At the end of a comment piece I wrote last month for the Guardian website I talked about Germany’s “economic narcissism”. A lot of the comments on the piece focused on my use of the phrase, so I thought I’d try to explain in more detail what exactly I meant. By using the term, I wasn’t simply trying to say that Germany was responding to the euro crisis in a selfish way. It seems to me that, in the end, whether you think Germany is pursuing its own economic interests or the long-term interests of Europe as a whole depends to a large extent on the economic theory in which you believe. By using the term “economic narcissism” what I had in mind was something related but slightly different: the way the debate in Germany about the euro crisis is so inward-looking.
Germany’s economic narcissism
Published February 12, 2012 German foreign policy Leave a CommentTags: euro, Germany
A post-Zionist Germany?
Published December 22, 2011 German foreign policy , international relations , Israel Leave a CommentTags: Auschwitz, Germany, Iran, Israel
In a piece about Germany as a geo-economic power that I recently wrote for Internationale Politik, a German foreign-policy journal, I argued that Germany’s “special relationship” with Israel might in future weaken. It seems to me that the relationship is all that remains of the foreign policy based on Auschwitz that Joschka Fischer sought to develop (a theme of my book, Utopia or Auschwitz). Although Chancellor Angela Merkel is personally committed to the Jewish state, I think she is under increasing pressure from an anti-Israeli public opinion and from Germany’s economic interests with the Arab world. I also wonder whether a dramatic event – such as an Israeli military strike on Iran – could be a tipping point that creates a rupture between Germany and Israel in the way that the Iraq war did between Germany and the US.
There is currently an exhibition in Holland about the love affair between the poet Paul Celan and Diet Kloos, a Dutch woman who had been a member of the resistance during World War II. I’ve written before about Celan – one of the most important figures in post-war German literature. However, until now I didn’t know much about Kloos, an oratorium singer whose husband was executed by the Nazis in 1945 after being tortured in front of her. Celan and Kloos met in Paris in 1949, when Celan was studying at the Sorbonne and Kloos at the conservatory in The Hague. The exhibition is based on the 12 letters that Celan sent Kloos during the following year (Kloos’s replies have been lost). The correspondence also includes three of Celan’s early poems, including his most famous, “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”, as John Felstiner translates it), which was written in 1944 and published in 1948.
Tribal qualities
Published September 13, 2011 German intellectual history Leave a CommentTags: anti-Semitism, Germany, nationalism, Zionism
I’ve always been interested in Walter Rathenau, the German foreign minister who was assassinated by anti-Semitic nationalists in Berlin in 1922. The son of Emil Rathenau, the founder of the groundbreaking Berlin-based electrical company AEG, he had run the German ministry of war’s crucial raw materials department during World War I and created what some see as the first planned economy. However, after the war, he and other leading Jewish figures were blamed by the right for the German defeat as part of the so-called Dolchstoßlegende, or myth of the “stab in the back”. In particular, as foreign minister, Rathenau became fatally associated with the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In a sense, his assassination symbolises the beginning of the end of the dream of Jewish assimilation in Germany.
Adorno and the Holocaust
Published August 17, 2011 1968 generation , German intellectual history , Utopia or Auschwitz 3 CommentsTags: 1968, Auschwitz, Nazism
I was pleased to see a review of Utopia or Auschwitz in the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which is published by the United States Holocaust Museum. The reviewer, Philip Spencer, raises the interesting question of whether the West German student movement misunderstood Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School’s interpretation of the Nazi past. Spencer says the Frankfurt School had a “sophisticated” view of the Holocaust as a “radical break” whereas the student movement “over-generalized” the Holocaust so that it became “only one case of genocide among many”. I think this is basically right. But it also seems to me, though perhaps I didn’t bring this out clearly enough in the book, that the tension between these two views of the Holocaust existed within the work of Adorno himself. So perhaps the student movement didn’t so much distort Adorno as read him selectively.
