This review was originally published in the TLS of February 2-9,
1990.
If, as Big Ben struck midnight on December 31, 1988, an inebriated reveller
had offered you a scenario of the incoming year that included a
non-Communist prime minister in Poland, Vaclav Havel as president of
Czechoslovakia, the execution of the Ceauşescus and the crumbling of the
Berlin Wall, you would understandably have put this down to the euphoria of
the moment rather than to a prophetic insight into the movement of
historical cycles. Your scepticism could have been intact until well into
the year. As the two Germanys prepared to celebrate their respective
fortieth anniversaries, their leaders had every reason to look back with
satisfaction, even complacency. Was there ever a more convincing
verification of the bon mot that nothing endures like the provisional?
Look back at Year Zero, at a Central Europe of rubble, starvation and
refugees, of missing husbands, brothers and sons, of occupiers whose
intentions could only be guessed at, of a moral void, with evil defeated but
the shape of the good as yet undiscerned. Look back at 1949, at an iron
curtain well in place, dividing Europe through Germany, at two new German
States, self-proclaimed as temporary, each the ideological image of its
protecting superpower, hesitatingly embarking on a new phase of limited
self-government. Then look at the heart of Europe in the spring of 1989.
In the West you see a federal republic, prosperous and stable beyond the
imagination of its founding fathers, an export dynamo with the world’s
second largest payments surplus, its central bank an independent actor on
the world economic stage. Britain may not belong to the Exchange Rate
Mechanism of the EMS, in order to retain its sovereignty in monetary policy,
but when the Bundesbank puts the discount rate up by 1 per cent, the Old
Lady has to follow suit. (We have Mr Lawson’s word for it.) You see a
parliamentary democracy which, for all the warts in the form of terrorism,
neo-Nazism, residual status neuroses and pressures for conformity, is more
securely liberal, tolerant, pluralistic and cosmopolitan than any previous
German State. You see a capitalist State that knows how to turn its profits
into public goods. The roofs of its museums do not leak, its opera houses do
not permanently hold out a begging bowl, its cities have public transport
systems in which you could almost eat off the platforms. The escalators
work, too. Its social peace and industrial training methods are held up as
an example for others to follow: West Germany as a model — Modell
Deutschland, as the prophet of the New Immodesty, Helmut Schmidt, put it.
Even in the East, as it then was, beyond Helmstedt and the Brandenburg Gate,
things looked quiet and solid. True, cars were smelly and factories worse.
You would be well advised not to swim in the Elbe. Out-of-season avocados
were hard to come by, unless you belonged to the nomenklatura. So, rather
more seriously, were children’s shoes or bicycle-pumps or bananas. But
nobody starved. You could not travel, but you could emigrate every night at
eight by courtesy of West German television news. Knowledgeable observers
agreed that though the German Democratic Republic lacked proper legitimacy,
it was not about to collapse. There was no Solidarity-type trade union,
perhaps because living standards were tolerable, perhaps because there is
not that visceral hatred of the Russians that every Pole is born with. There
was no Hungarian-type unofficial reform movement, perhaps because there was
no reform wing within the ruling party, perhaps because the Germans are too
obedient, perhaps because there was no Catholic Church to provide social
leadership and a meaningful moral home.
Whatever the reason, the German Democratic Republic was there to stay.
Chancellor Kohl insisted that the German Question was still open, but that
was really to keep the refugee lobby sweet, to stop marginal voters drifting
off to the Republicans, and to remind his Western Allies not to take the
Federal Republic for granted. Meanwhile the two German States conducted
their relations coolly but effectively: the West lent billions, the East had
an export back-door to the EC, grandparents shuttled to and fro, and it was
possible, with a bit of perseverance, to dial one’s cousin in Rostock or
Jena direct.
A suitable time, then, to take stock and look forward to forty more years of
the same. The future is rarely like the past, but the one thing one can
confidently forecast about the next forty years of the Germanys (or Germany)
is they will not be more of the same. In an important way the provisional
has come to an end, even though what succeeds it may also be provisional.
