The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Habermas lies in the tradition of the Frankfurt school in trying to provide a marriage of Marx and Freud. In his case, he sees the Freudian method of psychoanalysis as not just a favored method but as a metaphor for what he would like to see in the wider society, where deep reflection reveals the many hidden constraints acting (usually unconsciously) on individuals, leading to self-insight and emancipation. These, his considered reflections about reflection, are the subject of Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests). Only in such a fashion, he says, can we rediscover “ways to live together in harmony and mutual dependence, while respecting individuals’ autonomy, but without sacrificing the advances of modern technology.”69 Habermas has never been anti-science as so many postmodernists have been. For him, we have to find ways of “sustaining [a] moral community in the face of rampant individualism.”70 This depends on people’s being able to communicate effectively with each other.

  Habermas believes that in crucial ways the modern period differs from all previous periods. In particular the concept of reason has been distorted by the advance of science. The agenda of the Enlightenment philosophes was to develop critiques that would assess and criticize the prevailing assumptions of an age; empirically grounded and leading to greater freedoms, these critiques amounted to forms of reflection that expanded human self-awareness. Science, however—and here he agreed with Weber—offered instrumental reason, reason as a way of controlling and manipulating nature.71 Traditional scholarship, on the other hand, he defined as human emancipation through enhanced capacities for reflection, and this is where the cultural sciences came in, to make us more aware of the achievements of reflection.72

  LIVING WITHOUT CONSOLATION

  We have today, therefore, a very different and more pervasive form of “false consciousness” from that which Marx introduced: we are living in a thoroughly distorted version of reality or, as Habermas puts it, “systematically distorted communication.” In fact, this is now the accepted state of affairs, in which we all know, at some level, that facts and values “cannot be accepted uncritically as ‘givens,’” nothing we are told can be accepted at face value: late capitalism thrives on marketing and public relations, so that we are surrounded in the mass media by acts of communication that say one thing and mean another—not completely another, but with an agenda of their own, unspoken but present.73

  Habermas argues that the solution is “an ideal speech community,” in which politics is taken out of the hands of the “experts” and some sort of “public sphere” is created in which a consensus can emerge based on mutual concerns.74 The natural home for this might be the university (though Habermas also considered consciousness-raising groups), but so far, it is fair to say, such a mechanism has not emerged. The contemporary university, says Habermas, has reverted more to the eighteenth-century idea of teaching institutions than homes of critical reflection.

  On top of which, he says, all the scientific progress in the world has done little to advance our understanding of suffering, grief, loneliness, and guilt, the traditional concerns of religion. Having destroyed the basis of faith, the sciences have done nothing to provide a replacement and we must “resign ourselves to living without consolation.”

  THE “CAESURA” OF 1968

  Habermas was a prominent figure in the impressive survey published by Konrad Jarausch in 2006, with the title, in English, After Hitler: Recivilising Germans, 1945–1995. This book was published in German as Die Umkehr: Deutsche Wandlungen, 1945–1995 (literally, The Turning Back: German Transformations, 1945–1995).75 Both titles were controversial in their different ways.

  Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and also director of the Center for Research in Contemporary History at Potsdam in Germany, identified three well-defined periods as of crucial importance for the post–World War II history of Germany. The first was the immediate postwar period, which saw the disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, the dissolution of Nazi institutions and the prohibition of Nazi propaganda, together with the decentralization of the economy to eliminate the potential for war.76 He examined what this involved (80,000 Nazi leaders arrested, 70,000 Nazi activists dismissed, 3,000 German companies dismantled), together with the population’s gradual acceptance of their “partly active, partly passive” participation in the genocide of the Jews, the retreat from nationalism (“the collapse of the nation as a reference point”) and the origin of the idea of a “postnation nation.”77 He observed that “radical nationalism” was more “deeply anchored” in German culture than National Socialism, and that the privations people suffered in that period (a time when “all bellies disappeared”) provoked feelings of self-pity “for their newfound role as victims” that helped transform “the formerly aggressive nationalism” into a defensive, “residual sense of nationality…Though German identity had been badly damaged by the crimes of the Nazis, it did not disappear entirely but, rather, transformed its character into a ‘community of fate.’”78

  He observed a remarkable period of economic growth throughout the 1950s (an average annual increase, thanks to certain Keynesian measures, of 8.2 percent). However, it wasn’t until the 1960s, after the “relative stabilization” of the Adenauer period, and the Americanization of values and behavior, owing to prolonged occupation and “some intelligent exchange schemes,” that the breakthrough to a modern civil society occurred.79

