[Peace-discuss] Our Nato ally

[C. G. Estabrook]

	"Meine Ruh' ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer,
	Ich finde sie nimmer und nimmermehr..."

= one of the few bits of German verse (from Faust) I remember, and it seems to
fit this peculiar summer of our discontent. (Frank Rich, who's about my age,
would seem to think so too, judging from his column in yesterday's NYT.)  So I'm
appending a long and difficult but quite brilliant analysis of German politics 
on the eve of their election.

Germany is perhaps even more important than the UK to the US neo-colonial war 
against the Middle East. (US planners say that the UK -- with 200+ dead in AfPak 
-- is important only because a real political debate in the UK about the war 
there might awaken the US public.)

David Johnson & I will be discussing Germany, NATO, and the US war in AfPak -- 
and how some liberals are in favor of "Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee" (the 
title of Nat Hentoff's book from 15 years ago) -- on "News from Neptune" this 
Friday at 7pm on UPTV (and eventually online).

==============================================

	New Left Review 57, May-June 2009
	PERRY ANDERSON: A NEW GERMANY?

In the international clamour that has surrounded the onset of the current 
economic crisis, Germany has often appeared the still centre. Yet such seeming 
passivity belies the enormous structural changes that the country has undergone 
since the fall of the Wall. Polity, economy, culture and society have been 
subject to acute, often contradictory pressures. It is barely a decade since the 
federal capital was relocated, 300 miles to the east; less than that since the 
D-Mark disappeared and Germany assumed its dominant position within the 
eurozone. Politically, a new post-unification landscape began to emerge only 
with the elections of 1998, when fatigue with Helmut Kohl’s 16-year reign, 
broken promises in the East and, above all, slow growth and stubbornly high 
rates of unemployment ushered in a Red–Green coalition. No attempt to track 
Germany’s current direction can avoid consideration of these subterranean shifts.
I. politics

In 1998, Gerhard Schröder’s most prominent single pledge had been to halve the 
number of jobless within his term of office. How was this to be done? Oskar 
Lafontaine, the popular spd chairman installed as Finance Minister, had no 
doubts: reanimation of the German economy depended on scrapping the deflationary 
Stability Pact that Bonn had imposed as a price for monetary union, and boosting 
domestic consumption with counter-cyclical policies along Keynesian lines. After 
a few months of frustration, he was overboard. [1] Schröder, relieved to be shot 
of a rival, opted for orthodoxy: balancing the budget came first. Lafontaine’s 
successor, Hans Eichel, became a byword for wooden, if far from successful, 
devotion to the task of consolidating public finances. Tax cuts, when they came, 
were for capital not labour, assisting corporations and banks rather than 
consumers. Growth did not pick up. When the spd–Green government faced the 
voters again in 2002, its economic record was in effect a wash-out. Schröder had 
boasted he would reduce unemployment to 5 per cent. As the coalition went to the 
polls, it was just under 10 per cent. A scattering of modest social reforms, the 
most significant a long-overdue liberalization of the rules for naturalization, 
had done little to offset this failure.

Externally, on the other hand, the coalition enjoyed a less constrained field of 
operations. Within a year of coming to power, it had committed Germany to the 
Balkan War, dispatching the Luftwaffe to fly once again over Yugoslavia. 
Presented as a vital humanitarian mission to prevent another Holocaust on 
European soil, German participation in Operation Allied Force was greeted with 
all but unanimous domestic applause: by Centre-Right opinion as robust proof of 
the recovered national self-confidence of the country as a military power, by 
Centre-Left as an inspiring example of international conscience and 
philanthropy. In the media, the decisive conversion of the Greens to military 
action was the occasion for particular satisfaction. Two years later, the 
Bundeswehr had left Europe behind to play its part in the occupation of 
Afghanistan; a suitable regime for that country was fixed up between interested 
parties in Bonn, and a German general was soon in command of allied forces in 
Kabul. This expedition too met with general approval, if—a remoter venture—less 
active enthusiasm among voters. Germany was becoming a normal force for the 
good, as responsible as any other power in the democratic West.

In public standing, this transformation stood Red–Green rule in good stead. It 
made Fischer, its most profuse spokesman, the most popular politician in the 
land. But this was a position Foreign Ministers in the Bundesrepublik, usually 
representing smaller parties, had long enjoyed, as pastors of the nation’s 
conscience—not merely the interminable Hans-Dietrich Genscher, but even the 
imperceptible Klaus Kinkel possessing the same esteem in their time. Nor, of 
course, did loyalty to nato distinguish government from opposition. Prestige in 
performance abroad is rarely a substitute for prosperity at home, as figures on 
a larger scale—Bush Senior or Gorbachev—discovered. Heading into the elections 
in 2002, the spd–Green coalition was far behind the cdu–csu in the polls. The 
Christian Democrats had been seriously damaged by revelations of Kohl’s 
long-standing corruption—the party was extremely lucky these emerged after he 
had ceased to be ruler, rather than while in office. [2] But the solidarity of a 
political class, few of whose houses were not also built of glass, ensured that, 
as elsewhere in the West, the incriminated was never prosecuted, let alone 
punished; the waters rapidly closed over the episode without much benefit to the 
Social Democrats. With the economy still floundering, the opposition looked 
primed for victory.

In the summer of 2002, however, the countdown to the invasion of Iraq, signalled 
well in advance, altered the atmosphere. Regime change in Baghdad, however 
welcome a prospect in itself, clearly involved bigger risks than in Belgrade or 
Kabul, making public opinion in Germany much jumpier. Sensing popular 
apprehension, and fortified by the reserve of France, Schröder announced that 
Berlin would not join an attack on Iraq even—Habermas was scandalized—if the un 
were to authorize one. Fischer, devoted to the previous American administration, 
was reduced to muttering assent in the wings, while Christian Democracy was 
caught thoroughly off-balance—unable to back Washington openly, yet unwilling to 
fall into line behind the Chancellor. Schröder’s advantage was complete: this 
time, German pride could sport colours of peace rather than war, and to boot, 
the opposition could not share them. It only remained for the biblical 
intervention of a flood in the East, when the Elbe burst its banks, permitting a 
well-televised display of hands-on energy and compassion, to put him over the 
top. When the votes were counted in September, the spd had a margin of 6,000 
over the cdu–csu, and the coalition was back in power with a majority of eleven 
seats in the Bundestag. [3]

Once banked electorally, public opposition to the attack on Baghdad could 
recede, and discreet practical support be extended to the American war effort, 
German agents providing undercover identification of targets for Shock and Awe. 
In Europe, the occupation—as distinct from invasion—of Iraq was anyway soon 
accepted as an accomplished fact, losing political salience. But Schröder was 
careful to maintain the entente with Chirac he had formed during the run-up to 
the war, gratifying the Elysée both economically and politically, by conceding 
an extension of the Common Agricultural Policy and continued French parity with 
Germany in the weighting arrangements of the Treaty of Nice. Close alignment 
with France was, of course, traditional German policy since the days of 
Adenauer. For Schröder, however, it now afforded cover for overtures to Russia 
that were precluded when the ussr still existed, and might otherwise have been 
suspect of a second Rapallo. Warmly supported by German business, enjoying 
lucrative contracts in Russia, Schröder’s friendship with Putin—‘a flawless 
democrat’ in the Chancellor’s words—met with a cool reception in the media. 
Geopolitically, the growth of ties between Berlin and Moscow was the most 
significant novelty of Schröder’s tenure. But politically, it counted for little 
at home.
Liberalization

There, as his second term began, the economic problems that had originally 
elected him remained apparently intact. Aware how narrowly he had escaped 
punishment for failing to deal with them, and goaded by criticisms in the press, 
Schröder now decided to bite the neo-liberal bullet, as authorized opinion had 
long urged him to. [4] In the autumn of 2003, the Red–Green coalition passed a 
package of measures, dubbed Agenda 2010, to break the much decried 
Reformstau—blockage of needed improvements—in the Federal Republic. It comprised 
the standard recipes of the period: cutting the dole, raising the age of 
retirement, outsourcing health-insurance, reducing subsidies, abolishing craft 
requirements, extending shopping hours. German Social-Democracy had finally 
steeled itself to the social retrenchment and deregulation of the labour market 
from which Christian Democracy, throughout its long years in power, had 
flinched. Editors and executives, even if mostly wishing the Agenda had been 
tougher, were full of praise.

The spd had, in fact, passed a more concentrated and comprehensive bout of 
neo-liberal legislation than New Labour, a much-invoked model, was ever to do. 
But the political landscape in which Agenda 2010 was introduced was not that of 
Britain under Blair. On the one hand, there was no Thatcherism in Germany for 
social-democracy to inherit—it had been forced to do the same originating job 
for capital itself, rather than simply extending it further in the same 
direction. On the other, the German working class and its organizations remained 
substantially stronger than in Britain. If trade-union density was 
comparable—less than a third of the workforce in either case—the dgb commanded 
significantly greater bargaining power, through traditional corporatist 
institutions of wage negotiation and co-determination, than the tuc; while the 
spd itself, with over double the membership of New Labour, was far less hollowed 
out as a party. The result was twofold: the neo-liberal thrust of Agenda 2010, 
coming not from the radical right but a hang-dog centre, was inevitably much 
weaker than that of Thatcher’s regime, while the resistance to it within a 
still—relatively—uncastrated labour movement was much stronger than among 
Blair’s following.

Predictably enough, the neo-liberal turn, conducted without zest and received 
without enthusiasm, was something of a wash-out. For all its fanfare in the 
media, Agenda 2010 had minimal effect on the economy: even the most benevolent 
estimates could not attribute more than 0.2 per cent of additional gdp growth to 
it. [5] But its effect on the political scene was another matter. The final dose 
of the package, ‘Hartz iv’, cutting unemployment benefit—named after the 
human-relations chief of Volkswagen, a long-time intimate of Schröder in Lower 
Saxony, who designed it—was too bitter for the unions to swallow with good 
grace. Growing unrest in the base of the spd, and limited breakaways from it in 
the Ruhr and elsewhere in the West, ensued. In the Länder, the party lost one 
election after another. As evidence of its unpopularity mounted, discontent with 
Schröder grew. Finally, in the spring of 2005, the spd was routed even in its 
traditional stronghold of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in the 
federation, where its boss had been promoted to the Ministry responsible for 
framing Agenda 2010. Fearing to repeat the fate of Helmut Schmidt in 1981, 
repudiated by his own party for drifting too far to the right, Schröder decided 
on a pre-emptive strike, calling elections a year early, before he could be 
challenged.

