James Sperling. Germany at Fifty-Five: Berlin ist nicht Bonn? Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. 563 pp. $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7190-6473-9.
Reviewed by Georg Menz (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Published on H-German (March, 2007)
This festschrift for German-American political scientist Peter Merkl assembles a group of already accomplished and more junior scholars of German politics, seeking to engage in an exercise of collective stock-taking. As is perhaps inevitable with any such endeavor, the quality of the enterprise stands and falls with that of the individual contributions. Overall, the volume draws together respectable and generally interesting essays, but relatively little original research or truly novel insight can be found here. A few truly unfortunate exceptions penned by angry policy wonks are also included.
The twenty-three chapters "tick all the boxes" in a volume on contemporary German politics, though it must be said that the thematic coverage does not stray too far off the beaten path; thus, we find a historical section as well as coverage of the aftermath of the Nazi past, political parties, economic policy, and foreign policy. The first two historical chapters, by Karl Cerny and Mary McKenzie, cover the early years of the Bonn and Berlin republic respectively and offer good, if slightly textbook-style overviews. The authors seem to avoid contentious questions at all costs, leading to a slightly glossed over, if not simplistic presentation of the politics surrounding the demise of Helmut Kohl or the decision not to send troops to Iraq in 2003.
The next section, focusing on the "legacy" of Nazism, is somewhat disappointing and in parts downright appalling. Some of it is confused, but other sections are almost spiteful. Jeffrey Herf's chapter is a thorough, if utterly unremarkable descriptive attempt at tracing the evolution of the treatment of the Third Reich in Germany by studying politicians' major public speeches on both sides of the Berlin Wall. What emerges, perhaps unremarkably, is the picture of an ideologically tainted approach to the Holocaust in the East, that deemed certain victims more worthwhile of attention than others; while, in the West, the attitude expressed fluctuated a great deal between Theodor Heuss and Kurt Schumacher in the early years; Willy Brandt and Kohl's blunder in Bitburg; and the more recent bouts of odd wiggling. Most disappointingly, the author (ab)uses the postscript to his chapter as an opportunity to launch into a tirade against Gerhard Schröder's principled stand against the George W. Bush government. The author seeks to justify this loose polemic with the somewhat less than compelling claim that Saddam Hussein constituted a totalitarian threat to the existence of Israel on par with Nazism. History has already proven rather unkind to this sort of advocacy of the neo-imperalist turn in U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps Herf can join Francis Fukuyama in the recent exodus from the neo-conservative camp.
Lily Gardner Feldman's chapter sinks much lower. While her title promises a "three-dimensional view of German history," it is really fairly one-dimensional. According to this thoroughly underwhelming rant, there are three kinds of Germans: the good (Joschka Fischer), the not so good (Schröder), and the ugly (the late Jürgen Möllemann). The only possibly relevant criterion, of course, is the "moral compass" (p. 122) and attitude on display with respect to German Jews and Israel. The problem with this slightly less than sophisticated analytical take is at least two-fold. Firstly, it obscures the view of morally, highly questionable choices made by Fischer, in particular the instrumentalization of Auschwitz to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia. Secondly, it elevates the best-forgotten Möllemann to a level he certainly never came close to meriting, for better or worse. Here, the maverick former Free Democrat is portrayed as the harbinger of a new wave of antisemitism. In truth, Möllemann's public clash with odious ZDF talkshow host Michel Friedman quickly revealed the strikingly similar character traits shared by these two publicity-hungry talking heads. Though Feldman desperately seeks to incite our outrage over Möllemann's referring to Friedman as "unbearable, arrogant" (p. 127), we cannot help but agree with these adjectives as fitting description of both of these sad creatures. It is worth noting that Friedman's forced resignation as talk show host, from a show named in characteristic modesty after himself, had nothing to do whatsoever with any loutish army reserve officer with major insecurity complexes. Instead, Friedman's cocaine addiction and his even more unsavory habit of having Ukrainian sex slaves imported for his personal use contributed to his downfall. Any commitment to academic rigor, objectivity, or at least fairness and fact-based analysis have gone out of the window early on in the essay and not all readers will be willing to subscribe to Feldman's blanket accusation that "anti-Semitism remains a fact of life in German society"(p. 129). The author's deliberate tendency to confuse legitimate criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism further undermines any lingering shred of credibility.
Subtlety and objectivity are also lacking in Andrew Baker's chapter on Wiedergutmachung. At best, this chapter constitutes a description of the activities of the claims lodged by the American Jewish committee largely on behalf its American constituency, as opposed to the truly neglected and often destitute survivors of the death and work camps in eastern Europe. This particular "hot button" topic should have been dealt with in greater depth and preferably by a slightly more objective analyst, not a lobbyist with an immediate stake in the issue.
Robert Rohrschneider and Dieter Fuchs compare public opinion polls in both the old and new Länder, claiming that the commitment to liberal democratic values is less pronounced in the East, partially due to the disappointment over fledging economic performance there. Joyce Marie Mushaben charts the progress made during the Red-Green government's tenure in terms of gender equality. Her assessment is upbeat, yet her failure to examine critically the concept of gender mainstreaming disappoints--though ostensibly aimed at overcoming gender discrimination, its obsession with raising employment levels is clearly neo-liberal, not progressive in inspiration. Alice Cooper also reports on non-governmental organizations escaping being hugged to death by the embrace of the Red-Green government. Leonard Weinberg offers a well-crafted sketch of neo-Nazi activity, ultimately concluding that "contemporary neo-Nazism ... exhibits strong elements of fantasy and unreality" (p. 237). The assessment proffered would appear to underestimate resurgent neo-fascist activity in the East, however.
