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the �ederal Republic was based, the issue of German national consciousness
was troublesome because it seemed that an incomplete
Germany could not function as a proper ‘nation-state’. Some urged
an intensification of historical recollection to instil national pride into
German youth. Others preferred to see West Germany as the harbinger
of a new ‘post-national’ era in which the nation-state would lose
its importance. Ironically, this discussion was taking place at about
the same time as Erich Honecker was trying to give the GDR a bogus
national tradition of its own to create the illusion of an independent,
socialist Germany. In the West the controversy was given a particularly
bitter flavour by intense public discussions about the mass murder
of European Jews during the Third Reich. These discussions
caused some intellectuals to demand that the stigma of the Holocaust
should be removed from the German past to create a ‘normal’ national
consciousness, whereas others argued that Auschwitz must be
seen as the defining moment in modern German history, leading
them to the conclusion that a German nation-state was neither necessary
nor desirable. Winkler, who played an important part in such
controversies himself, has little time for those on the left who rejected
German unification and wanted Germany to play the role of a
missionary for post-nationalism, a posture which he regards as being
almost as arrogant as that of Reich enthusiasts between the wars.
Instead he argues that unification in 1990 established Germany for
the first time as an entirely normal nation-state, at peace with itself
and in harmony with its neighbours. It is a comforting conclusion,
and one with which few who know Germany well will have much to
disagree.
This is in all respects a remarkable work of scholarship. It is not
possible within the space of a review to do justice to the rich variety
of thought-provoking comments and original perspectives it contains.
It is a book to be read and reread. Many of its judgments are
controversial, and it is all the better for that. Perhaps towards the end
of the second volume we are led a little too far into the thickets of that
most arid of disputations, the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s,
and thereafter rather too much attention is paid to the agonizing by
left-wing intellectuals when faced with a unified German nation. But
these are very minor quibbles. This is a magnum opus on a grand scale.
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