To do so he had to circumvent the Constitution, which forbade dissolution of 
parliament at the will of the Chancellor, by staging a fake vote of confidence 
from which his deputies were instructed to abstain, to ensure his own defeat. 
This transparent violation of the Grundgesetz received approval from the highest 
court in the land, in a graphic illustration of the limits of Germany’s post-war 
legalism: since the leaders of both the spd and the cdu, each for their own 
reasons, wanted to break the law, the judges accommodated them. Merkel, now 
heading the cdu–csu ticket, could not wait to cash its lead—20 points ahead—in 
the opinion polls; Schröder could be sure the spd had no choice but to rally to 
him. The contest that followed was fiercer than any since the attempt to bring 
down Brandt in 1972. By now the media, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Welt and 
Spiegel leading the pack, were in full cry after Schröder, rounding on him for 
empty opportunism, and clamouring for a sharp break with the paralytic 
corporatism of the past. Egged on by the press, where she was hailed as the 
Thatcher the country needed, Merkel ran a stridently neo-liberal campaign, 
promising a society based on individual efforts and flat taxes, without 
mollycoddling. Schröder, seeing his chance, counter-attacked with brio, 
ridiculing her fiscal proposals and denouncing the new cdu as a threat to social 
solidarity. [6] So effective was his onslaught that by polling day Merkel’s huge 
initial advantage had evaporated. When votes were counted, the cdu–csu was ahead 
of the spd by less than 1 per cent, with four seats more in the Bundestag, and 
no parliamentary majority even with its ally the fdp. Schröder had to step down; 
but to govern, Merkel had to form a Grand Coalition with his party.
ii. economy

Few greeted this outcome with much expectation. At best, it was generally held, 
if the two main parties had to share the onus of necessary but unpopular 
measures, rather than being able to blame each other for them, liberal reforms 
had somewhat more chance of reaching the statute-book. At worst, conflicts 
between them could lead to still direr immobilism. In fact, however, beneath the 
political surface of polls and parties, deep structural changes had been 
underway, altering the parameters of rule. The unification of Germany had 
transformed the country, in two equally paradoxical ways. The long stagnation of 
the German economy, the central social fact of the years since 1989, is normally 
attributed in large measure, and not without reason, to the enormous costs of 
absorbing the former ddr—about $1.3 trillion at the latest count, requiring 
massive exceptional taxation, diversion of investment from productive innovation 
to infrastructural and environmental reconstruction, and escalating public debt. 
Notoriously, Germany’s lapse from grace was so drastic that the country which 
had originally gone out of its way to clamp the Stability Pact, forbidding any 
member-state to run a deficit of over 3 per cent of gdp, like a fiscal Iron 
Virgin onto Europe’s Monetary Union, became itself the worst recidivist from it, 
violating its provisions six times in defiance of the Commission.

But in what seemed such a heavy burden to German capital also lay the conditions 
of its reinvigoration. For unification decisively weakened labour. When West 
German trade unions attempted to extend their organizations to the East, and 
uphold nation-wide wage rates comparable to those in the West, they encountered 
industries that were crumbling so fast, and workers so beaten by surrounding 
unemployment, that failure was more or less foreordained. But once the East 
could not be integrated into the traditional corporatist arrangements of Modell 
Deutschland, these inevitably came under increasing strain in the West too. 
Cheaper labour in the former ddr was soon overtaken by still lower wage costs in 
Eastern Europe, as the prospect and then reality of eu enlargement drew a 
growing volume of German investment into Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, 
Poland and elsewhere. Beyond these, in turn, lay outsourcing of plants to Asia, 
Latin America, the Middle East, driving the original wedge of unification yet 
further into the domestic economy, prising loose the labour market.

The result was a steep decline, not just in the numerical strength of German 
trade unions—membership of the dgb dropping from 11 million in 1991 to 7.7 
million in 2003—but in their ability to resist unrelenting pressures from German 
capital. Real wages fell for seven successive years, giving German firms an ever 
sharper competitive edge in high-end international markets. By 2004, Germany was 
once more—as it had been in the seventies—the world’s leading exporter of 
manufactures. Such success was built, not on an outstanding performance in 
productivity—us gains were significantly greater in the same period—but on wage 
repression, as workers were forced to accept longer hours and less pay under 
threat of outsourcing, and domestic consumption remained flat. But with a 
swelling export surplus, investment increased and once the business cycle kicked 
up, growth at last accelerated in 2006, just as Merkel settled into office. By 
early 2008, unemployment had dropped by nearly two million. The serum of 
deregulation, injected from the East, seemed finally to have worked.
Backwash

Yet, in a second and reverse paradox, the unification which transformed the 
economic constitution of the country, releasing a less inhibited, more ruthless 
capitalism, has shifted its political landscape in the opposite direction. For 
the vast sums poured into the East, though they modernized the fixtures and 
fittings of society—communications, buildings, services, amenities—failed to 
create any commensurate industrial prosperity or sense of collective dignity and 
equality within the Federal Republic. The ddr was shabby, authoritarian, archaic 
by the standards of Bonn. But in the shadow of the state, all were employed and 
still relatively equal. With annexation by the West, and rapid demolition of the 
larger part of its industrial park, carpet-baggers arrived and jobs disappeared. 
In the rest of the ex-Soviet empire, the immediate sequels to Communism were 
often harsher, as countries that were poorer to start with fell into their own 
patterns of dislocation and recession. But, not squeezed into the same instant 
compression-chamber of competition, they had more breathing-space for adjustment 
and reconversion; it was not long before their rates of growth were higher and 
rates of unemployment lower than those of the neue Bundesländer. This superior 
performance had not just economic, but sociological roots. In Poland, Slovakia 
or Hungary, the restoration of capitalism was accomplished by local political 
elites—typically a combination of ex-dissidents and former party functionaries 
on the make—who made sure its fruits went principally to them. However popular 
or unpopular they might be at any point in the electoral cycle, they were an 
integral part of the local society.

In East Germany, no comparable stratum emerged. There, top political, economic 
and cultural positions in the new Länder were rapidly dominated—indeed, often 
virtually monopolized—by an influx of Westerners. Thus although unification 
would raise overall living standards in the East, as even the jobless received 
Western-style benefits, capitalism was widely experienced as a colonization 
rather than self-promotion, let alone emancipation. Even where it brought 
material benefits, it was not appropriated as a native dynamic, but remained 
inflicted, a force still felt as substantially alien. [7] Had all boats risen in 
the same tide, as Kohl promised, this effect would certainly have been less. But 
the painful sense of a cashiered past—a life-world irretrievably devalued—was 
not just a subjective reaction to the consequences of unification. It had an 
objective reflexion in the demographic disaster that overtook the East in these 
years, as the old lingered, the young left, and the middle-aged were shelved. A 
population of 16 million in 1989 had collapsed to 12.5 million by 2008, and was 
set to fall further—perhaps much further—with the exodus of young women to the 
West. Between 1993 and 2008, no less than two-thirds of 18–29-year-olds born in 
the East had abandoned it. [8] In the ddr, a leading writer from the region has 
remarked, buildings rotted, but they contained people, who had work; now the 
buildings are brightly refurbished, and the people are dead or gone. A quarter 
of the housing stock is empty, and many a smaller centre of habitation, 
particularly in the north, risks becoming a ghost-town.

In these conditions, the one party to defend a certain memory and express a 
regional identity could scarcely fail to flourish. When Kohl fell, the pds had a 
fifth of the vote in the East. When Schröder fell, it had a quarter, and was the 
second largest party in the region, a whisker ahead of the cdu and not far short 
of the spd. [9] Such growth was not uninterrupted, nor without setbacks: a drop 
in its vote in 2002, loss of office in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a sharp rebuff 
for its acceptance of social retrenchment in Berlin in 2006. Nor was the 
evolution of the party itself any linear progress. Its two most prominent 
leaders, Gregor Gysi and Lothar Bisky, withdrew for a period, after failing to 
persuade it that German troops needed to be available for military missions 
dispatched by the Security Council. Its members remained extremely advanced in 
years: three-quarters of them pensioners, more than half over seventy. In a 
sense, such severe limitations made the resilience of the pds all the more 
remarkable.
A new Left

What transformed a regional into a national force was the neo-liberal turn of 
the Schröder government. There were demonstrations all over Germany against 
Hartz iv, but the pds mobilized the largest in its Eastern bastions, some 
100,000 strong. In the West, the groupings based in the unions that broke away 
from the spd formed a list that ran, without great success, in the next Land 
polls and wary discussion of some kind of cooperation between the two forces 
followed. It was Schröder’s decision to call a snap election in 2005 that 
galvanized what might otherwise have been a protracted and inconclusive process. 
Running on a common platform as simply die Linke—‘the Left’—their combination 
took 8.7 per cent of the national vote, ahead of the Greens and not far short of 
the fdp, netting 54 seats in the Bundestag. [10] The catalyst for this success 
was Oskar Lafontaine, returning to the political scene as the leader of the 
Western wing of Die Linke. Hated for quitting Schröder’s government even before 
its turn to the right, and feared for his tactical and rhetorical skills, 
Lafontaine was henceforward the bête noire of the spd—a traitor who still 
undeservedly enjoyed national recognition, and could now encroach on its 
electoral base. So, in effect, it proved. In one Land election after another in 
the West, where the pds had never been able to gain a foothold, Die Linke easily 
cleared the threshold for entry into the Assembly—Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, 
Hesse—with a variety of local candidates. More ominously still, national opinion 
polls gave Die Linke between 10 and 13 per cent of the electorate, making it 
potentially the third largest party.

Behind the rise of Die Linke has also lain the long-term decline of the two 
dominant parties of the Bonn Republic. In the mid-seventies the cdu–csu and spd 
commanded 90 per cent of the electorate. By 2005, their share had sunk to 70 per 
cent. Remorselessly, secularization and tertiarization have shrunk what were 
once the core electorates of each. Church-going Catholics, 46 per cent of the 
cdu–csu vote in 1969, had plummeted to 12 per cent in 2005; unionized manual 
workers from 25 per cent of the spd vote to just 9 per cent. Their memberships 
too have fallen steeply: the spd from over 940,000 in 1990 to just under 530,000 
in 2008; the cdu from some 750,000 to a fraction over 530,000—the first time it 
has surpassed its rival; the csu, which has held up best, from 186,000 to 
166,000. [11] After the war, under an electoral system that distributes seats in 
the Bundestag proportionately to the votes of any party with at least 5 per cent 
of the ballots cast, the formation of a government had usually required the 
participation of the fdp, which held the balance between the two blocs. With the 
emergence of the Greens in the seventies, this three-party system gradually 
became a four-way contest, making a government without the fdp possible for the 
first time in 1998, the Red–Green coalition.