A fourth section takes stock of the changing dynamics of the party system. This is a solid, if at times perhaps too narrowly descriptive narrative, while the fifth section examines policy change both in terms of the organization of the military, macroeconomic, and tax policy. Karl Kaltenthaler charts the development of the Bundesbank and evaluates its achievement as one of the first Western central banks to detach itself politically, a status that has since been emulated by an ever increasing number of countries.
Michael Huelshoff's chapter disappoints. Not only is it already fairly dated in its outline of the infamous Agenda 2010 and the Hartz proposals, partially implemented by the Schröder government, but its advocacy of neo-liberal labor market deregulation to address the so-called structural problems within the German labor market appears both politically problematic and analytically flawed. Most preliminary analyses of the Hartz assault on welfare agree that the positive impact is very limited. In fact, by forcing individuals from the second tier of unemployment compensation, which is underwritten by the federal government, down towards the status of welfare recipients, paid for by local communities, the short-term impact of this plan has been very costly.[1] Curiously, the effect of unification is neglected, as is the misguided monetary policy of the European Central Bank. A more comprehensive review of root problems and a more politically balanced approach to proposing solutions would have made for a more nuanced and compelling assessment of the German economy; simply advocating Thatcherite deregulation is surely wrong-headed. The U.S. and Dutch "models" mentioned in passing are bereft with their own problems, which are acknowledged only partially or not at all.
The section closes with essays by Achim Truger and Wade Jacoby, who undertake a critical analysis of the Red-Green's tax policy and criticize the poor sequencing and timing of policy measures. Yet they admit that in redistributive terms the reform measures have been relatively successful. It is simply the issue of employment creation which these reforms have not addressed convincingly.
The last section addresses foreign policy themes. Here, Emil Kirchner charts the position of the Germans with respect to the European Union and in particular the now morbid constitutional treaty. This approach is not without some historical value, though one might have hoped for a more thorough examination of the extent to which the end of the Kohl era affected Germany's stance with respect to European integration. Mary Hampton describes Germany's position within NATO, but again we are left wondering whether the temporary breakdown in relations with the belligerent Bush administration is indeed due to a more affirmative German position and hence symptomatic of a larger shift or not mere political posturing. Given the recently revealed involvement of German intelligence in Iraq and of course the use of German airbases during aerial attacks on Iraq, the claim that Schröder's position was neutral or even antagonistic towards the Americans seems somewhat simplistic.
The last chapter is penned by the honoree himself. It attempts to sketch the track record of the Schröder government in particular with respect to implementing reforms in labor market, welfare, social and fiscal policy. The basic necessity of sweeping change is never once questioned here; instead, the usual slightly shop-worn arguments (or platitudes?) about the need for radical neo-liberal change are hauled out yet once again. In that sense, the question posed in the chapter's title, "Is the Reformstau Real," would appear rhetorical for the author. This is disappointing and lends little credence to this chapter. Simply rehashing the usual claims about the "inevitability" of neo-liberal change followed by lengthy quotes from former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's policy suggestions is not very original and, one may well suspect, does not spawn an essay that will age particularly well. The first line of the chapter--"Run, Gerhard, Run"--relates to the ham-fisted attempt to fit the dramaturgical framework of the since forgotten movie "Run, Lola, Run" (1999) to Schröder's years in office. Frankly, this unfortunate and unnecessarily confusing choice of framework is not only ill-fitted, it also seems to offer little if any added analytical insight.
Merkl's chapter as a whole is far from compelling. It seeks to shoe-horn twentieth-century German history into a dialectic relation between stability and change, or "reformism" and "Reformstau," which does not readily appear as the most obvious analytical vantage point. Any such succinct review tends to veer towards swiping generalizations, but many readers might feel somewhat uneasy about the slightly mangled observations Merkl engages in en route. Thus, he claims that "many democratic politicians or opinion leaders recoiled from the Nazi horrors with such vehemence that they lost sight of the very limited possibilities of reform and innovations among the ruins and hunger of 1945" (p. 501). The end of the stale and repressive Konrad Adenauer era is described thus: "In a few years the economic and political peace of the economic Wunderkinder was shattered by extremist movement of the left and right, the extra-parliamentary opposition, student rebellion, the neofascist NPD and finally a major terrorist threat, the Baader-Meinhof"(p. 502). Perhaps it is simply the somewhat unfortunate linguistic execution of this sentence, but is such juxtaposition of 1968 and the far Right, bordering on equating and even confounding the two, really justified? Occasionally, the narrative is not only somewhat muddled, it borders on the outright odd. Thus, we are confronted with the exclamation "How could the Germans worry about their Reformstau when the maelstrom of war and pece [sic] had seized their little ship of state" (pp. 518-519). It could be reasonably argued that the disagreement with Washington over Iraq had very little to do with Schröder's decision to call off further reforms, while the sustained domestic opposition to his Hartz reforms combined with the miniscule positive effects they delivered may have had more of an impact. Finally, it is not clear whether the world's third largest economy and largest exporter is best described as a "little ship."
In sum, this fairly solid collection of essays takes stock of various aspects of the German polity and its policies. It does not present any original research, which is perhaps a tall order to fill, though at times one would have hoped for a slightly less orthodox approach to the issues at stake here. Some chapters, it must be said, are also much weaker than others.
Note
[1]. Georg Menz, "Old Bottles--New Wine: The New Dynamics of Industrial Relations," German Politics 14 (2005): pp. 196-207.
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Citation:
Georg Menz. Review of Sperling, James, Germany at Fifty-Five: Berlin ist nicht Bonn?.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13003
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