Jody - # 15 Moses

Moses, A. Dirk. German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2007)

Summary of Argument:

Memory is indeterminate, and Moses sets out to study "professors and politics" to overcome the distinction between the history of ideas and the social history of intellectuals. Moses' work does not explore each controversy and debate but looks to how and why a political consensus developed. "Rather than posit linear progress or transformations in collective memory [YAY!], it tries to explain the source of controversies about the national past between 1945 and 2005 as manifest enactments of an underlying structure of German political emotions" (5). His focus is on the '45ers and not the '86ers. These intellectuals are important for they viewed universities as the site of national defense and renewal. They were the generation who lived through Nazism and understood that they must be the first German generation to uphold democracy and the Republic. These 45ers openly debated the future of Germany while holding to the importance of democracy and the Republic. And thus the book argues: "that the answer to the question about the sources of German political reorientation can be found by looking at another generation. [...] The 'forty-fivers' became the young academics and journalists in the 1960s who commenced the task of subjecting the national intellectual traditions to a searching critique in light of their experiences of the rupture of 1945 when many of them had to being reconsidering what they had been taught in the Hitler Youth or army" (9). And to be sure, public debates cannot be isolated from the political emotions [and experiences/perception] of the intelligentsia. In the end, their struggles led to the developments of debate and discourse that produced the now fourth-generation and its ability to separate themselves from the Nazi past.

Comment:

Wow! What can I say? I love, love, love this work - a few points to continue pondering:

• Immediate postwar the Americans want Germans to shake the stigma of the past, yet 65 years later the world does not budge on holding then to it. (31)
• Younger Germans are no longer vulnerable to such attempts to revive German stigma in the service of partisan geopolitics (283) Is this too optimistic? Never say never.

The book does start off very promising with the wonderful 'introduction' and '1st chapter' but then lingers on with political heaviness for the remaining chapters. The only other thing that I could critique is the book's repetitiveness, but then again this is not a major issue but an annoyance.

Argument (Chapter Outlines) with Notes:

Introduction

• German experience has become model of dealing with past (1)
• "Many Germans opposed the new memory politics, which they felt was imposed on them by distant leaders attuned to the expectations of Atlantic political and cultural elites" (2)
• Many literature elites exposed with Nazi past (3-4)
• "Mastered past" was (and is) unattainable (5)
• "All evidence points to the fact that the meaning of memory is indeterminate, controversial, and never fully controlled by political elites" (5)
• A consensus about German political institutions - as opposed to national identity - did develop over the past 60 years (5)
• No consensus about the Nazi and pre-Nazi past (7)
• '68s as crusaders, but the intentions and outcomes were NOT the same (8)
• Focus on the more important '45ers rather than '68ers (9)
• Controversies and disputes are a discursive achievement, not an anti-fascist or conservative-integrationist one (10)
• "Too often, ideas are isolated from the lives of their articulators, although it is readily apparent that the conceptual blockages and blindnesses that constitute the underlying structure of postwar German memory are bound up in the formative, adolescent experiences of the country's leading intellectuals" (10)
• "No party in the customary memory disputes in such societies possesses any epistemological advantage over the other. A future value consensus emerges incrementally out of contested struggles over collective memory" (14)

I. Stigma and Structure in German Memory

• problems arise from unification - who is German? (15)
• Outside view judges Germany through minorities and WWII remembrance (17)
• Use stigma and sacrifice over guilt-shame to understand G. pol. emotions (17)
• (German-) Jewish students equate "Germans" with those related to perpetration of the Holocaust (18)
• Immediate postwar Germans "had been indignant about the accusation of "collective guilt" leveled at them by the American authorities in particular" (19).
• The private sphere more than public sphere is the source of social memory (22)
• Stigma as flawed social identity not natural but constructed and maintained by others (25).
• Germans needed to absolve family from crimes - and nation as well since they see nation as community (29)
• Non-German German: those affected by stigma and the psychological dissonance it caused who leave their German identity behind to become new (30)
• Binary systems do not work [amen] - to understand we need not participate (32)
• Germans, postwar, could "try to convince themselves and others that they had invented a new collectivity, divorced from the unbearable past [non-G. Germans], or they could defend the viability of their collective identity by making the national past bearable through a variety of displacement strategies [G. Germans] (32)
• Volkan: traumatic memories are not handed down but are deposited (34)
• German German: needs to ward off the stigma by denationalizing the causes of the Nazis and ascribing them to non-German causes (37)
• This process of constructing and rejecting stigma was culturally productive (37)

II. The Languages of Republicanism and West German Political Generations

• Intellectuals represent the large-group identity (38)
• problems of distancing but integrating people associated with crime (40) = initial discourse of German intellectuals
• 2 enduring  features of redemptive republican consciousness in W. Germany: 1. tainted birth of the Fed Republic; 2.  missed revolution due to old elites (44) = mistrust of Fed Republic to have the Nazis still there postwar
• '68ers produce the Non-G. Germans (46)
• postwar pol. polarization persisted through early 21st century until trust in German society was gained by intellectuals (47)
• West German democracy was a discursive achievement not an integrationist or redemptive one (50)
• Intellectual generation of 45ers was responsible for democratization of Fed Rep (51) - giving W. Germany legitimacy
• Essentially the 45ers were "fresh contacts" with little to rely on the past - need to form new and not rely on synchronic interaction of cohorts and their historical context (53)

