In a compelling essay that appeared in Foreign Affairs in 2010, Mary Elise Sarotte describes how German reunification in 1990 “left behind fateful seeds, which sprouted into the 2010 crisis”. Although the idea of a single currency had been around since the 1970s, it took the prospect of reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to prompt Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President François Mitterrand to convene the intergovernmental conference that led to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. In a sense, it was a quid pro pro for reunification. But in what Sarotte calls the “mad rush” to agree the terms of monetary union, European leaders who knew little of economics created a single currency that did not have the ability to respond to crises or real political coordination.

At the time, Kohl talked about German reunification and European integration as “two sides of the same coin”. German reunification was only possible in the context of European integration – as Konrad Adenauer had said, “German problems can only be solved under a European roof”. Conversely, reunification was also a “catalyst”, as Sarotte puts it, for the creation of the euro – a further massive step in European integration (although because of French resistance it was not possible to agree the greater political integration that Germany wanted to accompany the currency union). In short, Kohl believed that there was a symbiosis between Germany and Europe. Initially, he seemed to have been proven right as fears about German power failed to materialise.

However, during the decade after the euro was created in 1999, Germany’s relationship with Europe began to change. As economic imbalances grew, economic interests within the eurozone diverged. Meanwhile, having achieved its goal of reunification, Germany became more Eurosceptic. As I have argued elsewhere, the size of the German economy, and the interdependence between it and those around it, is now causing instability within Europe. Germany needs the EU as a market for its exports and the euro to keep its own currency from being overvalued, but is not able or willing to act as a hegemon. One might almost say that Germany’s relationship with Europe has gone from symbiotic to parasitic. In fact, I am starting to wonder whether, if the euro crisis is not solved, German reunification may ultimately lead to European disintegration.

The debate about the euro in the last couple of years takes place against the background of what I think is a general tendency in Germany to what in a previous post I called “moral narcissism”. Germany tends to be somewhat inward-looking and, for obvious reasons, focuses on its own history and identity. In a sense, it is a good thing that Germany is struggling is to learn the lessons from its own past. But it can also make foreign-policy debates self-referential. Perhaps the best example of this is the debate about the Kosovo war in 1999. Although I think Germany ultimately took the right decision by agreeing to make a contribution to the NATO military intervention, the debate about it was one that seemed more about German identity after Auschwitz rather than the Balkans.

In this case, I think it means Germany tends to assume that the economic lessons of its own history are universal. In Germany the idea of an independent central bank enforcing “stability culture” is sacrosanct because it helped control inflation, create the Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle”, of the 1950s and 1960s and a strong Deutschmark. But Germany is now also seeking to impose those lessons throughout the eurozone. As George Soros pointed out at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Germany is also attempting to impose the lessons it has learned in the last decade. Austerity and wage restraint beginning under the “red-green” government helped Germany restore competitiveness in the 2000s. But that does not mean everyone in the eurozone can do the same thing. In fact, Keynesians would argue that this leads to a deflationary spiral.

Narcissism also implies a lack of awareness of your environment. Germans tend to think that their increased competitiveness is simply the result of their own exertions and to neglect the boost that the eurozone itself has given to the German economy. In particular, as I argued in a short piece for the Canadian international affairs magazine Global Brief, the eurozone has helped Germany to dramatically increase exports. The introduction of the euro cut the cost of borrowing in peripheral countries such as Greece, which enabled them to buy German cars and submarines. At the same time, the weakness of the euro compared to the Deutschmark has made German exports to the rest of the world and especially China much more competitive than they were before 1999. But listening to the debate in Germany, you would think Germany has simply pulled itself up by its bootstraps – that’s what I meant by “economic narcissism”.

The background to the possible emergence of what my colleague Daniel Levy calls a “post-Zionist Germany” is the reduction in the importance of the Holocaust as a factor in German foreign policy. From the 1980s onwards, the Holocaust became an increasingly important collective memory in West German public life. But during the last decade it has started to recede in importance. In the NATO military intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the Federal Republic sent troops into combat for the first time following a debate that centred on the Holocaust. In 2011, by contrast, it abstained on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 authorising military intervention to prevent a massacre in Benghazi. Moreover, during the debate about it, few people brought up Auschwitz at all.

Against this background, there has been increasing resentment against Israel in Germany – in particular  around the issue of settlements – which has put pressure on Merkel. She reiterated her commitment to the Jewish state when Benjamin Netanyahu visited Berlin last January – but even she was disappointed with him. The following month, Germany voted in favor of a UN resolution demanding a halt to Israeli settlement expansion - an unusual break with Israel. Later in the year, Germany opposed the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. But according to one poll,  84 percent of Germans supported Palestinian statehood and 76 percent believe Germany should act to recognise it – an even higher proportion in each case than in France or the UK.