The consolidation of Die Linke, were it to hold, would transform this political 
calculus, making it mathematically more difficult for any two-party combination 
to achieve the requisite majority in parliament, other than a Grand Coalition 
between Christian and Social Democracy along current lines. This has long been 
the normal formula in Austria, and might eventually become so, faute de mieux, 
in Germany. But the political traditions of the two countries are not the same. 
The institutionalized carve-up of positions in state and economy between 
Catholics and Socialists in the Proporz system, a reaction-formation arising 
from the experience of civil war in the Austria of the thirties, has never had a 
counterpart in the Federal Republic. Here grand coalitions, anyway liable to be 
destabilized by the cycle of competitive Länder elections, have always been 
regarded by both parties as abnormal makeshifts that encourage extremism on 
their flanks, to be wound up as soon as possible. In the sixties, it was the cdu 
that lost ground in the Grand Coalition, to the advantage of the spd. Today it 
is the other way around, Merkel and her colleagues benefiting at the expense of 
a seemingly rudderless Social Democracy, as Schröder’s departure left a divided 
party, tacking clumsily away from the centre to counter the rise of Die Linke, 
to the ire of its neo-liberal wing, without much to show for it electorally. 
With its ratings currently around a quarter of the electorate, depths never 
reached before in post-war history, the spd faces the prospect of a structural 
crisis. For what unification has delivered is, in effect, a new political system.
Red–Red–Green?

In the Berlin Republic, the combined forces of the spd, Greens and Left have to 
date commanded a sociological majority that was never available to Social 
Democracy during the Bonn years: some 53 per cent in 1998, 51 per cent in 2002 
and 2005, as against successively 41 per cent, 46 per cent and 45 per cent for 
the cdu, csu and fdp. But this structural alteration of the underlying balance 
of forces in the country so far remains ideologically debarred from expression 
at federal level. The pds and now Die Linke have been treated as beyond the pale 
of respectable partnership in national government, considered tainted by descent 
from Communism. In 1998 and 2002, the spd and the Greens did not need the pds 
for a majority in the Bundestag. But in 2005, Schröder ceased to be Chancellor 
only because of the taboo against forming a government with the support of the 
Left. Had the spd and Greens been willing to do so, the three parties together 
would have enjoyed a robust parliamentary majority of 40. Since this combination 
remained unthinkable, the spd was forced into the arms of the cdu–csu as a 
junior partner, unsurprisingly to its detriment.

The record of the Grand Coalition has for the most part been an uninspired tale 
of wrangling over low-level social-liberal reforms as the economic upswing of 
2006–07 reduced unemployment and absorbed the deficit with increased tax 
revenues, before the country plunged into deep recession in late 2008. Merkel, 
presiding over a recovery that owed little to her tenure, and a depression no 
less beyond her control, has benefited from both, with ratings that far outstrip 
any potential spd candidate for her post in 2009. But this popularity, probably 
as passing as any other, owes more to a carefully cultivated manner of 
unpretentious womanly Sachlichkeit, the staging of foreign policy spectacles—G8, 
Eurosummit—and the current fear of instability, than to any special reputation 
for domestic efficacy. In opposition Merkel occupied positions on the tough 
right of the political spectrum, supporting the invasion of Iraq and attacking 
welfare dependence. In power, though more anti-Communist than Schröder, and 
cooler to Russia, she has otherwise cleaved to the centre, leaving little to 
distinguish her incumbency from his. Fortwursteln remains the tacit motto. [12]

Trapped into a debilitating cohabitation, its poll numbers steadily sinking, as 
matters stand the spd risks a crushing defeat in 2009. Attempts to stop the 
spread of Die Linke with a few social gestures—call for a federal minimum wage, 
restoration of commuter subsidies—have made little impression on the electorate. 
In desperation, the party’s hapless chairman Kurt Beck—the fourth in five 
years—called for amendments to Hartz iv, as the heaviest albatross round its 
neck, before being ousted by the still strong spd right, which has installed 
Schröder’s long-term factotum, Foreign Minister Steinmeier, as its candidate for 
Chancellor. Beyond such floundering, younger office-holders have started to 
contemplate the unthinkable: coming to terms with the Left. The statistical 
logic of a Red–Green–Dark Red coalition, long theoretically plain, risks 
becoming more and more a practical torment for German Social Democracy. In 
Berlin, Klaus Wowereit has held the capital for the spd in a compact with the 
pds–Linke for seven years, without even Green support. But for political 
purposes, Berlin counts as part of the East, and its big-city profile anyway 
separates it from the rest of the country—Wowereit belonging to the phenomenon 
of the good-time mayor of the metropolis, strong on shows and happenings, less 
so on budgets or utilities, that has produced Livingstone in London, Delanoë in 
Paris, Veltroni in Rome. Its electoral arithmetic is too atypical to offer any 
wider paradigm. More significant has been the debacle of the spd in Hesse, where 
the local party leader Andrea Ypsilanti, after sternly promising not to make any 
deal with the Left, attempted to form a Red–Green government dependent for a 
hair-breadth majority on the support of Die Linke. With this, a step would have 
been taken whose implications escape no one. Once the taboo was broken in a 
Western Land, it could be replicated at federal level.

Between that cup and the lip, however, there remains a considerable distance. In 
part this is because, for the draught of an alternative coalition to be 
drunk—bitter enough, for the apparat of the party—the Greens have to be willing, 
too. But their days of counter-cultural insurgency are long over. Once ensconced 
in office in the Berlin Republic, they shifted further to the right than the spd 
under Schröder, embracing market-friendly and nato-proud policies that would 
have been anathema in the seventies. The party has become an increasingly tame 
prop of the establishment, its ranks filled with politically correct yuppies 
competing with the fdp as a softer-edged version of German liberalism. Fischer’s 
own evolution, from bovver boy of the Putz faction of Revolutionary Struggle in 
Frankfurt to golden boy of Madeleine Albright, was an exaggerated version of 
this development. But his prominence as the Green talisman on the hustings, and 
consistent flattery in the media, meant that he could take the party further 
into a Kaisertreu Atlanticism than it might otherwise have gone. [13] With his 
departure, the party has showed signs of trying to row back from the Western 
adventure in Afghanistan, if only on seeing how unpopular it was becoming. 
Structurally, however, the party has altered sufficiently to be a possible 
partner in power with the cdu. A Black–Green coalition is already in place in 
Hamburg and, niceties of energy policy aside, much of the party is in many ways 
now ideologically closer to Merkel than to Lafontaine. How far its voters would 
accept a connubium with the Centre-Right is less clear, and the principal 
inhibition on such a scenario.

If the Greens dislike talk of a ‘left bloc’, the spd is more divided, with 
younger figures like the party’s deputy chair Andrea Nahles willing to toy with 
the prospect of such a combination in future. But its old guard, not to speak of 
the eager neo-liberal modernizers, both viscerally anti-Communist, remain 
appalled at the idea, and enjoy widespread intellectual support. For 
left-liberal historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Heinrich August Winkler, the 
very thought of the spd supping with the Stalinist Gysi and the renegade 
Lafontaine recalls nightmares of Weimar, when the party failed to see the need 
to abandon its Marxist illusions and forge a firm alliance with the Catholic 
Centre and moderate Liberals against the dangers of revolutionary extremism. 
[14] The press, naturally, brings its weight to bear in the same sense. In 
Hesse, the right of the party had no hesitation in torpedoing the prospect of an 
spd government, preferring to hand power back to a Black–Yellow coalition—which 
won a crushing victory after Ypsilanti was ditched by her own 
second-in-command—rather than permit contamination by Communism. Would not the 
spd in any case fatally lose the middle ground, if it were tempted to treat with 
the pariah to its left? Such arguments could paralyse the social logic of a 
realignment for a long time.

What, finally, of Die Linke itself? Like any hybrid formation, it faces the task 
of welding its disparate fractions into a political force with a common 
identity. Prior to the fusion, its pds component had suffered a yet steeper 
attrition of membership—biologically determined—than the large parties, even as 
it increased its electorate. The ability of the new party to appeal to a younger 
generation across the country will be critical to its future. Programmatically, 
resistance to further deregulation of markets and erosion of social protections 
gives it a strong negative position. With positive economic proposals, it is not 
better endowed than any other contingent of the European left. In principle—even 
in practice, as the experience of Berlin shows—its domestic stance is not so 
radical as to rule out collaboration with it for the spd. The sticking-point 
lies elsewhere, in Die Linke’s refusal to underwrite German military operations 
in the Western interest abroad. This is where the real dividing line for the 
European political class is drawn. No force that refuses to fall in with the 
requirements of the Atlantic imperium—as the Greens in Germany did effusively; 
the pcf in France and Rifondazione Comunista in Italy morosely, to keep impotent 
junior ministries—can be regarded as salonfähig. Only acceptance of nato 
expeditions, with or without the figleaf of the un, qualifies a party as a 
responsible partner in government. It is here—the conflict over Gysi in the pds 
can be taken as a prodrome—that the pressure of the system on Die Linke will be 
most relentlessly applied.
iii. society

If the long-run effect of unification has been to unleash an antithetical double 
movement within Germany, shifting the economy effectually to the right and the 
polity potentially to the left, the interplay between the two is bound to be 
mediated by the evolution of the society in which each is embedded. Here the 
changes have been no less pronounced, as the landscape of the Berlin Republic 
became steadily more polarized. At the top, traditional restraints on the 
accumulation and display of wealth were cast to the winds, as capital markets 
were prised loose and Anglo-American norms of executive pay naturalized by 
German business. Schröder, slashing corporation and upper-bracket income tax, 
and rejecting any wealth tax, gave his own enrichissez-vous blessing to the 
process. Structurally still more important, by abolishing capital gains tax on 
the sale of cross-holdings, his government encouraged the dissolution of the 
long-term investments by banks in companies, and reciprocal stakes in firms, 
traditionally central to German corporatism—or in the consecrated phrase, the 
‘Rhenish’ model of capitalism. In its place, shareholder value was increasingly 
set free. The first major hostile takeover, an operation hitherto unknown in 
Germany, came within a year of Schröder assuming power, when Vodafone seized 
Mannesmann. Hedge funds and private equity companies were soon pouring into the 
country, as banks and firms unloaded their cross-holdings. By 2006, foreigners 
had acquired an average of over 50 per cent of the free float of German 
blue-chip companies—the top 30 concerns on the dax index. [15] In the opposite 
direction, German capital surged abroad, its volume of acquisitions level with 
inward investment, as more and more manufacturing moved off-shore to cheaper 
locations. Nearly half the total value-added of German exports is now produced 
outside the country. [16] The business press had every reason for its 
satisfaction at Kapitalentflechtung, the unravelling of an older and more 
restrictive Modell Deutschland.