III. The Forty-fivers: A Generation between Fascism and Democracy

• Those born between 1922-1932 belong to a single intellectual generation (56)
• Their issue: reflect upon their cognitive map in view of bankruptcy of ideals they grew up in and the criminality of Nazi which they socialized in (57)
• Most Germans in the 50s retreated to private sphere of family/work (59)
• 50s/60s = denial and defensiveness (59)
• Many 45ers were bound to Hitler and defeat was disappointing (63)
• First G. generation to commit to democratic/republic system (65)
• [JRM:] In essence, they experienced Nazism and could want for change - hence no denunciation or questions of family actions during Nazism
• Either cut off Nazis as alien or ascribe Nazism to other sources - forming a postwar symbiosis necessary for the new state(73)

IV. The German German: The Integrative Republicanism of Wilhelm Hennis

• Prominent political thinker, Hennis, wrote mainly about Max Weber (74)
• 3 years of naval military experience (75) but kept distance from Nazism
• focus question of 45ers: How did '33 happen and how to prevent it again (77)
• Identified German problems in the larger European context (82)
• Hennis saw as problem of European modernity and not the sway from Germany's "special path" away from modernity (86)
• distrust of politicals and Western lib. dem. seen as insufficient (87)
• Urged others to support state even with problems (89)
• Sees fascists potential in all modernizing societies - but then again Germans actively persecuted Jews (103) 

V. The Non-German German: The Redemptive Republicanism of Jürgen Habermas

• Solidarity with Israel was imperative (106)
• wanted release from nationalism and to move beyond nation-state (107)
• separate Germans from Nazis (109)
• reject any notion of past - due to privileged insight of being a Nazi (121)
• Germans and Jews were in symbiosis according to Habermas (125)
• 50s study finds students not completely supportive of democracy (128)
• radical university reform needed (130) 

VI. Theory and Practice: Science, Technology, and the Republican University

• restructuring university to be various autonomous faculties with students making their own course of study (132)
• must separate state and politics from university (134)
• should emphasize new work and not rely on old (Nazi) findings (142)
• saw university as place for cultural wars (151)
• no consensus possible in 60s but opened way for '68ers (159)

VII. The Crisis of the Republic, 1960-1967

• 60s: decade of cultural awakening, pol. progress, and social dynamism (160)
• key issues: (anti)communism, intellectuals, domestic and foreign policy - all with the Nazi shadow lingering (161)
• Spiegel affair and Nazi past were of utmost importance for intellectuals (174)
• Over this decade there was a polarization of the intellectuals (184)
• The student protests would drive a wedge between redemptive rep. and integrative ones (184)

VIII. 1968 and Its Aftermath

• student radicalization came from the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg in Berlin on 2 June 1967 along with anxiety of emergency law threat (187)
• Students failed to realize the diff btw Nazi/Rechtsstaat (same as Nazis) (197)
• pol. comm. profs. and graduates, the media, and cultural life finally influenced ideals to hold to the Basic Law (203) - but there was a dark side
• 1977 height of terrorism - real threat was blame instead of looking at est. (218)

IX. The Structure of Discourse in the 1980s and 1990s

• 80s & 90s debates - from Bitburg to Historian's Debate (219)
• 1982 - Kohl to repair the cultural damage of '68 (220)
• 2 big questions: how to us power and who belongs to German state? (221)
• Guest workers invited in the 50s/70s not returning home (226)

X. History, Multiculturalism, and the Non-German German

• Historian's dispute put the Holocaust as unique (232)
• for non-G. Germans the Berlin memorial is a stigmata rather than stigma (240)
• link btwn. Holocaust victims and crucified Christ (240)
• taboo: fear of communist comparison (242)

XI. German Germans and the Old Nation

• Germany conducted its foreign policy with moral highground and goodness (250)
• The nations knew the limits of power and had learned their lesson (250)
• Most important domestic issue was asylum law and violence toward foreigners (251)
• Nolte argues that utopianism drove Nazism as well as Communism (253) Kuehne
• Media (Non-G. Germans) was seen as cont. stigmatization (261)

XII. Political Theology and the Dissolution of the Underlying Structure

• Struggle with the Berlin memorial - who controls/makes memory (265-6)
• Attempting to separate: German/Germans, German/Jews, Turkish/G, etc (267)
• 3 generations and collective guilt questions continue (269)
• memorial for honor not happiness (273)
• the memorial exists for a non-monolithic meaning (278)
• 4th generations grow up with no living family member part of Nazism (281)
• The generational change shows no more stigmatization or stigmata - just a tourist attraction, object of indifference, or educational tool (282)
• Younger Germans are no longer vulnerable to such attempts to revive German stigma in the service of partisan geopolitics.  Identity dilemmas based on ethnicity and immigration as with all countries (283)