Helmut Kohl's Quest for Normality: His Representation of the German Nation and Himself 9781782385745

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K Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality L

MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editor: Stefan Berger Founding Editor: Jörn Rüsen Bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory, this series crosses the boundaries between both academic disciplines and cultural, social, political and historical contexts. In an age of rapid globalisation, which tends to manifest itself on an economic and political level, locating the cultural practices involved in generating its underlying historical sense is an increasingly urgent task.

For full series listing, please see back matter.

Helmut Kohl’s Quest

for

Normality

His Representation of the German Nation and Himself

Christian Wicke

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2015, 2017 Christian Wicke First paperback edition published in 2017 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wicke, Christian.   Helmut Kohl’s quest for normality : his representation of the German nation and himself / Christian Wicke.    pages cm. — (Making sense of history ; volume 20)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-78238-573-8 (hardback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-178533-739-0 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-78238-574-5 (ebook)   1.  Kohl, Helmut, 1930–  2.  Prime ministers—Germany (West)— Biography.  3.  Prime ministers—Germany—Biography.  4.  Germany (West)—Politics and government—1982–1990.  5.  Germany—Politics and government—1990–  6.  Nationalism—Germany—20th century.  I. Title.   DD262.W53 2015   943.087'8092—dc23 2014029580 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78238-573-8 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78533-739-0 paperback ISBN: 978-1-78238-574-5 ebook

For Thea

Contents

Preface ix List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction 1 Organization of the Study 8 Chapter 1.  Approaching Nationalism: Conceptual Frameworks 16 Nationalism: Normal, Flexible and Personal 18 Religion and Nationalism: Replaced, Intrinsic and Constituent 25 Taming Nationalism? Liberal Nationalism and Constitutional Patriotism 31 Ethnocultural Compensation? Romantic Nationalism and Heimat 36 The Historian as Poppy Grower: A Canberran Perspective 42 Nationalism and Germany’s Second Unification 46 Chapter 2.  Kohl as Catholic Nationalist The Black Giant Christian Democracy: The German (Anti-)Ideology? Concluding Remarks on Kohl’s Catholic Nationalism Chapter 3.  Kohl as Liberal Nationalist The ’45er: From the War to the West Preserving Adenauer’s Heritage Restoration and Unification: Prologue to Complete Normality? Concluding Remarks on Kohl’s Liberal Nationalism

63 64 77 87 97 98 105 115 125

viii Contents

Chapter 4.  Kohl as Romantic Nationalist The Palatine Kohl’s Philosophy of Heimat A Subdued Romantic Concluding Remarks on Kohl’s Romantic Nationalism

136 137 147 155 161

Chapter 5.  Kohl as Nationalist Historian Heidelberg: Between German and Eternal Spirit No Fear of History: Kohl’s Integrative Republican Historism Exonerating Germans from the Past: A Prelude to Normality Concluding Remarks on Kohl’s Historism

170 172 180 189 196

Conclusion.  A Synthesis of Kohl’s Personal Nationalism

207

Bibliography 217 Index 245

Preface

In December 2011 I organized an international symposium at the Centre for European Studies of the Australian National University (ANU), entitled ‘European Nationalism and Biography’. Reflecting on the discussions, Paul James concluded that ‘all the key theorists [on nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s] were outsiders who, through various means, came to confront the central commonsense of their time . . . ’.1 I would not arrogate myself to be ‘a key theorist on nationalism’, but my fascination for this theme, particularly within the German context, is probably related to my position ‘in between’ different nations for several years. As an exchange student from Maastricht University, I was fortunate to attend my first intensive course on theories and case studies of nationalism at Bog˘aziçi University in Istanbul. I am still grateful to Selim Deringil for introducing me to nationalism studies and his social-constructivist view, and for his brilliant sense of irony. Published biographical narratives combined with Helmut Kohl’s political speeches and writings form the fabric of the epistemological patchwork from which this study’s central argument derives. The historiographical framework focuses on contemporary Germany, in particular West Germany after 1945, and the theoretical foundation of this research is the crossdisciplinary field of nationalism studies. The overwhelming volume of archival sources on Kohl renders any systematic usage of their inspiring material impossible in a single study. As this study is primarily concerned with Kohl’s representation in the public arena over time, printed volumes comprising selections of Kohl’s speeches helped the process of my own selection of primary sources and the formation of this project. Important primary data

x Preface

was collected from the local archive of Kohl’s hometown, especially with the great help of Stefan Mörz, who has supported me throughout this research. I enjoyed generous hospitality in Ludwigshafen. Klaus Hofmann, Albin Fleck and Eckard Seeber, in particular, kindly introduced me to some interesting facets of Kohl’s former lifeworld. I also wish to express my appreciation to the academics and the private, public, religious and political institutions in Germany that provided valuable assistance by mail and email. A large part of sources were collected from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s archive in St. Augustin (KAS), which is affiliated with Kohl’s party. Substantial secondary research was conducted in state and university libraries in Berlin, Canberra, Edinburgh and Hanover. I thank Monika Storm and Alexandra Schmidt from the archive of the Rhineland-Palatine parliament. While writing in Australia, I accessed crucial sources in the online Bundestag archive with the ongoing assistance of Elisabeth Skrip of the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government of Germany (BPA). So many wonderful people have influenced the result of this research in different ways that they cannot all be mentioned here. I must express my deep gratitude to Ben Wellings for his continuous academic and moral support at the ANU. Further, I thank Jonathan Hearn and James Kennedy for their theoretical guidance and stimulating conversations over many years since the start of my studies at the University of Edinburgh. James Kennedy’s comments were very helpful for the preparation of the final manuscript. I also appreciate Paul Pickering’s assistance, especially during my first year in Canberra, where I enjoyed the inspirational climate of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts. Of all places in the world, however, the ANU Centre for European Studies (initially called the National Europe Centre), hidden under the gumtrees at the end of Balmain Lane, provided the most fruitful support during my research and writing process. In particular, my ‘doctoral grandfather’ Bruce Kent has to be mentioned in this context. I miss our dialogues very much! I also wish to show my gratitude to Isabela Burgher, Sue and Cassandra Cutler, Diana Davis, Beth Harris, Johannes Krebs, Karis Müller, Will Shannon and Josh Wodak for their substantial help during the preparation of this manuscript. I would also like to thank the copyeditor, Jaime Taber, for her excellent work, as well as Elizabeth Berg and Adam Capitanio for organizing this publication. I thank the Collaborative Research Centre 804 at Dresden University of Technology, the history department at Monash University, and the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University, Bochum, for providing me with workplaces during reconsideration of some final aspects of the manuscript. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Stefan Berger, the general editor of this book series, for his helpful criticisms and comments on each chapter of this book and his support since my return to Germany from Australia. Last but not least, my parents, family and friends have been very caring and understanding over the last years. My feelings of gratitude to Thea Coventry are

Preface

xi

greater than any written words can convey, and not only because she facilitated this book’s production with her professional editorial skills and analytical acuity.

Notes 1. P. James. 2013. ‘Closing Reflections: Confronting Contradictions in Biographies of Nations and Persons’, Humanities Research 19(1) (J. Hearn and C. Wicke [guest eds], Nationalism and Biography: European Perspectives), 137.

Abbreviations

ANU BdV BPA BVP CDU CSU DHM DPA EC EU FAZ FDP FRG GDR KAS SED SPD StALu U.S.

Australian National University Federation of Expellees Press and Information Office of the Federal Republic of Germany Bavarian People’s Party Christian Democratic Union Christian Social Union German Historical Museum German Press Agency European Community European Union Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Free Democratic Party Federal Republic of Germany German Democratic Republic Archive of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Socialist Unity Party Social Democratic Party of Germany City Archive Ludwigshafen United States

Introduction

Nationalism has become normal in the contemporary world. Despite changes in international relations and notions of sovereignty, nation-states have continued to mushroom over the past two centuries. And despite efforts to write transnational histories, the public is fundamentally organized along national lines, inasmuch as its nationalized representation of the past has supplied nationstates with legitimacy. In 1989, Richard J. Evans wrote that there was ‘no fundamental reason why a linguistic or cultural group such as the Germans should need to be united under a single state, any more than the same principle should be applied to other linguistic or cultural groups, such as the English-speaking nations’.1 However, after the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, it took only a few weeks for the movement for democratization in the German Democratic Republic to become a movement of unification. Millions in East and West Germany held that, to borrow the words of Willy Brandt,‘what belongs together is now growing together’.2 Many Germans believed unification would be the only feasible remedy for the historical dysgenics of their nation’s eastern appendage, and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was celebrated as the liberator of the suppressed. It was the beginning of Kohlmania.3 In his memoirs, Kohl recalled German Democratic Republic (GDR) Premier Hans Modrow waiting stony-faced at the end of the escalator, when the Chancellor left the airplane in Dresden and ‘thousands of people waited for us at the airport, a sea of black-red-golden flags waved in the cold December air – in between an almost forgotten white-green flag of Saxony.  .  .’.4 Kohl Notes for this section begin on page 12.

2

Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality

was greatly enthused by the masses welcoming him with banners and shouting ‘Helmut, Helmut’,‘Germany, Germany’ or ‘We are one Volk’. Despite his enjoyment of this exaltation, however, he was apprehensive about his own appearance before the ruins of the Dresden Frauenkirche, which he feared could be interpreted abroad as nationalistic. He asked himself what would happen if the euphoric crowd began to sing, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. Conscious of his embodiment of German normality, Kohl spontaneously asked the church to send a singer to perform ‘Now Thank We All Our God’, lest the masses embarrassingly strike up that first stanza of the ‘Song of Germany’.5 In this speech on 19 December 1989, Kohl assured hundreds of international journalists that ‘my goal remains – when the historical moment allows for it – the unity of our nation’. At the same time, he asked the Germans for empathy because the world was anxious about the upheaval in the GDR. Like any other Volk (the German term ‘Volk’ corresponds to both ‘the people’ as well as an ethnic group), he assured his audience, the Germans were entitled to the right of self-determination. But conscious of fears of another German Sonderweg (Germany’s special historical path outside of the West), Kohl portrayed the new ‘house of Germany’ as ‘built under a European roof ’. He commemorated the bomb victims of ‘this gorgeous old German city’ and emphasized his guiltlessness for the Second World War by reminding his audience that he had been only fifteen in 1945. Kohl was thankful for his ‘chance to grow up “over there” in my Palatine Heimat’, unlike the Germans in the East, and emphasized his belonging ‘to this young generation that swore after the war: “never again war, never again violence”. I want to renew this oath here in front of you: only peace must spring from German soil in the future – that is our common goal’. Finally he reminded his listeners of the upcoming Christmas, which would foremost be a festival of peace and a family celebration. Evoking the national solidarity that transcended the border between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Kohl affirmed solemnly that ‘especially on such days we perceive ourselves as one German family’. He thanked the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for his policies of perestroika, and the Polish Solidarity Movement and the reform movement in Hungary for helping to overcome forty years of German division, and concluded his speech: ‘God bless our German fatherland!’6 In exchange for some financial support, Modrow made several concessions, including the opening of the Brandenburg Gate, where Kohl would make another historic speech as a Christmas present to all Germans.7 Kohl not only symbolized Western affluence but also stood for a return to solidity and the national life in Germany, as it ought to be lived. He sought to personify the de-radicalized nationalism of the man in the street, whom he wished nobody in the world to fear anymore. This representation facilitated Kohl’s reputation both in Germany and internationally as the Chancellor of Unity, whose statesmanlike actions contributed to the reappearance of a

Introduction

3

supposedly natural order of things. Jürgen Habermas was highly suspicious of Kohl’s role in the unification process, as he feared the normalization of German nationalism and the restoration of the German nation-state, which was responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust.8 However, Habermas also portrayed Kohl retrospectively as ‘die verkörperte Entwarnung’.9 Beyond this comment’s satirical allusion to Kohl’s enormous body size, Habermas’s description could be loosely translated as ‘the embodiment of the all-clear’. In English the term all-clear has been used in times of war to inform others that a danger has passed. This representation of the all-clear epitomized Kohl’s personal nationalism, which foreshadowed the new normality of today’s united German nationstate as part of the West. During the (re)unification process, the ‘wall peckers’ near the Brandenburg Gate who sold pieces of the Cold War epicentre to tourists from all over the world were, in Konrad Jarausch’s view, pursuing their ‘understandable urge to return to normalcy’.10 Like all-clear, normalcy had become a popular expression in the United States after the First World War. However, as Philip Jenkins explained, this term implied not only the wish to return to conditions before the war, but also U.S. conservatives’ desire in the 1920s for ‘social tranquillity and ethnic homogeneity set somewhere in the historic past’.11 As a subset of Kohl’s quest for normality, this nostalgic pursuit of normalcy was also about ideological consensus and national identity. But Kohl went further in his quest for normality, insisting on territorial unity and a major image makeover for his nation. The (re)unification of 3 October 1990 eventually became the prime example of a nationalist event, fulfilling the modern ‘one nation = one state’ formula that has become an almost unchallenged norm worldwide.12 Though this normality had been challenged under communist rule in wide parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the abnormality appeared even stranger for the German nation, which was held responsible for the two world wars and the Holocaust. Kohl felt this reputation as a thorn in his side. For the German nation, the Second World War ended on 8 May 1945. Nevertheless, the peculiar repercussions of the all-clear signal persisted. Its reverberating undertones were fine-tuned over generations in the Federal Republic (established in 1949). Normality became a magic word among the provisional orchestrators of the West German identity project, which commenced when the emerging Cold War ended the Nuremberg Interregnum.13 The downfall of the Third Reich was followed by attempts to extract ‘good patriotism’ from ‘bad nationalism’. The great search began, excavating below the rough exterior of the German nation towards its golden heart, which the (re-)establishing political parties sought to represent during the early phase of the new West German state.14 It could be argued that the question of normality then became the German Question. It was primarily about the reconstruction of the country, the need for security, the suppression and denial of the Nazi past, and the question of the nation-state. Further, it was about tackling the belief that the nation