In these years, conspicuous among the expressions of the change was the 
emergence of a new breed of American-style managers with little time for 
sentimental talk of trade unions as partners or employees as stake-holders; 
downsizing in good years or bad, maximizing shareholder value without 
corporatist inhibitions, and rewarding themselves on a hitherto frowned-on 
scale. The emblematic figure of this transformation has been Josef Ackermann, 
imported from Switzerland to run the Deutsche Bank, the country’s largest 
financial institution and currently leading forecloser of mortgages in the us. 
Embroiled in a prosecution for his role in the sale of Mannesmann, but a notable 
success in boosting profits and cutting staff, his salary was soon twelve times 
that of his famous precursor, Alfred Herrhausen, an intimate of Kohl 
assassinated in 1989. At €14 million a year, this is still only a fraction of 
the earnings of the best-paid us executives, but a sufficient alteration of 
scale to attract wide public comment. [17] Younger bosses in the same mould at 
Siemens, Daimler-Benz, Allianz and the like aspire to similar levels of 
remuneration. Below, the growth of long-term unemployment and jobless—often 
immigrant—youth have created a corresponding under-class of those beneath the 
official poverty line, reckoned at about a fifth of the population. This too has 
aroused considerable public discussion, as a running sore—perhaps lurking 
danger—unknown to the Bonn Republic. Avarice at the top, abandonment at the 
bottom: neither comfort the self-image of a socially caring, morally cohesive 
democracy enshrined in the post-war consensus.

So far, the increasing inequality they promise remains moderate enough, by 
Anglo-American standards. Gated communities are still a rarity. Slums, where 
immigrants—now about one in five of the urban population—are most concentrated, 
may be coming into being. But ghetto riots have yet to break out. Comparatively 
speaking, German capitalism continues to be less starkly polarized than many of 
its competitors. But the trend, as elsewhere, is clear enough—between 2003 and 
2007, corporate profits rose by 37 per cent, wages by 4 per cent; among the 
quarter of lowest-paid workers, real wages had actually dropped by 14 per cent 
since 1995. [18] Less typical is popular perception of these changes. The Bonn 
Republic was famous for the Americanism of its official outlook and cultural 
life, possessing the political establishment and intellectual class most loyal 
to Washington in Europe, steadfast in its ‘unconditional orientation to the 
West’, in Habermas’s ardent phrase. Much of this was the reflex subservience of 
the defeated, as—consciously, or unconsciously—tactical and temporary as in 
other such cases. But there was always one striking respect in which West 
Germany after the war did resemble, more than any other major European society, 
not in self-delusion but reality, the United States. This was in the relative 
absence of a traditionally stratified hierarchy of social class in the country. 
The two national patterns were, of course, not quite alike; still less was that 
absence absolute. But in certain respects a family resemblance obtained all the 
same.

The reason lies in the fall of the Third Reich, which took down with it so great 
a part of the elites that had colluded with Hitler. The loss of East Prussia and 
Silesia, and the creation of the ddr, destroyed the bulk of the aristocratic 
class that had continued to loom large, not least in its domination of the armed 
forces, during the Weimar Republic. [19] The industrial dynasties of the Ruhr 
were decapitated, Krupp, Thyssen and Stinnes never recovering their former 
positions. Individual survivors of these formations—a Dönhoff or Lambsdorff; a 
Porsche or Mohn—could make careers or rebuild businesses after the war. But 
collective identity and power were decisively weakened. West Germany, bourgeois 
enough by any measure, felt relatively classless, because in that sense topless. 
Even today, if one compares its elites to those of Britain, France or Italy, 
which survived the war more or less intact, it is much less clear how they are 
recruited: no public schools, no grandes écoles, no clerical preferment. Indeed, 
in that respect the Bundesrepublik appears more socially acephalous than the us 
itself, where Ivy League colleges have always provided a fast track to 
Washington or Wall Street, and the Gini coefficient is anyway far higher.

But if the Bonn Republic lacked any clear-cut privileged stratum above, it 
contained labouring masses below with a far greater sense of their past, and 
position in society, than their counterparts in America. The German proletariat, 
historically a later arrival than the British, never developed quite the same 
cultural density, as of a world set apart from the rest of society. But if its 
collective identity was in that sense somewhat weaker, its collective 
consciousness, as a potential political actor, was nearly always higher. Though 
both are greatly diminished today, the German working class—less pulverized by 
de-industrialization, in an economy where manufacturing still counts for more; 
less demoralized by frontal defeats in the eighties—retains a practical and 
moral influence in the political system which British workers have lost.

In this configuration, in which the absence of long-standing elites enjoying 
traditional deference is combined with the presence of a—by no means aggressive, 
but unignorable—labour movement, the impact of sharpening inequalities and a 
more visible layer of managerial and other nouveaux riches has been 
significantly more explosive than elsewhere. Virtually everywhere in the world, 
opinion polls show a widespread belief that inequality has been increasing over 
the past decades, and that it should be reduced. They also show how few believe 
it will be. Passive resentment rather than active protest is the keynote. 
Redistribution has low electoral salience, where it acquires any at all. Germany 
looks like being the exception. There, public feeling has swung strongly against 
ongoing polarization of incomes and life-chances, forcing Merkel to toss a few 
sops to social solidarity, under pressure from the csu and the labour component 
of her own party; and leading the spd to attack hedge funds as locusts, and 
backtrack from Agenda 2010, even before the collapse of financial markets in 
2008. [20] This was, above all, the context that enabled Die Linke to make such 
widespread gains, as the most egalitarian formation on offer. Here not just the 
residual strength of labour organizations in the West provided favourable 
terrain. The party also benefited from having the deepest roots of any in the 
East, where labour may be weak, but inequality is least accepted as the natural 
order of things. Its rise is all the more striking, of course, for running so 
clean against the trend of the period. But if Germany, before any other country 
in Europe, has thrown up a new force to the left of the established order, it is 
also because the theme of ‘social injustice’ has become, for the moment at 
least, a national argument.
iv. culture

Of its nature, this is a discourse of division: some enjoy advantages that 
others do not, and there is no defensible reason for their fortune and our want. 
Elementary thoughts, but novelties in the establishment politics of the Federal 
Republic. There, the leitmotif has always been, and remains, consensus—the unity 
of all sensible citizens around a prosperous economy and a pacified state, 
without social conflicts or structural contradictions. No other political system 
in post-war Europe is so ideologically gun-shy, averse to any expression of 
sharp words or irreconcilable opinions; so devoted to banality and blandness. 
The quest for respectability after 1945, federal checks and balances, the 
etiquette of coalitions, all have contributed to making a distinctively German 
style of politics, an unmistakable code of high-minded, sententious conformism. 
This was not, of course, a mere ideological mannerism. It reflected the reality 
of a bipartisan—Christian and Social Democratic—convergence on a corporatist 
model of development, designed to square all interests: naturally, each 
according to their station, or Mitbestimmung writ large, as a charter for social 
harmony.

This consensus is now, for the first time since the late sixties, under serious 
pressure. From one direction, demands for social justice risk splitting the 
fictive unity it has cultivated. The received name for this danger, abhorrent to 
every self-respecting pundit and politician, is populism—incarnate in the 
demagogue Lafontaine. It threatens the legacy of Bonn from the left. But the 
same consensus was also under pressure from an opposite direction. This came 
from opinion attacking it in the name of liberalism, and calling for a new 
paradigm of politics worthy of the move to Berlin. For these critics of the 
status quo, the vital spirit that post-war Germany always lacked is what 
Anglo-American societies have long possessed: a sense of individual liberty, 
suspicion of the state, faith in the market, willingness to take risks—the 
tradition of Locke, Smith, Jefferson, Ricardo, Mill and their successors. [21] 
Politically, the marginality of the fdp reflected the weakness of any such 
outlook in the Federal Republic. Even the nearest German equivalent after 1945, 
the Freiburg School of Ordo-Liberals—Eucken, Müller-Armack, Röpke—still had, for 
all their positive influence on Ludwig Erhard, too limited a vision of what a 
free society requires, as the capture of their originally anti-statist slogan of 
a ‘social market economy’ by the clammy corporatism of later years had shown. A 
more radical break with inveterate national reflexes, closer to the intransigent 
temper of a Hayek or Popper, was required.

This line of argument, hitting the post-war settlement at an unfamiliar angle, 
has been a development of intellectual opinion, distant from any obvious popular 
mood, but resonating across a wide band of the media. How significant is it 
politically? German tradition, famously, tended to separate the world of culture 
from that of power, as a compensation or sphere superior to it. In his recent 
study of The Seduction of Culture in German History, Wolfgang Lepenies convicts 
this inclination of a significant share of blame for the country’s surrender to 
authoritarianism, from the Second to the Third Reich, pointing in particular to 
the failure of so many German thinkers and writers to defend Weimar democracy; 
indeed, their often outright hostility or contempt towards it. In the post-war 
period, so this case goes, such attitudes gradually waned: ‘Germany’s special 
path eventually flowed into the mainstream of parliamentary democracy, the 
market and the rule of the law. Playing off culture against civilization no 
longer made much sense. It also no longer made much sense to think of culture as 
a substitute for politics.’ By 1949 Leo Strauss was complaining that German 
thinking had become indistinguishable from Western thought in general. Actually, 
Lepenies comments, in such assimilation lay ‘one of the great political success 
stories of the twentieth century’. [22] The temptations and delusions of Germany 
as Kulturnation were eventually set aside for a sturdy adjustment to the 
everyday world of contemporary politics in Bonn.