Utopianism and liberalism
Published August 14, 2011 1968 generation , Utopia or Auschwitz Leave a CommentTags: 1968, resistance, Utopia
In a previous post I said that my book, Utopia or Auschwitz, was meant to be a story of one example of utopian thinking by a particular group of people at a particular time in a particular place rather than a critique of utopian thinking in general. Although I thought the story of the Achtundsechziger illustrated some of the dangers of utopianism, I didn’t want to make generalisations based on it. However, since I wrote the book, I have been thinking more about utopianism in general. In particular, I recently read an interesting essay by Michael Walzer (editor of Dissent and author of Just and Unjust Wars) who argues that although utopian aspiration can be dangerous, it is also essential in order to check liberal democracy’s inherent tendency towards authoritarianism and hierarchy. “Without the steady pressure, or, better the intermittent uprisings, of men and women in pursuit of some ideal of justice, liberalism will give us only oligarchs and plutocrats”, he writes.
German ideology and pathology
Published August 7, 2011 1968 generation , German intellectual history , Nazism 1 CommentTags: 1968, anti-Semitism, Germany, nationalism, resistance, Stasi
I’ve been fascinated by Horst Mahler – who, it has just emerged, may have been a Stasi informant in the 1960s – since I wrote a profile of him for The Times in 2003. The son of a Nazi, he became a socialist lawyer in the 1960s and represented leaders of the West German student movement such as Rudi Dutschke. After its collapse, he founded the Red Army Faction (RAF), the West German left-wing terrorist group, and spent the whole of the 1970s in prison until he was released with the help of another young left-wing lawyer named Gerhard Schröder. Just after Schröder became Germany’s Social Democrat chancellor in 1998, Mahler became a neo-Nazi and represented the far-right NPD. He is now in prison serving a seven-year sentence for denying the Holocaust – a criminal offence in Germany. But what, if anything, does his strange political journey tell us?
Germany’s Kissinger
Published July 23, 2011 German foreign policy , international relations Leave a CommentTags: Germany, idealism, normality, Ostpolitik, realism
I’m currently working on an academic paper on the concept of “normality” in debates about German foreign policy since reunification. In that context, I’ve been reading a lot about Egon Bahr, who I argue played a crucial role in the late 1990s and early 2000s in redefining “normality” in terms of a foreign policy based on sovereignty and the pursuit of national interests. As Chancellor Willy Brandt’s foreign-policy adviser in the early 1970s, Bahr was the architect of West Germany’s Ostpolitik, a policy that dovetailed with the Nixon’s administration policy of detente towards the Soviet Union. Now in his eighties, he is a kind of éminence grise of German strategy and in particular the guru of German foreign-policy realism. In that sense, it seems to me that Bahr can be thought of Germany’s Henry Kissinger.
Herzl’s German adventure
Published June 25, 2011 German intellectual history , Israel 1 CommentTags: Germany, Israel, nationalism, Zionism
I’m very interested in the influence of German ideas and in particular German nationalism on early political Zionism. In previous posts, I’ve written about how the Utopia that Theodor Herzl imagined in his novel Altneuland was in some ways a very German one and how Max Nordau’s ideas were strikingly similar to those of German nationalists. I’ve just finished reading Amos Elon’s excellent biography of Herzl (1975), which (in contrast to Alex Bein’s earlier biography) emphasises how thoroughly German Herzl was in his ideas and aspirations. But the really interesting thing that emerges is how Herzl’s affinity for German culture influenced the political strategy that he followed in order to try to realise his dream of a Jewish state. It seems that Herzl saw it not just as a solution to the “Jewish question” but also as an outpost of German influence in the Orient.
Obama’s idealism
Published May 22, 2011 America , international relations Leave a CommentTags: idealism, Libya, realism
In the last few months, the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa seem to have transformed President Obama from a realist into an idealist. What is remarkable about this trajectory is how similar it is to that of his predecessor. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he disdained Bill Clinton’s idealist “nation building” tendencies and in particular the idea of humanitarian intervention. But after September 11, Bush pursued his own hyper-idealist “freedom agenda”, the centrepiece of which was the Iraq war. When Obama took over in January 2009, he also repudiated the hubris of his predecessor and promised more humility in American foreign policy. During the first two years of his presidency, the United States seemed to have tilted towards realism. But just as Bush reinvented himself after 9/11, so Obama seems to have remade himself since the Arab Spring.