4

Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality

and its history were special, in psychological, social, cultural and political terms. Whereas before 1945, the perception that Germans were different from other nations had been viewed as positive; afterwards it was reversed into something negative: normality was about being like all other peoples.15 The victory of Konrad Adenauer and his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the first elections in 1949, along with Adenauer’s personification of unconditional Westbindung (integration with the West), had laid the foundation for the partial normality that Kohl felt obliged to defend.16 Since the 1960s, however, when Fritz Fischer caused a furore by arguing that Germans had followed a negative historical trajectory from the Reformation towards Nazism, the unity of German historiography had been publicly contested amongst Federal Republican intellectuals.17 The Nazi episode was subsequently historicized not simply as a historical accident that could potentially have also happened to other nations, but as the cumulative result of peculiarly German developments. At the same time, Adolf Eichmann’s sentence in Jerusalem and a series of Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt increasingly confronted the public with the German past, which appeared as anything but normal at the time.18 Conservatives, including the young Kohl, publicly agitated against Fritz Bauer’s initial calls for younger generations to recognize the crimes committed in Nazi Germany. Ignoring the emerging studies of Nazism, Kohl’s decision then was that it was too early to judge this episode of the German past.19 This presumption contradicted his own approach to contemporary history: Kohl’s Ph.D. thesis in history, submitted at the University of Heidelberg in 1958, dealt with the political reconstruction after 1945.20 Generations, like nations, can be regarded as large, very diverse groups that develop common identities by historicizing themselves subjectively on the basis of ‘collective experiences’ that differentiate them from other generations. Objectively, both are ideal-typological categories in historical and social sciences, and both provide important frameworks for ideologized narrations of the past. (Nations, however, are designed to transcend generations and have become much more powerful categories in any regard.) By retrospectively ‘breaking up’ nationalized time in West Germany, the protesting 1968 generation challenged the semi-normality of the country that had been reconstructed by their quieter parents, whom they held largely responsible for Auschwitz.21 ‘In German mythology’, as Heinz Bude put it,‘1968 lies between 1945 and 1989’.22 The cultural process associated with 1968 stood for another normalization of Germany, a kind of westernization that differed from the conservative longing for NATO belonging. The ’68ers deconstructed the myth of the Stunde Null (the ‘zero hour’ of 8 May 1945) and revealed the continuities between Nazism and Federal Republicanism.With his genuflection at the former Warsaw Ghetto in 1970, Willy Brandt (SPD) responded to the changing historical culture. Parallel to the rising demands for greater Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) this act of political memory occurred in the context of Brandt’s new Ostpolitik, which aimed at normalizing diplomatic relations with

Introduction

5

the East.23 Yet half of the West German population still found Brandt’s gesture in Warsaw exaggerated.24 Moreover, Christian Democrats agitated against the new foreign policies, which they saw as betraying the constitutional demand for unification.25 Normality was still open to dispute. The political climate change of the mid-1970s subsequently ignited a reactionary spirit of yearning for the lost values of the 1950s, which Kohl sought to put into operation with his chancellorship in 1982.26 Feeling obliged to dampen the postnational aberrations of 1968, Kohl marketed this coming to power as a geistig-moralische Wende (spiritual-moral change).27 While the division of Germany itself became more and more normal, Kohl was pursuing his quest for normality at the top level of Federal Republican politics, which caused momentous disturbances amongst the intellectual elites. He sought to endow the citizenry with emotional security and a deeper, romantic normality below the naked surface of the Cold War’s political structures, but the left-liberal intelligentsia in particular was apprehensive of what they perceived as a reactionary conservatism. Pride and traditions, Kohl felt, were needed to assure the nation’s well-being and prevent the regime in East Berlin from exploiting this alleged cultural vacuum. Consistent with the conservative-liberal concept of German memory, Kohl wished to prevent the normalization of a postnational identity, as envisaged by Habermas and the left-liberal antagonists.28 This tension led to a major historiographical debate in 1986 known as the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute), which would have been unimaginable without the insistent domestic and international memory politics pursued under Kohl’s governance.29 The quest for normality was increasingly about drawing a line – about overcoming the culture of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, often by relativizing Nazism against communism through portraying the real evil as still lying in Moscow and its East Berlin satellite. Kohl carefully walked this line, risking negative consequences for his ‘all-clear’ image when he pushed the boundaries of political correctness. The quest for liberation from anti-national sentiments was most dominant among, but not restricted to, the conservative-liberal establishment, which boosted Kohl’s morale. The exotic example of Martin Walser suggested that someone associated with the left in West Germany could still be a nationalist writer calling for national identity and unification.30 The 1980s saw a growing desire to dismantle the Germans’ stigma, shake off the burden and reject the notion that the division of the nation had been a punishment for uniquely evil crimes committed by Germans.31 Kohl responded to this desire and sought to amplify it. His search for normality sought both a departure from the old, anti-Western Sonderweg and the closure of the new, post-national Sonderweg.32 With the solidification of the new Berlin Republic, this double normality, which was the ideal effect of Kohl’s oeuvre, has come very close to its realization. Habermas, who believed that Auschwitz was the precondition for the creation of a liberal political culture in Germany, warned of a development in

6

Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality

which an increasingly faint memory of the Nazi past would result in its singularity being relativized against the memory of the Stasi past.33 However, after sixteen years in office at the Chancellery in Bonn and electoral defeat in 1998, the Chancellor of Unity passed the routine on to his successors, and Germans came ever closer to Kohl’s vision of normality.34 Biographical interest in Kohl was particularly strong in the 1990s, due to his role in the unification process in 1989/90, and again at the end of the Kohl era in 1998. The conventional media substantially revived its interest in Kohl upon the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009 and Kohl’s eightieth birthday celebration in 2010. In 2011, Kohl was again in Germany’s mainstream media spotlight after public disclosure of details of his family life.35 In October 2014, during the week of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Kohl once more dominated the mainstream media in Germany; without Kohl’s permission, Heribert Schwan, who Kohl had hired as ghost writer for his memoirs, published a book containing controversial statements Kohl made during interviews Schwan had conducted in the early 2000s.36 Kohl simultaneously published an updated version of his memoirs on the (re)unification process.37 Shortly thereafter he presented his book Aus Sorge um Europa, reaffirming his belief in European integration and attacking his successors for the wrong policies, and staging himself again as a ‘great European’. Despite Kohl’s ongoing presence in German public debate, little has been written about his ideology. He described himself as anti-ideological, and his biographers have tended to emphasize a primary interest in political power rather than looking at the ideas, rhetoric and representation of this key figure in contemporary European history.38 It is worth noting that Hans-Peter Schwarz’s recent standard work on Kohl does not aim at a break with the established narrative about Kohl, and is careful in maintaining the image of him as an average hero. Schwarz’s political biography is surprisingly unsurprising in its narration and analysis, given the impressive research undertaken.39 In contrast to his allegedly anti-ideological facade, Kohl strove to be remembered as a man of principles and identities, devoted to Christian, Palatine, Federal Republican, German and European ideals.40 In Kohl’s worldview, these ideals were not contestable: they were historically derived and beyond discursive reason. He based his ideology on a conviction of natural law and stylized his own personality as representing and guarding a deeper truth from which Germans were alienating themselves. Patrick Bahners explained Kohl’s notion of normality as situated beneath ‘the really predominant or the statistically dominant’; it was something regulative and unavoidable: ‘the norm provided an order, which could not be changed. One may disagree with that normality but would still have to comply’.41 Kohl suffered a holistic bias, and in trying to mute any oppositional voices he used Karl Popper’s concept of critical rationality, which did not abide by the normality he represented. Any criticism would be dogmatic and allow for the polarization of society that Kohl warned against throughout his political career.42

Introduction

7

Kohl perceived the absence of the nation-state as abnormal, but achieving it was not a central value for him. That is, realizing territorial unity was not the highest aim in Kohl’s nationalist rhetoric; instead, it was one of several crucial aspects of his quest for normality. Irrespective of the borders, he presented the unity of the German nation as destiny. As long as the Kulturnation (cultural nation) was maintained, so the argument ran, the theoretical prospect for unification could be preserved. The cultural and ethnic German nationhood underpinning political realities was key to providing Germans with permanent assistance to internalize this truth. Kohl believed that all Germans were called to work for unification. It was the constitutional demand, and the constitution was a quasi-sacred national symbol in Kohl’s personal nationalism. Nonetheless, the lesson Kohl had learned from Konrad Adenauer – the major national hero in Kohl’s narrative of the past – was that unification must not happen at the expense of Germany’s belonging to the West. Belonging to the West and being on equal moral terms with Western nations were central elements of Kohl’s personal nationalism. By positioning his romantic conception of German nationhood under the hegemony of the West, Kohl was able to rehabilitate allegedly dangerous traditions in German nationalism. This synthesis was part of his personal manifestation of German normality. Further, Kohl did not see the instalment of state unity within the Western framework as necessarily assuring complete normality. During the (re)unification process, when asked about his vision for the next ten years, he responded ‘that things will normalize. That’s the most important thing for us. That we become a wholly normal country, not “singularized” in any question . . . [Y]es, that we simply don’t stick out [sic]’.43 The prospect of the new German nation-state thus was not enough to cure his national inferiority complex. Kohl remained unsettled about the success of his controversial attempts to relativize the Nazi past. He felt that his calls for a more positive national identity were left unanswered, and that Germans’ reputation as a rogue nation had yet not disappeared. In line with most Germans, Kohl’s rhetoric regarded nationalism as a faux pas, something erroneous, abnormal, outdated and essentially dangerous. He saw this terminological sanitization as necessary to conform to the standards of German normality. However, Kohl was his own individual type of nationalist. His imagination, rhetoric, actions and representation helped preserve and reshape the German nation. The personal nationalism of the Chancellor of Unity thus went much further than his claims for (re)unification, which merely followed Ernest Gellner’s prominent definition of nationalism as ‘a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent’.44 Kohl had never been indifferent about the content of the Deutschlandbegriff (notion of Germany), which was analogical to his idealized portrayal of himself as the embodiment of German normalitiy. His early socialization supplied him with a repertoire of self-images that he mobilized selectively in the course of his political career to represent a particular vision his nation.

