Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 10/07

German Politics and Society

Vol. 19, No. 3, Issue 60 (Fall 2001)

Articles

• Experimentalism as a Tool of Economic Innovation in Germany

  Wade Jacoby and Martin Behrens

  Uns geht es schlecht aber auf einem sehr hohen Niveau.
  - Otto Graf Lambsdorff

  Our purpose in this article is to analyze changes in the German wage bargaining system, a system that has attracted enormous attention from scholars of comparative political economy and comparative industrial relations. We argue that the wage bargaining portion of the German model is neither frozen in place, headed for deregulation, nor merely "muddling through." Rather, we see the institutional capacities of the key actors -- especially the unions and employer associations -- making possible a process we term "experimentalism." In briefest form, experimentalism allows organizations that combine decentralized information-gathering abilities with centralized decision-making capacity to probe for new possibilities, which, once found, can be quickly diffused throughout the organization. We will show that the capacity for such experimentalism varies across actors and sectors. And, to make things even tougher, neither major German social actor can sustain innovation in the longer term without bringing along the other "social partner."

• Local and National Elites in the German Empire: The Case of the Württemberg Varnbülers

  Irmline Veit-Brause

  The formation of a national elite in Germany during the period before and after political unification, 1871, is still a largely unexplored topic in German social history. The Prussocentric perspective in German historiography, which is still prevailing in much of the work done by the so-called critical history of the 1960s and 1970s, has tended to give scant consideration to the sociocultural diversity underlying and enshrined in the federal structure of the Empire. The process of national consolidation of Imperial society could profitably be studied along the center-periphery continuum of national integration. It would be interesting, in particular, to subject to closer scrutiny the notion of "preindustrial elites," which held on to the reigns of power in Prussia-Germany at a time of such rapid social and economic change. The cliché of manipulative preindustrial elites has become the explanatory passe-partout for analyzing the retardation of Germany's political modernization. But, as other historians in this field have tried to show, the concrete historical meanings and significance of preindustrial elites for the specific course of German history is in fact exceedingly difficult to pin down. More sophistication has been added to this notion of preindustrial elites by Arno J. Mayer's suggestion of focusing on the persistence of the ruling classes' preindustrial mentality, despite their successful adaptation to capitalist activities. However, this "strange" life in multiple realities was not unique to the German social and political elite. It was typical for all European countries at that time. In any case, it does not seem to invalidate the principal suggestion that the conventional explanatory scheme of German social history is largely derived from the Prussian experience and assumes an essential continuity between the social structure of Prussia and that of the Reich. This assumption seems worthy of closer examination.

• "Ein Staatsmann mit Geschichte": Joschka Fischer's German Past

  M. Anne Sa'adah

  Joschka Fischer (b. 1948), Germany's foreign minister and for several years one of the country's most popular politicians, is a man of the moment, of consequence both domestically and beyond his country's borders. Nationally prominent as leader of the "realo" faction of the Greens, he was instrumental in turning a protest movement into the partner in power of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). During the Kosovo crisis, he was a key figure in securing German participation in the NATO intervention. He has played an influential role in the unfolding debate about institutional reform within the European Union. During the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian violence, he has actively tried to bring the parties to the table.

• Un-settling Scores: A Review of Michael H. Kater's Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits

  Steven M. Whiting

  After Different Drummers (1992) and The Twisted Muse (1997), Michael H. Kater has presented Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits, as "the last in a trilogy on the interrelationship between sociopolitical forces on the one side, and music and musicians in the Third Reich, on the other" (264). The author is Distinguished Research Professor of History at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (York University). The author of the present review, a musicologist, must express his gratitude to Professor Kater for helping to make it professionally unacceptable to restrict oneself anymore to "the music itself" when considering certain composers active in Germany of the 1930s. By the same token, Kater's reticence about "the music itself" (which presumably springs from humility) will leave many a musicologist itching to adduce (if not consult) the scores to confirm or to contest Kater's points, for Kater is writing about lives, not works, unless the works have impinged on biographical issues.

• Stars on the Screen, Strangers on the Streets

  Sara Hall

  Jans B. Wager, Dangerous Dames. Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999)

  Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

  According to most accounts, the field of German cinema studies has its origin in two books published after World War II outside of Germany: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, published in the United States in 1947, and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen, first published in France in 1952. As might be surmised from their titles, as well as their publication dates, both works reexamine films of the Weimar Republic for the messages they reveal about the German psychological disposition and its role in the events leading to World War II and the Holocaust. While maintaining that some of the social and aesthetic questions raised by Kracauer and Eisner are indeed central to current scholarship, late twentieth-century film historians have strongly challenged certain of these authors' respective methods and conclusions. Two recent contributions to the field of German cultural studies, Jans B. Wager's Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir and Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum, have followed suit by demonstrating the positive dimensions of the Eisner-Kracauer legacy. At the same time, both books work to loosen the authoritative hold that these titles have on scholarship on Weimar visual culture.

• Democracy, Federalism, and the European Union: The Pitfalls of Combining Explanation and Normative Theory

  Craig Parsons

  Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum, eds., Democracy in the European Union (New York: Routledge, 2000)

  Dusan Sidjanski, The Federal Future of Europe: From the European Community to the European Union (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2000)

  These two volumes by European scholars bravely attempt to combine normative discussions of European integration and democracy with social-scientific analysis. Democracy in the European Union argues that the development of "deliberative supranationalism" may lessen the EU's much-maligned "democratic deficit" more than would a more formal parliamentarization of EU institutions. The Federal Future of Europe suggests that federalist ideas have inspired much of the development of the EU, and that stronger federalism promises a still better Europe. I am sympathetic to the normative positions and most basic analytic claims of both books. I also salute the goal of normative-analytic synthesis, though I share the typical American wariness of its potential pitfalls. Unfortunately, both books do more to showcase these pitfalls than anything else.