 From this perspective, there was a troublesome interlude around 1968, when 
students rejected the new normalcy under the influence of traditions now out of 
time—not necessarily of the same stamp as those uppermost between the wars, but 
in their way no less disdainful of markets and parliaments. However, such 
revolutionary fevers were soon over, leaving behind only a mild counter-cultural 
Schwärmerei, eventually issuing into an inoffensive Greenery. Thereafter, the 
intellectual climate in the Federal Republic by and large reflected the 
stability of the political system. No culture is ever made of one piece, and 
cross-currents persisted. But if Kohl’s long rule, as distinct from the system 
over which he presided, found few admirers, the cultural ‘dominant’ of the 
period could be described as a theoretical version of the practices of 
government, in more left-liberal register. The two emblematic thinkers of these 
years might indeed be said to illustrate, each in his own way, the validity of 
Lepenies’s diagnosis, exhibiting the reconciliation of culture and power in a 
pacified German democracy. They shared, appropriately enough, a common American 
point of departure in Talcott Parsons’s Social System—a work which nowhere else 
in Europe enjoyed such a reception.

Habermas’s huge Theory of Communicative Action, which appeared in 1981, supplied 
an affirmative variation on Parsons, developing his idealist emphasis on 
value-integration as the basis of any modern social order into a still loftier 
conception of consensus, as not only the hallmark of a political democracy, but 
touchstone of philosophical truth. Niklas Luhmann offered a saturnine variant, 
radicalizing Parsons’s account of differentiated sub-systems within 
society—economy, polity, family etc.—into a theory of their complete 
autonomization as self-reproducing, self-adjusting orders, without subjective 
agency or structural interpenetration, functioning simply to reduce the 
complexity of the environments outside them. Though less palatable to polite 
opinion, Luhmann’s tacit construction of the Bonn Republic as a matter-of-fact 
complex of so many mechanisms of technocratic routine disavowed any critical 
intent. If Habermas told his readers that things could be as they should be—and, 
under the protection of the Grundgesetz, mostly were—Luhmann’s message was 
dryer, but no less reassuring: things were as they had to be.

On the heights of social theory, these bodies of thought commanded the terrain. 
In history, the other discipline of greatest public projection, the scene was 
much more varied, with significant conservative figures and schools continuously 
active. But here too, the cutting edge of research and intervention—the 
‘societal’ history associated with Bielefeld—was a left-liberal loyalism, 
critical of the Second Reich as an antechamber of the Third, and tracing the 
path of a reactionary Sonderweg that, in separating Germany from the West, had 
led to disaster. Here political emphasis fell on the contrast between a 
calamitous past and a transfigured present: the Bonn Republic as everything that 
Weimar had not been—stable, consensual, faithful to the international community. 
As prolific as Habermas, a close friend from schooldays, Hans-Ulrich Wehler was 
no less active a presence in the public sphere, sustaining the values of the 
post-war settlement with a distinctive tranchant of his own. Still more pointed 
as instruction for the present was the work of Heinrich Winkler on the German 
labour movement between the wars, dwelling on the blindness of the spd’s failure 
to understand that compromise with parties of the bourgeois centre could alone 
save German democracy, as had thankfully been upheld since the war.
Rightist dissidents

The hegemony of a left-liberal culture in essential syntony with the character 
of the political system—while always keeping a critical distance from its 
particular incumbents—was never exclusive. Powerful earlier bodies of writing, 
dating back to the interwar period, continued to circulate and exercise 
influence to other effects, less hospitable to the status quo. The Frankfurt 
School had been one of these, central in detonating the rebellion of the late 
sixties. Consensus was not a value dear to it. But once the hyper-activist turn 
of the revolt had passed, or was crushed, and the legacy of Adorno and 
Horkheimer had been put through the blender of Habermas’s philosophy of 
communication, little memory was left of the critical theory for which they had 
stood. Dissonance now increasingly came from the right. There could be found the 
still active figures of Heidegger, Schmitt, Jünger, Gehlen, all compromised 
during the Third Reich, each an intellectual legend in his own right. Of these, 
Heidegger, the best known abroad, was probably of least importance, his post-war 
reception greater in France than in Germany itself, where under American 
influence analytical philosophy gained entry early on; his runic ontology had 
only a narrow purchase on the political or social issues of the period, as one 
generically desolate vision of technological modernity among others.

The other three, all—unlike Heidegger—masters of a terse, vivid German prose, 
were of greater moment: Schmitt, the most ruthlessly brilliant, unstable mind of 
his generation, for his kaleidoscopic ability to shake sovereignty, law, war, 
politics into sharply new and unsettling patterns; Gehlen, for his uncanny sense 
of the closure of ideological and artistic forms in the ‘crystallizations’ of a 
post-histoire, and the probability of student and guerrilla rebellions against 
it; Jünger, for the arresting arc of a trajectory from lyricist of a machine 
civilization to seer of ecological disaster. The calendars and areas of their 
influence were not the same, in part depending on their personal situations. 
Schmitt, institutionally the most ostracized, was intellectually the most 
consulted, constitutional lawyers flocking to his ideas early on. [23] Gehlen, 
who died much younger, was stylized as a counter-weight to Adorno. Jünger, who 
lived longest, regained the most complete droit de cité, ending up with every 
kind of honour, indeed decorated by Mitterrand. But, though never ‘residual’, in 
Raymond Williams’s sense, the intellectual world such thinkers embodied could 
not compete with the post-war consensus as any kind of public doctrine. It was 
an alternative to the dominant discourse, inescapable yet peripheral, incapable 
of displacing it. Hegemony remained left-liberal.

Around the mid-eighties, there were the first premonitions of a change. 
Habermas’s last great book, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, appeared 
in 1985. Intellectually, it was already on the defensive—a noble rescue 
operation to save the idea of modernity from the descendants of Nietzsche, from 
Bataille to Foucault to Derrida, who were darkening it once more into an 
ecstatic antinomianism. If the dangers Habermas discerned were principally 
French, it was not long before German sub-variants materialized. Peter 
Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, greeted respectfully by Habermas 
himself, had set the ball rolling two years earlier: a bestseller born of a 
sojourn with the guru Bhagwan Rajneesh in Poona. Over the next twenty years, a 
torrent of sequels poured out, zig-zagging across every possible terrain of 
frisson or fashion, from psychotherapy to the ozone layer, religion to genetic 
engineering, and catapulting Sloterdijk to the status of talk-show host and 
popular celebrity—a Teutonic version, more whimsical and bear-like, of 
Bernard-Henri Lévy. The sway of communicative reason could hardly survive this 
triumph of public relations. Habermas’s pupils, Albrecht Wellmer and Axel 
Honneth, have continued to produce honourable work, on occasion more radical in 
tenor than that of their mentor, of late increasingly preoccupied with religion. 
But the philosophical props of the peace of Bonn have gone.

In the historical field, the story was different. There the mid-eighties saw a 
more direct assault on left-liberal heights, which was successfully repulsed, 
but marked a shift of acceptable opinion all the same. The Historikerstreit of 
1986 was set off by Ernst Nolte’s argument that Nazi atrocities were a reaction 
to prior Bolshevik crimes, and should not be treated as either unique, or as 
absolute definitions of the German past. This soon involved a wider group of 
conservative historians, making less extreme claims, but in the eyes of their 
critics—Wehler and Habermas among them—nonetheless not only palliating the 
criminality of the Third Reich, but undermining the necessary centrality of the 
Judeocide to the identity of post-war Germany, as memory and responsibility. 
[24] National rehabilitation was not to be had in this fashion. There could be 
no question who won this dispute. Soon afterwards, however, the tables were 
turned, when in their zeal to preclude any revival of national sentiment the 
leading lights of left-liberalism—Winkler, Wehler, Habermas—expressed their 
reserve or opposition to reunification of the country, even as it was plainly 
about to become a reality. However justified were their objections to the form 
it took, there was no concealing the fact that this was a transformation of 
Germany they had never conceived or wished for, as their antagonists had. Here 
too the dominant had dissolved. [25]
v. trouble-makers?

In the gradual change of intellectual atmosphere, one catalyst stands out. Since 
the war, Germany’s leading journal of ideas has been Merkur, which can claim a 
record of continuous distinction arguably without equal in Europe. Its 
remarkable founding editor Hans Paeschke gave it an interdisciplinary span—from 
the arts through philosophy and sociology to the hard sciences—of exceptional 
breadth, canvassed with consistent elegance and concision. But what made it 
unique was the creed of its editor. Inspired by Wieland’s encyclopaedism, 
Paeschke gave the ecumenical range of his Enlightenment model a more agonistic 
twist, combining the capacity for Gegenwirkung that Goethe had praised in 
Wieland—who had published Burke and Wollstonecraft alike—with a Polarisierung of 
his own, as twin mottos for the journal. These remained the constants in 
Merkur’s changeable liberalism—first conservative, then national, then left, as 
Paeschke later described its phases: an editorial practice welcoming opposites, 
and setting them in play against each other. ‘The more liberal, the richer in 
tensions.’ [26] At one time or another Broch, Arendt, Curtius, Adorno, 
Heidegger, Brecht, Gehlen, Löwith, Weizsäcker, Voegelin, Borkenau, Bloch, 
Schmitt, Habermas, Weinrich, Benn all appeared in its pages. Uninterested in the 
Wirtschaftswunder, hostile to the Cold War, regarding Adenauer’s Germany as a 
‘pseudomorphosis’, Paeschke maintained good relations with writers in the East, 
and when the political scene changed in the sixties, was sympathetic to both the 
student revolt and the turn to an Ostpolitik. Averse to any kind of Syntheselei, 
he conceived the journal socratically, as a dialectical enterprise, in keeping 
with the dictum Der Geist ist ein Wühler. [27] Spirit is not a reconciler, but a 
trouble-maker.

