Stefan Berger. Germany. London: Hodder Arnold, 2004. xiv + 274 pp. $45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-340-70584-1; $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-340-70585-8.
Reviewed by Andreas Huether (Department of History, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany)
Published on H-German (September, 2005)
"Historians had better ... work on overcoming myths."[1]
In the sixth installment of the valuable Inventing the Nation series, Stefan Berger, professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Glamorgan/Wales, pursues the multiple discourses of German national identity aiming to uncover the artificial characters of the respective constructions and to "explode nationalist myths" (p. xiv). According to the objective of the series, the author's task is not only to follow the often multi-layered developments of nationality constructs, but also to discuss them in light of the most recent research trends challenging historiographic orthodoxies (p. xi). Stefan Berger succeeds in introducing a wide range of recent publications while at the same time delivering a compelling read of the mutations of the subject at hand. This is no mean task considering the complexity of German national identity at any given time and the rapidly increasing attendant research.[2] Evidently, a survey of such proportions forbids an exhaustive historiography. Instead, the focus falls on seminal contributions in any given research area.
The structure of the book follows the main political ruptures in German history since the early nineteenth century. While the discourses of the elites are the main focus for most part of the narrative, the focus shifts to debates in the political arena, especially for the period after 1945. Interspersed throughout the book are literary reflections of national identity. However, the main questions the author poses for each period are about the competition of "ethnic and civic inventions of the nation," the "strength of economic national identities," the role of social/national outsiders, women in nation-building processes as well as the masculinity of nationalism, "federal inventions of the nation," and lastly the "influence of wars on inventions of national identities" (pp. 9-11). As is natural for such a wide range, both temporal and topical, not all issues are discussed with the same thoroughness.
The first chapter deals with the problem of a proto-national discourse ranging from the fifteenth-century humanists through the short-lived mass movement of national liberation in the 1810s. It is stressed that the attempted definitions of what "German" meant came from an educated elite and to a large extent were of little concern to the majority of the population. This state of affairs was to change in the half-century up to the founding of the Empire in 1871 (chapter 2). With this subtle alteration of traditional periodization, the author places the Frankfurt Parliament and the Revolution of 1848/1849 squarely into the nationalist debates rather than treating them as the pinnacle of liberal nationalism; in this way, Berger reflects on research stressing the continuity of national discourse throughout the century. In terms of national debate, the Second Empire is probably the most thoroughly investigated period after the National Socialist regime (chapter 3). It offers a wide range of national discourses--those of social outsiders as well as those of the social and political mainstream--which slowly declined into an enthusiastic, near-monolithic front willing to fight for God, Emperor, and Fatherland. The chapter dealing with the Weimar Republic (chapter 4) includes World War I in order to show the continuity of "old" thinking within the new state. The 1920s continued to be a time of great plurality until other discourses were slowly pushed even further to the social and political peripheries by völkisch, xenophobic anti-democratic forces towards the end of the decade. The focus of the fifth chapter is on the politico-religious cult of biological determinism cultivated by National Socialist ideologues and the impact of the construction of the "racial nation" (p. 141) for Germany ever since. The success of Nazism is attributed to its successful merging of a great many national constructions.
Three chapters are devoted to history after 1945. The Federal Republic of Germany (chapter 6) and the German Democratic Republic of Germany (chapter 7) are treated individually, before the debates about national identity after unification (chapter 8). Berger calls the nation-building process of the GDR a failure. Both endeavors, the construction of a progressive workers' state in the 1950s and 1960s as well as the attempt to build a distinct German identity in the 1970s, failed. Ironically, after the demise of the GDR in 1989, emotional attachments to their sunken state--also known as Ostalgie--among East Germans emerged. Both the nation-building process of the FRG and the debates about the quest for "national normality" (which according to the author cannot be defined for any nation, p. 267) after the re-unification of 1990 are dominated by the author's concerns about the appropriation of such discourses by the intellectual right. However, he regards the debate about Germans as victims of aerial bombardment and expulsion as part of the maturing process Germany is experiencing. These new debates are indicators that national identities in Germany continue to be "ongoing, contested and open-ended construction(s), deconstruction(s) and reconstruction(s)" (p. 258).
With his tour de force covering more than two hundred years of German national discourses, Stefan Berger has compiled a very valuable introduction to the latest research debates on the discourses of German national identity. Despite the topical density and the impressive quantity of literature handled, the book is clearly structured and accessible. Nevertheless, it is more than a reference and textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, it is also a reminder that national discourses are always artificial and arbitrary.
Notes
[1]. Heinrich-August Winkler, "Historiker müssen Mythen zerstören"--Über das Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Raum und Geschichte. Regionale Traditionen und föderative Ordnung von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Thomas Kühne and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne (Leinfelden-Echterdingen: drw-Verlag, 2001), pp. 257-270; here p. 266.
[2]. Franz-Josef Brüggemeier's Zurück auf dem Platz. Deutschland und die Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft 1954 (Munich: DVA, 2004) might serve as an example of the penetration of research into post-1945 German national identity: While the surprising German victory of the 1954 soccer world cup is generally portrayed as the emotional foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany (for example on p. 184 in the publication under review here), Brüggemeier convincingly claims that the success in Berne was only of momentary significance but actually failed to become part of the German success story until much later.
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Citation:
Andreas Huether. Review of Berger, Stefan, Germany.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11124
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