There has been much discussion recently about the possibility of Israeli military action against Iran in 2012. In a list we made of possible developments in international politics in 2012, my colleagues and I at ECFR suggested that next year there could be a perfect storm in which the Netanyahu government might think it is the best time to strike. My hunch is that if that happens, the remaining sympathy the German public has for Israel would evaporate. An Israeli military strike would prompt another competition in Germany between the two principles of “Never again war” and “Never again Auschwitz”. In 1999, “Never again Auschwitz” seemed to win. But my reading of collective memory trends in Germany in the last decade tells me that in 2012 “Never again war” is likely to.

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.

Celan and Kloos first met at a cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris in August 1949, when Kloos was on vacation with a friend. Celan and Kloos were both in their twenties and struggling to overcome the trauma they had suffered during the war and begin a new life. They started talking in French about their experiences during the war. However, Celan subsequently asked Kloos if they could continue the conversation in German – which was both his mother tongue and the language of the perpetrators. The 12 letters he subsequently wrote to Kloos – which inevitably remind one of Kafka’s famous letters to Felice Bauer - are also in German. Occassionally there is something of the strange syntax and vocabulary of Celan’s poetry that George Steiner has described as “Heideggerian”.

Although the Holocaust is mentioned explicitly only a couple of times, it resonates through them – much as it does in Celan’s poetry. In one of the  letters, Celan talks about the song “Strange Fruit”, to which he later returned in the poem “Mapesbury Road” – the subject of my previous post on Celan. Celan and Kloos had seen the African-American singer Gordon Heath perform the song at a cafe in Saint-German-des-Prés during the week they first met, so it had a special meaning for them. When Celan returns to the same cafe for another concert in September 1949, he gets into a conversation with a Norwegian man who, upon hearing Celan’s accent, begins asking him what he did during the war. Celan concludes he had been a Nazi collaborator during the German occupation. Just when you think you have escaped the past, Celan writes to Kloos, you realise it was there all along.

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.

In his book The Pity of it All, Amos Elon (whose biography of Theodor Herzl I’ve previously mentioned) shows how the Rathenau family epitomised the German-Jewish community’s dream of assimilation. But despite the family’s apparent success at a time when the Jewish middle class was at its most confident and optimistic, Rathenau seems to have had a deep sense of anxiety about being a Jew in Germany. Elon suggests that, like Theodor Herzl, he idolised the Prussian officer class and was deeply hurt when he was refused a commission in the army after completing his military service. Afterwards he wrote of the “painful moment” when he realised that, as a German Jew, he was a “second-class citizen”. You get a sense of Rathenau’s mixture of pride and insecurity from Edward Munch’s 1907 portrait of him (above).

One expression of this sense of anxiety was “Hear, O Israel!”, a strange, desperate text aimed at German Jews that Rathenau wrote and pseudonymously published in a journal just as he was turning 30 in 1897. In it, he described the Jewish middle class as “an Asiatic horde on the sandy plains of Prussia, … not a living limb of the people but an alien organism in its body”. He urged Jews to look in the mirror to see the signs of their “bodily decline” and urged them to undergo a “bodily rebirth” through intermarriage. Like Max Nordau’s analysis of diaspora Jews at the Zionist Congress in Basle in 1898, Rathenau’s description of German Jews, and in particular their physical characteristics, echoed anti-Semitic tropes. Seen from today’s perspective, Rathenau and Nordau both look like examples of the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred.

The interesting thing is that these two figures shared a negative view of disapora Jews but differed about the solution. Unlike Nordau, Rathenau believed that the Jewish “problem” could be overcome through assimilation and thus opposed Zionism. Instead of settling in Palestine, he urged German Jews to “breath German mountain and forest air” and to “consciously adopt the tribal qualities of the host country”. Thus whereas Herzl saw the Jews as a Volk in their own right (he famously declares in The Jewish State that ”We are a people, one people”), Rathenau believed German Jews were part of – or at least could become part of – the German Volk. The similarities and differences between Rathenau and Nordau illustrate the way that both German assimilationists and German Zionists thought in terms of the concept of the Volk but differed on how to define themselves as Jews in relation to it.

The Frankfurt School had initially seen Nazism and the Holocaust as a function of capitalism (e.g. Max Horkeimer’s dictum that “he who does not wish to speak of capitalism should also be silent about fascism”). But beginning with The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Adorno and Horkheimer saw it instead as the end point of an even longer Western tradition of instrumental reason. This Fortschrittskritik, or critique of progress, tended to universalise the Holocaust. For example, at a lecture in 1965, Adorno said that the Vietnam war was proof of the continued existence of the “world of torture” that had begun in Auschwitz. On the other hand, however, as Spencer rightly points out, Adorno also saw Auschwitz as a Zivilisationsbruch – an unprecedented ethical and metaphysical break. This view is reflected above all in later works such as Negative Dialectics (1966). In short, there is a tension within Adorno between a particular and a universal view of the Holocaust.

