The German Genius

key text. 82 The at times violent confrontation took a full decade to subside, culminating in the “German autumn” of 1977, with the murder of the president of the League of Employers, the liberation of a hijacked plane in Mogadishu, and the “controversial suicides” of Ulrike Meinhof, on May 8, 1976, and Andreas Baader, on October 18, 1977. The strategy of confrontation had failed, says Jarausch, and most of the confrontationists, including Joschka Fischer, “found their way back to the constitutional state.” But that could not disguise the fact that German society had changed fundamentally: even though the power structure of Germany had not been changed by the events of 1968 and the decade afterward, there had been an “anti-authoritarian transformation of values.” There was also the beginning of a change from the concept of German identity as a negative one—as shown in the works of Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Rolf Hochhuth, and Peter Weiss (see Chapter 42)—and a turn to greater internationalism (or, more accurately, non -nationalism; this generation was no longer ashamed to be German, but it was not necessarily international in outlook either). 83 Nevertheless, as Klaus Schönhoven put it, “there was more air to breathe.”
    Jarausch’s analysis is important for its emphasis on the different views of themselves that Germans have as compared with what most of their near neighbors understand about them. It is not the whole picture, however. There was in Germany, according to one researcher, “historical illiteracy on a staggering scale.” In one survey, published in 1977 and titled What I Have Heard about Adolf Hitler , children described him variously as Swiss, Dutch, or Italian; he was a professor, a leader of the East German Communist Party; he had lived in the seventeenth—or the nineteenth—century. Rolf Hochhuth’s Die Juristen ( The Lawyers ), premiered in 1978, concerned a real-life attorney who was still denying his war crimes. 84 This was the time when Chancellor Helmut Kohl used the phrase “the blessings of late birth” to describe a generation that could have had no role in the Nazi evil. Though this had an element of truth, it was also less than the whole truth, given the historical illiteracy already displayed. * 85
    Jarausch’s third period in Germany’s transformation centers around Unification Day (Der Tag der deutschen Einheit), October 3, 1990, though he spent some time examining the change of thinking in East Germany in the 1980s as a precursor to investigating whether “a middle course of democratic patriotism” would now be possible in what the theologian Richard Schröder called the “difficult fatherland.” Jarausch thought that there was, even then, “a continuing weakness in the newly emerging structures of [German] civil society.” 86 Despite everything, Jarausch found that critical minorities had gradually developed in the GDR, and that there had been “a retreat into private life,” a dacha culture, the cultivation of a conscious double life “that meant conformity in public and defiance in the private sphere.” This was in some ways a disturbing parallel to the “inner emigration” of the Nazi years but, says Jarausch, it contributed to the stability of the East German state because it diverted the dissatisfaction with the regime inward. 87 Nevertheless, in a small way the idea of a “negotiation society” was established.
    A “N ORMAL ” G ERMANY
     
    The most important psychological/intellectual change provoked in Germany by reunification, when in the words of Rolf Hochhuth “the German clock struck unity” (and which was feared by some, such as Günter Grass and Margaret Thatcher, who believed there might be a return to aggressive German nationalism), has been the search “for a post-national self-understanding conditioned by the Holocaust,” a search for the extent to which Germany is now—and can ever be—“normal.” 88
    What did that entail? The changes in the East in the early 1990s were breathtaking although for a time many people retained “a wall in the head.” There remained a great divide between “Ossis” and “Wessis,” and the exposure of the widespread Stasi collaboration produced a depression in many Easterners. Later, though, in the latter half of 2000, there emerged an “Ostalgie”, a nostalgia for the East among its former inhabitants, in particular a nostalgia for once-familiar products and brands, for