HOW CAN WE "RECONCILE" COMMUNIST AND NAZI LEGACIES?
597
The new nationalists hate "the state," especially their own. They
think that the successful liberal democratic Gennan state - which they
too, as constitutional patriots, don't call
Deutschland
but
Bundesrepublik,
an important rhetorical distinction - is a foreign, artificial creation, the
Federal Republic. The Federal Republic is a state that has been imposed
by an historical disaster.
It
is alien to the Gennan nation. Thus, the new
nationalism actually opposes the most successful Gennan state there ever
was.
What is considered "the common democratic nationalism" in itself is
self-congratulatory. The Americans talk about this great nation of theirs,
the French about
La
republique.
In contrast, the new Gennan nationalism
is opposed to all the institutions that characterize the Gennan nation as
it is today. So, like the Russian, the Hungarian, the Macedonian na–
tionalism, it is anarchic, anti-statist; its focus is not politics but culture.
All cultural nationalisms of the twentieth century are anti-political. The
new German type contends that all Gennans belong to a community
that is independent of their state.
The new rightist Gennan nationalism indeed has very nasty under–
tones. Still, it is dissimilar to what we observed when our forefathers,
who were unfortunate enough to witness the nationalism of the
twenties that paved the way for National Socialism, were faced with: a
strong German nationalism, a kind of affirming and bolstering of the
state. People like Strauss and Syberberg and Zittelmann, and others, are
no different from the far left in their hatred for the Gennan state.
This changes the situation very interestingly. Nationalism is no
longer an ideology of the establishment, as Strauss says. The Gennan es–
tablishment is liberal. So the new German nationalism is not so much
directed against the French or the Americans, but against Gennan liber–
als.
It
is very much in the spirit of Oswald Spengler, who in his now-for–
gotten but once celebrated work,
Prussianism and Socialism,
took up
what was !wrong with the idea of "Gennan liberalism." His answer was
that it is an oxymoron, it couldn't exist; Gennany was not England. A
Gennan who is a liberal cannot be a Gennan. This is what to a certain
extent Strauss says, that the enemies are within. But unlike in Spengler's
time, it is only within. "German decadence" means for Strauss and for
Syberberg that Gennany has somehow relinquished its tragic mission and
identified itself with the most banal, dullest, most uninteresting thing,
with liberal democracy. And it has lost its essence.
A few words about the most important German nationalist, Ernst
Nolte. Of course, as Professor Gress told us this morning, people misread
Nolte (I'm not talking about Hillgrubber; that's a different thing alto-