  Jarausch then identified 1968—the year of the student revolts in Poland, Berlin, New York, and Paris, of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam—as a caesura “that requires a cultural approach [as opposed to a political one] to be better understood.” Jan-Werner Müller agreed, arguing that this time brought about “new structures of feeling,” and Dirk van Laak even went so far as to assert that the 1960s were a threshold of change as much as the 1920s were.80 A motivating force here was the young generation that had grown up since the war and was more willing—much more willing—to examine the involvement of their parents’ cohort in National Socialism than were the parents themselves. The particular circumstances of Germany, therefore, sharpened this generational divide and had important cultural consequences. In particular, Jarausch identified the emergence of a “critical public sphere” and a new professional ethos “that favoured contemporary criticism over approval of government policies.” A critical discourse emerged in the 1960s, he says, that advocated a broader social self-determination. Habermas, in Der Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), argued that public discussion was “a crucial precondition for civic freedom.” This was, perhaps, old news in other Western countries but, says Jarausch, in Germany older authoritarian thinking was still widespread, and many people were still reluctant to engage in politics. But the events of 1968, he insisted, and the emergence of a critical public sphere, marked the internalization of democratic values and behavior, at least among the educated middle classes. Habermas agreed: he called the movement of the “68ers” the “first fairly successful German revolution, while Elias described it as an important break in the ‘chain of generations’ and the final stage in German ‘catching up’ with the West.” (It has to be said that many older Germans reject this picture, insisting that there were early exposés of Nazi wrongdoing, which they faced head-on. One book often cited is Eugen Kogon’s Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager, published in 1946.)81

  Protest, Jarausch says, was centered on the “inner emptiness” of consumer society, and Herbert Marcuse’s book, One-Dimensional Man, with its concept of “repressive tolerance” became a key text.82 The at times violent confrontation took a full decade to subside, culminating in the “German autumn” of 1977, with the murder of the president of the League of Employers, the liberation of a hijacked plane in Mogadishu, and the “controversial suicides” of Ulrike Meinhof, on May 8, 1976, and Andreas Baader, on October 18, 1977. Th
e strategy of confrontation had failed, says Jarausch, and most of the confrontationists, including Joschka Fischer, “found their way back to the constitutional state.” But that could not disguise the fact that German society had changed fundamentally: even though the power structure of Germany had not been changed by the events of 1968 and the decade afterward, there had been an “anti-authoritarian transformation of values.” There was also the beginning of a change from the concept of German identity as a negative one—as shown in the works of Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Rolf Hochhuth, and Peter Weiss (see Chapter 42)—and a turn to greater internationalism (or, more accurately, non-nationalism; this generation was no longer ashamed to be German, but it was not necessarily international in outlook either).83 Nevertheless, as Klaus Schönhoven put it, “there was more air to breathe.”

  Jarausch’s analysis is important for its emphasis on the different views of themselves that Germans have as compared with what most of their near neighbors understand about them. It is not the whole picture, however. There was in Germany, according to one researcher, “historical illiteracy on a staggering scale.” In one survey, published in 1977 and titled What I Have Heard about Adolf Hitler, children described him variously as Swiss, Dutch, or Italian; he was a professor, a leader of the East German Communist Party; he had lived in the seventeenth—or the nineteenth—century. Rolf Hochhuth’s Die Juristen (The Lawyers), premiered in 1978, concerned a real-life attorney who was still denying his war crimes.84 This was the time when Chancellor Helmut Kohl used the phrase “the blessings of late birth” to describe a generation that could have had no role in the Nazi evil. Though this had an element of truth, it was also less than the whole truth, given the historical illiteracy already displayed.*85

  Jarausch’s third period in Germany’s transformation centers around Unification Day (Der Tag der deutschen Einheit), October 3, 1990, though he spent some time examining the change of thinking in East Germany in the 1980s as a precursor to investigating whether “a middle course of democratic patriotism” would now be possible in what the theologian Richard Schröder called the “difficult fatherland.” Jarausch thought that there was, even then, “a continuing weakness in the newly emerging structures of [German] civil society.”86 Despite everything, Jarausch found that critical minorities had gradually developed in the GDR, and that there had been “a retreat into private life,” a dacha culture, the cultivation of a conscious double life “that meant conformity in public and defiance in the private sphere.” This was in some ways a disturbing parallel to the “inner emigration” of the Nazi years but, says Jarausch, it contributed to the stability of the East German state because it diverted the dissatisfaction with the regime inward.87 Nevertheless, in a small way the idea of a “negotiation society” was established.

  A “NORMAL” GERMANY

  The most important psychological/intellectual change provoked in Germany by reunification, when in the words of Rolf Hochhuth “the German clock struck unity” (and which was feared by some, such as Günter Grass and Margaret Thatcher, who believed there might be a return to aggressive German nationalism), has been the search “for a post-national self-understanding conditioned by the Holocaust,” a search for the extent to which Germany is now—and can ever be—“normal.”88

  What did that entail? The changes in the East in the early 1990s were breathtaking although for a time many people retained “a wall in the head.” There remained a great divide between “Ossis” and “Wessis,” and the exposure of the widespread Stasi collaboration produced a depression in many Easterners. Later, though, in the latter half of 2000, there emerged an “Ostalgie”, a nostalgia for the East among its former inhabitants, in particular a nostalgia for once-familiar products and brands, for Florena soap, Konet Foods, and even the Ampelmännchen, the chirpy man who was East Germany’s green traffic light symbol which, Martin Blum says, have now been elevated to cult status among the young. These products, where they can be found, are not consumed as such, but left in living rooms, intact in their packaging, to serve as a challenge to the supposed superiority of Western consumer culture.89 More formally, the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR (Dok) in Eisenhüttenstadt maintains changing exhibitions on the material culture of the German Democratic Republic.