Paeschke retired in the late seventies, and in 1984 the succession passed to 
Karl Heinz Bohrer, pre-eminently equipped for the role of Wühler. A student of 
German Romanticism, and theorist of Jünger’s early work, Bohrer made his début 
in Merkur in 1968, with a defence of the student revolt against liberal attacks 
in the mainstream press, praising it as the expression, at its best, of an 
eclectic anarchism. [28] the Frankfurt School, he argued, but the French 
Surrealism that Benjamin had admired and Adorno dismissed, was the appropriate 
inspiration for rebellion against the detestable juste milieu of the Bonn 
system. [29] These were the sentiments of a writer who was soon making a name 
for himself as editor of the feuilleton section of the country’s leading 
conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, before falling out 
with his superiors and being packed off as correspondent to London. A decade 
later, he returned to the charge in Merkur with a bravura survey of the fate of 
the movements of 1968—compared to those of 1848 and 1870–71—as uprising and 
counter-culture, covering politics, theatre, film, art, theory and music, and 
marking 1974 as the end of a revolutionary epoch in which Blake’s tiger had 
stalked the streets. A mere restoration of ‘old-bourgeois cultural piety’ was no 
longer possible, but the new culture had by now lost its magnetism: only an 
artist like Beuys retained an anarchic force of subversion. [30] Bohrer’s own 
deepest allegiances were to ‘suddenness’ as the dangerous moment, without past 
or future, in which true aesthetic experience ruptures the continuity of 
existence and so, potentially, the social fabric. Captured by Nietzsche, 
Kierkegaard, Hofmannsthal and Jünger—in their own way Woolf or Joyce, too—the 
sudden found its political expression in the decisionism of Schmitt. [31] The 
central figure in this pantheon, combining more than any other its aesthetic and 
political moments—epiphany and act—remained Jünger, the subject of Bohrer’s 
Ästhetik des Schreckens (1978), the work that won him a chair in Modern German 
Literary History at Bielefeld.

On taking charge of Merkur soon afterwards, Bohrer opened his editorship in 
spectacular fashion, with a merciless satire on the petty-bourgeois 
philistinism, provincialism and consumerism of Bonn politics and culture, 
complete with a ruinous portrait of Kohl as the personification of a mindless 
gluttony. [32] This was a state, wanting all aesthetic form, that could only be 
described in the spirit of the early Brecht, or Baudelaire on Belgium. A 
three-part pasquinade on the German political class followed, depicting both the 
new-found cdu–fdp coalition and the spd opposition to it with blistering 
derision. [33] Time did not soften these judgements. At the turn of the 
nineties, Bohrer unleashed another ferocious fusillade against German 
provincialism, in a six-part series covering government, literature, television, 
advertising, press, songs, stars, movies, cityscapes, and culminating in special 
scorn for delusions that the enthusiasm of his compatriots for Europe was 
anything other than a tourist form of the same parochialism. From the ‘pastoral 
boredom’ of Die Zeit and the faz, to the ‘fussy sentimentalism’ of Grass or 
Walser, to the grotesqueries of Kohl as ‘Giant of the Caucasus’ and Genscher as 
his Sancho Panza, little escaped Bohrer’s scathing report. At best, the 
Frankfurt of the sixties had not been quite so dreary as Düsseldorf or Munich, 
and Fassbinder was a bright spot. [34]

The polemical élan of such broadsides was never just destructive. From the 
beginning, Bohrer had a normative ideal in mind. Germany was in need of a 
creative aesthetics of the state. It was the absence of one that produced the 
dismal landscape scanned in his first editorial, and its many sequels. To those 
who taxed him with that ‘aestheticization of politics’ which Benjamin had 
identified as peculiar to fascism, he replied that in fact every democratic 
state that respected itself had its own aesthetic, expressed in its capital 
city, public buildings, ceremonies, spaces, forms of rule and 
rhetoric—contemporary America, England, France or Italy supplied the evidence, 
to which a special issue of Merkur was devoted. [35] It was in these that the 
identity of the nation acquired tangible legitimacy and shape: a state without 
its own distinctive symbolic forms, in which politics was reduced to mere social 
assistance, was hardly worth the name. It was time for Germany to put the 
stunted half-life of the Bonn Republic behind it.

When the Berlin Wall came down five years later, but reunification was still 
quite uncertain, and resisted by the liberal left in the West, Bohrer was thus 
well positioned to publish, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, perhaps the most 
powerful single essay of the time in favour of German unity: ‘Why We Are Not a 
Nation—and Why We Should Become One’. [36] His leading adversary was Habermas, 
treated with the respect Bohrer had always shown him. The contribution to Merkur 
immediately following his famous ‘Aesthetics of the State’ had, indeed, been an 
article by Habermas on the peace demonstrations against the stationing of 
Pershing missiles, and when the Historikerstreit came two years later, Bohrer 
had not hesitated to side with him. But Habermas’s resistance to unification, 
worthy though his notion of a disembodied constitutional patriotism might be as 
an abstract ideal, was a delusion. Behind it lay a ‘negative chiliasm’, in which 
the Judeocide stood as the unconditional event of the German past, barring the 
country from any recovery of a traditional national identity, with its own 
psychic and cultural forms. ‘Did our specifically “irrational” tradition of 
Romanticism have to be so thoroughly destroyed by the bulldozers of a new 
sociology?’, he asked pointedly.
Deficiencies of form

With reunification and the transfer of the capital to Berlin came possibilities 
of another kind of Germany, for which Bohrer had polemicized. For with them 
faded the intellectual nimbus of the old order. But if the arrival of the Berlin 
Republic marked the passage to a new situation, it was not one which Bohrer 
viewed in any spirit of complacent vindication. When Merkur took stock of the 
country in late 2006 with a book-length special issue ‘On the Physiognomy of the 
Berlin Republic’, under the rubric, Ein neues Deutschland?—a virtuoso 
composition, containing essays on everything from ideology to politics, 
journalism to architecture, slums to managers, patriots to professors, 
legitimacy to diplomacy—Bohrer’s editorial, ‘The Aesthetics of the State 
Revisited’, made clear how little he had relented. [37] Germany was now a 
sovereign nation once more; it had a proper capital; and globalization ruled out 
any retreat into the self-abasing niche of the past. These were welcome changes. 
But in many respects the lowering heritage of the Bonn era lived on. In Berlin 
itself, the new government quarter was for the most part a vacuous desolation, 
inviting mass tourism, redeemed only by the restoration of the Reichstag—even 
that banalized by fashionable bric-à-brac and political correctness, not to 
speak of the droning addresses delivered within it. [38] Alone had dignity the 
ensemble of Prussian classicism, at length recovered, extending east from the 
Brandenburg Gate to the Gendarmenmarkt. Nor had Berlin’s return to the position 
of a national capital had any transformative effect on other German cities, or 
even aroused their interest: if anything, each had become more regional, the 
country more centrifugal, than ever. The feel-good patriotism of the World Cup 
of 2006, with its sea of bon enfant flag-waving youth, as vapid as it was 
vulgar, was the obverse of the lack of any serious statecraft at the helm of the 
republic, of which Merkel was only the latest dispiriting, institutionally 
determined, incarnation. Missing in this order was any will to style. The 
expressive deficit of the Bonn Republic had not been overcome.

True independence of mind, Bohrer would subsequently remark, was to be found in 
those thinkers—Montaigne, Schlegel, Nietzsche—who replaced Sinnfragen with 
Formfragen, [39] a substitution that could be taken as the motto of his own 
work. But Sinn and Form are not so easily separated. Bohrer’s critique of the 
deficiencies of the German state, both before and after the move to Berlin, 
could by its own logic never remain a purely formal matter, of aesthetics alone. 
 From the beginning, his editorial interventions in Merkur had a substantive 
edge. A state that respected itself enough to develop a symbolic form was one 
that knew how to assert itself, where required, in the field of relations 
between states. From his post in London, Bohrer had admired British resolve in 
the Falklands War, and he thereafter consistently backed Western military 
interventions, in the Balkans or the Middle East. The deficit of the German 
state was thus not just a matter of buildings or speeches, it was also one of 
arms. Bohrer was a scathing critic of Kohl’s failure to join in Operation Desert 
Storm; advocated the dispatch of German ground troops to Yugoslavia; and handed 
Schröder a white feather over Iraq. With such belligerence has gone a shift of 
cultural reference. Paeschke subtitled Merkur ‘A German Journal of European 
Thought’, and kept his word—Gide, Eliot, Montale, Ortega, Russell appearing 
alongside his native eminences. Few German intellectuals of his generation were 
as well equipped to maintain this tradition as Bohrer, whose contempt for the 
provincialism of Bonn and all it stood for was rooted in personal experience. 
Steeped in Anglo-French culture, after working in London he later lived much of 
the time in Paris, editing Merkur from afar.

But by the turn of the century, a change had come over the journal under him. 
The presence of Europe faded. Contributors, topics and arguments were now more 
insistently American. Bohrer had never been an enthusiast for the eu, his view 
of it close to a British scepticism—he liked to invoke the Spectator—he had long 
admired. Intellectual sources in the United States, however, were something new. 
The combination of a hawkish Aussenpolitik and multiplying signatures from the 
Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute can give the impression that a German 
version of us-style neo-conservatism has of late taken shape in Merkur. Bohrer 
rejects any such classification. If he is to be labelled at all, it should be as 
a ‘neo-liberal’ in the spirit, not of the imf, but of Richard Rorty, at once 
patriot and ironist. That he cannot, in fact, be aligned with either kind of 
transatlantic import is clear not only from his more accurate self-description 
elsewhere as an ‘anti-authoritarian, subjectivist liberal’, but also the 
occasion that produced it, an essay on the fortieth anniversary of the student 
revolt in Germany. ‘Eight Scenes from Sixty-Eight’—clipped reminiscences of that 
year: so many strobe-lit flashes of Dutschke and Krahl, Enzensberger and Adorno, 
Habermas and Ulrike Meinhof—is sometimes acerbic, but for the most part 
unabashedly lyrical in its memories of the intellectual and sensual awakening of 
that year: ‘Who has not known those days and nights of psychological, and 
literal, masquerade and identity-switching, does not know what makes life 
exciting, to vary Talleyrand’s phrase’. [40] Reitz’s Zweite Heimat offered an 
unforgettable re-creation of them. The worst that could be said of 68ers was 
that they destroyed what was left of symbolic form in Germany. The best, that 
they were never Spiesser. If they left a residue of fanaticism, today that had 
perhaps become most conspicuous in root-and-branch denunciations of 68 by former 
participants in it. Bohrer had little time for such renegades. He was not Daniel 
Bell: the antinomian held no fears for him.
vi. world power

Looking back on Paeschke’s command at Merkur, Bohrer once remarked of it that 
though Schlegel’s Athenaeum was a much more original journal than Wieland’s 
Teutsche Merkur, it was the latter—which lasted so much longer—that marked its 
epoch; regularity and consistency requiring that eccentricity be curbed, if 
authority was to be gained. This was a lesson Paeschke had learnt. He himself, 
however, came out of the Romantic, not the Enlightenment tradition, and took 
some time to see it, before attempting to conjugate the two. [41] As Bohrer’s 
tenure moved towards its appointed end, the results of that effort were visible. 
In intention, at any rate, authority has increasingly materialized, in the shape 
of contributors from just those organs of opinion Bohrer had once castigated as 
the voices of a pious ennui: editors and columnists from Die Zeit, Die Welt, the 
faz, coming thick and fast in the pages of the journal. Here a genuinely 
neo-liberal front, excoriating the lame compromises of the Schröder–Merkel 
years, is on the attack, aggressively seeking to replace one ‘paradigm’ with 
another. Flanking it, if at a slight angle, is the journal’s theorist of 
geopolitics, Herfried Münkler, author of an ambitious body of writing on war and 
empire, [42] whose recent essays in Merkur offer the most systematic prospectus 
for returning Germany, in the new century, to the theatre of Weltpolitik.