The two German States have been unique in post-war Europe in not being
nation-states. True, the minorities they contain are in theory transitory —
Turkish and other “guest workers” in the West, Vietnamese in the East. Nor
are there ethnic discontents or separatist demands. They are non-national in
quite a different sense. It is not merely that the German nation is divided
into two, but that the two States that emerged were designed to have limited
sovereignty; they were created for the purpose of integration into the
supra-national frameworks that were evolving around them.
No doubt a West German State would have come into being sooner or later, given
the incompatibilities of Soviet and Western intentions in post-war Europe.
But the immediate impulse to its creation was the formation of that OEEC,
the Organization for European Economic Co-operation, which in turn owed its
origin to the Marshall Plan: if the Western occupation zones were to be
included in Marshall aid, they would have to join the OEEC; if they were to
join the OEEC, a federal form of government would have to be found for them.
But that was only the first stage of supranational integration. It was
followed by membership of the Iron and Steel Community of 1950, of Nato in
1955 and the Common Market in 1957.
This early and lasting internationalization of the Federal Republic had
multiple purposes. The first was to ensure Western security, on which the
aims of the Western powers and Konrad Adenauer converged. Nothing helped
Adenauer more than Kurt Schumacher’s jibe that he was “the chancellor of the
Allies”. That was exactly what the majority of West Germans wanted. The
second was to provide a new generation of Germans with an identity that
transcended frontiers. Whether this will work in the long run we cannot
tell, now that the blocs are ceasing to be blocs, but it was a powerful
factor for at least two decades. The third was to remove a major source of
European wars during the preceding century, the antagonism between France
and Germany. The Franco-German relationship has had its ups and downs, but
that it is now the axis on which the politics and economy of Europe revolve
is surely beyond dispute. Hidden in these three sets of motives was a
fourth, unwritten one. For the Western Allies it was to maintain German
subordination, for the West Germans to maximize their bargaining position,
given the suspicions with which the rest of the world, East and West,
regarded them. It is worth remembering the original raison d’etre of Nato:
“to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down”. Nato has
achieved the first two. The West German economy has irrevocably negated the
third.
Where, then, does this leave the population of the Federal Republic as we
begin to examine the blueprints of the new European home? Karl Jaspers may
have engaged in wishful thinking when he proclaimed in 1962 that the age of
the nation-state was over. The notion that frontiers should coincide with
cultures is too strongly embedded to be swept away by the abuses to which it
has been put. Tribal emotions survive. Spasms of them recur whenever West
German sportsmen win the World Cup or become Wimbledon champions, West
German scientists win Nobel Prizes, or Audi or BMW is voted car of the year
in a foreign consumer magazine. But most West Germans identify, however
unequally, with their own republic, with the German nation and “the West”.
Karl-Dietrich Bracher’s formula of a “post-national democracy” gets it about
right.
The year 1989 was therefore a highly suitable moment at which to take stock of
this puzzling, but ultimately reassuring amalgam of the traditional and the
unprecedented, not because it marked, as everyone thought it would, an
arbitrarily chosen anniversary, but because, as it turned out, it initiated
the true end of the post-war era. Dennis L. Bark and David R. Gress set
themselves this task over nearly 1,200 pages. There is a lot of information
in their two volumes, helpful annotation, a good index and a comprehensive
bibliography. Anyone wanting a political chronology of the past forty-five
years will find their work a useful study aid. But they have set themselves
a more ambitious task. They hoped to write, in the spirit of Ranke,
verstandene Geschichte, history comprehended. And they hoped to defend the
Federal Republic against its left-wing detractors, an idea that came to them
at a university conference that seems to have been addressed exclusively by
escapees from an asylum for the loonier left, whom they, however, regarded
as “typical of much academic opinion in both West Germany and the United
States”. What was needed, they concluded, was a revised version, free from
“one-sided views” and “selective distortions”. On neither of these counts
can they be considered successful.
A History of West Germany, detailed and meticulous as it is, lacks themes.
