HOW CAN WE "RECONCILE" COMMUNIST AND NAZI LEGACIES?
599
about) in constitutional patriotism.
It
is important for Germans to iden–
tify with their country but also to live in prosperity and peace. This new
kind of self-satisfied, un-romantic, national feeling and identification with
institutions is the bourgeois kind of nationalism that classical German
nationalism always has historically opposed. Fichte has finally been de–
feated. The discussion of the founding of German nationalism has finally
become obsolete for the first time in German history. The fervent desire
for freedom, liberty, and racial nationalism, which originated with
Fichte, is at its end. And the romantic new right cannot recreate it. This
complaining, sulking, satirical, indirect, subtle new nationalism doesn't
capture people's imaginations, for the very simple reason that what it
recites is a list of complaints by people linked to the tradition of Ger–
man nationalism by a high culture that is more successfully undermined by
German television than by the bombing of Dresden.
Carnes Lord:
Thank you. We will open the floor to discussion.
Dmitri Urnov: I
teach at Adelphi University, and I am from Russia.
Since all of the panelists touched on my country, I would like to briefly
comment on each of their remarks. I would like to support Professor
Hollander's amazement at the tolerance of and lack of responsiveness to
the atrocities which were taking place in my country during the Soviet
period, most of all to our own people, by the international community.
Professor Hollander could find real support, historical evidence by look–
ing at what Russia's oldest generation of emigres, the post-revolutionary
emigration, wrote immediately upon leaving Russia or having been ex–
iled from it.
I speak as an insider. I was born in the year Stalin's constitution was
adopted and went through the whole period of Stalinist and post-Stal–
inist indoctrination. And I can testify to the fact that with all the stu–
pidities that were taught, there was never a hint of racism. We never
were told that as a nation we were in any sense superior to others.
Professor Herf, I believe, found a perfect formula for describing
Stalin's political attitudes. Stalin looked at Jews as possible holes in the
Iron Curtain. That explains the initial persecution of his closest col–
leagues and allies or their wives - when his colleagues were Russian and
their wives were Jewish. On the other hand, the Cold War drastically
changed the situation of the country. But it never changed its attitude
about Soviet or American allies. We always believed in FDR as a great
figure, and neither Stalin himself nor anyone after cast a single shadow
on that.
