RICHARD
LOWENTHAL
193
many, which had arisen in the early middle ages as an integral, and
at times a central, part of the emerging Western civilization, came in
its struggle against the Napoleonic heirs of the French revolution
and in the process of creating a belated national state to see herself as
representing an "in-between-culture," with a special mission bet–
ween "Anglo-Saxon materialism" and "Russian barbarism." This
was the spirit that animated imperial Germany in World War I, that
was never effectively exorcized during the Weimar Republic, and
that reached its destructive climax in its synthesis with Hitler's
racism - only to perish with it. For that spirit was inseparable from
the belief in Germany's role as a great power and potentially a world
power , and 1945 marks the historic moment when that belief was de–
stroyed forever .
It is this fact - that the national catastrophe of 1945 brought
about an irreversible change in both the political and cultural men–
tality of the Germans - which is so difficult to realize for non–
Germans who did not actually experience the change. It was not, at
first, the moral conversion after the horrors of Nazism which many
Westerners were looking for; except for a minority, the moral con–
version came only later, in the next generation. What was im–
mediate, however , was the shock of being no longer a great power–
and having no prospect of ever belonging to that league again. To
give an emotionally neutral example, it might be compared to what
happened to Sweden, which had been a great European power, after
the decisive defeat of Charles
XII
at Poltava: suddenly, the Swedes
understood that for that kind of role, there were not enough of them
- and after the centuries of Swedish wars of conquest followed a
peaceful age of a parliamentary regime of the aristocracy, known in
Swedish history as "Freedom's Time." German national pride and
militancy had finally overreached themselves under Hitler; they had
been at the Atlantic coast, in Africa, and in the Caucasus - and it had
all been no good. Now the end of the war not only brought defeat,
occupation, and partition: it brought the rise of two superpowers,
soon both equipped with nuclear weapons, and the end of great–
power roles for
all
the traditional European powers. The Germans,
who have overreached themselves most, understood that fundamen–
tal change more quickly and more thoroughly than those European
powers who shared in the victory; but it has become true for all of
them.
