The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800
Stefan Berger
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1571816208
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Historikerstreit of the 1980s has ended inconclusively amidst heated debates on the nature and course of German national history. The author follows the debates beyond the unexpected reunification of the country in 1990 and analyzes the most recent trends in German historiography. Reunification, he observes, has brought in its wake an urgent search for the "normality" of the nation state. For anyone interested in the development of the national master narrative in more recent German historiography, this book will provide an essential guide through the multitude of historical debates surrounding the nation state.
and a strong army would be capable of maintaining Germany intact.60 The neoRankeans’ support for authoritarian government and their pompous Bismarck cult were once again justified with reference to Ranke’s ‘great men’ theory.61 In Imperial Germany historians played a prominent role in what Benedict Anderson has termed ‘official nationalism’.62 As we have seen in the cases of Treitschke and Schäfer, nationalist historiography was officially supported and sanctioned by political elites and the
perspective also remained firmly linked to the theory of totalitarianism. As early as 1930 Friedrich Meinecke had argued for the essential identity of Communism and National Socialism.152 In the late 1930s American political scientists worked out a theory of totalitarianism which had important repercussions on historical scholarship in Germany.153 In the period of the Cold War, the theory of totalitarianism facilitated the integration of historians into the FRG. Many of their theories and
that the Holy Roman Empire or the German Federation had been more appropriate than a unified nation-state which was almost certain to upset the balance of power in Europe over and over again.35 Golo Mann found the aim of reunification unrealistic. Even if it were possible to achieve reunification in the distant future, it was more important, he argued, to aid internal reform in the GDR so as to allow its citizens greater freedom. He regarded the democratisation of the GDR as more important than
thesis) was closely related to its adherence to meaningless concepts of national identity. It would, they argued, only be able to compete with newer disciplines such as sociology and politics, once it had abandoned the national apologetics of the past and defined its task as that of the defence and propagation of a democratic civil society. In the 1960s the period of the ‘hot Cold War’ was beginning to be replaced by détente. Neue Ostpolitik meant a more relaxed relationship to the Communist
allegedly finds its positive counterpart in ‘hard, ascetic fascism which demands sacrifice and enthusiasm’.62 In the face of such hair-raising fantasies it needs to be stressed that the belated acceptance of the anti-fascist struggle against Nazism from the 1960s onwards served as an important ingredient in the serious efforts made by West Germans self-critically to face their most recent past in an unprecedented public debate. Anti-fascism in the GDR, despite politically motivated efforts to