8

Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality

Nationalism has been described as a quasi- and post-religious phenomenon that endows societies with a sense of transcendence across time and space.45 Though often implying something extreme and out of date, here nationalism is treated as a contemporary, mainstream phenomenon that traverses personal, public and official spheres. Nationalism is not only an issue of organized politics; it is an informal matter of everyday life, where things, ideas and actions have been culturally nationalized.46 This omnipresence makes nationalism hard to reflect upon and easy for politicians to exploit. Nationalism, however, does not exclusively emanate from the upper classes to the masses. Political elites’ mindsets are themselves products of their nationalized environment that develop over the course of their socialization, which should not be seen as disconnected from the mainstream socialization. Thousands of notions of the nation exist, informed by melanges of ideas and concepts idiosyncratic to each individual. As Kohl’s example demonstrates, religion, political ideology, generation, region, education and profession are integral to the repertoires that shape notions of nations. Nationalism is a discursive phenomenon, but one that is permanently penetrated by other discursive phenomena. These vary amongst members of the same national group, although commonalities exist to which all members can refer. Clearly, then, nationalism cannot be a singular concept but rather takes many forms through diverse social and conceptual frameworks. Some of these multiple faces of German nationalism are discernible within Kohl himself, who personified a particular nexus between national, group and individual identities. Born on 3 April 1930 in Ludwigshafen on the Rhine, Kohl’s trajectory as a Christian Democratic politician provides important perspectives on nationalism in contemporary Germany. This research thus aims to use the life and ideology of Kohl to explore the management of national representation and historical culture in the Federal Republic.47

Organization of the Study Chapter 1 is designed to provide a theoretical foundation and framework for this study, which can be read as a methodological proposal to scholars of nationalism in general.48 The chapter explores theories on nationalism and provides definitions for key concepts that underpin subsequent chapters. It proposes working definitions for concepts of nation and nationalism, and reasons for the choice of biographical method. Because the terminology used here may have different meanings depending on the respective authorship and discursive context, the reader should know that in this study, ‘Catholic nationalism’ is a form of religious nationalism, in which religious thought and belonging shape the notion of nation; ‘liberal nationalism’ consists of a set of normative efforts to preserve the integrity of nationalism under the hegemony of liberal values; ‘romantic nationalism’ refers to the accentuation of ethnic and cultural

Introduction

9

attributes of nationhood over political structures, noting particular connotations in the German context (it could also be treated more generally as ‘ethnocultural nationalism’); and ‘national historism’ is the act of conceptualizing the past in national categories, or the use and production of history for nationalist purposes. Finally, the concept of unification is introduced. Chapter 2 examines Kohl’s socialization in the Catholic milieu, where his Christian Democratic ideology originated and his notion of Germany became imbued with religious ideas. In German historiography, Catholicism re-emerged from the Second World War as representing a notion of Germany that stood in contrast to the anti-Western and pro-Prussian Sonderweg image. Kohl’s autobiographical representation drew on a portrayal of his parents and political mentors as at once religious, patriotic and dissociated from Nazi ideology. He thereby historicized his own background as a positive example in German history, emphasizing the continuity between the political Catholicism of the Weimar Republic and Christian Democracy in the Federal Republic, while concealing the relationship between Catholicism and Nazism. This biographical feature was a useful asset in his quest to represent German normality. As a successor of the former Catholic Centre Party, the Christian Democratic Union rapidly emerged as the main conservative force in West Germany by accommodating a broad electorate, including liberal Protestants. The westernization of German conservatism under the umbrella of Christian Democracy marked a significant shift whilst also preserving the anti-communist tradition. Adenauer was able to present the curing of Nazi Germany’s apostasy from God as in keeping with the persistent threat from the East, and Kohl projected this position thereafter. The protection of the Christian occident was consistent with the Americanization of the German economy and culture, and European integration was advocated as an expression of the common Christian heritage among European nations that must not be suppressed by ‘ideologies’. In Kohl’s imagination, the process of Westernization was an advent of normality with which he himself strongly identified. Kohl’s subsequent political life was characterized by theorizing the liberal principles of the Federal Republican constitution and German culture as rooted in Christianity. Positing Germany as an essentially Christian nation, he depicted his party as the most patriotic trustee of the national heritage. He propagated Christianity as an anti-ideological force: Nazism and communism were equally dangerous atheist ideologies, whereas his worldview and that of his party were beyond ideology and protected by belief in the human being as the image of God. In addition to Christianity’s importance for political and national wellbeing, Christian ethics were vital to personal, emotional security and solidarity in society. Kohl thus resorted to religious motives during his conservative reaction against the ‘spiritual-moral crisis’ of the post-1968 era. Chapter 3 positions Kohl’s generational belonging in relation to his liberal nationalist rhetoric. Kohl belonged to the ’45ers, the generation sandwiched

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Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality

between Wilhelminian parents, who had been in charge during the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, and the ’68ers. His experiences during the Third Reich, towards the end of the Second World War and in its aftermath fundamentally shaped both his idea of Germany and his ideal of Germany’s historical culture, which he sought to disseminate as a politician. His generation could claim to be eyewitnesses to the transition from Third Reich to Federal Republic, and his generational identity endowed him with an appearance of historical authenticity in his representation of this new German state. This biographical characteristic bequeathed to Kohl a powerful narrative that he was able to use in his political life to sustain the representation of normality. He portrayed himself as someone who was too young to be guilty of the Nazi atrocities yet old enough to know the meaning of war and dictatorship. He thus staged himself as predestined to represent the spirit of the foundation of the Federal Republic and its liberal political culture, and to ensure that German history would not repeat itself. Kohl cleverly aligned himself with the new post-1945 situation. He became a politically active paragon of the new civil society. Members of his generation saw the Federal Republic as fundamentally superior to the political and social order they had experienced as children and teenagers during the Second World War, and they reacted strongly to any potential undermining of the legitimacy of the republic and its belonging to the West. The progression from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic, the economic miracle and the westernization of his state were the dominant developments in Kohl’s historical memory until (re)unification. Within this generational spectrum, Kohl was among the liberal nationalists, who believed that their constitutional patriotism still required a national underpinning. He articulated a German nationalism that, though fearful of any further Sonderweg, did not allow for a complete break with the nationalist tradition. The zero hour was thus not an absolute rupture for Kohl, who always put great emphasis on the positive, liberal continuities in Germany’s political culture and sought to highlight the connection between Weimar and the new system in Bonn.The liberal principles of the constitution were, for Kohl, rooted in a much older, Christian and Enlightenment heritage of the German nation. Kohl articulated the ‘dogmatism’ of 1968, which he also associated with Social Democracy, as a threat to the republic. It was part of his political method to continually attribute the success of the golden years of the early West German state to Adenauer and his party in power. Seeking to instigate a revival of national and Federal Republican identity, he constantly reminded the public of Adenauer’s heritage and styled himself as his political grandson. Kohl used the connection between himself and Adenauer to suggest his categorical commitment to the West, the Transatlantic Alliance and the vision of a united Europe – a significant alignment in his representation of normality. A key observation in this regard is that Western integration (i.e., loyalty to the United States and NATO as well as to the European integration project)

Introduction

11

and national restoration were two mutually reinforcing principles in Kohl’s liberal nationalism. Remembering Kohl as a nationalist thus does not preclude a public memory of Kohl as a statesman convinced of the existential need for European integration. Chapter 4 deals with Kohl’s regional background and his romantic nationalism. His Rhenish origin endowed him with another biographical characteristic by which to demonstrate German normality. He emphasized the Palatinate’s geographic position bordering France and articulated his Palatine identity as a sign of his genuine Western and European nature. His display of Palatine belonging was also part of his representation of Germany’s decentralized makeup as a conglomerate of local folk cultures. Like religion, these regional traditions were, in Kohl’s view, important to preserving solidarity and emotional security against alienation in modern industrial societies and, at the same, ensuring the functionality of democracy. Kohl’s propagation of a particular Heimat consciousness (the romanticized notion of homeland), comprised of romantic associations with both local and national origins, was part of his conservative vision of a ‘spiritual-moral’ change in society, in reaction to the structural and ideological constraints of his time. The German Volk was primarily defined as a group with common ethnic and cultural backgrounds rather than a political nation. However, Kohl’s ethnic conception of German nationhood was in harmony with Federal Republican law. The cultural reading of Germany that Germans had traditionally generated in response to the absence of the nation-state was, in Kohl’s case, pervaded by Cold War rhetoric. He believed only the Federal Republic was entitled to represent German culture. The GDR, he retorted when East Berlin aspired to claim the prerogative of German history, should be excluded from the national heritage. Further, Kohl’s demand for unification focused only on the territories of the FRG and GDR. Though forced to accommodate German expellees’ organizations and right-wing nostalgia about the lost regions further east, Kohl never raised any revanchist, territorial claims. Paradoxically, the romantic nationalism that sustained his representation of Germany as an essentially European and Western nation, as communicated in his correspondence, was often subordinated to his liberal nationalism and thus worked to support his image of normality. Chapter 5 outlines Kohl’s style of historicizing the German past. The essay first offers some insights into the ambience of Kohl’s university education at Heidelberg in the 1950s, where he was taught by professors who had previously sympathized with Nazi ideals or been actively involved in the Nazi movement and remained able to continue their careers at public institutions in the Federal Republic. Kohl’s Ph.D. focused on political reconstruction in his home region after the Second World War. The year 1945 was the vanishing point of his historical study. In essence, however, he bypassed the negative episode of the Third Reich, except for the positive imagery of the resistance, and emphasized the

12

Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality

democratic attitude of postwar politicians who had been active prior to the Nazi takeover of power. This was integral to Kohl’s schema for signalling the all-clear. In his view, the new state legitimized itself not only against the backdrop of Germany’s historical accident, which he presented as caused largely by Hitler alone, but also in relation to a continuous national history connected to the role of political parties and individuals in the Palatinate. As a trained historian, Kohl was confident in his pursuit of controversial Geschichtspolitik (history politics), which has attracted intensive scholarly attention since the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. He was conscious of his self-revelation as the epitome of German normality – the one who had learned the lessons from history. But in pursuing his conservative agenda, Kohl caused a series of domestic and international scandals that threatened his quest for normality. Kohl followed Germany’s ‘historist’ tradition: he had internalized a conception of history in which a few incontestable entities followed a natural determination. He used this method to legitimize the (West) German state, his ideology and his power. As he saw it, public contestation of Germany’s national history not only harmed the German nation’s reputation but also undermined the legitimacy of its possible political (re)union and, most importantly, questioned its natural belonging to the West as a fundamental part of Europe. For Kohl, history was something absolute and essentially national; therefore it was impossible, or at least immoral, to sever ties with it. History was in accordance with human nature: not perfect but generally positive. The aberration of the Third Reich and the GDR only confirmed the otherwise positive stream of Germans’ history, in his account. In this apologetic presentation of Germany, the Germans themselves eventually entered the circle of Nazi victims, and though the younger generations should not forget this dark chapter of their history, it was time to walk out of Hitler’s shadow and get back on track towards a brighter future. Hence, Kohl’s personal nationalism will be analysed along four traditions in German nationalism, which he internalized during his early socialization. The four empirical chapters of this volume discuss Kohl in that order – as Catholic nationalist, liberal nationalist, romantic nationalist and nationalist historian – each connecting Kohl’s nationalist ideas to a particular biographical narrative. The conclusion marks the synthesis of these four nationalisms: combined, they shaped Kohl’s representation as the embodiment of German normality.

Notes 1.  R.J. Evans. 1989. In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past, New York: Pantheon Books, 102. 2. B. Rother. 2001. ‘“Jetzt wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört” – Oder: Warum Historiker Rundfunkarchive nutzen sollten’, in T. Garton Ash (ed.), Wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört? Berlin: Schriftenreihe der Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung, 25–30.

Introduction

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3. A. Glees. 1996. Reinventing Germany: German Political Development since 1945, Oxford: Berg, 249–52. 4.  H. Kohl. 2005. Erinnerungen, vol. 2: 1982-1990, Munich: Droemer, 1020. All primary and secondary sources that were originally written in German have been translated by the author into English, unless otherwise indicated. 5. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 1022–23. 6.  H. Kohl. 1990. ‘Ziel bleibt die Einheit der Nation’ (Speech delivered at a rally in Dresden, 19 December 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, Bonn: BPA, 138–42. 7. Kohl. 1990. ‘Eine der glücklichsten Stunden’ (Speech delivered at the opening of the Brandenburg Gate, 22 December 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, Bonn: BPA, 154–55. 8. J. Habermas. 1990. ‘Der DM-Nationalismus’, Die Zeit, 30 March; J. Habermas. 1992. ‘Die zweite Lebenslüge der Bundesrepublik: Wir sind wieder „normal“ geworden’, Die Zeit, 11 December. 9.  J. Habermas. 1994. In U. Greiner (ed.), Meine Jahre mit Helmut Kohl, Mannheim: Bollman, 9–11. 10.  K. Jarausch. 2006. After Hitler: Recivilising Germans 1945-1995, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 214. 11.  P. Jenkins. 1997. A History of the United States, Basingtoke: Macmillan, 209. 12. J. Breuilly and R. Speirs. 2005. ‘The Concept of Unification’, in J. Breuilly and R. Speirs (eds), Germany’s Two Unifications: Anticipations, Experiences, Responses, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2. 13. J. Herf. 1999. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; P. Bender, 1997. Episode oder Epoche? Zur Geschichte des geteilten Deutschlands, 3rd ed., Munich: dtv. 14.  J. Gabbe. 1976. Parteien und Nation: Zur Rolle des Nationalbewußtseins für die politischen Grundorientierungen der Parteien in der Anfangsphase der Bundesrepublik, Meisenheim a.G.: Anton Hain. 15. See Aleida Assmann on the notion of normality in (West) Germany: A. Assmann. 1999. ‘Die Schlagworte der Debatte’, in A. Assmann and U. Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945, Stuttgart: DVA, 59–63; see also L. Niethammer. 2001. ‘“Normalization” in the West:Traces of Memory Leading Back into the 1950s’, in H. Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968, Princeton: Princeton University Press, chapter 10. 16. A. Poppinga. 1975. Konrad Adenauer: Geschichtsversändnis, Weltanschaung und politische Praxis, Stuttgart: DVA; N. Frei. 2002. Adenauer‘s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, trans. J. Golb, New York: Columbia University Press. 17.  J. Moses. 1975. The Politics of Illusion: The Fischer Controversy in German Historiography, London: Prior. 18. R. Wittmann. 2005. Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 19.  C. Fröhlich. 2005. Wider die Tabuisierung des Ungehorsams: Fritz Bauers Widerstandsbegriff und die Aufarbeitung von NS-Verbrechen, Frankfurt: Campus, 151–52; F. Bauer. 1961. Die Wurzeln faschistischen und nationalsozialistischen Handelns, Mainz: Landesjugendring Rheinland-Pfalz. 20.  H. Kohl. 1958. ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’, Ph.D. dissertation, Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, copied from the Bibliothek des Niedersächsischen Landtags. 21.  H. Kundnani. 2009. Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press. Cf. C. Lorenz and B. Bevernage (eds). 2013. Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. For a critique of generational analysis see also W. Kansteiner. 2014. ‘Generation and Memory: A Critique of the Ethical and Ideological Implications of Generational Narration’, in S. Berger and B. Niven (eds), Writing the History of Memory, New York: Bloomsbury, 111–34.

