The German Genius

Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and also director of the Center for Research in Contemporary History at Potsdam in Germany, identified three well-defined periods as of crucial importance for the post–World War II history of Germany. The first was the immediate postwar period, which saw the disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, the dissolution of Nazi institutions and the prohibition of Nazi propaganda, together with the decentralization of the economy to eliminate the potential for war. 76 He examined what this involved (80,000 Nazi leaders arrested, 70,000 Nazi activists dismissed, 3,000 German companies dismantled), together with the population’s gradual acceptance of their “partly active, partly passive” participation in the genocide of the Jews, the retreat from nationalism (“the collapse of the nation as a reference point”) and the origin of the idea of a “postnation nation.” 77 He observed that “radical nationalism” was more “deeply anchored” in German culture than National Socialism, and that the privations people suffered in that period (a time when “all bellies disappeared”) provoked feelings of self-pity “for their newfound role as victims” that helped transform “the formerly aggressive nationalism” into a defensive, “residual sense of nationality…Though German identity had been badly damaged by the crimes of the Nazis, it did not disappear entirely but, rather, transformed its character into a ‘community of fate.’” 78
    He observed a remarkable period of economic growth throughout the 1950s (an average annual increase, thanks to certain Keynesian measures, of 8.2 percent). However, it wasn’t until the 1960s, after the “relative stabilization” of the Adenauer period, and the Americanization of values and behavior, owing to prolonged occupation and “some intelligent exchange schemes,” that the breakthrough to a modern civil society occurred. 79
    Jarausch then identified 1968—the year of the student revolts in Poland, Berlin, New York, and Paris, of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam—as a caesura “that requires a cultural approach [as opposed to a political one] to be better understood.” Jan-Werner Müller agreed, arguing that this time brought about “new structures of feeling,” and Dirk van Laak even went so far as to assert that the 1960s were a threshold of change as much as the 1920s were. 80 A motivating force here was the young generation that had grown up since the war and was more willing—much more willing—to examine the involvement of their parents’ cohort in National Socialism than were the parents themselves. The particular circumstances of Germany, therefore, sharpened this generational divide and had important cultural consequences. In particular, Jarausch identified the emergence of a “critical public sphere” and a new professional ethos “that favoured contemporary criticism over approval of government policies.” A critical discourse emerged in the 1960s, he says, that advocated a broader social self-determination. Habermas, in Der Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit ( The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ), argued that public discussion was “a crucial precondition for civic freedom.” This was, perhaps, old news in other Western countries but, says Jarausch, in Germany older authoritarian thinking was still widespread, and many people were still reluctant to engage in politics. But the events of 1968, he insisted, and the emergence of a critical public sphere, marked the internalization of democratic values and behavior, at least among the educated middle classes. Habermas agreed: he called the movement of the “68ers” the “first fairly successful German revolution, while Elias described it as an important break in the ‘chain of generations’ and the final stage in German ‘catching up’ with the West.” (It has to be said that many older Germans reject this picture, insisting that there were early exposés of Nazi wrongdoing, which they faced head-on. One book often cited is Eugen Kogon’s Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager , published in 1946.) 81
    Protest, Jarausch says, was centered on the “inner emptiness” of consumer society, and Herbert Marcuse’s book, One-Dimensional Man , with its concept of “repressive tolerance” became a