There is next to no emphasis or accentuation, little discrimination between
the essential and the contingent, the trivial and the momentous. Virtually
nowhere can the reader not already familiar with post-war Germany stop and
say to himself: here is a point at which history turned, here is an event or
a decision without which the rest of the story would have been different. It
is, after all, not too difficult to isolate the factors that have made the
Federal Republic a success: Adenauer’s foreign policy vision, a workable
constitution and the social market economy.
Only the first of these is dealt with at all adequately and here the authors
are on relatively safe ground. However controversial Adenauer’s Western
option might have been at the time -- and this the book brings out clearly
-- it is in retrospect widely accepted. Former liberal critics of Adenauer,
like Arnulf Baring, freely acknowledge this. Indeed, events since the book
was published lend spectacular support to the Adenauer thesis that if only
the West sits tight, the East will collapse under the internal
contradictions of Marxism-Leninism. The weakness of the Adenauer position
was that, like his fellow-Rhinelander Karl Marx, he had few notions on what
the world would be like after the enemy had been overthrown. Nor does the
Adenauer scenario invalidate the Ostpolitik of the 1970s, conducted with
“nervous haste” according to Bark and Gress. Both the intention and the
effect of “Wandel durch Annäherung” (change through rapprochement) was to
help create the sort of civil society in the GDR that could challenge and
replace the Communist dictatorship. The crowds that welcomed Chancellor
Brandt with chants of “Willy, Willy” were the predecessors of those who
filled the centre of Leipzig with calls of “We are the people”. Those
attending the Federal Republic’s birthday parties needed to ask themselves
not only: Where would all this be without Adenauer? but: Where would all
this be without Brandt?
Bark and Gress are clearly interested in foreign policy. They are just as
evidently bored by constitutions and economics. The discussion of the Basic
Law is perfunctory in the extreme. The revolutionary innovation of the
Federal Constitutional Court is mentioned only in passing. The long debate
in the Parliamentary Council on executive-legislative relations, which
resulted in the adoption of the “constructive no confidence vote”, by which
a Chancellor could be overthrown only if there were a majority for a
successor, is ignored. The electoral law is not part of the constitution
and, in the form in which they cite it, was not passed until 1956. At no
stage is there a coherent discussion of how much of the Federal Republic’s
stability is derived from the formal or normative provisions of the Basic
Law.
Lastly there is the economy. Here the crucial decisions were taken very early.
The authors rightly devote about one-fifth of their book to events before
1949, when many of the most critical choices were made. These included the
currency reform of 1948, of all the policy options of those years the one
with the most immediate impact and the most lasting effect. Bark and Gress
duly give it a chapter, along with a brief account of the then current
economic theories, but without much guidance on how it fitted into the
post-war evolution of the Western zones.
What was introduced in 1948 was a market economy. The social element, in so
far as it was not inherited, came later: the first step towards it came in
1952 with co-determination in heavy industry, the second in 1957 with the
dynamische Rente, a universal, indexed, old-age pension. Both are duly
mentioned, but the reader would need to guess at their role in defusing
class conflict and drawing the trade unions into a consensus that the Social
Democratic Party would sooner or later have to follow. Both had an
ideological as well as a pragmatic purpose, despite Adenauer’s reluctance on
co-determination: to buy social peace, but above all to demonstrate to all
Germans, East and West, that a liberal economic order could provide not only
prosperity but justice.
While there is little coherence in the authors’ narrative, there is all too
much in their propaganda. Their conclusion is simple: that the left was
never in the right, a proposition that seems implausible on any random
principle. Now the left is not exempt from original sin, in Germany or
anywhere else. Its members have said many silly things and done some wicked
ones. But what kind of verdict is this on the student movement of the 1960s:
“The new father figures -- the bearded student revolutionaries -- were far
more tyrannical and authoritarian than the old ones had been”? They and the
Nazis “both blamed present depravity on specific ‘guilty parties’ who had to
be eradicated if the radiant future was to become reality. The Nazis pointed
to the Jews; the student radicals of the 1960s to American capitalism and
its German allies, in particular the CDU/CSU.” As for antisemitism in
post-war Germany, Bark and Gress devote five pages to its undeniably
repulsive manifestations on the radical left. But is that the only place
where it is to be found? Who vandalizes Jewish cemeteries, the Greens? Do we
really attribute the anti-missile marches of 1983 to the Communists who
“suitably camouflaged, took care of renting buses and trains, directing the
marchers and making sure that the banners bore innocuous slogans”? What has
happened to the commitment to eschew one-sided views and selective
distortions?