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22. H. Bude. 2009. ‘Achtundsechzig’, in É. François and H. Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte 2, Munich: C.H. Beck, 122. For a more general discussion of generational analysis, life stories and historical science, see J. Reulecke (ed.). 2003. Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 58, Munich: Oldenbourg. In a chapter in this volume entitled ‘Die 50er Jahre im Spiegel der Flakhelfer- und der 68er-Generation’, Heinz Bude contrasts Kohl’s generation with the 68ers, arguing that Germany has been a more ‘generation-ridden’ society, at least in comparison to the more ‘class-ridden’ British society (p. 145). 23.  C. Fink and B. Schaefer (eds). 2009. Ostpolitik, 1969-1974: European and Global Responses, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 24.  Der Spiegel. 1970. ‘Kniefall angemessen oder übertrieben?’ 14 December. 25.  C. Clemens. 1989. Reluctant Realists: The Christian Democrats and West German Ostpolitik, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 26.  Der Spiegel. 1975. ‘Tendenzwende: Jeder fühlt den neuen Wind’, 6 January. 27.  R. Seuthe. 2001. Geistig-moralischen Wende? Der politische Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit in der Ära Kohl am Beispiel von Gedenktagen, Museums-und Denkmalprojekten, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 28.  J. Habermas. 1988. ‘Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: Remarks on the Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West’, Acta Sociologica 31(1), 3–13. 29.  C.S. Maier. 1988. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 30.  M. Walser. 1987. Dorle und Wolf, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp; M. Walser. 1989. Über Deutschland reden, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. In the 1990s Walser was increasingly associated with right-wing revisionism, see T.A. Kovach. 2008. Martin Walser: The Burden of the Past, Martin Walser on German Identity:Texts, Contexts, Commentary, Rochester, NY: Camden House. 31. A.D. Moses. 2007. German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 24–31, 258. 32.  S. Berger. 2007. The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness since 1800, revised ed., Oxford: Berghahn Books, xiii–xxvi and 176–97. 33.  J. Habermas. 1995. Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 170. 34. For a recent discussion on the concept of normality in the German context, see S. Taberner and P. Cooke (eds). 2006. German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-first Century: Beyond Normalization, Rochester: Camden House. 35. The books by Helmut Kohl’s son Walter and by Heribert Schwan, were bestsellers in Germany; see W. Kohl. 2011. Leben oder gelebt werden: Schritte auf dem Weg zur Versöhnung, Munich: Integral; H. Schwan. 2011. Die Frau an seiner Seite: Leben und Leiden der Hannelore Kohl, Munich: Heyne; see also R. Urschel. 2011. ‘Das private Martyrium’, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 June. 36.  H. Schwan and T. Jens, Vermächtnis: Die Kohl-Protokolle, Munich: Heyne, 2014. 37.  H. Kohl, Vom Mauerfall zur Wiedervereinigung: Meine Erinnerunngen. New Edition, Frankfurt: Droemer, 2014. 38.  For some biographies on Kohl see, e.g., W. Wiedemeyer. 1975. Helmut Kohl: Porträt eines deutschen Politikers. Eine biographische Dokumentation, Bad Honnef: Osang; F. Hermann. 1976. Helmut Kohl: Vom Kurfürst zum Kanzler, Person, Politik, Programm, Stuttgart: Bonn Aktuell; K. Hofmann. 1984. Helmut Kohl: Kanzler des Vertrauens, Eine politische Biographie, Stuttgart: Bonn Aktuell; E. Henscheid. 1985. Helmut Kohl: Biographie einer Jugend, Zurich: Haffmans;W. Filmer and H. Schwan (eds). 1990. Helmut Kohl, 4th ed., Düsseldorf: Econ; K. Hofmann and G. Müchler. 1992. Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of German Unity: A Biography, trans. K. Muller-Rostin, Bonn: BPA; W. Maser. 1993. Helmut Kohl: Der deutsche Kanzler, revised ed., Frankfurt: Ullstein; A. Gauland. 1994. Helmut Kohl: Ein Prinzip, Berlin: Rowohlt; K.H. Pruys. 1996. Kohl, Genius of the Present: A Biography of Helmut Kohl, Chicago: Edition Q; P. Bahners. 1998. Im Mantel der Geschichte: Helmut Kohl oder die Unersetzlichkeit, Berlin: Siedler; J. Busche. 1998. Helmut Kohl: Anatomie eines Erfolges, Berlin: Berlin; P. Clough. 1998. Helmut Kohl: Ein Porträt der Macht, trans. S. Aeckerle, Munich: dtv; K. Dreher. 1998. Helmut Kohl: Leben mit Macht, 2nd ed., Stuttgart: DVA; B. Engelmann. 1998. Schwarzbuch Helmut

Introduction

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Kohl - oder: wie man einen Staat ruiniert, revised ed., Göttingen: Steidl; H. Bering. 1999. Helmut Kohl, Washington D.C.: Regnery; H. Leyendecker et al. 2000. Helmut Kohl, die Macht und das Geld, Göttingen: Steidl; J. Leinemann. 2001. Helmut Kohl: Ein Mann bleibt sich treu, Berlin: Aufbau; K.H. Pruys. 2004. Helmut Kohl – Der Mythos vom Kanzler der Einheit, Berlin: Edition Q; J. Schönfelder and R. Erices. 2007. Westbesuch: Die Geheime DDR-Reise von Helmut Kohl, Quedlinburg: Bussert and Stadeler; W. Bickerich and H. Noack. 2010. Helmut Kohl: Die Biographie, Berlin: Rowohlt; H. Schwan and R. Steiniger. 2010. Helmut Kohl: Virtuose der Macht, Mannheim: Artemis and Winkler. This list can be extended. For an interesting collection of essays on his chancellorship, see. C. Clemens and W. Paterson (eds). 1998. The Kohl Chancellorship, London: Frank Cass. For a volume of essays on various thought-provoking aspects of Kohl’s worldview, see R. Appel (ed.). 1990. Helmut Kohl im Spiegel seiner Macht, Bonn: Bouvier. 39.  H.P. Schwarz. 2012. Helmut Kohl: Eine Politische Biographie, Munich: DVA. 40.  Kohl’s Ph.D. thesis had autobiographical elements; see Kohl, ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’. Kohl’s first major autobiographical work focused on his role in the unification process; see H. Kohl. 1996. Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit, ed. K. Diekmann and R.G. Reuth, Berlin: Propyläen; see also H. Kohl. 2000. Mein Tagebuch: 1998-2000, Munich: Droemer, which he wrote in response to the CDU contributions scandal of 1999. For Kohl’s most important autobiographical writing, see the three volumes of his memoirs: H. Kohl. 2004. Erinnerungen, vol. 1: 1930-1982, Munich: Droemer; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2; H. Kohl. 2007. Erinnerungen, vol. 3: 1990-1994, Munich: Droemer. To reach a broader readership, Kohl published a shorter version of his memories of the (re)unification process; see H. Kohl. 2009. Vom Mauerfall zur Wiedervereinigung: Meine Erinnerungen, Munich: Droemer. 41. Bahners, Im Mantel der Geschichte, 54. 42. H. Kohl. 1984. Hausputz hinter den Fassaden: Praktikable Reformen in Deutschland, Osnabrück: A. Fromm.This early programmatic booklet by Kohl outlined his ideology in response to the challenges of the time, when his party was in opposition in the Bundestag. 43. S. Schmemann. 1990. ‘Kohl, the Man for the German Movement’ (interview with Helmut Kohl), New York Times, 1 July. Stephen Brockmann took this interview as the starting point for his essay, S. Brockmann. 2006. ‘“Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl’s Vision Been Realized?’ in S. Taberner and P. Cooke (eds), German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century, 17–30. 44.  E. Gellner. 2006. Nations and Nationalism, 2nd ed., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1. 45.  B.Anderson. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed., London:Verso. 46.  R. Jenkins. 2008. Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations, 2nd ed., London: Sage, 164–67. 47.  For a useful volume on methods in political biography see T. Arklay et al. (eds). 2006. Australian Political Lives: Chronicling political careers and administrative histories, Canberra: ANU E Press. 48. An article summarizing the argument and methodology of this study was published as C. Wicke. 2013. ‘The Personal Nationalism of Helmut Kohl: A Paragon of Germany’s New Normality?’ Humanities Research (19)1, 61–80.

CHAPTER

1

Approaching Nationalism Conceptual Frameworks

A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears; a deficiency in any of these particulars is not inconceivable and does from time to time occur, but only as a result of some disaster, and it is itself a disaster of a kind. – Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism

Nationalism, as something normal in daily life, strongly affects the self-images, emotions and worldviews of billions of our contemporaries, whose thoughts and actions contribute in turn to the strength and persistence of nationalism. This chapter supplies some theoretical equipment to accompany the reader for the rest of this case study of the personal nationalism of Helmut Kohl. I shall first clarify that nationalism is treated here as a contemporary, mainstream phenomenon, one that is often internalized reflexively. I will also point to its ability to be highly malleable. This last feature has made a particular contribution to the force of nationalism and should thus be taken into account when considering methods in Nationalism Studies. Because the usage of the term ‘nationalism’ varies in both common parlance and academia, I shall provide a working definition intended to reflect nationalism’s ubiquity, its openness and flexibility to being shaped by ideological and structural conditions, and its outstanding fitness to continually generate personalized notions of the nation. The discursive nature of nationalism is extremely Notes for this section begin on page 49.



Approaching Nationalism

17

versatile, so notions of nations differ amongst individuals of the same national groups, depending on their socialization. This also holds for their political elites. Even though deconstructing the authenticity of the public nexus between representation and reality, or government and people, is a legitimate quest, national leaders cannot be seen as systematically detached from the complex society in which they are brought up. Against the backdrop of the various manifestations of personal nationalism, I finally suggest that (individual) biography is a useful method of accounting for the conflations of sociological, historical and political categories and life experiences that shape notions of nations and deliver their individual content. I recommend the contextualized biographical approach taken as but one of many rewarding ways of studying the complexity of nationalism.To be sure, critical biographical studies should not be pursued for the sake of officializing private imaginations of life stories through scientificity, as for example Pierre Bourdieu has warned his readers, but rather to help challenge personal and national myths. This approach should also be revealing when engaging with the representations, performances and autobiographical illusions of less famous personages, where the repertoire of data allows for such in-depth enquiry (which is unfortunately not often enough the case).1 The case of Kohl illustrates, on the one hand, an interesting overlap between religious, generational, geographical, educational, professional and ideological specificities in the broader discursive context of German nationalism; and on the other hand, Kohl’s key agency in the development of German nationalism under his chancellorship. Further, before briefly explaining the concept of unification, I will link theory respectively to each of the four empirical chapters, which treat Kohl in turn as a Catholic nationalist, liberal nationalist, romantic nationalist and nationalist historian:





1. There are different ways of looking at the interplay between religion and nationalism. While not disregarding nationalism’s proto-religious features, I am sceptical of treating nationalism as something post-religious. I propose to look at Catholic nationalism as a form of religious nationalism in which religious socialization and belief shape the personal notion of the nation and nationalist representation. Being Catholic may also shape the personal theorization of nations and nationalism more generally. 2. For this study of Kohl, liberal nationalism shall be defined as an attempt to synthesize and ultimately domesticate nationalism under the hegemony of liberal values. Liberal nationalists take a normative view on nationalism, propagating it as something precious to the well-being of societies. I contrast this approach with the Habermasian vision of constitutional patriotism, which was opposed to any form of nationalism without really offering the total exit from nationalist thinking. 3. In the post-1945 context, the ethnocultural elements of German romantic nationalism endured, but without glorifying the objective of the nation-state. Instead they appeared as a reactionary energy that illuminated the cultural side of ethnicity while clouding the political side of the state. The concept of Heimat, as used in a conservative way by Kohl, is a good example of this

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Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality

romanticized notion of belonging that seeks a panacea to cure the protuberances associated with modernity without rejecting modernization. 4. Historical writing and symbolism are treated here as standard stimulants of national imagination. Their effects may differ from person to person, while supply and demand vary from place to place and the products themselves may be overhauled now and then. Historians and politicians form alliances to assure the delivery of national histories. They may squabble over the quality and authenticity of the product, but they cannot afford sobriety.The Germans may have been deprived of their nation-state after 1945, but the historist tradition persisted, and Germans used nationalist generics until they could re-enter the club of nation-states in 1990.

