Identity Creation and the Culture of Contrition: Reconfiguring National Identity in the Berlin Republic Karl Wilds Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Germanic Studies University of Sheffield June 2000 Contents Abstract 1 Acknowledgements 2 1. Introduction: Reconfiguring Identity at the "End of History" 3 and "Beyond the Nation State"? 1.1 National Identity in Flux 4 1.2 Neoconservatives, Left-liberals and Identity 9 1.3 Aims and Limitations of the Thesis 19 2. Salvaging the Past: Neoconservatism, Compensation and 25 National Identity 2.1 A Crisis of Values 25 2.2 Identity versus Emancipation 38 2.3 The Need for Patriotism 49 2.4 Confronting the Past 57 3. The Emancipation from the Past: Critical History and 75 Vefassungspatriotismus 3.1 The "Refounding" of the Federal Republic 75 3.2 The Sonderweg Thesis and Emancipation 85 3.3 Radical Democracy and Emancipation 95 3.4 Post-Traditional Patriotism 104 4. Westbindung and Nation 117 4.1 Victory of the Westbindung? 117 4.2 "Hard Times" and Identity 127 4.3 The Continuities of Geopolitik? 135 5. The 'New Right' and the End of Emancipation 148 5.1 The Renaissance of the Nation 148 5.2 Historisierung and Modernisation 161 5.3 Race, Class and Mass 171 5.4 The End of Emancipation 182 6. The "Westernisation" of the German Nation 192 6.1 The Endangered Republic? 192 6.2 Transcending the Dichotomy between Nation and Republic 199 6.3 "Emancipation" and Post-National Social Solidarity 218 7. The Culture of Contrition and the Reconfiguration of National 232 Identity 7.1 History as Dementi 232 7.2 Learning the "Lessons" of the Past 241 7.3 The Holocaustmahnmal and "Broken Identity" 249 7.4 "Ordinary Germans" - Then and Now. The "Goldhagen 263 Controversy" 7.5 Power Politics between Sonderbewuj3tsein and Siindenbewuj3tsein? 272 8. Concluding Remarks: National Identity: Compensation, 279 Emancipation or Contrition? 9. Bibliography 292 ii ABSTRACT The thesis examines the reconfiguration of concepts of national identity in post- unification Germany in three broad sections. Section one examines the discourse of identity of neoconservatives and critical thinkers between the 1960s and 1980s. Neoconservatives advocated a return to conventional national identity based upon the patriotic identification with indigenous national traditions. Critical thinkers argued for a post-national Constitutional Patriotism based upon the critical reflection of national traditions. Both these approaches are located within the context of conflictual attitudes towards the concepts of "compensation" and "emancipation" in past and present and towards the experience of the National Socialist past. Section two examines the reception of unification within the liberal conservative and neue Rechte milieu. Liberal conservatives sought to synthesise the technocratic Westernisation of the post-war FRG with a traditional national concept. Neue Rechte conservatives rejected "Western" values and perceived in the collapse of Communism the discrediting of both the "utopia" of radical social alternative and also of the Kleinutopie of civil society. The post-Cold War constellation signified for these thinkers the opportunity for a return to pre-1945 traditions of German nationalism and offered an opportunity to relativise the national socialist past. Finally, section three offers an analysis of the reconfiguration of national identity which synthesises the concern for "national" identity with the left-liberal concept of "post- national" identity. The "Westernisation" of the concept of the German nation perceived positive antecedents in the bourgeois emancipation movements of the pre-national nineteenth century. The final chapter elaborates the thesis of a "culture of contrition" for the national socialist past which formulates a radical, "post-national" identity with emancipatory aspirations. The thesis perceives in this latter discourse of "broken" identity an attempt to reconfigure a sense of national "normality" in the present which is predicated upon the acknowledgement of "abnormality" in the past. Acknowledgements Many people have helped me in numerous ways to complete the following project. You know who you are. Thankyou. Three people deserve special mention at this point for their encouragement, support, faith and not least patience over many years: My Grandad Jack, Julia and Moray McGowan. My deepest thanks to you all. 2 1. Introduction: Reconfiguring Identity at the "End of History" and "Beyond the Nation state"? But we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better. Other, less reflective ages also thought of themselves as the best, but we arrive at this conclusion exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy. I Der nationalstaatliche Rahmen fur die Implementierung von Menschenrechten und Demokratie hat, tiber die Grenzen von Stammen und Dialekten hinweg, eine neue, abstraktere Form der sozialen Integration moglich gemacht. Wir stehen heute vor der Aufgabe, diesen Prozel3 mit einem weiteren Abstraktionsschritt fortzusetzen. 