Nationalism in German Reunificaiton
As fireworks lit up the Berlin sky to signify the reunification of the two German states on October 3, 1990, eventual Nobel laureate author Günter Grass voiced his disgust towards this event. What Grass‟s response illustrates is a deep seeded angst to the redevelopment of a German nation-state. Specifically, his reaction expressed the feelings of a select few on the left of the political spectrum who detested the processes in which the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) reunified. The primary reason that Grass, and others, communicated their dissent against the recreation of a German nation-state was because of the legacy that the German past carried after World War II and the Nazi atrocities. Moreover, their fear of a resurgence of extreme German nationalism came from Grass‟s insistence that the legacy of the Nazi past, as articulated by the German term of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, supersede any movement toward the establishment of a unified Germany.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung translates as a struggle to deal with, or come to terms with, the past in a general sense. Moreover, this term has come to be associated specifically with the German attempt to understand how and why such terrible crimes came to fruition during the Nazi era and whether or not “ordinary Germans” should carry guilt as well. This holds true even if they were only guilty of standing by and doing nothing while crimes were committed. In addition, Vergangenheitsbewältigung also represents the concept of the burden to cope with Germany‟s past and its impact that this burden has had on the conceptualization of nationalism and the representation of a German nation-state.
In essence, some Germans in the FRG rejected romantic notions of nationalism because of their sense of Vergangenheitsbewältigung they carried following the Nazi time in power.
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With reunification, the far Right seized the political initiative and was able to consolidate and expand a considerable base of support. The Republicans, a neo-fascist party, received nearly a million votes in the national elections in December 1990, and although they did not enter the national parliament, the far Right attracted a sizeable following among German youth. By waging a militant campaign against the influx of pornography and prostitution in the East (formerly forbidden except in state run brothels), they struck a sympathetic chord among many people who otherwise would have been repulsed by their fascist politics. During times of economic hardship, the Right's attempt to channel frustration against the nearly six million foreigners living in Germany may have permanently altered the political and social landscape of Germany. In order to stop the arrival of refugees, the constitution (or Basic Law as it is called) was amended by the Bundestag in May 1993.
As we have already seen in the case of the anti-nuclear movement, direct actions played a central role in changing government policy, and after reunification, neo-Nazi skinheads pushed the government as hard as they could. Although they stayed out of Kreuzberg for fear of being beaten up, thousands of young Germans took it upon themselves to Germanize their newly united country. Flush with patriotic pride as their nation unified, bands of young hoodlums roamed the country, attacking Vietnamese workers, Turkish immigrants and any foreigners -- Polish tourists on shopping trips, Americans looking for a party (like the Olympic Luge team) or British schoolteachers on holiday. They brutalized Vietnamese children in kindergartens, sent Greek children on their way home from school into the hospital with broken bones, attacked disabled people in their wheelchairs, and set homeless loners on fire. Other favored targets of the skinheads included punks, gays, lesbians, and anyone who looks like a non-conformist. In the suburbs and countryside, many German youth were compelled to choose between joining the neo-Nazis or hiding. Neo-Nazi youth enjoyed themselves at football games and rock concerts. Their Oi music, a fusion of punk and heavy metal that expunged African influences from rock, was popularized by groups with names like Destructive Force (Störkraft) and Evil Uncles (Böse Onkelz). With lyrics like "Germany awake!" (a slogan used by Hitler) and "Turks out!" skinhead music encouraged attacks....
In 1991, police estimated the number of hard-core members of neo-Nazi groups in eastern Germany at slightly more than 2000, a figure regarded as notoriously low by most knowledgeable persons. By the end of 1992, as attacks on foreigners mounted, the government estimated there were more than 40,000 right-wing extremists in Germany, of whom 6500 were classified as neo-Nazis.