Nationalism: Normal, Flexible and Personal The vast body of literature emerging in Nationalism Studies has become an interdisciplinary subdiscipline of its own, involving scholars from highly diverse academic backgrounds. Undergraduate courses at many universities, postgraduate coursework programmes and a range of journals and associations signal persistent scholarly interest in the phenomenon of nationalism. Yet there is no agreement on clear definitions of nations and nationalism. Nationalism has been assumed to be a modern ideology, worldview, movement or state of mind that endows people with emotions, identity and self-images, suggests a paradoxical sense of shared self-determination through statehood and motivates collective behaviour.2 As nationalism has expanded, its parasitic qualities have proven it superior to (other) political ideologies. Andrew Vincent wrote that nationalism has ‘eaten its fill from most ideological banquets. There have been, and still are, liberal, socialist, conservative, fascist and even anarchistic nationalisms .  .  . There is no one nationalist doctrine – there are rather nationalisms’.3 Therefore, Michael Freeden argued, nationalism could hardly be seen as a distinct ideology.4 Since any ideology is pliable, this study does not intend to debate whether or not nationalism should be treated as a univocal ideology. Ideologies compete for survival within changing contexts to which they are forced to adapt. Some adapt themselves better than others and thus emerge as the winners of these selective processes.5 Along these lines, nationalism could be regarded as a super-ideology. The question of which came first, nation or nationalism, is somewhat of a red herring.6 This study treats the two concepts as highly interdependent, and because its concern is not the origins of nations but nationalism itself, the concept of nation is central to my definition of nationalism. In this respect, I have followed Miroslav Hroch’s suggestion to deviate ‘from the notion that nationalism is the primary formative factor and the nation is derivative’, preferring to ‘posit the conception of the nation as a constituent of social reality and nationalism as a phenomenon derived from the existence of that nation’.7



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Setting aside the importance of the constructivist critique of ethno-symbolist ideas of nationhood, this perspective allows for a more contemporary engagement with the various forms that nationalism takes at times when the world’s organization as a conglomerate of nations reaches a domestic and international momentum of normality.8 Hroch remarked that the nationalist’s ‘individual national consciousness . . . is determined on the one hand by general factors (objective relations) and on the other by the conditions of his own existence’.9 Ironically, Hroch, an outstanding Czech historian, based his study exclusively on group analysis and not on autonomous individuals, thereby destining it to miss an important part of his own suggestion to take the nationalist’s ‘own existence’ into account. This study aims to do that without failing to contextualize the particular identity within its changing ‘ecology’.10 Nationalism, according to Benedict Anderson, spread when ‘Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm’.11 As Elie Kedourie remarked, the emerging idea of self-determination promoted the belief ‘that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national selfgovernment’.12 Once rulers were no longer considered to be God’s shadows on earth, they needed to find instruments to legitimize their power.13 A new style of politics, often associated with the French Revolution, emerged when rulership came to be represented as being on behalf of the cross-class collective. The new regimes required new forms of effective public symbolism to ensure the approval of the masses.14 Imaginations of popular sovereignty grew in conjunction with the ideal of ethnic homogeneity.15 Combined with the rise of the modern state and new forms of warfare, new class structures and infrastructural changes in the course of industrialization provided for nationalism’s diffusion as an enduring force from above and below.16 The quartet that Michael Mann defined as the ‘four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political (IEMP) relationships’ paved the way for nationalism’s triumph:17 memories became nationalized, while both demand for and supply of invented tradition rose dramatically.18 After the end of the First World War, the ethnic interpretation of self-determination became a core principle in international relations, changing maps under the liberal assumption of creating a better world.19 Right up to the present day, the nationalist ethos has proven a powerful mobilizer of feelings of solidarity and duty to the state. In most cases this loyalty has not been primarily to a single ruler but to an imagined collective, in which systems of mass exploitation, hierarchies and mythologies can be maintained to varying degrees or replaced by each other.20 Nationalism’s history is in this sense symptomatic of the dialectic of Enlightenment.21 ‘Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity’, Ernest Gellner observed, ‘but it has now come to appear as such’.22 This is the essential rationale of methodological nationalism in daily life.23 Despite cosmopolitan

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aspirations, living in a nation is now normal, and people deprived of this condition can react vehemently. Norbert Elias described nationalism ‘as one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful belief-system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’.24 Throughout the last two centuries, belief in the naturalness and legitimacy of one’s nation has become so strong that questioning this absolute norm has come to constitute an immoral breach of a taboo. In this light, Jürgen Habermas’s idealistic perception that the world is facing an emerging ‘post-national constellation’ – as evidenced by the democratic deficit of the German (re)unification, European integration, NGOs, global movements and migration25 – seems overstated. The Age of Extremes, as Eric Hobsbawm designated the period between 1914 and 1991, may well be over, for now, but the age of nationalism persists, a trend only furthered by the collapse of the Soviet empire.26 Nationalism continues to endow people with a sense of ‘being someone in the world’.27 Paradoxically, individuality and the holistic category of an anonymous collective have both become zenith values at the same time; the person and nation still appear as closely related and not purely independent beings. A person’s self-esteem can be affected by various factors, but one’s own nation’s performance influences the shaping the modern sense of self.28 Individual self-determination is translated into national self-determination; nationalism provides individuality and identity against the background of other nations’ existence. The nation itself has become a collective self, worth being defended against other nations, while the ideal image of the nation has become analogous to an ideal image of the self, making love of the nation a form of self-love.29 Personal prestige can thus derive from the nation’s success within the competitive international sphere.30 The cosmopolitan self may act as the international national, cautious and aware of the behaviour of other nations.The triumphs of the nation are treated as personal triumphs; conversely, the crises of the nation can lead to personal identity crises. Nationalism, therefore, may also produce feelings of shame.31 When national prestige is felt to be at stake, the nation loses legitimacy and its now defiant members are encouraged to relativize their peculiarity; thus national history becomes contested.32 In this sense, the nation can be understood as Otto Brunner’s transcendental Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of destiny), involving quasi-inescapable collective feelings of pride, shame and quasi-traumatic experiences that can be effectively communicated over generations through shared memory within the national group.33 In the world of nations, it has become almost become impossible to break away from the psychological impacts of nationalism. Individuals are steadily, routinely forced to absorb national symbolism, while common euphemisms like ‘patriotism’, ‘national consciousness’ or ‘national feeling’ indicate the terminological sanitization of nationalism. In his study of this phenomenon in the United States, Michael Billig challenged the false consciousness often intrinsic



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to contemporary nationalism, asserting that nationalism should not be studied only as something historical or occurring beyond the established, western nation-state. Billig demanded that it should rather be realized as fundamental to his contemporaries’ perception of reality.34 His approach can thus be seen as a reaction against the conceptual marginalization of nationalism, a phenomenon predominantly associated with something extreme and violent that can happen at the periphery of time and space, but by no means here and now. For Billig, nationalism instead was foremost ‘a way of thinking or ideological consciousness. In this consciousness, nations, national identities and national homelands appear as “natural”’.35 Billig was also suspicious of the lack of self-reflection inherent to nationalism, which manifests itself through ‘unimaginative repetition’.36 By illuminating the reflexive internalization of nationalist symbolism in daily life, Billig showed that nationalism was ever present in the form of what he called ‘banal nationalism’ – practices, however banal, that had the significant function of maintaining and safeguarding the nation and its appearance as something perfectly normal in everyone’s life. As he saw it, this had an existential effect on nations, which continuously require re-creation and reaffirmation by their respective members: ‘only if people believe that they have national identities, will . . . homelands, be reproduced’.37 Billig’s work thus showed that a nation is not a perpetual motion machine; it is a creatio continua. To follow Gellner, and reduce nationalism to a transitory force that ‘invents nations where they do not exist’ would be too restrictive. The study of nationalism must not end at the point when the nation-building process is finished; such an endpoint can in fact hardly be identified.38 In that regard Anthony Giddens made the interesting observation that ‘[t]he routinization of daily life has no intrinsic connections with the past at all, save in so far as what “was done before” happens to coincide with what can be defended in a principled way in the light of incoming knowledge’.39 Nevertheless, Billig’s focus on the social psychological dimension of nationalism – the primarily passive internalization of national rites and symbols – supported Gellner’s conviction that people can seldom choose their nationality.40 The extent to which the re-creation of nations has followed a static blueprint image of a nation remains uncertain, for in reality this is a highly impressionable process: Austrians have not continued to feel German; Australians no longer imagine themselves part of the British nation. Notions of nations do not stagnate as their imitation evolves over time, and crises can lead to relatively rapid re-conceptualizations of the national past. Irrespective of the changing context, however, Billig demonstrated that the personal reflexivity of domesticated nationalism is underdeveloped in the mainstream of Western societies. Furthermore, besides offering shared material, nationalism also differs amongst constituent co-nationals inside the nation, who imagine and represent their nation differently.41 Anthony Smith described nationalism as ‘chameleon-like’ in that it ‘takes its colour from its context. Capable of endless

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manipulation, this malleable nexus of beliefs, sentiments and symbols can be understood only in each specific instance’.42 This seems also to hold for variations within the personal context. Nationalism’s great success within the sphere of normality is thus attributable to its immense openness and flexibility, varying from time to time, nation to nation, group to group, person to person. That is why nationalism should be studied as something more personal and dependent upon the nationalist’s specific social setting.43 Often subject to certain ‘elective affinities’,44 the biographical constellation of an individual inevitably assembles different organizational structures (private, professional, public, political, etc.). Each of these overlapping structures may contain its own belief system, ideology and historical culture that become synthesized in individual identities. Nationalism can be considered an involuntary process of socialization dependent on changing, individual contexts. This, however, still leaves doubt as to whether one should view a nation’s existence as dependent on the active will of its nationals. Nationalism is not a ‘daily plebiscite’.45 Willingness and real choice are two different categories: people may want to live in the national world they are familiar with, but they often cannot see any alternative. Shared national symbolism creates a quasi-incontestable reality that instructs its subjects in how to allocate their loyalty to an outsized group of people, leading Billig to warn that the benign appearance and reflexive nature of nationalism disguises a dangerous potential that unfolds when ‘the crisis occurs; the president calls; bells ring; the citizens answer; and the patriotic identity is connected [sic]’.46 The question is whether the caller’s patriotic identity is less genuine than that of the party being called. Neither the ‘average Joe’s’ nationalism nor that of ‘Mr. President’ can be understood as autonomous from the world in which it is created. Human reality is too amorphous to ignore the overlapping social networks that are formative to individual ideas and actions.47 Power, according to Max Weber, means ‘every chance within a social relationship to impose one’s own will.  .  .’.48 The chance to persuade is distributed unevenly throughout societies, and powerful social groups have rarely shown reluctance to exploit their positions, which allow them to exercise their will to shape the shared aspects of national culture more effectively than can less powerful members of their society.49 Nationalism, which supplies individuals in class-ridden societies with an important service as it ‘symbolically elevates the lower classes and ennobles their activities . . . [by] tying one’s sense of dignity and self-respect to one’s national identity’, is naturally open to exploitation by political elites seeking to nourish their power.50 The ability to use institutions and information systems to speak to a susceptible public, whose members acquired their receptiveness to nationalism during their early socialization in the family unit, encourages political elites to reinforce nationalism from above.51 It is thus difficult to think of any successful politician in contemporary history who has not been a nationalist. Political leaders’ representation, language and official narratives and visions reflect and shape the national image of their time, as James



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Curran demonstrated in his study of Australian prime ministers.52 There is, however, no indication that the elites themselves do not experience the emotional elevation that nationalism provides in an international world. They are not immune to their own Machiavellian activities. Nationalism is thus more than a ‘metropolitan ruling-class conspiracy . . . to dupe the proletariat’, as Tom Nairn sharply detected: the elites themselves can be dupes, believing in their own propaganda.53 Orlando Figes’s book Natasha’s Dance sought to demonstrate that elites share fundamental aspects of their nationalist socialization with the lower classes.54 The work’s title, a reference to the fictive Countess Natasha Rostova in Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, concerns an instance in which this aristocrat enters a peasant hut and instinctively begins to twirl to a folk song like a Russian peasant girl. Figes implicitly referred to the egalitarian effect intrinsic to the entanglement of culture and nationalism. Upper-class children in eighteenthcentury St Petersburg were brought up with peasants in a traditional ‘Russian’ culture, whereas later in life they were forced to represent the habitus of Western elites, which Natasha internally rejected.The essential point of Figes’s argument is that the formation of national imagination cannot be reduced to the position of individuals in social hierarchies. Social position is only one crucial facet in the making and articulation of personal nationalism. What individuals associate with their present nations, how they want to see them in the future and the way they historicize them depend greatly on their multifaceted biographies. Elites and masses have diverse notions of their common nation that can both conflict and overlap. Even if selectively and intentionally projected into the public sphere, the private backgrounds of national leaders affect the articulation of nationhood at the top end of anonymous social hierarchies.55 In Anthony Cohen’s view, any attempt to establish hegemonic nationalist discourses from above is doomed to fail. He was convinced that any politician seeking to exploit overly generalized representations of nationhood needed to carefully judge the susceptibility of the masses. Cohen thus saw politicians’ ability to persuade individuals or represent complete images of nations as strongly limited because their elite representation differed in nature from the self-perception of the nation’s legitimate ‘owners’.56 A primary requirement of Cohen’s concept of nationalism was individual creativity, rather than leadership; he called for studying ‘the personal dimension of nationalism’ and ‘the agency of the self in the construction of the nation’.57 Nevertheless, Cohen omitted to study the individual nationalisms of any real people and thus failed to realize that in reality, some of them have more power to propagate their views than others. Cohen saw the nation as primarily a resource ‘on which individuals draw to formulate their sense of selfhood’,58 and defined national belonging primarily in terms of individual rights or private ownership, with ‘personal nationalism’ referring to ‘the association of the individual with the nation’.59 Throughout this study of Kohl in the context of Germany, however, personal

