In John le Carré's 1968 novel, A Small Town in Germany, the protagonist takes note of some posters in Bonn on a "pious Friday evening in May" during the early post-World War II period: "Send the foreign workers home! Rid us of the whore Bonn! Unite Germany first, Europe second! Open the road east, the road west has failed!" Children of a New Fatherland, written with startling brevity by Jan Herman Brinks, reminds us that the old adage "the more things change the more they remain the same" holds depressingly true for German politics. The small town of Bonn was, in le Carré's words, a "Balkan city," all the more so because with East Berlin, another such small town in those days, it ruled a divided, Balkanized Germany. Today Berlin has been restored to pretensions of greatness and leads a reunified Germany, but the spirit of those old posters remains as a reminder of the continuity of this country's history with its present and future. It is about the power of this tradition in a "new Fatherland" that Brinks writes.
Of course, the many American visitors to Bonn during the Cold War and the few Americans who entered East Berlin in the same period were lectured by German hosts on how their respective peoples--West and East Germans--had turned their backs on the Fuehrerprinzip seemingly imbedded in their history and had embraced, respectively, parliamentary democracy in Beethoven's birthplace on the Rhine and proletarian democracy in the precincts of the university on the Unter den Linden where Marx had absorbed Hegelian scientific history. Now there were the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the first having cleansed itself in denazification and the second in an antifascist pedagogy. However, when the Berlin Wall came down and Germans were united again, they discovered that the forty-five years of their separation had not diminished their apparently genetic allegiance to a commanding national separateness astride middle Europe, which has remained ambiguously closeted from a latter-day allegiance to the commonality of peoples in a new European union.
Brinks moves relentlessly in his narrative, each part and chapter leading to the next almost like a screenplay: the forced march from partition to the political culture of the GDR to the right wing of the united Germany of today. His main focus is on the GDR, largely, I suspect, because the inner cultural and political workings of its efforts to escape the German past are less well known to most readers than the FRG's sometimes contradictory policies. The GDR had based its very existence--its national raison d'être --on antifascism, with dismal results. To some outsiders East Germany seemed to be a Soviet model that even Moscow could not match in terms of good, solid, German discipline, but some of its youth may already have been in latent resistance to the GDR's ersatz political system by silently embracing the very fascism that mythology claimed had been vanquished by victorious socialism.
Today this right-wing German history is alive, well, and ominous, or at least so the narrative of Children of a New Fatherland concludes in its third part, "The Right Wing of the United Germany." Here the chapter topics follow each other closely and horribly: antifascism; the swing to the right; the new right; the Republikaner; anti-Semitism; the debate on asylum seekers and new right influence; the Polish question; and Weimar revisited. Since this book is not a novel, let alone one in the le Carré mold, I think it is not giving too much away to let readers know that Brinks concludes his analysis of the current German right wing this way: "Contemporary problems do not make the reunited Germany into a modern Weimar, but there are signs that must give cause for concern."
In the real Weimar of the 1920s there had been no memory of Nazism to contend with and no strong premonition that Nazism would be Germany's fate in the 1930s. For this reason, there can be no contemporary Weimar any more than there can be a re-creation of the Third Reich. But each nation's history has an inescapability about it, so that contemporaries live with the sins of their fathers, as the prophets of Israel, most often to little or no avail, warned their people. Surely German history in this century has been of biblical proportions through two catastrophic wars, Hitler's horror, and the nuclear terror of the Cold War. In this sense Weimar was a kind of Saturnalia, a feast of exhaustion, where even sober minds believed that the scolding prophets of history could be flamboyantly ignored with impunity. The contribution that Brinks has made in his book is, in this sense, immeasurable: under the umbrella of the German past no one can afford a long holiday.
It must be remembered, however, that of the 130 years of modern Germany's existence, forty-five--or some 30 percent--have been spent as a country divided between East and West. Both Moscow and Washington, with their bipolar architectural policies, adopted head-in-the-sand attitudes toward what was happening on the right wing in their respective spheres of influence. The Soviets saw the GDR as the furthermost extension of their empire in Europe proper. By definition, this meant there could be no such thing as what Brinks calls "anti-anti-fascism." And the Americans viewed the FRG and the "small town in Germany" that served as its capital as the quintessence of the cosmopolitan side of German culture epitomized in the great choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth. Not surprisingly, both Bonn and East Berlin wished to cultivate the mythologies of their superpower patrons because of the special significance these alliances bestowed on both Germanies during the Cold War.
So mythologies served mythologies in the name of grand ideologies pitting East against West, the Germans no longer a great power but surely the most crucial of allies to those who were. International stability still rested on Germany, albeit a divided one. In Germany as in Korea, partition turned out to be good business for satellites as well as their masters. During the era of division, the United States surely bore some responsibility for the winking at the extreme right in West German politics. The game was ignored by Washington as it concentrated solely on building and dominating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Germany's soil.
Similarly, the foundation myth of antifascism in the GDR became a convenient fiction for the Soviet Union, which focused only on the forward deployment of its vast military capabilities. It could even be argued that signs of latent "anti-anti-fascism" among youth in East Germany proved that there was an omnipresent internal threat that required constant communist vigilance (and surveillance) by the Kremlin as well as the regime in East Berlin. Meanwhile, the East German regime had ingeniously employed symbols from Germany's authoritarian past to shore up its own tenuous legitimacy. The prosperous career of Russia's new leader, Vladimir Putin, began in this cynical marshland.
Brinks does not dwell much on the continuation of German rightist proclivities after 1945 within the context of partition and the superpower dominance and patronage that went along with separation. The context is, essentially, a given. If the great conquerors of the Third Reich had no objection to continuation of fascism under other names, why should the Germans worry about being politically correct? Most of them had defended the Nazi regime with their very lives until the final crushing of their effort and the suicide of their leader. But it is important to remember that the phoenixlike character of the German extreme right wing owes something of its surreal persistence to the powers that had pledged to destroy it once and for all in their joint declarations during the war. The United States and the Soviet Union fell on each other after 1945 and came to depend for their very survival, in one of modern history's great ironies, on well-disciplined, authority-conscious Germans now serving as faithful helots, until history came full circle again in the last decade of Hitler's century.
Having emerged from the abyss of totalitarianism and partition, the Germans now find themselves unified in a democratic political culture that differs from Weimar's but that has not eliminated the legacy of right-wing power "that must give cause for concern." In a breach of etiquette, perhaps, it might be wise for us to let the author of the book's foreword have the last word, confident that David Binder does not mean by "dispassionately" that we should act indifferently when he says, "Now that a centrist-leftist coalition has taken the helm in [German] national politics, it may be possible to view the current role of the right and its extremist fringe a bit more dispassionately."
Reviewed by Robert J. Pranger in the Mediterranean Quarterly 11.4 (Fall 2000) 165-167
Robert J. Pranger is a private consultant specializing in the management of international resources. He was formerly associate/managing editor of Mediterranean Quarterly.