More than 23,000 right-wing extremist crimes were investigated by police in 1993 alone. Altogether, at least 80 killings were attributed to fascists between 1990 and 1994. The "brown network" of skinheads, neo-Nazis, old Nazis, and neo-fascist parties also apparently includes many police. Among 2426 police reserves in Berlin, 607 (an astounding 1 in 4) had prior associations with the Right, and half of the entire force were reputed to vote for the Republicans.
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As we know today, economic downturns more often result in fascism than revolution, and the more severe the downturn, the better chance a severe turn to the right will occur. Despite the temptation to posit a facile economic explanation for the resurgence of Nazism, many German sociologists regard the emergence of neo-fascism as conditioned by more than economic factors. The list of causal forces include the atomization of life, a convoluted sense of what being a man entails, and the fragmentation of what had been a relatively stable social system. Perhaps most important is the peculiarity of the German context. In plain English, once the wall came down, East Germans became second-class citizens, so pride in Germany became a means of promoting their own superiority vis-a-vis foreigners. Rather than live an obscure existence and wait for opportunity to knock, many choose to fight for the purity of German national identity as a way to be somebody. The anonymity and depersonalization of consumer society, which in the affluent West produced the New Left of the 1960s, had an entirely different
outcome in the 1990s.
Christa Wolf, the best-known writer in what used to be East Germany and, like Grass, a progressive person clearly opposed to neo-Nazis, used a similar construction of typical German behavior to comment upon the ways East Germany's history and her own role there were being critically reviewed. She complained that in place of:
...an honest, blunt discussion carried out, however, in an atmosphere of empathy, about our personal history in the last few decades, [there is] the good old German inclination for always being right, for thoroughness in reckoning with the 'opponent,' the bigoted demand to fulfill an abstract, rigorous moral code.
Once again, it is German behavior, German thoroughness, and German bigotry which defined the situation. "Always being right," a type of personality which exists in far too many cultures, is not a human condition for Wolf, but a German one. The fact that Grass and Wolf, unquestionably progressive human beings, are the ones making reference to uniquely German behavior is an indication of how widespread the tendency to Germanize human problems is. In their own internal deliberations, members of the autonomous women's movement also referred to how their movement was not spared the "German sickness of friend/foe, black/white thinking, the widespread incapability to discuss differing ideas, and the customary habit of defaming differences." During the Gulf War, Alice Schwarzer (Germany's leading feminist) publicly declared she was proud to be German because the country's new pacificism was superior to the American militarist mentality.
Like other particularistic cultures, Germans tend to regard their history (and destiny) as unique (and of superior significance to that of other nations or cultures). Expressionist painter Kirchner and the Blaue Reiter understood themselves as German nationalists. German world maps commonly ascribe old German names to cities that have long since had other names -- as for example, Königsberg. One radical German claimed Left and Right were political categories developed in the course of the German revolution of 1848 rather than the French Revolution of 1789. Even in how the worst aspect of their history is understood, Germans believe in the "uniqueness of the German history of extermination" (Einzigkeit der deutschen Vernichtungsgeschichte). American genocide at My Lai or Wounded Knee may not be as neat, orderly, premeditated or calculated as German genocide at Auschwitz, but it is genocide nonetheless -- as were the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Indonesia in East Timor, and Turkey in Armenia. To consider Germany's genocide during World War II as a special case outweighing all other cases of genocide is to deny the human capacity for genocidal behavior, a denial that fails to mitigate such possibilities in the future. Whether Serbia's "ethnic cleansing," Brazil's ecocidal destruction of rain forest life, or Germany's death factories, the effect of these monstrosities is to kill those defined as "other" and to seize their land and property. Progressive Germans are capable of arguing for hours that the African slave trade and the genocide of Native Americans, despite their quantitative superiority to the holocaust, qualitatively differ from the latter. Changing the subject, these same progressives will go on at equal length about the uniqueness of the German autonomous movement, the German neo-Nazis, or the German Greens, as if any of these constructions existed purely along national lines. Considering Nazism and its genocide purely a German problem is to end up producing the same effect as that intended by Hitler: Germanization of the cultural universe. Such a mechanical negation of Nazism (not a determinate negation in Hegel's sense of the word) loses sight of the human dimension of the situation, the human essence of action and the potential for genocide of human beings, who even in our failures and horrors exist as a species -- a dimension of our existence severed and mutilated by assertions of Germanity.