The logic of the inter-state system of today, Münkler suggests, may best be 
illustrated by an Athenian fable to be found in Aristotle. In an assembly of 
beasts, the hares demanded equal rights for all animals; the lions replied, ‘But 
where are your claws and teeth?’, whereupon the proposal was rejected, and the 
hares withdrew to the back rows again. Moral: for equal rights to obtain, there 
must be a reasonable equality of powers. In their reaction to the American 
lion’s attack on Iraq, countries like France and Germany protested like so many 
hares, earning only leonine contempt. Even united, Europe could not itself 
become a lion overnight, and should realize this. But what it could, and should, 
become is a continental fox in alliance with the lion, complementing—in 
Machiavelli’s formula—the force of the one with the cunning of the other; in 
contemporary jargon, American hard power with European soft power. The loyalty 
of the fox to the lion must be beyond question, and each must overcome current 
resentment against the other—the lion feeling betrayed, the foxes humiliated, by 
what has happened in the Middle East. But once good relations are restored, the 
fox has a special role to play in the cooperation between them, as a beast more 
alert than the lion to another, increasingly prominent species in the animal 
kingdom—rats, now multiplying, and spreading the plague of terror. Such rodents 
do not belong to the diet of lions; but foxes, which have their own—lesser, but 
still sharp—teeth and claws, devour them, and can halt their proliferation. That 
zoological duty will require of Europe, however, that it develop a will to 
fashion a world politics of its own—ein eigener weltpolitischer 
Gestaltungswille. The necessary self-assertion of Europe demands nothing less. [43]

What of Germany? In contrast to the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, both 
deeply insecure, and the rabid attempt to over-compensate such insecurity in the 
Third Reich, the Berlin Republic exhibits a new and warranted self-confidence. 
Post-war Germany for long sought to buy its way back into international 
respectability, simply with its cheque-book. Kohl, helping to defray the costs 
of the Gulf War without participating in it, was the last episode in that 
inglorious process. Since his departure, Münkler argues, the Federal Republic 
has finally assumed its responsibilities as an outward-looking member of the 
European Union: dispatching its armed forces to the Balkans, Afghanistan and 
Congo, not in any selfish pursuit of its own interests, but for the common good, 
to protect others. Such is the appropriate role for a medium power, which must 
rely more on prestige and reputation than repression for its position in the 
world, and has naturally sought a permanent seat in the Security Council 
commensurate with its contribution to the operations of the un. [44] Yet 
Germany, politically integrated into the eu and militarily into nato, still 
relies too much on its economic weight for its role as a sovereign state in the 
world. It needs to diversify its portfolio of power, above all by recovering the 
ideological and cultural attraction it formerly possessed, becoming once again 
the Kulturnation und Wissenschaftslandschaft of old. The attraction of the new 
Berlin as an international city, comparable to its radiance in Weimar days, will 
help. But soft power alone will not be enough. All Europe, and Germany with it, 
confronts resistances to the existing world order of capitalism, not from a 
China or India that are now sub-centres of it, but from the periphery of the 
system. There, terrorism remains the principal challenge to the post-heroic 
societies of the West, of which Germany is the deepest example. It would be 
naïve to think it could be defeated by mere economic aid or moral exhortation. [45]

Propositions such as these, adjusting Prussian modes of thought to contemporary 
conditions, aim at making policy. Münkler, no figure of the right but a 
frequenter of the spd, is listened to within today’s Wilhelmstrasse, which has 
organized ambassadorial conclaves to discuss his ideas. German diplomats, he 
writes with satisfaction, are readier to play on the different keyboards of 
power he recommends than are, so far, politicians. Here is probably the closest 
interface between the review and the state to be found in Merkur. The influence 
of a journal of ideas is never easy to measure. Bohrer’s enterprise has 
certainly played a critical role in dethroning the comfortable left-liberalism 
of the post-war intellectual establishment. But its destructive capacity has 
not—or not yet—been equalled by an ability to construct a comparable new 
consensus. The kind of hegemony that a journal like Le Débat for a period 
achieved in France has been beyond it. In part, this has been a question of 
form: the essays in Merkur, closer to a still vigorous German tradition of 
belles lettres, remain less ‘modern’ than the more empirical, better documented, 
contributions to the French review. But it has also been a function of Bohrer’s 
own distinctive handling of his office. In the tension between Schlegel and 
Wieland, although he would respect the goal of authority, his own higher value 
has always been idiosyncrasy—that is, originality, of which the strange cocktail 
of themes and positions he developed out of Romantic and Surrealist materials in 
his own texts, effervescent and potent enough by any measure, was the presiding 
example. Editorially, even in its late neo-liberal moods, Merkur always 
comprised contrary opinions, in the spirit of Paeschke’s Gegenwirkung. But the 
underlying impulse was polarizing, not in his but in the avant-garde sense 
inaugurated by the Athenaeum. To Bohrer’s credit, conventional authority was 
forfeited with it.
vii. displacements

The distance between trenchancy and influence can be taken as the index of a 
wider disconnexion between the political and cultural life of the Berlin 
Republic at large. Under the dispensation of Bonn, notwithstanding obvious 
contrasts between them, there was a basic accord between the two. In that sense, 
Lepenies’s thesis that in post-war Germany culture by and large ceased to be at 
odds with politics, as both became in the approved sense democratic, is sound. 
Habermas’s notion of a ‘constitutional patriotism’ peculiar to the Federal 
Republic can be read as a tacit celebration of that harmony. Since 1990, on the 
other hand, the two have drifted apart. When, midway through the eighties, Claus 
Leggewie published his polemic Der Geist steht rechts, he was previous. Twenty 
years later, that such a shift had occurred was plain. Intellectual energy had 
passed to the right, no longer just a fronde, but a significant consensus in the 
media—a climate of opinion. The political class, however, was still tethered to 
its familiar habitat. Neither Red–Green nor Black–Red coalitions had much 
altered the juste milieu of Bonn descent. The equilibrium of the West German 
system of old, however, was broken. A series of torsions had twisted its 
components apart. The economic sphere has been displaced to the right. The 
political sphere has not yet drifted far from the centre. The social sphere has 
moved subterraneously to the left. The intellectual sphere has gravitated in the 
opposite direction.

What the eventual outcome of these different tectonic shifts might be remains 
beyond prediction. The crash of the global economy, wrecking German export 
orders, forced the country into a downward spiral as the coalition in Berlin 
entered its final year, amid mounting tension between its partners. If the cdu 
maintains the lead it currently enjoys over the spd in the opinion polls, and if 
the fdp holds up sufficiently, a Black–Yellow government could emerge that, till 
yesterday, would have had a freer hand to deregulate the social market economy 
more radically, according to neo-liberal prescriptions. The slump will put these 
on hold. But since the fdp’s identity depends on an assertive anti-statism, a 
drift back to older forms of corporatism, beyond emergency measures, would not 
be easy. If, on the other hand, electoral dislike of growing inequality and 
social insecurity combines with widespread fear of any kind of instability, the 
vote could tilt back to the dead-point of another Grand Coalition. Changes in 
intellectual climate must affect the working through of either formula, though 
the extent of their incidence could be another matter. A few years ago, the 
international soccer championship was promoted with billboards across the 
country proclaiming ‘Germany—Land of Ideas’. The country’s traditions of thought 
have, fortunately, not yet sunk to the reductio ad abiectum of an advertising 
slogan for football. But that their specific weight in society has declined is 
certain.

Viewed comparatively, indeed, German culture in the past third of a century has 
been distinguished less as a matrix of ideas than of images. In that respect, 
one might say that it exchanged roles with France, philosophy migrating west 
across the Rhine, while painting, photography, cinema travelled east. It is in 
the visual arts that German culture has been most productive, often pre-eminent. 
In their different ways: Beuys, Richter, Trockel, Kiefer; the Bechers, Struth, 
Gursky, Ruff; Fassbinder, Syberberg, Reitz—no other European society of the 
period has had quite this palette. More of it, too, has touched on the history 
of the country and its transformations than anywhere else; and more explosively. 
The cinema, as one might expect, has been the directest site of this. 
Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun, with the final immolation of its heroine 
as the bellowing commentary on the World Cup final of 1954 reaches a crescendo, 
closes with a pallid, reversed-out image of Helmut Schmidt filling the screen, 
as the grey death’s-head of the Wirtschaftswunder. Reitz’s Heimat trilogy, the 
first part of which was released in 1984, just as Kohl was consolidating his 
power, ends in the prosperous, united Germany of the new century with the 
destruction by financial predators of the family firm of one brother, the crash 
of the plane of another into the cliffs above the Rhine, the suicide of a 
Yugoslav orphan in the river below, the burial of a fabled trove of paintings by 
an earthquake: settings and intimations of a modern Ring Cycle. Its final image 
is of the youngest female survivor, looking out into the darkness, her features 
slowly resembling, as the camera closes in, the mask of a haunted animal. Art 
has its premonitions, though they are not always right.

20 April 2009


[1] The immediate background to Lafontaine’s exit lay in a violent, national and 
international, press campaign against him: Joachim Hoell, Oskar Lafontaine. 
Provokation und Politik. Eine Biographie, Braunschweig 2004, pp. 197–205.

[2] For financial and political details of Kohl’s malfeasance, see Edgar 
Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 477–8.

[3] While traditional contrasts in former West Germany between an spd North and 
cdu–csu South were accentuated, the principal novelty of the vote was its gender 
distribution, women for the first time favouring the spd over the cdu–csu by 
virtually the same margin—some 4 per cent—as men preferred Christian to Social 
Democrats. For the data, see Dieter Roth, ‘A Last-Minute Success of the 
Red–Green Coalition’, German Politics and Society, vol. 21, no. 1, Spring 2003, 
pp. 49–50.

