568
PARTISAN REVIEW
The manner in which the many problems posed by unification were
handled over the last five years brings to mind the earlier damage done
to the construction of political consciousness and judgment. In part, this
is a result of chronically ignoring the Nazi past. Now that the division
of Germany has ended, we are reluctant to discuss our political identity
and whether or not it is reasonable to negate this identity as Germans.
For political identity in a unified Germany implies relating to National
Socialism as the last shared period of German history.
In the former FRG, continuity with this period was denied, and fa–
vored instead political identity based on Germany as an economic na–
tion, which included an explicit attitude of reluctance and indifference
towards political institutions. Habermas alludes to this as the "nation–
alism of the German mark." He cites the historian Hans Mommsen, who
in the early eighties stated that Germans, instead of expressing national
pride, avoid the central theme of their history, aggressively remove the
East from their perception, and are eager to adapt Western values and
life styles. And they are proud of their economic achievements. Shortly
after the historical turn, Germans probably would have recognized
themselves when their relation to the process of unification was described
as pragmatic, oriented towards facts, down-to-earth and rational. In
itself, this description does not sound negative.
It
implies what Ralf
Dahrendorf noted from his British perspective, namely, that the Germans
of the West did not react with hurrah patriotism to unification. If we
consider, however, that this behavior is built on decades of denial and
de-realization of history veiling the continuity of National Socialism, the
view of this behavior changes. It can then be interpreted as an unac–
knowledged mistrust stemming from the effects of the mass psychology
during National Socialism. As long as the relationship between
skepticism and historical experience remains unconscious, it will con–
tribute to the lack of political identity.
These elements of political identity, however, lend constancy to the
collective self as an economic nation. But insofar as these elements allow
us to deal with the past, they are not appropriate to dealing with the
National Socialist heritage the former GDR left to its children. For this
heritage contains a post-fascist syndrome about which only little is
known. The centralizing similarities between the regimes of National
Socialism and the GDR allowed for the identification of the GDR with
the National Socialist state because, among other things, entire sections
of the population were being controlled by fear of denunciation. If one
assumes that, on the psychological level, emotionally distant rationality
favors collective denial, the question arises as to how such veiled fear can
be transformed into a collective a behavior that both East and West