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nationalism refers not only to the individual’s identification with the nation as a form of self-imaging, but also to the specific content of the individual’s notion of the nation and the way the individual tries to represent his or her own nation. Personal nationalism is regarded here as a product of a multilayered relationship of external factors.60 Nationalism’s nebulous appearance between ‘universalism and complete particularism’61 makes the search for methodological onsets unavoidable, and this is exactly where the method of biography can provide its valuable contribution. The biographical contextualization of the nationalist’s ideas is an effective way to create some safe ground between the special and the common, individual motifs and general structures, unique constellations and grand theory, as well as between personal nationalism and ideal types of nationalism that can conflate within single mindsets. Abstracting supposedly ‘Western, political, civic, liberal’ nationalisms from ‘Eastern, cultural, ethnic, illiberal’ nationalisms, then, becomes again an analytical tool rather than a normative style of classification.62 Beyond sociologically categorizable relations, the life stories and autobiographical illusions of nationalists influence the articulation of their nationalism. A biographical approach goes deeper than the generalization intrinsic to the concepts of social theory, history, culture, ideology and nation without disconnecting nationalists from the setting in which they operate. Good biography looks at ideas in context. It goes beneath idealist, elitist and structuralist approaches to nationalism, as it does not remove the individual from the material and ideological environment that affects the personal nationalism and is, in turn, subject to manipulation by the nationalist concerned.63 Nor should a biographical approach detach analysis of the nationalist’s life from theories of nationalism, as they can be useful devices to locate and understand individual ideas and actions.64 At the same time, a political biography on the nationalism of a public figure like Helmut Kohl should not shy away from looking at the immediate context of the protagonist’s life from its beginning. This recognizes the individual socialization that endows subjects with particular repertoires to draw on in their own representations of their own nation.65 Biography can thus be a helpful way to approach the pliable phenomenon of nationalism, with the positive side effect of leading the enquirer into ‘unexpected and unimagined territory’, as Ben Pimlott enthusiastically observed.66 This sense of exploration and discovery, intrinsic to biographical writing, was to him ‘like entering a deep cavern . . . and when your exploration is finished you will have not only a unique appreciation of the particular cave, but a better feeling for geology in general’.67 Surrounded by ‘unimagined territory’, the particularistic explanations that individual biography offers are themselves of basic human interest, which cannot be satisfied by generalizations.68 To avoid any misunderstanding and set the foundation for this work, I will now propose two broad working definitions without assuming any universal validity. I suggest defining ‘nation’ as a notion that refers to a large, highly



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socially differentiated group of people with a sense of transcendental belonging across time and space, who imagine themselves to be culturally distinctive and entitled to be politically sovereign. Beneath this universal shell, however, I would argue that the notions of nations vary not only between national groups that endow their members with different assortments of shared symbolic repertoire, but also from person to person. The individual notion of the nation can be replete with various personal experiences, identities, loyalties and imaginations, including ideological and religious convictions. I would then define ‘nationalism’ as the accumulation of all individual ideas and actions that contribute to the creation or maintenance of the nation, reflexively or purposively. This understanding shall account for the great flexibility in the articulation of nationalism – not simply with regard to the greater variables across time and space, but more specifically concerning those on a very personal level.

Religion and Nationalism: Replaced, Intrinsic and Constituent Nationalism has been theorized both as quasi- and post-religious. Considered as such, it looks like a modern ‘pseudo-religion’ or ‘substitute religion’.69 Functionally, then, nationalism might adopt and fulfil the roles traditional religions played in premodern times, while structurally nationalism could become a religion in itself.70 However, there are different kinds of interplay between nationalism and religion and different ways of looking at them. As I shall demonstrate in chapter 2, Kohl’s Catholic background strongly shaped his personal nationalism; nonetheless, the tenor of his notion of Germany was not dominated by his Catholicism. Kohl’s case shows religion to be just one of many influences on an individual’s personal nationalism. Other personal nationalisms of co-nationals may have been influenced by a different religion, influenced differently by the same religion or not influenced by religion at all. In Kohl’s worldview nationalism was not replaced by religion, but it did have religious tendencies. Much more important for this study of Kohl’s representation of Germany, however, is that his religious socialization and religious thinking were constituent to his national imagination. That nationalism has religious tendencies is not a new insight. By the 1920s Carleton Hayes had highlighted a dangerous perversion in the syncretism between Christianity and nationalism:71 from laic France, nationalism had turned into a global religion, and each nation had developed its own ‘theology’. The political elites watched carefully, needing to secure the people’s loyalty to the new church of the nation.The new god of nationalism was ‘either the patron or the personification of one’s patrie, one’s fatherland, one’s national state’.72 The modern nation-state fulfilled the former functions of the Church, its mission of salvation and its suggestion of immortality. It offered parades, processions,

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pilgrimages, a holy anthem and a flag as the central focus of worship.73 Hayes repeated these claims in 1960, observing that ‘it is an interesting fact that the era of Enlightenment, which witnessed among the classes the growth of scepticism about Christianity, witnessed also a substitute exaltation – a sanctification, as it were – of the secular state, especially the national state’.74 In the 1940s, Hans Kohn approached nationalism via the history of ideas, shaping the image of nationalism as something that preconditioned and paralleled processes of secularization since the Enlightenment.75 In the 1970s George Mosse took a very critical view of the history of nationalism. He argued that popular sovereignty and general will, ideas that had emerged in the course of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, had become politicized as a secular religion, turned racist, and ultimately paved the path to fascism in the twentieth century.76 Benedict Anderson explained in the early 1980s that the loss of religious transcendence required new spiritual sources of compensation: the nation, ‘looming out of an immemorial past’, provided a sense of continuity and salvation.77 According to him, ‘the medieval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present’, which are central to the nationalist imagination.78 Anderson stressed that nationalism entails a degree of transcendental loyalty resembling the power of religion that (other) political ideologies fail to provide: ‘neither economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community to be defended’.79 Moreover, Anderson suggested, nations always involve the religious imagination of an eternal goodness that cannot be eclipsed by off-putting aberrations.80 Eric Hobsbawm recognized that ‘[r]eligion is an ancient and well-tried method of establishing communion through common practice and a sort of brotherhood between people who otherwise have nothing much in common’.81 Though the modern state needed more than the traditional religion to be competitive, Hobsbawm argued, it still required similar ideas and practices to survive: nationalism became the ‘civic religion’ that ensured public support and legitimacy.82 John Armstrong argued that nations have pre-modern, ethnic roots, and that their formation has often been helped by religious – in particular Christian – institutions at the local level.83 Later anti-modernist studies of nationalism by Adrian Hastings, Anthony Smith and Steven Grosby resembled Armstrong’s work and elaborated on the interplay between the Judeo-Christian traditions.84 Hastings traced the origin of nationalism far back into the Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on language,85 seeing Christianity, as opposed to Islam, as crucial to the formation of nationalism.86 Hastings believed that in Western Europe, the conviction of being a chosen people followed the Israelite model, and that this sense of chosenness was further encouraged by the tension between Catholicism and Protestantism. But among the nations of the East, he explained, it was the model of Constantine’s Christian empire that informed claims of exceptionalism in contemporary history.87



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With exception of the Jews, nation and nationalism were, to Hastings, thus ‘characteristically Christian things, which, in so far as they have appeared elsewhere, have done so within a process of westernization and of imitation of the Christian world, even if it was imitated as western rather than as Christian’. In the sixteenth century, both Protestant and Catholic lower clergy used their vernacular to promote a culture of translation, national literature, and thus diversity, which gradually came to be perceived as normal. A sense of national identity and ownership evolved with the foundation of national churches, which helped to mythologize the ‘us-group’, the chosen people who, like the ancient Israelites, had God on their side.88 Hastings stressed the English example, where the myths of the Old Testament were ‘rediscovered’ to sustain a collective selfimage of being chosen.89 He also mentioned cases ranging from Ireland to the Balkans, where religious denominations had been constitutive to the formation of national identities.90 In his view, Nazism and other horrific forms of nationalism also showed biblical features. Furthermore, he compared the more recent push for European unity to a ‘resurrection’ of the Christian era. Interestingly, Hastings explained that Catholicism had a lesser nationalist tendency than Protestantism because of the upper clergy’s universal responsibility to Rome: ‘While the Catholic Church has in practice often under-girded nationalism – in Spain, France, Ireland or Poland – there are limits to its national enthusiasm, at least within areas effectively influenced by the papacy’. More recently, Steven Grosby strongly emphasized the biblical traditions that would have been of key importance in the persistence of nationalism.91 He supported Hastings’s view of Islam as being essentially anti-national.92 Grosby also emphasized the idea of territorial sovereignty, the notion of being chosen and the role of national churches against the universal Church.93 However, he went much further in trying to discover nationality in ancient civilizations, claiming ancient Israel as a conscious nation.94 Anthony Smith, the aforementioned and best-known ethno-symbolist of his time, in contrast presented nations as modern creations built around a pre-modern, ethnic core.95 Smith also stressed the biblical attributes of nationalism, contending that nationalism had always involved beliefs in a national mission and myths of national destiny, including notions of ethnic election and ancestral homelands.96 Memories of the Promised Land and the loss of the paradise of Eden, he argued, were converted into a nationalist mission guided by a salvation-historical understanding of past and future.97 Nationalism, then, in Smith’s view, was modelled on Abraham’s biblical appointment and Moses’ intergenerational acceptance of this contract.98 The exodus myth was transformed into a narrative of the national quest for unity that romanticized the homeland and treated it as sacred. This narrative presented the common folk as special and deserving of autonomy free from artificial, external interventions. National heroes and liberators were thus perceived as messiahs. The conservative German historian Thomas Nipperdey took this religious dimension of nationalism very seriously: ‘in nationalism, the religion becomes

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secularized, and secularism becomes sacralized’. Nipperdey observed that ‘the individual takes the nation as the space of his origin and future, the nation transcends the world in its daily conception into something primordial as well as prospective’. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a left-liberal social historian of Germany, similarly emphasized the religious character of nationalism. Wehler treated nationalism as something modern – though primarily of historical rather than present nature – emerging from the okzidentale Kulturkreis (the West) and aiming at fulfilment in the nation-state. He viewed nationalism in the West as emerging when rulers’ legitimacy was transformed through crises of modernization like Protestantism, the Dutch independence movement, the English, American, French and industrial revolutions and their imitations. Hence, according to Wehler, nationalism became a political religion, providing a new source of legitimacy harking back to the model of the Judeo-Christian tradition while also using teleological myths of ancestry, natural borders and a common glorious past.99 Wehler explained that, akin to religion, nationalist rituals ensured the demonstration of power, meaning, belonging and continuity. Both belief systems – nationalism and religion – offered compensation for worldly disadvantages. Wehler also referred to the amity between religion and nationalism, maintaining that early nationalists used Christian mythology in a modern style: especially Protestantism, and within Protestantism particularly Calvinism, became nationalism’s intellectual companion.The Communio Sanctorum of the church served as an example of the newly imagined national community. Fired up by a secular doctrine of predestination, the messianic tradition posited nationalism as a historical mission, and hence the realization and protection of the nation-state as divine destiny. Like religion, nationalism could answer questions of human existence and the meaning of the world, and promote martyrdom. This, according to Wehler, coupled with the Christian ideal of fraternity, was articulated as internal solidarity in opposition to external groups. Enlightenment thinking further romanticized the right to individual self-determination with reference to the Jewish-Christian tradition of natural law. Ideas of the chosen people and the promised or holy land informed popular images of territoriality and enmity, articulated in a rhetoric of particular ‘homelands’ or ‘fatherlands’. In Wehler’s view, this modern transformation therefore does not replace religious tradition; rather, secular political motives are the brainchild of theological traditions and implicitly support the enduring existence of the Christian tradition in secular form.100 Since the 1920s, then, nationalism has clearly been identified as something historically Western and closely related to the Christian imagination.The belief that the world could be rationalized – what Max Weber called disenchantment – may have facilitated nationalism’s birth and upbringing;101 however, this disenchantment itself was doomed to remain incomplete with the triumph of its own ersatz ideology. Nationalism and the making of modern nation-states can consequently be seen as an outcome of both the modern processes of