This approach is at its weakest when the authors address the relationship of
contemporary Germans with the past. That is a topic that will not go away,
as the recent historians’ dispute has demonstrated. It arose at an early
stage in Adenauer’s administration over high offices for compromised officials.
The first prominent case was that of Hans Globke, who became head of the
Chancellor’s Office. He was also the author of the authoritative commentary
on the Nuremberg Laws. But wait: critics of Globke “could not provide a
satisfactory answer to those who pointed to the thousands or perhaps tens of
thousands of German Jews who were able to leave Germany thanks to the
interpretation of the Nuremberg Laws that Globke provided”. This is very
mysterious, since enforced emigration was in fact Nazi policy until 1939.
Nor does it fit with Globke the drafter of the laws that abolished state
governments in 1933 or formed the basis for the “Germanization” policies in
occupied territories after 1939. The second case was that of Theodor
Oberländer. a minister in Adenauer’s cabinet, first of the Expellees’ Party
(BHE) and then of the CDU, with a record of mass expulsions and mass
executions in the war-time East. Bark and Gross have a better solution to
the Oberländer problem. They do not mention him at all.
There is a realist case for Adenauer’s blind eye. Externally it was necessary
to make peace with victims and former enemies, which he did -- genuinely and
generously -- with France and the Jews. At home, it was necessary to build
the future by drawing a veil over the past, for to dwell on the past was to
divide the nation. Why not come clean on this, instead of dragging up
ancient, threadbare excuses?
All benefits, however, have their cost. The argument against keeping Globke
and Oberländer in office was not that they were criminals, but that this
gave the wrong moral signals. Their appointments offended against style as
well as justice. And so the 1950s in Germany became history-less.
Reconstruction required practical skills, not doubt and self-analysis. One
cannot understand the radicalism of the 1960s, excesses and all, without
also seeing it as a renewed search for history -- at its worst, as revenge
on silent, and therefore presumably guilty, parents. Only in this context
can the shock of the concentration camp guards’ trials in the 1960s, and the
heated debate on extending the limitations statute on Nazi crimes, be
understood. Only in this context, too, does the historians’ dispute of the
1980s make sense. It really will not do to assert, as do Bark and Gress,
that only Ernst Nolte’s opponents “had a prior political commitment to a
certain view of the Holocaust and the matter of German guilt” or continually
“resurrected (Nazism) for contemporary political and ideological reasons”.
Nobody can discuss the recent German past without relating it to the
present, as any reading of the conservative contributors to this debate,
whether Nolte, Hillgruber. Fest or Stürmer, will show. Bark and Gress quote
from Charles Maier’s The Unmasterable Past, but they do not seem to have
taken his argument on board.
There is a difference between conservative historiography and partisan
polemic. Recent works by conservatively inclined German historians of the
modern period, such as Hagen Schulze and Thomas Nipperdey, are sensitive and
original contributions that go some way towards rehabilitating national
identity and middle-class values. They can be read with profit by those who
would dissent from some of their conclusions. They are a thousand miles away
from the splenetic point-scoring that disfigures too much of Bark and Gress.
We still need a “comprehended” history of the Federal Republic.
Peter Pulzer DENNIS L. BARK and DAVID B. GRESS
A History of West Germany Volume One: From Shadow to Substance 1945-1963
579pp.
Volume Two: Democracy and Its Discontents 1963-1988 567pp.
Oxford: Black well. £30 each.
To read the review in this week's TLS by Hans Kundnani of Documents
on British Policy Overseas: Series III, Volume VII: German Reunification
1989–1990, edited by Patrick Salmon, Keith Hamilton and Stephen Twigge, click
here.
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