  In these debates, four people have stood out: Karl Heinz Bohrer, Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Botho Strauss, and Martin Walser. Bohrer, professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld, a journalist, and the editor of Merkur, the “German Journal for European Thought,” argued that reunification was necessary so that the two “partial nations” could come together to “remember together” and establish a common memory; he wrote that reunification, involving reconciliation with each other, could become a reconciliation with the past, so that Germany’s “soul” could find peace and the nation as a cultural phenomenon be reformed.90 Only now, at last, could there be a modern German nation.91

  Syberberg, well known for his films, Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, a Film from Germany; 1977) and Parsifal (1982), which treated “irrationalism, music and Romanticism as the core of German identity and intellect,” has also written a number of books, in which he argues that the core of German identity was lost after World War II and that the void was filled by foreign, largely American, culture.92 His arguments are starkest in Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Krieg (On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the Last War; 1990).93 Originally from East Germany, Syberberg examined German identity and aesthetics in the light of reunification. The book consciously embraced German exceptionalism, referring back to the German tradition of pessimistic anticapitalism and to a form of anti-American consumerism, arguing that art and aesthetics are the primary sphere of human existence, “that all other spheres are secondary.” The most tragic victim of the Nazi era, on this account, was not the Jews but art itself. Hitler, for Syberberg, was the culmination of modernization, the embodiment of the dark side of the Enlightenment, and he argued that the instrumental rationalism identified by Weber has foisted an ugliness and inhumanity on the world, above all a meanness that was incarnated in “the Bonn democracy of money.” For him, Germany was a unique province on the map of “European authenticity…the home of a new depth that has to be rediscovered.”94

  Botho Strauss is also a writer, of plays mainly, but his controversial essay, “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” (“Goat Song, Swelling Up”), was published to acclaim and controversy in 1993. “The song of the goat” was of course the original meaning, in Greek, of “tragedy,” and so Strauss too, like Syberberg, like Nietzsche in fact, was giving voice to a longing for the primitive power of art rather than instrumental reason.95 “The increasing volatility and unpleasantness of German life,” Strauss suggested, “came from the feeling that an entire way of life had reached its unnatural limit, and that it was impossible to go on with the thoughtless, smug, wasteful materialism of the West German past.” Strauss mourned the loss of what he saw as the most valuable part of Germany’s cultural heritage, its irrationalism as a critique of economic utilitarianism and materialism. “We know nothing about the face of the future tragedy. All we can hear is the sound of the mysteries growing stronger…”96

  In May 2002, Joschka Fischer, by then Germany’s foreign minister, wrote an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which he explored the idea of “normality” in the German context. He introduced the thought that there were two important meanings of “normality” for Germans. One related to Germans and Jews and here, he said, he favored a return to normality. Germany, as many people do not realize, he pointed out, was by then made up of one third of immigrants who had arrived since 1945, including 3 million Turkish Muslims and 150,000 Soviet Jews who, in the 1990s, joined some 28,000 mainly elderly Jews already living in Germany. Since the year 2000 German nationality requirements had shed their “blood and soil” criteria, citizenship being extended now to individuals born in Germany to a parent who had reside
d there for more than eight years. All this pointed to an increasing German accommodation with “foreignness.”

  At the same time, Fischer resisted the concept of normality that reflected the efforts by conservatives to “draw a line” under Germany’s Nazi past and “reinstate a positive German national identity.” Like Fischer, Habermas was also against this.97

  But some Germans thought obstacles were being put in the way of their return to “normality” (seven-tenths of all Germans were born after World War II). In 1998 the novelist Martin Walser was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association, and in his acceptance speech—another controversy—he questioned what he saw as an increasing emphasis on the Holocaust in the 1990s, remarking that he himself had begun to “look away” when “constantly subjected to media images of Germany’s shame.”98 He rejected the new Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as “an instrumentalisation of our shame for present purposes” and though he himself would “never leave the side” of the guilty he insisted that a private conscience, a “redemptive individuality,” was more important and relevant than “constant public preoccupation.” Although many in his audience that day agreed with him (Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer were seen nodding their heads, and he was given a standing ovation), one man, Ignatz Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, subsequently attacked Walser for being anti-Semitic in such terms that the Schröder government was forced to acquiesce in building the Holocaust monument. The philosopher Hermann Lübbe made a parallel point to Walser when he said that collective kommunikatives Beschweigen (communicative silence) about the past in the early Federal Republic had enabled West Germany to evolve into a functioning democracy by providing stability.99 The argument continued (it was too acrimonious to call it a debate). In 2007, Saul Friedländer, the eminent historian of the Holocaust, was the recipient of the Peace Prize and in an interview he gave at the time of the ceremony claimed that Walser’s speech of 1998 was typical of a recurrent German tendency to end concern about the Holocaust.