Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 10/07

German Politics and Society

Vol. 21, No. 2, Issue 67 (Summer 2003)

Articles

• Protest and Reform in Asylum Policy: Citizen Initiatives versus Asylum Seekers in German Municipalities, 1989-1994

  Roger Karapin

  Many writers have argued that anti-immigration politics in Germany and other West European countries have been driven by radical-right parties or the electoral maneuvering of national politicians from established parties. Others have argued that waves of violence against immigrants and ethnic minorities have spurred anti-immigration politics, or that racist ideologies and socioeconomic inequality are the root causes. By comparison, authors have paid relatively little attention to anti-immigration mobilization at subnational levels, including the public positions taken by subnational politicians and the activities of movement groups, or "challengers." Nonetheless, research has shown that subnational politicians are often important in pressing national campaigns for immigration controls. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, anti-immigration politicians in Britain and Germany have responded in large part to local challengers, who were aided by political elites at local and regional levels.

• Changing Memory Regimes in Contemporary Germany?

  Eric Langenbacher

  Are collective memories currently changing in the land where the "past won't go away?" Long dominated by memory of the Holocaust and other Nazi-era crimes, Germany recently witnessed the emergence of another memory based on the same period of history, but emphasizing German suffering. Most commentators stress the novelty and catharsis of these discussions of supposedly long-repressed and unworked-through collective traumas and offer predominantly psychoanalytic explanations regarding why these memories only now have surfaced. However, thanks to "presentist" myopia, ideological blinders, and the theoretical/political effects of Holocaust memory, much of this discourse is misplaced because these German-centered memories are emphatically not new. A reexamination of the evolution of dominant memories over the postwar period in the Federal Republic of Germany is necessary in order to understand and contextualize more fully these current debates and the changes in dominant memories that may be occurring-tasks this article takes up by utilizing the memory regime framework.

• The Politics of Physical Culture and German Nationalism: Turnen versus English Sports and French Olympism, 1871-1914

  Udo Merkel

  The 2002 Soccer World Cup in Japan took place during the final phase of the national election campaign for the German Bundestag and managed to temporarily unite Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) and his conservative challenger, Edmund Stoiber. Both were keen to demonstrate repeatedly that they were so interested in the progress of the German team that they simultaneously interrupted or left meetings to follow televised matches. Domestically, they support very different soccer clubs. Stoiber is on the board of directors of the richest German club, Bayern Munich, whose past successes, wealth and arrogance, numerous scandals, and boardroom policies of hire-and-fire have divided the German soccer nation: they either hate or adore the team. Schröder is a keen fan and honorary member of Borussia Dortmund, which is closely associated with the industrial working class in the Ruhr area. It is the only team on par with Munich; despite its wealth, the management policies of the club appear modest and considerate; the club continuously celebrates its proletarian traditions and emphasizes its obligations to the local community. Stoiber's election manifesto did not even mention sport, whereas the SPD's political agenda for sport focused upon a wide variety of issues ranging from welfare, leisure, physical education, and health to doping, television coverage, facilities, and hosting international events.

• Representation, Identity, Recognition: The Politics of Immigrant Incorporation in the Federal Republic of Germany

  John S. Brady

  Riva Kastoryano, Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)

  Zafer Senocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990-1998, trans. and ed. Leslie Adelson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000)

  One charge often made about minority politics in Germany is that it consists mostly of Stellvertreterpolitik-that is, the politics of intermediaries. Members of the country's various minority communities lack, so the critique goes, direct access to the Federal Republic's public sphere; instead of having a public voice, they must content themselves with letting others speak for them: union representatives, charity officials, and government figures. Given such mediated political participation, the suspicion is that the real needs and concerns of these communities, when they in fact reach the wider public, do so only at a muted volume and in diluted form.