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secularization since the Enlightenment, and the need for a substitute to fill the resulting cultural and spiritual gaps and the vacuum of political legitimation.102 However, as the Catholic elements in Kohl’s personal nationalism demonstrate, nationalism does not necessarily replace religion or stand in for it, but should instead be seen as a moderately autonomous force of modernity that corresponds to the transformation of religion. As Hans Kohn observed, ‘in many ways the growth of nationalities has been helped or hindered by the influence of religion. Religious differences sometimes divided and weakened nationalities, and even helped to create new nationalities’.103 Discussing the role of Catholicism in Croatia, Poland and Ireland, Kohn demonstrated how traditional religion was a crucial supplier of meaning to the concept of the nation. In these cases nationalism was conflated with religion, whilst also gaining an extra measure of self-legitimization by suggesting a pre-modern origin. Hobsbawm, moreover, indicated that nationalism, far from ousting religion in the age of the modern nation-state, had formed fruitful alliances with religion, which itself could add to the repertoire of ethnic differentiation. He mentioned a number of cases in which nationalism and religious denomination could hardly be seen as separate from each other.104 This type of religious nationalism has recently been on the rise – a development that must not be ignored, as religion seems likely to persist as a factor in the development and study of nationalism.105 Some nationalisms have been defined basically through religious denomination, which endows them with further legitimacy and a certain pre-modern appearance.106 This perspective on the interaction of nationalism and religion thus emerges in regard to the objective content of the nationalist’s notion of the nation. Nationalists are, in such cases, assumed to represent religious features that are typical for their nation, or to define their nation through religious distinction. The tension between the Enlightenment and religion may then itself seem somewhat of a myth, as David J. Sorkin argued, challenging the assumption that the Enlightenment was the intellectual starting point of secularism.107 Michael Printy, for example, showed that in Germany the Enlightenment affected Protestant and Catholic circles, and their ideas of state, politics and nation, without essentially harming their doctrines.108 Inspired by the ‘liberal Catholicism’ in France, German Catholics formed organizations and took actions to fight for German unity during the 1848 revolution.109 However, whereas Protestantism focused primarily on the power of the modern nationstate, which Germany attained in 1871, Catholics retained strong notions of the German Volk and Reich.110 Within German nationalism, the tension between two major Christian denominations with different political tendencies, concepts of nation and desires for secularism was signified most sharply by Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (cultural struggle) legislation in the 1870s to reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Prussia.111 It can be argued that with the Catholic Rhinelander Konrad Adenauer’s triumph as first Federal Republican Chancellor in 1949, the previous denominational tension

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eventually found a sustainable synthesis that Kohl felt obliged to preserve and foster (as will be discussed in chapter 2). However, German history provides an example of different religious groups within one nation holding rival notions of the same nation. This points to subtle forms of interaction between religion and nationalism that can be analysed on levels below the national. Therefore, one should also bear in mind that when nationalism and secularism are treated as historically related, the secularization process is uneven politically, socially and mentally.112 Further, excluding non-Western societies from notions of modernity produces a very biased perception of the contemporary world. Whereas some societies may be less prepared than others to exclude religion completely from public life, secularism does not necessarily involve the absence of religion in the public sphere but can refer solely to the state’s disconnection from religious institutions.113 Moreover, the secularization of the mental world does not always accord with the secularization of the social world.114 The extent of European societies’ secularization; whether it has been a linear, horizontal, progressive development; and whether this development would automatically support the growth of nationalism are subject to dispute.115 Conversely, recent debates suggest that there is a global trend of ‘de-secularization’.116 The discussion so far has referred both to religious nationalism and nationalism as a modern ersatz religion. Another form of interplay between religion and nationalism occurs when the nationalist propagates the theoretical idea of the nation – as opposed to a particular nation’s objective existence – as religious per se. For example, Pope John Paul II, following the idea of patrimony, theorized nationalism as explicitly Christian. Patriotism and the preservation of the cultural and assigned territory of the native land were, according to the Pontiff, Christian duties, as ‘the fourth commandment . . . obliges us to honour our father and mother’. John Paul II believed that ‘Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention’. Therefore, he argued, ‘in human history they cannot be replaced by anything else’. The nation was God-given and provided fertile ground from which state and democracy could later grow. He thus sustained his ethnic and romantic nationalism with Catholic imagination and theory. The Messiah, John Paul II recalled, came from the chosen nation of Israel, but within the Church as ‘the new and universal Israel . . . every nation has equal rights of citizenship’.117 In this sense the Holy Father can also be seen as a liberal nationalist who qualified his ideology with religious doctrines. John Paul II treated nations as individuals who were equal before God and would experience their baptism at their point of realization. This Catholic theory of nationalism endowed him with a particular notion of Europe and the Enlightenment. According to him, ‘it was evangelization which formed Europe, giving birth to the civilization of its peoples and the cultures’, while the Enlightenment ideas that originated in



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Europe were ‘profoundly rooted in the Christian tradition’. These ideas ‘prepared the way for a better understanding of human rights .  .  . It should be stressed that these rights were already known to be rooted in the nature of man created by God in his own image’. Human dignity was thus derived from the idea of God’s incarnation in man. Further, the former Pope wrote, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had ambiguous results, a positive one being that this development promoted ‘the right of nations to exist, to maintain their own culture and to exercise political sovereignty’ along with ‘the idea of fraternity’, which sought to unite ‘not only men but nations’. However, he argued, one should also remember that Marxism emerged as a negative outcome of this intellectual change.118 This kind of rhetoric was also symptomatic of Kohl’s Catholic nationalism. As described in chapter 2, religious thinking influenced Kohl’s liberal and romantic nationalism, his philosophy of German politics and culture, and his historicization of the German past.

Taming Nationalism? Liberal Nationalism and Constitutional Patriotism Awareness of the potential destructiveness of nationalism is as old as nationalism itself and was present long before nationalism reached the stage of normality.119 Elie Kedourie felt that this awareness was reached only through ‘[e]xperience, bitter experience’ and the realization ‘that contrary to the dreams of Mazzini and President Woodrow Wilson, national self-determination is a principle of disorder, not of order, in international life’.120 Other scholars do not share this pessimism. Michael Hechter, for example, suggested around the turn of the millennium that the ‘recrudescence of “the old Adam”’ could be contained by decentralizing state institutions.121 Yet it remains an open question whether human beings should try to domesticate and instrumentalize nationalism for future social organization, whether we should drop it entirely, or whether we are powerless against its anthropological firmness. Few scholars have reacted to nationalism with a categorical lack of sympathy. Benedict Anderson, for example, having previously written that nationalism’s foundation on a sense of communal immortality has made ‘it possible over the last two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings’,122 strangely introduced himself during an interview in 2005 as ‘the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly . . . I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements’.123 Anderson believed it could encourage ‘good behaviour’. But he was not alone, not even amongst the Marxist theorists. Earlier, Tom Nairn had taken a much more differentiated view when he conceptualized nationalism as emanating from the uneven, global advance of capitalism and ultimately saving the world from imperialist overkill. In the 1970s,

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Nairn believed that the potential for both positive and negative repercussions was always intrinsic to any nationalism.124 Some liberal nationalists, in contrast, promoted normative arguments in favour of nationalism. Positing that individuals could attain their individuality and identity only through their social context, Neil MacCormick sought to reconcile the idea of individualism with nationalism in the early 1980s. He believed that long before the French Revolution and Rousseau’s modern idea of general will, nationalism and democracy were primordially related. MacCormick was aware of the inherent constructivism in nationalism but thought the falseness of national myths would prove an acceptable means to the higher end of solidarity, while nationalism’s ugly side could still be contained by a culture of respect for other nations.125 After the fall of the Soviet empire and the consequent independence of its satellite states in Eastern Europe, liberal democracy came to be regarded as the happy end of history.126 With the removal of the Iron Curtain, nationalism seemed likely to continue to matter for future societies and was at the same time recognized as something that would restore the natural order.127 Margaret Canovan complained about the absence of nationalism in political theory, which lacked applicability to the real existing conditions of the contemporary world as shaped by nationalism.128 The realization that nationalism matters, however, developed into a trend of glorifying nationalism as a force that would make the world a better place. Nationalism, it was claimed, would produce positive synergies in capitalist systems of representative democracy, facilitate learning from the achievements of the West through its ability to stimulate social progress, and stimulate institutional reform. Nationalism was believed to promote rights, justice, solidarity and inclusion, encourage societies’ greater participation and redistribution, and foster a sense of belonging and equality while curbing the effects of globalization.129 In this ideological climate,Yael Tamir thought it pertinent for liberal thinkers to adjust and acquire nationalism as a useful tool to fulfil their ideals. She was convinced that national identity would secure ‘mutual responsibilities and obligations, care for future generations, and respect for communal past’, and that the liberal state should not be neutral toward its citizens, as liberal thinkers had often suggested, but be judged by the functioning of its welfare state. In Tamir’s view, a national tradition brought helpful concepts of belonging, loyalty and solidarity into the liberal tradition of personal autonomy, reflection and choice. And because she saw national identity as elective – that is, wanted and valued – she sensed no conceptual tension between personal freedom and national belonging. According to Tamir, national self-determination and cultural distinctiveness were individual rights that must be realized as broadly possible.130 Interestingly,Tamir saw the state itself as based on a cultural essence reflected ‘in its political institutions and in the official language, as well as in the symbolic sphere, in the selection of rituals, national heroes and the like’. All



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these features were prerequisite for a healthy public sphere embedded in a unique culture. The contract between people and state – individuals’ ability to rely on public institutions and their willingness to assume obligations to the state – would necessitate a patriotic identity, which only national culture could provide. Politics and public life could thus never be separated from culture; they were ‘an expression of cultural identification’ that any minority had to accept. In Tamir’s view, however, national loyalty should not overrule other personal ties: the realization of ‘tolerance and respect of diversity of members of one’s own group and for outsiders’ was essential to achieving liberal nationalism.131 David Miller remarked that liberalism’s protean character made it easily reconcilable with communitarian ideas.132 Similarly, because nationalism would be extremely fluctuant, it could not really be essentially illiberal. Miller was convinced that liberalism and nationalism could together form an effective, symbiotic alliance for the future. Human beings, Miller thought, were not designed to act rationally. Like Tamir, he countered any purely political, cultural notions of citizenship: ‘I reject civic nationalism in this form . . . national identities that support common citizenship must be thicker’. Miller thus was not against romantic nationalism and believed that religion, language and national history were valid elements by which to secure a citizen’s faith in the nation. The fabrication of heroic historism and stories of liberation were, in his view, part of an overall healthy process to produce egalitarianism and inclusion, and to enable the state authority to devote itself to one particular culture. No matter whether nations’ foundational beliefs were false or true, Miller argued, people wanted to live in nations and had a desire to share this condition with those whom they perceived as having certain characteristics in common. He therefore demanded that the sense of belonging that nations provide be understood as something real and accepted as rationally valid.133 Although nations may be ‘conscious creations of bodies of people’, they should still, in Miller’s eyes, be treated as ‘inescapable parts of the modern human condition’. For Miller, the paradoxical condition of the modern individual deserves solemn respect, as nationality has the power to meet ‘people’s need to have a secure identity in an open society where traditional “stations” have lost their meaning’. Nationalism would consequently be ‘a legitimate way of understanding your place in the world’.134 The ‘duties we owe to our fellow-nationals,’ Miller asserted, ‘are different from, and more extensive than, the duties we owe to human beings as such’;135 meanwhile nations, as ‘ethical communities’, are able to promote welfare and social justice, although global inequalities will always remain unsolvable.136 As a result, a successful democracy could, in Miller’s theory, occur only in the framework of the homogenous nation-state – too much multiculturalism would be counterproductive to democracy and welfare. A state that hosted different national groups would have to act neutrally instead of using its ability to represent the nation; whereas a sovereign state would strengthen the sense

