Mary Fulbrook

The State and the Transformation of Political Legitimacy in East and West Germany since 1945

Recent German history has produced a remarkable succession of state forms: an empire riddled with internal social tensions, brought down by external defeat in a world war for which it bore a large degree of responsibility; an unstable and ultimately suicidal parliamentary democracy; a genocidal dictatorship which eventually collapsed, totally defeated by opponents of its expansionist and increasingly radical foreign and domestic plans; and, concurrently, two remarkably stable and enduring instances of quite different political types, liberal parliamentary democracy in the capitalist west, and “actually existing socialism” based in democratic centralism in the communist east. Compared to their respective Western and Eastern European neighbours, the Germans on both sides of the inner-German border are now sustaining and reproducing their respective political systems with remarkable efficiency. Put crudely, it seems that good Nazis have been turned into good democrats and good communists, respectively.

Un-civilizing processes? : excess and transgression in German society and culture : perspectives debating with Norbert Elias

Mary FULBROOK: Introduction: The Character and Limits of the Civilizing Process Sebastian COXON: Laughter and the Process of Civilization in Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival Geraldine HORAN: (Un-)Civilized Language: The Regulation of Cursing and Swearing in German through the Ages Martin SWALES: Civilization, Un-Civilization, Transgression: On Goethes Faust Susanne KORD: The Pre-Colonial Imagination: Race and Revolution in Literature of the Napoleonic Period Mark HEWITSON: Violence and Civilization: Transgression in Modern Wars Ernest SCHONFIELD: Civilization in the Dining Room: Table Manners in Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks Maiken UMBACH: The Civilizing Process and the Construction of the Bourgeois Self: Music Chambers in Wilhelmine Germany Stephanie BIRD: Norbert Elias, the Confusions of Toerless and the Ethics of Shamelessness Mererid Puw DAVIES: Bodily Issues: The West German Anti-Authoritarian Movement and the Semiotics of Dirt Mary FULBROOK: Changing States, Changing Selves: Generations in the Third Reich and the GDR

Interpretations of the two Germanies

Introduction.- Historical Development.- Politics.- Economy and Society.- Patterns of Culture.- The End of the Two Germanies.- Conclusions.- Select Bibliography.- Index.

The Limits of Totalitarianism: God, State and Society in the GDR

History is not an exact science. In describing and seeking to resurrect—or at least reconstruct—past societies, historians make use of concepts which bear a double freight of meaning. Unlike the elements, atoms and molecules of natural science, which—however much they are artefacts of the inquiring scientists mind rather than natural ‘givens’ of the outside world—cannot answer back, the terms which historians use to describe the human world are themselves not only part of the way in which that past world was lived and experienced by the historical actors, but are also part of the way in which historians see, experience and act in their own social and political world. Historical concepts at any level of abstraction beyond the most basic and immediate empirical reference are also part of broader contemporary debates.

The Emergence of Modernity: Patterns and People in Sociocultural History A Review Article

The early modern period of European history is one of striking political, social, and cultural upheaval, characterised by the emergence of political states out of the diffuse structures of feudalism and the emergence of religious confessions out of the universality of mediaeval Catholicism. Associated with these changes were changes in patterns of conduct and social relationships, as knights became courtiers, rulers sought increased central powers, bourgeois classes and artisans worked under new economic conditions. In different

THE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM, 1648–1815

The German territories emerged somewhat strengthened from the Thirty Years War, at least in respect of their political position in relation to the Empire. It was quite clear that, although they still did not formally possess full sovereignty, territorial rulers rather than the Holy Roman Emperor were the key political actors. In the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire under Napoleonic rule in 1806, a unique pattern of political multiplicity existed in the German lands. The Holy Roman Empire ceased to be an active political vehicle or potential basis for the development of a centralised state; on the other hand, its continued juridical functions and rather passive political protection permitted the survival of many small units, fragments which without this wider context might easily have been submerged by larger neighbours. Viewing the Empire as a whole, this was the German pattern of ‘small principalities’ or Kleinstaaterei which has led some observers to see Germany as a petty, small-scale provincial backwater compared to the increasingly powerful western European states of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (notably of course England and France). Concomitant with this overall pattern of Imperial decentralisation was however a relatively high degree of centralisation of power at the territorial level. Individual rulers within the small states sought to gain more power for themselves at the expense of those below.

INTRODUCTION : THE GERMAN LANDS AND PEOPLE

In a famous and much-quoted verse, those two most renowned German writers, Goethe and Schiller, posed the question which has been at the heart of much German history: ‘Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? Ich weiss das Land nicht zu finden.’ (‘Germany? But where is it? I know not how to find the country.’) They went on to put their finger succinctly on a further problem of the Germans: ‘Zur Nation euch zu bilden, ihr hoffet es, Deutsche, vergebens; / Bildet, ihr konnt es, dafur freier zu Menschen euch aus.’ (‘Any hope of forming yourselves into a nation , Germans, is in vain; develop yourselves rather – you can do it – more freely as human beings!’) Between them, these quotations encapsulate perhaps the most widespread general notions about Germany and the Germans – although of course Goethe and Schiller could hardly foresee, let alone be held responsible for, what was to come. A belated nation, which became unified too late, and a nation, at that, of ‘thinkers and poets’ who separated the freedom of the sphere of the spirit from the public sphere and the powers of the state; a nation which, notoriously, eventually gave rise – whatever its contributions in literature and music – to the epitome of evil in the genocidal rule of Adolf Hitler. A nation with an arguably uniquely creative culture and uniquely destructive political history; a nation uniquely problematic, tormented, peculiar, with its own strange, distorted pattern of history.

THE AGE OF CONFESSIONALISM, 1500–1648

A cluster of changes occurring in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries appear to render this period an important turning point in European history. The (re)discovery of America in 1492 opened up a new world, with significant effects on the economies and politics of the old world; the ‘late mediaeval crisis of feudalism’ initiated the formation of a propertyless wage-labouring class, the harbinger of developing capitalism; the emergence of an interacting system of increasingly centralised European states began to displace the dispersed sovereignty and more localised politics of feudalism; the invention of a technique of printing with movable type by Gutenberg radically altered the character of intellectual life; and the Reformation initiated by Martin Luther shattered the religious and cultural unity of mediaeval Christendom, with a process of territorial confessionalisation both sustained by and sustaining the concomitant processes of territorial state-building. These major changes in European history should not blind us to certain continuities, particularly in relation to Germany. The period from the mid-fourteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century was characterised by a continued – and developing – territorial particularism within a relatively weak wider Imperial framework. German society continued to be largely based on feudal agrarian relations. While the economy of England expanded, that of Germany grew less rapidly, or stagnated. And for all the elements of ‘modernity’ that historians have sought in the Reformation, there was much that was essentially ‘mediaeval’ in sixteenth-century thought and beliefs.

The End of the Two Germanies

Less than a year after Honecker’s attempted celebration of the GDR’s fortieth anniversary on 7 October 1989, the GDR had ceased to exist. On 3 October 1990 the two Germanies were united in a new and enlarged Federal Republic. How can this extraordinarily rapid and dramatic transformation be explained?

German National Identity after the Holocaust

Preface. 1. National Identity and German History. 2. Landscapes of Memory. 3. Overcoming the Past in Practice? Trials and Tribulations. 4. Awkward Anniversaries and Contested Commemorations. 5. The Past which Refuses to Become History. 6. Collective Memory? Patterns of Historical Consciousness. 7. Citizenship and Fatherland. 8. Friends, Foes and Volk. 9. The Nation as Legacy and Destiny. Index.