[4] The standard view, expressed as an incontrovertible—foreign and 
domestic—consensus, could be found in the Economist: ‘Most analysts readily 
agree on what is wrong with the German economy. First and foremost, the labour 
market is far too sticky. Second, taxes and social-security contributions are 
too high and profits too low. Third, and not unconnected, social security 
payments, pensions and health-care arrangements are too generous. And fourth, 
there is far too much red tape’. See ‘A Survey of Germany’, 5 December 2002, p. 10.

[5] ‘The beguiling path of non-reform’, Economist, 22 December 2007.

[6] For Schröder’s sense of the priorities of a statesman, see the self-portrait 
in his mistitled Entscheidungen, Hamburg 2006: ‘For me an electoral campaign is 
the most interesting time in the life of a politician. I have taken part in 
countless campaigns, spoken in hundreds of town squares, shaken thousands of 
hands, given innumerable autographs. Certainly doing and shaping politics, 
reaching decisions, is the central task of a politician, his duty, so to speak. 
But for me the elixir is the electoral campaign, the direct encounter with 
voters, the competition and struggle for votes, the exchange of argument. 
Technocrats can also make decisions, journalists can also be know-alls; but 
politicians alone can and should conduct electoral campaigns’: p. 496.

[7] By 2003–04, those who identified themselves with the East still far 
outnumbered those who did so with Germany as a whole: Katja Neller, ‘Getrennt 
vereint? Ost-West-Identitäten, Stereotypen und Fremdheitsgefühle nach 15 Jahren 
deutscher Einheit’, in Jürgen Falter et al., Sind wir ein Volk? Ost- und 
Westdeutschland im Vergleich, Munich 2006, pp. 23–5. For some comparative 
observations on the outcome of unification in the ex-ddr, see Claus Offe, 
Varieties of Transition. The East European and East German Experience, 
Cambridge, ma 1997, pp. 148–58.

[8] See International Herald Tribune, ‘In Eastern Germany, an exodus of young 
women’, 9 November 2007. Demographically, Germany as a whole has one of the 
lowest rates of reproduction in the world. In the 2009 Federal elections, voters 
over the age of 50 will be as large a bloc as all other age-groups combined.

[9] As successor organization to the ddr’s ruling sed, the pds was often 
dismissed in the early years after unification as simply the party of 
‘Ostalgia’, dependent on the ageing functionaries and accomplices of a police 
state. In fact, more than any other post-Communist party in Eastern Europe, it 
succeeded in recasting itself as a lively radical movement.

[10] For the emergence of Die Linke, see Dan Hough, Michael Koss and Jonathan 
Olsen, The Left Party in Contemporary German Politics, Basingstoke 2007, pp. 
134–53, a study also covering the evolution of the pds under the Red–Green 
coalition.

[11] See, respectively, David Conradt, ‘The Tipping Point: the 2005 Election and 
the De-Consolidation of the German Party System?’, German Politics and Society, 
vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 2006, p. 13; Hermann Schmitt and Andreas Wüst, ‘The 
Extraordinary Bundestag Election of 2005’, German Politics and Society, vol. 24, 
no. 1, Spring 2006, p. 34. For the data, see Table 1 in Oskar Niedermeyer, 
‘Parteimitglieder in Deutschland: Version 2008’, Arbeitshefte aus dem 
Otto-Stammer-Zentrum, 13, Berlin 2008.

[12] For a lucid analysis of the systemic obstacles to the taking of radical 
measures by any German government to date, and a pessimistic forecast for the 
Grand Coalition, see Wolfgang Merkel, ‘Durchregieren? Reformblockaden und 
Reformchancen in Deutschland’, in Jürgen Kocka, ed., Zukunftsfähigkeit 
Deutschlands, Berlin 2007, pp. 27–45.

[13] In the words of a satisfied historian: ‘Joschka Fischer embodies the 
integrative achievement of Federal Germany’s successful democracy: beginning as 
a rebellious streetfighter, he rose through various posts to the summit of the 
Foreign Office, where he won respect beyond partisan frontiers. Fischer marched 
so long through the institutions that he became an institution himself’: 
Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie, p. 479. For a more astringent portrait, see 
Michael Schwelien, Joschka Fischer. Eine Karriere, Hamburg 2000. Schwelien is a 
writer for Die Zeit who spotted in advance the likely successor to Fischer in 
his favourite, the ‘eel-smooth’ Cem Özdemir, current Green chairman: pp. 62, 65–6.

[14] For vigorous raising of this alarm, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s intervention, 
‘Wird Berlin doch noch Weimar?’, Die Zeit, 5 July 2007.

[15] ‘The Coming Powers: How German Companies are Being Bound to the Interests 
of Foreign Investors’, Financial Times, 1 April 2005. Lower down, the 
Mittelstand remains traditionally patriarchal, with 94 per cent of all German 
companies family-controlled, some of them large concerns: ‘Legacies on the 
Line’, Financial Times, 9 December 2008.

[16] ‘Why Germany is Again the Engine of Europe’, Financial Times, 29 March 2007.

[17] Rainer Hank, ‘Angekommen im Globalen Kapitalismus. Die Manager der Berliner 
Republik’, Merkur, 689–690, September–October 2006, p. 909.

[18] ‘Berlin to Boost Share Ownership’, Financial Times, 28 August 2008; and 
‘Politicians Focus on Filling the Pockets of the Populace’, Financial Times, 29 
September 2008.

[19] For a panorama of aristocratic influence before the war, see Christopher 
Clark, London Review of Books, 9 April 2009.

[20] In the summer of 2007, nearly three-quarters of those polled thought the 
government was doing too little for social justice, 68 per cent wanted to see a 
minimum wage enacted, and 82 per cent a return to retirement at the age of 
sixty-five: Thomas Schmidt, ‘Demoskopie und Antipolitik’, Merkur 709, June 2008, 
p. 532.

[21] For a pungent version of this complaint from the chief editor of Die Zeit, 
see Josef Joffe, ‘Was fehlt?’, Merkur 689–690, September–October 2006.

[22] Wolfgang Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History, Princeton 
2006, p. 128.

[23] Schmitt’s juridical influence is documented in Dirk van Laak, Gespräche in 
der Sicherheit des Schweigens: Carl Schmitt in der politischen Geistesgeschichte 
der frühen Bundesrepublik, Berlin 1993; and his wider intellectual impact in 
Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, 
New Haven 2003, pp. 76ff, which, as its title indicates, extends beyond the 
German field itself.

[24] Habermas: Eine Art Schadensabwicklung, Munich 1987; Wehler: Entsorgung der 
deutschen Vergangenheit?, Munich 1988.

[25] Within a year of the Historikerstreit, there had appeared sociologist Claus 
Leggewie’s knockabout tour through what he took to be the emergent forms of a 
new conservatism, Der Geist steht rechts. Ausflüge in die Denkfabriken der 
Wende, Berlin 1987. In this constellation, the most significant figure was Armin 
Mohler, secretary to Jünger and friend of Schmitt, famous as the author of Die 
konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–1932: Grundriss ihrer 
Weltanschauungen, which had apeared in 1950, on whom see pp. 187–211.

[26] ‘Kann keine Trauer sein’, Merkur 367, December 1978, p. 1180: Paeschke took 
the title of this beautiful farewell to the journal he had edited from Gottfried 
Benn’s last poem, written a few weeks before his death, published in Merkur.

[27] ‘Vorbemerkung’, in Merkur. Gesamtregister für die Jahrgänge I–XXXII, 
1947–1978, Stuttgart 1986, p. x. The phrase comes from Burckhardt.

[28] ‘Die Missverstandene Rebellion’, Merkur 238, January 1968.

[29] ‘Surrealismus und Terror’, Merkur 258, October 1969.

[30] ‘Die ausverkauften Ideen’, Merkur 365, October 1978.

[31] ‘Der gefährliche Augenblick’, Merkur 358, March 1978; themes developed in 
Plötzlichkeit: zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins, Frankfurt 1981, of which 
there is an English translation, Suddenness: on the Moment of Aesthetic 
Appearance, New York 1994.

[32] ‘Die Ästhetik des Staates’, Merkur 423, January 1984.

[33] ‘Die Unschuld an die Macht’, Merkur 425, March 1984; Merkur 427, May 1984; 
Merkur 431, January 1985.

[34] ‘Provinzialismus’, Merkur 501, December 1990; Merkur 504, March 1991; 
Merkur 505, April 1991; Merkur 507, June 1991; Merkur 509, August 1991; Merkur 
512, November 1991.

[35] ‘Ästhetik und Politik sowie einige damit zusammenhängende Fragen’, Merkur 
451–452, September–October 1986.

[36] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 January 1990; for an English version of 
this text, see New German Critique, no. 52, Winter 1991. Its translator, Stephen 
Brockmann, would later describe Bohrer’s arguments as ‘a foundational discourse 
for the triumphal conservatism that emerged on the German right in the wake of 
reunification’. For this judgement, see his Literature and German Reunification, 
Cambridge 1999, p. 57.

[37] ‘Die Ästhetik des Staates revisited’, Merkur 689–690, September–October 
2006. The title of the special number alludes, of course, ironically to the 
official daily of the former ddr.

[38] For a mocking tour of the fixtures and fittings of the new Bundestag, and 
of the government district at large, see Gustav Seibt’s deadly squib, ‘Post aus 
Ozeanien’, Merkur 689–690.

[39] ‘Was heisst unabhängig denken?’, Merkur 699, July 2007, p. 574.

[40] ‘Acht Szenen Achtundsechzig’, Merkur 708, May 2008, p. 419.

[41] ‘Hans Paeschke und der Merkur. Erinnerung und Gegenwart’, Merkur 510–511, 
September–October 1991.

[42] For a penetrating critique of his major recent work, Imperien, which came 
out in 2005, see Benno Teschke, ‘Empires by Analogy’, nlr 40, July–August 2006.

[43] Münkler, ‘Die Selbstbehauptung Europas. Fabelhafte Überlegungen’, Merkur 
649, May 2003.

[44] Münkler, ‘Die selbstbewusste Mittelmacht. Aussenpolitik im souveränen 
Staat’, Merkur 689–690, September–October 2006.

[45] Münkler, ‘Heroische und postheroische Gesellschaften’, Merkur 700, 
August–September 2007.

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