Whether their forests or their fascists, the Nazis romanticize everything German, but all too often, anti-Nazis do the same thing, albeit in a negative rather than a positive fashion. Like Israelis and Japanese, Germans take enormous pride in their uniqueness and exclusivity. Based in their final analysis on blood lines, such constructions of identity serve to obscure the commonality of the human experience. Historically speaking, the German nation-state (the one from Bismarck to Hitler) existed less than seventy-five years. The brevity of Germany's political life helps explain the motivation behind German enthusiasm for their positive political accomplishments (and the current government's comparative lack of legitimacy can be traced to its historically transitory character).
One of the political legacies of German history is that structures of authority within the personalities of German people remain comparatively strong. One of the latest proofs of Germans' addiction to order was publicized in 1993. After an American journalist joked that "order über alles" characterized Germany, five students at the University of Trier constructed a way to determine whether Germans would actually obey "absurd rules." At the main post office in Trier, they hung official-looking signs on telephone booths that read "women only" and "men only" and then watched the reaction. Of 69 telephone users observed, nearly all the women and three-fourths of the men obeyed the instructions, while only one women and nine men were bold enough to use the phone designated for the opposite sex. On January 28, 1994, students at the University of Münster conducted an experiment to test whether or not German students would allow themselves to be steered into racially segregated entrances to the university's student cafeteria. Holding signs reading "Germans" and "Foreigners" at adjacent doorways, the students found that 95% of their colleagues allowed themselves to be steered into the"correct" entrance.
Such unconscious dimensions to racism and authoritarianism are difficult to measure, but a conscious affinity with Nazi beliefs among West Germans was continually documented in study after government study. One of the more recent studies to document this was conducted in 1979 and held secret for two years (until May 1981), when it was finally given media coverage. The survey claimed that 18% of West Germans felt that "Under Hitler, Germany had it better." The government report went on to say: "A total of 13 per cent of the voters (about 5.5 million people) have an ideologically complete frame of mind, the main supports of which are a national socialist (Nazi) view of history, hatred of foreigners, democracy, and pluralism and an exaggerated devotion to people, fatherland, and family." In 1989, Der Spiegel published a comprehensive analysis of Hitler accompanied by the results of a new poll in which they found that only every other German had sympathy for the Jews while a total of 79.9% were mildly to strongly "proud to be German."
These polls may not come as a surprise, but what is astounding is many activists' and militants' unawareness of the deep psychological structure on which the espousal of fascist beliefs depend. When not subject to conscious reflection and their transformation, these patterns of everyday interaction can be spontaneously reproduced even within the movement. As the Autonomen developed from the crucible of popular struggles and merged with their cultural counterparts in the youth ghettos, it was often an unprincipled fusion wherein violence and callousness went unchallenged. At the same time, the Protestant ethic so proudly claimed by Max Weber to be at the heart of capitalism continued to be a powerful force on political activists. One could begin by pointing out that the Autonomen black uniform is the same color as that of the Puritans. Even in the movement, puritanical norms are evident.
Comparing the German Autonomen to their Polish counterparts (the Orange movement) or to Danish BZ people, there is a hard edge to the Germans which does not exist in these other contexts.
Even though there are severe problems within the movement, no where else in the political universe of Germany do the desire for a different kind of society and the necessity of building a new way of life coincide. Hope is to be found in the sublime harmony of many activists as well as in their attempts to build a supportive collectivity amid daily anxieties about police and neo-Nazi attacks. Whether or not these marginalized groups survive to live in the kind of society they want, they have to some degree already brought it into existence in their small groups. Whether autonomous movements are able to realize more freedom depends, at least in part, on a protracted transformation of the inner character of everyday life.
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