Dan Diner brilliantly elaborates this tension between particularism and universalism in his important book Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse (which has not yet, as far as I know, been translated into English). The two central questions about the Holocaust, Diner says, are how and why? The question of how is a historical one that focuses on the victims – i.e. the particular experience of Jews as Jews. The question of why, on the other hand, is an anthropological one that focuses on the perpetrators – i.e. the implications for humanity as a whole. Although it aims to learn lessons from the Nazi past, this latter perspective tends to turn the Holocaust into “one genocide among other genocides,” as Diner puts its. He thus suggests it was no coincidence that Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues embodied the tension between these two perspectives: as “universal thinkers of Jewish origin” their biographies compelled them to see the Holocaust in both ways simultaneously.

Walzer takes as his starting point Isaiah Berlin’s essay on the decline of utopian ideas in the West. As a liberal writing in the aftermath of World War II, Berlin welcomed the decline of utopianism – in other words the belief in the possibility of creating a perfect society – which had led to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But although Walzer – himself a veteran of the movement against the Vietnam war in the 1960s – agrees with Berlin about that utopian aspiration can be anti-liberal because it leads to the idea that just ends justify extreme means, he also argues that it is the only force that can motivate “insurgent movements, radical mobilizations, and political struggles” such as the labour movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s that have expanded liberalism. Thus for Walzer, utopianism is not just legitimate but necessary to protect liberalism from itself. This seems pretty persuasive to me.

What troubles me, however, is Walzer’s use of the concept of “resistance” to characterise such utopian movements. As I’ve mentioned before, that is exactly how the Achtundsechziger saw their struggle against the Federal Republic: against the background of the Nazi past, some were thinking of the anti-fascist resistance; inspired by national liberation movements in the Third World, others were thinking of anti-colonial resistance. However this idea of “resistance” justified methods that were more appropriate to fighting a totalitarian or colonial regime than reforming a fledgling democracy. In fact, I think this is precisely where Germany’s 1968 generation went wrong. So perhaps if there is a lesson from the story of the Achtundsechziger for utopian thinking in general, it is that when protest or opposition in a liberal democracy becomes “resistance” it can also become anti-liberal.

The key question about Mahler – who is also one of the central characters in my book, Utopia or Auschwitz – is whether he should be seen as an anomaly or representative of a wider phenomenon. As David Aaronovitch put it at the launch of the book in London in November 2009, are we talking about an ideology or a pathology? Many on the left in general and former members of the student movement in particular dismiss Mahler as simply crazy. To some on the right, however, Mahler’s strange political journey is actually an illustration of the proximity of far-left and far-right ideology – the idea that “les extrêmes se touchent”. The best answer I have to Aaronovitch’s question is that the thinking of the 1968 generation – of which Mahler is not representative but nevertheless illustrative – was the product of a complicated mixture of both ideology and pathology.

The key to understanding Germany’s 1968 generation, it seems to me, is the Nazi past. The Achtundsechziger were the children of the generation of the Germans who were responsible for the Holocaust – what they called the “Auschwitz generation”. Many of them grew up with an acute sense of being the “children of murderers”, as Rainer Langhans, a key figure in Kommune 1 (a West Berlin commune that played a key role in the student movement), put it when I interviewed him for the book. The West German student movement can therefore be understood as a kind of ex post facto resistance against Nazism. The sympathy of some of its members for the “anti-fascist” GDR should also be seen against this background. Yet although it thought in terms of “resistance”, it also had nationalist and anti-Semitic undercurrents within in. In other words, it was not simply a left-wing movement but rather a mixture of left-wing and right-wing ideas.

Mahler is the most extreme – but not the only – example of this phenomenon. As I told the Guardian last week when it emerged that he may have informed for the Stasi, his whole life has been a struggle with the Nazi past. In that context, it seems to me that his far-right turn can be understood in pathological terms as a kind of posthumous reconciliation with his Nazi father. “We have to straighten out our relationship with our parents,” he wrote in a book published together with another German neo-Nazi, Franz Schönhuber, in 2000. Another striking example is Bernward Vesper, Gudrun Ensslin’s husband. Vesper’s father was the Nazi poet Will Vesper, whom he both hated and tried to rehabilitate together with Ensslin before she left him for Andreas Baader, the central figure in the RAF. (The story of the bizarre love triangle between Baader, Ensslin and Vesper is the subject a good movie that came out in Germany earlier this year, Wer wenn nicht wir).

