Download - German Historical Institute London

JAN-WERNER MÜLLER, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification
and National Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2000) ix + 310 pp. ISBN 0 300 08388 2. $27.50. £20.00
Intellectuals have traditionally taken a prominent place on every
issue concerning German national identity. As a central event of
German post-war history, German unification represented a special
challenge for them. Müller’s study asks how German intellectuals
reacted to unification, what positions they occupied in relation to the
redefinition of national identity, and what impact this event had on
their self-image as intellectuals. German unification marks not so
much a break in as a culmination of the discourse on national identity.
The different positions on nationality that had developed in postwar
Germany were raised again. Some were reformulated, others
were stubbornly defended in their old form, but by becoming a political
priority they gained a new explosiveness.
The discourses around unification which Müller presents with a
great deal of empirical detail demonstrates that in Germany national
identity cannot be constructed without reference to the National
Socialist past. In a word, anyone who wants to be taken seriously in
this debate must disclose their own attitude to this chapter of German
history. Paradoxically, this also applies to the conservative spectrum
whose members ask for relations to the nation and history to be
‘normalized’, and plead for more ‘national self-confidence’. However,
they must then acknowledge that there cannot be any ‘normality’
in Germany unless it includes this dark side of the country’s past
and the national trauma resulting from it. In the right-wing and the
left-wing camps, unification forced German intellectuals to take a
position on the nation. In order to trace these discourses, Müller presents
individual portraits of well-known writers and intellectuals such
as Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, and Karl Heinz Bohrer. He complements
these by analyses of intellectual camps, such as the left
spectrum or the New Right. Unification represented a particular
problem for every one of these camps. Was the division of Germany,
as Günther Grass and many left-wing intellectuals argued, a just
punishment for National Socialist barbarism, and thus did unification
provide a final exculpation and therefore initiate a process of forgetting?
Or did unification for the first time offer the chance to stand
up for one’s own history as a whole nation? The literary critic Karl
107