2 In the following, I wish to examine the reconfiguration of German national identity within the broader parameters delineated by the above two positions. Francis Fukuyama perceived in the collapse of the Soviet Union the exhaustion of the modernist dialectic of social transformation and progress represented in Hegelian and Marxist concepts of social transience. We can, for Fukuyama, no longer imagine a future alternative social-historical form which is better than the present, only worse. For Fukuyama, the pinnacle of human social form appears represented in the liberal, democratic Free Market society of the United States. Jiirgen Habermas, on the other hand, remains committed to the ongoing "modernist project" and the values of universalism, reason and human emancipation.' For Habermas, whilst the nation-state has been exhausted as a cohesive social form, the modernist project which created the nation must be continued after its demise into the "post-national constellation". Habermas seeks to rescue the republican core of the nation-state and the radical project of the post-war social state upon the supra-national level of Europe and ultimately a universal cosmopolitan world order. Whilst both these thinkers pursue different political and philosophical projects, these arguments appear, in their essence, to express two constitutive perceptions of the present: the exhaustion of both the classical concept of human social progress and of the classical form of the nation-state. I Francis Fukuyama, 'The End Of History And The Last Man.' Penguin Books, London. 1992.p.46. 2 Jilrgen Habermas, 'Die postnationale Konstellation.' Suhrkamp. 1998. p. 36. 3 Jilrgen Habermas, 'Die Moderne - ein unvollendetes Projekt. Philosophisch-politische Aufsatze 1977- 1992.' Reclam. Leipzig. 1992. 3 Whilst the collapse of the Soviet Union strengthened a conservative social outlook which can countenance no alternative social form to Free Market society, throughout the 1990s the traditional nation-state appears compromised as the prime unit of identification in political culture." In this context, one might perceive, with Eric Hobsbawm, that the present constellation is characterised by the eclipse of the conventional points of orientation through which left and right have gained definition since the French Revolution.' Whilst the "party of progress" has conventionally been defined by its commitment to human emancipation and alternative social forms, the "party of order" has conventionally orientated itself towards the nation as the ultimate focus of collective loyalty and social regulation. More specifically, I wish to examine the development of a post-unification discourse of identity with recourse to distinct conservative and left-liberal approaches to the German national past and present which emerged in the 1980s in West Germany, I attempt to pursue this development by a critical reception of the left-liberal discourse of "critical history" and Verfassungspatriotismus as media of political "emancipation" and conservative concepts of Historie and national identity as media of political "compensation". I contend thereby that whilst during the 1980s these discourses existed in a dichotomous relationship with one another, during the 1990s they have undergone an uneven and open-ended process of synthesis. The unification of the two German states clearly exercised a profound impact upon such discourse and offered a material context for the articulation of the seemingly abstract debates of the 1980s over national identity. Yet at the same time, these debates themselves have not evolved in a vacuum and have themselves been transformed, In particular I am interested in examining the changing role played by reflections of the National Socialist past as a media of national identity creation for both the "party of progress" and the "party of order". 1.1 National Identity in flux Despite the claims of conventional "national identity", both the nation state and "national consciousness" are neither eternal in character or of fixed meaning throughout history. In order to assess the characteristics of varieties of national thinking and identity construction 4 c:fthe collection of essays in John Dunn (ed.) 'Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?' Blackwell. Oxford. 1995. Paul Kennedy, 'Preparing for the Twenty-First Century.' Harper-Collins. London. 1993. esp. pp. 122-134. 4