German? As many younger Germans -- and Jews -- believe, perhaps the controversies will dissolve only when the last survivor of the Third Reich has died
- Geiss , Imanuel . 1988 . Die Habermas-Kontroverse: Ein deutscher Streit Berlin For detailed discussion of the Historikerstrtit, see
- Maier , Charles S. 1988 . The Unmasterable Past History, Holocaust, and German National Identity Cambridge , , USA
- Evans , Richard J. 1989 . In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past New York and Peter Baldwin ed., Reworking the Past Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate
- Rabinbach , Anson . 1988 . "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past" . Dissent , 35 Spring : 197 Quoted in
- See "Streit mit Waiser is neuer Historikerstreit", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11 December 1998; and Stephan Reinicke, "Markiert der Streit um Waisers Rede ein neues Kapitel deutscher Geschichtspolitik?' taz, 28 November 1998.
- Every effort to commemorate a traumatic event in the modern German past seems to call forth a reaction that erupts into a major debate. After the 50th anniversary commemoration of the end of World War II in 1995, and the national attention accorded Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, came 15 minutes in the spotlight for Daniel Goldhagen, a young American Jewish sociologist, who in mid-1995 published the German edition of his book Hitler's Willing Executioners.Goldhagen asked this question: How wide and deep was anti-Semitism within the German populace of the Third Reich? Based on case studies such as that of the Hamburg police battalion 101, Goldhagen charged that an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" prevailed among Germans -- and had done so for many decades before Hitler's election. But Goldhagen never demonstrated that his case studies were representative. Nor did he engage in comparative history between Germany and other nations with a modern history of anti-Semitic sentiment (e.g., France and Russia).The denouement was odd. In 1997, on receiving a book prize in Germany, Goldhagen lavishly praised postwar Germany as a "normal' country, indeed a "model" for other nations. For Goldhagen knew of no other country that treated "so openly and systematically the inglorious chapters of its past", which rendered it exemplary. Markus Franz, "Preis für den Beobachter der willigen Vollstrecker", AZC, 11 March 1997.
- Or as Evans puts it: "For if the Germans did not commit a crime that stood out from all others in its horrors, then they have no more to be ashamed of than any other nation, and so it becomes possible for them to tread the international stage unburdened by a degree of guilt that no other nation can share". In Hitler's Shadow, quoted in Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1989, 5. That burden sometimes appears to amount, as Susan Eisenhower, daughter of Dwight D. Eisenhower, put it in an interview, to an "ethnic original sin". NYT, June 5, 1994.
- Nolle was professor of history at Free University of Berlin; Stürmer taught at Erlangen; HiIlgruber at Cologne; and Joachim Fest was a Hitler biographer and a FAZ editor. FranÝois Furet and Ernst Nolte, Feindliche Nãbe: Kommunismus and Faschismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1998).
- Rabinbach . "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past" ” . 195 Quoted in
- Immanuel Geiss, Die Habermas-Kontroverse.
- Rabinbach . "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past" ” . 194 Quoted in