The German Genius

Florena soap, Konet Foods, and even the Ampelmännchen, the chirpy man who was East Germany’s green traffic light symbol which, Martin Blum says, have now been elevated to cult status among the young. These products, where they can be found, are not consumed as such, but left in living rooms, intact in their packaging, to serve as a challenge to the supposed superiority of Western consumer culture. 89 More formally, the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR (Dok) in Eisenhüttenstadt maintains changing exhibitions on the material culture of the German Democratic Republic.
    In these debates, four people have stood out: Karl Heinz Bohrer, Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Botho Strauss, and Martin Walser. Bohrer, professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld, a journalist, and the editor of Merkur , the “German Journal for European Thought,” argued that reunification was necessary so that the two “partial nations” could come together to “remember together” and establish a common memory; he wrote that reunification, involving reconciliation with each other, could become a reconciliation with the past, so that Germany’s “soul” could find peace and the nation as a cultural phenomenon be reformed. 90 Only now, at last, could there be a modern German nation. 91
    Syberberg, well known for his films, Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland ( Hitler, a Film from Germany ; 1977) and Parsifal (1982), which treated “irrationalism, music and Romanticism as the core of German identity and intellect,” has also written a number of books, in which he argues that the core of German identity was lost after World War II and that the void was filled by foreign, largely American, culture. 92 His arguments are starkest in Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Krieg ( On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the Last War ; 1990). 93 Originally from East Germany, Syberberg examined German identity and aesthetics in the light of reunification. The book consciously embraced German exceptionalism, referring back to the German tradition of pessimistic anticapitalism and to a form of anti-American consumerism, arguing that art and aesthetics are the primary sphere of human existence, “that all other spheres are secondary.” The most tragic victim of the Nazi era, on this account, was not the Jews but art itself. Hitler, for Syberberg, was the culmination of modernization, the embodiment of the dark side of the Enlightenment, and he argued that the instrumental rationalism identified by Weber has foisted an ugliness and inhumanity on the world, above all a meanness that was incarnated in “the Bonn democracy of money.” For him, Germany was a unique province on the map of “European authenticity…the home of a new depth that has to be rediscovered.” 94
    Botho Strauss is also a writer, of plays mainly, but his controversial essay, “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” (“Goat Song, Swelling Up”), was published to acclaim and controversy in 1993. “The song of the goat” was of course the original meaning, in Greek, of “tragedy,” and so Strauss too, like Syberberg, like Nietzsche in fact, was giving voice to a longing for the primitive power of art rather than instrumental reason. 95 “The increasing volatility and unpleasantness of German life,” Strauss suggested, “came from the feeling that an entire way of life had reached its unnatural limit, and that it was impossible to go on with the thoughtless, smug, wasteful materialism of the West German past.” Strauss mourned the loss of what he saw as the most valuable part of Germany’s cultural heritage, its irrationalism as a critique of economic utilitarianism and materialism. “We know nothing about the face of the future tragedy. All we can hear is the sound of the mysteries growing stronger…” 96
    In May 2002, Joschka Fischer, by then Germany’s foreign minister, wrote an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which he explored the idea of “normality” in the German context. He introduced the thought that there were two important meanings of “normality” for Germans. One related to Germans and Jews and here, he said, he favored a return to normality. Germany, as many people do not realize, he pointed out, was by then made up of one third of immigrants who had arrived since 1945, including 3 million Turkish Muslims and 150,000 Soviet Jews who, in the 1990s, joined some 28,000 mainly