Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 10/07

German Politics and Society

Vol. 20, No. 1, Issue 62 (Spring 2002)

Articles

• Continuity or Politikwechsel? The First Federal Red-Green Coalition

  Michaela Richter

  This article examines the first red-green federal coalition in the light of the rules and practices that, in the course of five decades, have come to define coalition politics in Germany's party-state. My analysis rests on three arguments. First, while recent coalition studies have stressed the importance of contextual influences (such as constitutional rules or the party system) for German and western European coalition politics, I argue that informal rules, mechanisms, and norms are no less critical. Whereas the former shape the coalition options available to the relevant parties, the latter determine how well they can work together in negotiating and maintaining a mutually satisfactory coalition relationship. In the Federal Republic, such informal rules, procedures, norms, and mechanisms now govern the preelection behavior of potential coalition partners, as well as coalition negotiations and subsequent coalition relations.

• Selling the Economic Miracle: Public-Opinion Research, Economic Reconstruction, and Politics in West Germany, 1949-1957

  Mark E. Spicka

  This article will examine how during the 1950s the major parties increasingly utilized public-opinion polling and modern political advertising in order to understand and connect with potential voters more effectively. While one would not expect a conservative party led by a man in his seventies to accept these tools readily, the CDU and Konrad Adenauer led the way among West German parties in the adoption of both polling and advertising techniques. I will argue that, by applying these new techniques, the party was much more effective than the SPD in its ability to identify sociological groups of voters, to determine their collective political views, and to garner their votes by tailoring electoral appeals directed to them. This approach to campaigning created what I characterize here as a more Americanized political culture in West Germany in which party ideology became muted in favor of stressing the achievements of the party and its leadership.

• Post-Communist Feminism in Germany: Equality and Difference in the Party of Democratic Socialism

  Pamela Fisher

  This article will examine feminist debates within the PDS; I shall suggest that the party's predominating "feminism of difference"— which equates women's interests with "nature" and, by association, with concerns for peace and ecology—has been created and promoted by the essentially masculine culture of GDR Marxism-Leninism. While essentialist positions on gender are open to the charge of conservatism, I shall contend here that in the GDR these "feminine" values were not a consequence of political passivity but were pivotal in an emancipatory struggle against a patriarchal system. Therefore, the ostensibly conservative gender positions adopted by many PDS women should not be simply attributed to a lack of feminist consciousness, but rather should be understood as the result of a particular, complex historical context, in which "feminine values" offered an alternative to the failure of former ideological certainties. The views of the women interviewed for this study can only be properly understood in the light of these factors.

• Competing Interpretations of the Past in Contemporary Germany

  Eric Langenbacher

  Micha Brumlik, Hajo Funke and Lars Rensmann, Umkämpftes Vergessen: Walser-Debatte, Holocaust- Mahnmal und neuere deutsche Geschichtspolitik (Berlin: Verlag Das Arabische Buch, 2000)

  Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

  Klaus Naumann, Der Krieg als Text: Das Jahr 1945 im kulturellen Gedächtnis der Presse (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998)

  Klaus Neumann, Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)

  As the evil of Nazism and its crimes, above all, the Holocaust, rose to prominence over the last few decades, many authors have simultaneously devoted attention to the state of memory and efforts to confront and work through the past in the Federal Republic of Germany. Germans' attitudes towards the ever-present historical burden of the Third Reich became a kind of barometer, indicating how much, or even if, they had transformed themselves from the people who supported and carried out Hitler's genocidal policies. Accepting memories that center on the crimes committed, acknowledging responsibility for the Holocaust and its aftermath, and transforming attitudes and behavior comprise the progressive, healthy form of historical consciousness.

• Theological Discourse and Histories of the Shoah

  Rachel T. Greenwald

  Stephen Eric Bronner, A Rumor about the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)

  Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California, 2000)

  Stephen Eric Bronner and Dan Diner in two recent books address the difficulties in writing about antisemitism and the Shoah without creating a contemporary narrative of Jewish exceptionalism. For Bronner and Diner, historians should emphasize Jews as the primary victims of European fears of modernization and Nazi extermination plans. However, both authors believe there is danger in perpetuating the victim status of Jews long after World War II and the founding of the state of Israel. The on-going characterization of Jews as victims lends support to the racial categories of the early twentieth century; moveover, as Bronner and Diner suggest, it has led Jews to create and maintain a form of Zionism that precludes peaceful coexistence with non-Jews. At risk is the preservation of an exclusive ethnoreligious identity in an increasingly cosmopolitan world that rejects the conflation of nationalism and religion.

• "Not Yet": Weimar and the Alluring Promise of a Future Past

  Brett R. Wheeler

  Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

  Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

  These compelling new books by Janet Ward and Bernd Widdig do little to weaken the magic of Weimar. To the contrary, they link anew the decade after World War I with the spirit of our own age and with the experiences and self-consciousness of postmodern culture. At the same time, this link continues to reveal nostalgia, as scholars ask permission to imagine a future other than the one that is now past.

• The Communist Past and the Inter-German Present: Two Perspectives

  Thomas A. Baylis

  A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

  Christiane Olivo, Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of the Citizen Movements and Alliance 90 (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

  A. James McAdams and Christiane Olivo have written thoughtful studies that trace the course of the German response to two very different aspects of the GDR's past. McAdams analyzes the official quest for "retrospective justice" in dealing with the Communist era; Olivo examines the philosophical underpinnings and subsequent political fortunes of the ideas and approaches animating the Bürgerbewegungen (citizens' movements) that briefly took center stage in the protests that brought down the former regime. Both the sought-after reckoning with the Communist past and the attempt to build on the legacy of the citizens' movements became caught up in the politics and the complex psychology of the eastern German-western German relationship. The course taken by both undertakings was also conditioned by the institutional realities created in the process of unification. Both have left more than their share of disappointment and frustration in their wake.

• The German Election of 1998 and the Transformation of the German Left

  Alexandra Cole

  David P. Conradt, Gerald R. Kleinfeld, and Christian Søe, Power Shift in Germany: The 1998 Election and the End of the Kohl Era (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000)

  Charles Lees, The Red-Green Coalition in Germany: Politics, Personalities, and Power (New York: Manchester University Press, 2001)

  Read together, these two works, The Red-Green Coalition in Germany and Power Shift in Germany can be used as companion pieces in understanding the transformation of the left4 in Germany. There are many different levels of understanding of this transformation. In the most obvious change, the left has gone from being a party in opposition to a party governing at the federal level. What was necessary to achieve this? Has a transformation of the governing status of the left also included a transformation of some of the more fundamental aspects of the left—namely, ideology and party organization? If so, were these ideological and organizational changes necessary for a change in governing status? What are the long-term prospects for this transformation and for German politics? From these two works, initial answers to these questions can be gleaned.