At the same time, however, it seems to me impossible to understand the 1968 generation completely in pathological terms. Rather, it inherited and developed elements of a longer line of anti-liberal political thought in Germany – what Adorno, in his essay “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” (“What is meant by the working through the past?”), called “the anti-civilisational, anti-Western undercurrent of the German tradition”. This undercurrent is intimately connected to the history of German nationalism, which emerged in opposition to the French revolution and the Enlightenment ideas it represented in the early nineteenth century. It influenced both right-wing and left-wing critiques of capitalism in the twentieth century and culminated in Nazism but continues to be of relevance to contemporary debates about Germany and the West. What Mahler ultimately illustrates, it seems to me, is that in some ways the most interesting fault line in German intellectual history is not between left and right but between liberalism and anti-liberalism.

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.

You might not immediately think of the Social Democrat Bahr as the equivalent of the Republican Kissinger. Whereas Bahr stood above all for peace, Kissinger is accused of war crimes. However, Bahr’s Entspannungspolitik, or detente policy, developed in parallel with Kissinger’s own policy of detente under Nixon in the early 1970s. In his book Diplomacy, Kissinger describes how US support for Ostpolitik enabled it to solve the 20 year-old Berlin crisis and calls Bahr “extremely skillful”. Bahr’s approach was meant to be transformative: according to his theory of Wandel durch Annäherung, or change through rapprochement, engaging with East Germany would lead to a series of small steps that would ultimately transform it. Nevertheless the idea of detente with totalitarian regimes such as the GDR and the Soviet Union is usually thought of as a realist one. Thus American foreign-policy idealists – and in particular neoconservatives such as Scoop Jackson - reacted against it.

In the paper I’m working on I argue that Bahr’s redefinition of the concept of “normality” was also a realist one. From reunification until the late nineties, “normality” had been defined by reference to the Nazi past or in terms of Bündnisfähigkeit, in other words the ability to fulfil commitments as a member of NATO. However, Bahr saw a “normal” foreign policy instead as one that was based on the pursuit of national interests. Thus in a book published in 2003, he wrote that “normality means that each country pursues its interests, and seeks to achieve its objectives, without being paralysed by its past”. I argue that this realist definition of “normality” had a particular influence on Gerhard Schröder when he was chancellor, particularly after 9/11. It seems to me that nowadays pretty much everyone uses the term “normality” in the realist way Bahr defined it – for example in discussions about Germany’s response to the euro crisis.

Elon describes the young Herzl as a German romantic. He was “German by culture” – largely the result of his mother, who was “enamored of German Kultur“. Elsewhere Elon says Herzl’s parents were “piously devoted to the German culture of the master nation”. When he was a schoolboy in Budapest, Bismarck replaced Ferdinand de Lesseps, the engineer who built the Suez canal, as his idol. He loved Heine and Hölderlin and wanted above all to become a “German writer”. German culture seems to have continued to influence Herzl as an adult. For example, while writing The Jewish State in Paris in 1895, he listened to Wagner’s Tannhäuser for inspiration. The German influence is also clear in the text itself – for example in the conception of the Jews as a Volk. Herzl imagined the main language of the Jewish state would be German rather than Hebrew, which he did not know. “I can never be anything but a German”, he wrote.

Herzl’s sense of German identity may explain why he turned first to the Kaiser to help him realise his dream of a Jewish state. As I mentioned in a previous post, Bismarck had seen Germany as a European power, but after he resigned as chancellor in 1890, Wilhelm II sought to make the Reich a “world empire” (although Brendan Simms argues in a forthcoming book that this “global turn in German grand strategy” was ultimately “not a bid for world domination but a cry for help in Europe”). Herzl’s idea of a Jewish state in Palestine – at the time part of the Ottoman empire – initially appealed to the Kaiser because it fitted into his Weltpolitik. In particular, at the time when Herzl approached him in 1898, the Kaiser was seeking a concession to build a railway from Berlin to Constantinople (the first stretch of what became known as the Berlin-Baghdad railway), which would extend German influence into the Middle East to fill the vacuum left by the ailing Ottoman empire.

When Herzl met the Grand Duke of Baden (who acted as an intermediary between him and the Kaiser) he emphasised that “German writers – though of Jewish descent – are leading the Zionist movement”. He explained that he envisioned the Jewish state as a German protectorate that would export German culture to the Orient. Excited about the prospect, he wrote in his diary that “life under the protectorate of this powerful, great, moral, splendidly administered, firmly governed Germany, can only have the most salutary effects on the Jewish national character”. It was only after what Elon calls Herzl’s “German adventure” failed – in part, Elon suggests, because of Herzl’s “infatuation with the person and would-be role of the Kaiser” – that Herzl turned to the Ottoman Empire and Britain. But just before Herzl died, he made another last attempt to enlist the Kaiser’s support. “There is in our movement an element of German culture which should not be underestimated”, he wrote.