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of identity and civic obligation.137 As Miller saw it, democracy was built upon the mutual trust, loyalty to the constitution and common identity generated by the cultural aspects of nationality. Nationalism, to borrow Robert Putnam’s concept, would produce ‘social capital’ to make liberal societies work.138 The right to national self-determination was thus imperative because it would increase national institutions’ capacity to respond to the particular needs of the national community. The needs of a society are defined differently from case to case, as Miller pointed out, and a self-governing nation has the ability to evaluate what is necessary and define people’s ideals. Therefore, Miller contended, the absence of a homogenous nation-state would disadvantage the non-elite sections of society by restricting their access to public culture and economic opportunities.139 To be sure, liberal nationalism is a broad, ideal-typological concept that in reality varies among liberal nationalists.140 MacCormick, like Yael Tamir and David Miller, can be described as a liberal nationalist with social democratic tendencies.141 All three sought to rehabilitate nationalism by proposing a theoretical conflation with liberalism to contain the potential dangers of nationalism and simultaneously promote the solidarity and personal well-being that nationalism provided. They saw liberalism as essentially independent from nationalism because the former offered a virtue of reflexivity that the latter lacked; however, if the two were combined with care, liberalism would benefit from nationalism’s moral provision.142 This approach differed fundamentally from the Habermasian model of constitutional patriotism. Unlike the liberal nationalists, Jürgen Habermas rejected any form of nationalism as good or necessary.143 As a substitute, Habermas borrowed the concept of constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotimus) from Dolf Sternberger, who was Kohl’s teacher and employer at the University of Heidelberg in the 1950s (see chapter 5). To Sternberger, the fatherland differed from the nation as such, being primarily a republican state. He saw patriotism, unlike nationalism, as principally a republican idea, much older than the idea of the nation. Although the nation itself was divided, Sternberger argued that ‘we live in a whole constitution, in a whole Rechtsstaat, and that is in itself a form of fatherland’. Further, he contended, ‘the fatherland is the constitution, which we make alive. The fatherland is freedom, which we enjoy as long as it is well-fortified, that is, when we endorse, use and protect it’. Like Kohl, Sternberger perceived a disconcerting decline of patriotism in West Germany in the late 1970s; he called for ‘patriotic duty’ and loyalty to the constitution, which must be defended against its enemies.144 The concept of constitutional patriotism advanced by Habermas differed from Sternberger’s original concept, most visibly in its opposing view on the question of (re)unification. Whereas Habermas was critical of any rhetoric of national unity, in 1979 Sternberger lamented: ‘still we mourn, still we hope . . . The national feeling remains injured, we do not live in the whole Germany’.145



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Habermas’s notion of constitutional patriotism abstained from any unification nationalism, and he remained suspicious of the concept of the nation as such, as ‘its somewhat constructed character makes it naturally susceptible to manipulative misuse by political elites’.146 He did not reject national citizenship as such, but added that it had to be based entirely on constitutional patriotism, going without national identity; moreover, he advocated a dual citizenship: national and global.147 Habermas recognized the historical and social-psychological relationship between nationalism and republicanism, but in line with Tamir and Miller, he rejected the assumption ‘that the two are linked at the conceptual level’. Unlike them, however, Habermas did not believe a national-cultural sub-structure was needed to make liberal societies viable. He saw promoting participation in a shared public sphere and political culture as an inescapable necessity that would require a common understanding of norms and values, which should also find their expression in ‘cosmopolitan law’. However, the German philosopher envisioned the development of a global political culture based on universal principles of law and thus fundamentally different from the existing international system of nation-states.148 National sovereignty should be transferred to a world court and parliament, Habermas suggested; therefore the transition towards a cosmopolitan global system would require strong limitations on national sovereignty, autonomy and self-determination. Remarkably, Habermas continued to defend this position after (re)unification and the national revival in the East, and even managed to perceive a positive trend away from nationality.149 To Habermas, constitutional patriotism meant that ‘the citizens internalize the principles of the constitution and their concrete meaning not only from their abstract content, but from the context of the individual national history in each case’.150 It is thus noteworthy that he still thought in national categories. However, instead of regressing to a conventional national identity based on the invention of a proud, uniform national past, and celebrating alleged continuities aimed at the construction of social integration, he favoured a pluralist, critical image of history that would allow for a more reflexive, post-conventional, universalistic identity. In this regard it should be recalled that Habermas had introduced the concept of constitutional patriotism into the German Historikerstreit in 1986, arguing that it would be ‘the only patriotism that does not alienate us [Germans] from the West’. Habermas then sought to remind the West German public that ‘a bond, rooted in convictions of universalist, constitutional principles, has unfortunately only evolved in the Kulturnation of the Germans after – and because of – Auschwitz’.151 The memory of this moral catastrophe was, in Habermas’s opinion, a chance for Germans to develop this new Western identity. He warned that the historic opportunity should not be gambled away by downplaying German guilt, and accused conservative historians and the Kohl administration of a ‘new revisionism’, concerned that they would erroneously try to sustain the great

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achievement of Germany’s Western integration on the basis of a ‘nationalist NATO philosophy’.152 Kohl and Habermas were of the same patriotic generation, poised between the ’33ers and the ’68ers.153 Similar to the conservative politician Kohl, the left-liberal intellectual watchman Habermas asserted that ‘the unreserved opening of the Federal Republic against the political culture of the West is the great intellectual achievement of our post-war era, of which especially my generation can be proud’.154 As he was a post-nationalist, however, Habermas’s perspective on the relationship between nationalism and liberalism differed fundamentally from that of liberal nationalists, including Kohl. Instead of recognizing and reinforcing nationalism, Habermas challenged the nationalist normality; and instead of following the official trend of becoming a normal nation, he called on post-(re)unification Germans to undertake a more public confrontation with their traumatic past: It is a hardly realisable truth that, in a culturally, highly civilized society like the German one, a liberal political culture could develop only after Auschwitz. That it developed through the reflection of the incomprehensible past, is easier to understand, if one considers what Human Rights and democracy actually mean: that is, the simple expectation to exclude nobody from the political community and to equally respect the integrity of everyone’s alterity.155

So far, both approaches – liberal nationalist and constitutional patriotic – echo the tensions in Federal Republican history, where the legitimacy of the liberal welfare state was almost beyond dispute among the mainstream but the roles of nationalism and post-nationalism were estimated differently (as primarily described in chapter 3). However, during a dialogue with the future Pope Joseph Ratzinger, Habermas recognized that in the Western Kulturkreis, ‘a common religious background, common language, and above all the newly awakened national consciousness were helpful for the emergence of a highly abstract civic solidarity’.156 Habermas’s line of argument thus resembled the liberal nationalists’: liberal societies would need more than what the state could provide.The constitutional state still needed political virtues, including solidarity, which could not be enforced by legal measures. He also agreed with Ratzinger that religious principles, when translated into secular language and subject to communicative reason, were very useful in attaining such ambitions.157

Ethnocultural Compensation? Romantic Nationalism and Heimat Romantic nationalism, in this study, refers to a nationalism articulated as something not primarily related to the state but essentially based on national culture and ethnicity. In other words, it largely concerns Kohl’s ethnocultural representation of his nation and himself. In the German context, romantic nationalism has extra connotations when teleologically traced along an ideological supply



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route towards the Third Reich. The political structure in Germany – that is, the reoccurring absence of the nation-state – had indeed opened wide spiritual spaces for state-detached notions of nationhood, which imparted a strong texture to the ideological patchwork of Nazism. Also after 1945, romantic nationalist ideas, including ethnocultural usage of terms like Volk and Heimat, continued to have an interesting career in West Germany.158 Kohl frequently used these concepts, which were integral to his conservative ideology. However, he also managed to subordinate these allegedly perilous expressions of nationalism to the primacy of the West and his liberal nationalism (as demonstrated in chapter 4). It is thus important to be aware of the ideal-typological character of the distinctions made here for analytical purposes, as these nationalisms not only intertwine in practice159 but are also articulated differently from nationalist to nationalist. Early in the twentieth century, Friedrich Meinecke suggested that the ethnocultural nationalism of the early romantics, who dreamed of a world republic when the nation-state was still utopian, could ultimately be instrumentalized to nationalize Germany under Prussian hegemony.160 In 1946, after German nationalism had shown its most terrifying face, Meinecke was one of the first historians to think about Germany’s unusual path towards Nazism. At this point he felt that German nationalism’s ideological history had little explanatory power, and that much of the ‘catastrophe’ was likely rather accidental in nature and could have happened to other nations too.161 In the following years, however, more scholars began to focus on the deeper intellectual roots of Nazism. The historical trajectory of the Germans became associated with the interdependency of an unusual class structure, tardy industrialization and an overly militarized nation-state whose advent was relatively late, among Western nations. Further, a cultural Sonderweg ‘from Herder to Hitler’ was constructed on which the apolitical idea of German Kultur stood in opposition to Western Zivilisation.162 In 1950, Eugen Lemberg concluded in his relatively unknown Geschichte des Nationalismus in Europa that the Herderian idea of humanity eventually proved too weak to contain the nations created by the Herderian notion of Volk within an order that could protect those nations from each other.163 In an article on the rise of German nationalism published that same year, Hans Kohn described the early romantics as categorically opposed to the Enlightenment and the liberal state, and essentially as anti-Western.164 Later, in The Mind of Germany, Kohn dedicated another chapter to romanticism, arguing that the romantics had evoked the Volksgeist (soul of the people) under the assumption that ‘a nation could never be based upon a constitution protecting individual rights but only upon indigenous customs’. This illiberal notion of Germany, Kohn believed, facilitated the conservative tenor until the dusk of 1945.165 While Kohn pioneered this field, it is remarkable how much Liah Greenfeld’s work of the new school in Nationalism Studies resembled his views in this regard.166

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In the early 1960s, George Mosse traced the völkisch ingredients of the Nazi ideology directly back to their romantic origin: ‘since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century “Volk” signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental “essence”’.167 Mosse was reacting to attempts during the early years of the Federal Republic to reduce the Third Reich to a historical accident and reconstruct the proud, historist tradition of the German nation as represented by, for example, by Gerhard Ritter and Hans Rothfels.168 Mosse found that the particularity of Nazism, as opposed to other fascisms, revealed a contrast with Western nations that had not repudiated ‘the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the social radicalism of the French Revolution’.169 The German intelligentsia had been occupied with the German question since the late eighteenth century, and even more so after the Napoleonic invasions and the subsequent war of liberation. After the sobering outcome of the Congress of Vienna, ‘those Germans who wanted unity looked increasingly to the formation of a cultural cohesion amongst their people, rather than political unity which seemed far distant’.170 Romanticization of the Volk had revolutionary implications, as it subsequently paralleled – and sometimes intertwined with – the liberal movement: ‘traditional politics was seen as exemplifying the worst aspect of the world in which [the romantic nationalists] lived’. Mosse, therefore, saw the romantic idea of the Volk as a reaction to structural difficulties in Germany’s history: ‘Idealized and transcendent, the Volk symbolized the desired unity beyond contemporary reality’. This spiritual reaction only increased after the failure of the 1848 revolution: with the dream of a common nation-state quashed, the search for a cultural identity intensified. Völkisch ideas were hence carried into the industrial age. As the lower middle class’s hopes for the new, rapidly industrializing nation-state of 1871 were disappointed, it cultivated a new romanticism that constituted the beginning of what Mosse called the ‘crisis of German ideology’. Social and economic problems encouraged Germans to seek loopholes in reality and rootedness in the nature of the Volk, which they perceived as threatened by the modernizing world. The educational sector, student fraternities and youth movements offered anti-materialistic alternatives; nature and landscape were romanticized; Heimatkunde (local history) was taught at the Volksschule (compulsory primary school). After the First World War, the quest for a ‘German Revolution’ reached the political mainstream, which began to blame the Jewry for the modern evils of Western civilization. The Nazis thus found strong supporters among the educated middle class. Nazism now provided ‘the “ideal” bourgeois revolution: it was a ‘“revolution of the soul” which actually threatened none of the vested economic interests of the middle class’.171 For Nipperdey – who, like Kohl, opposed the post-national tendencies in the Federal Republic and still believed in the positive facets of German nationalism – there has never been any anti-Western Sonderweg.172 At a conference in Canberra in May 1980, he agreed that there were different types of nationalism,



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and that romantic nationalism was a ‘particular kind of cultural nationalism’ – an ideal type that in reality had mixed with other types of nationalism – and took ‘culture as its starting point, not the state’. Further, Nipperdey agreed that romantic nationalism differed from the political nationalism of ‘the preceding Jacobin-revolutionary nationalism as well as later imperialistic-integral nationalism’ but needed also to be ‘differentiated from the concurrent liberal nationalism, even though they are interwoven’. He also confirmed the romantic nationalists’ opposition to the universalism of the Enlightenment, which they associated with the Napoleonic ‘threat of a uniformization of Europe’.173 Nipperdey explained that in romantic nationalism, no social contract would be necessary, as the individual was imagined as a natural part of the greater, more significant whole of the organic nation: one could become a complete individual only by being totally assimilated into the national culture of the ethnic group. Romantic nationalism was thus extremely holistic and emphasized national individuality more than personal individuality. The state, its institutions and its laws were seen as reflecting the Volksgeist as much as the nation’s art and language. Romantic nationalists resented the political establishment for nationalizing history and nature, which should be regarded as an expression of ‘the crisis of modernization, the nostalgia for a particular, traditional and also Christian way of life, the loss of Heimat (the feeling of belonging), a product of alienation, rationality, economization, atomized individualism, of history destroying futurism and progressiveness, of the abstract universalism of modern development’.174 Seeking to draw a more positive picture of German history, Nipperdey presented a much more optimistic image of romantic nationalism than Kohn and Mosse did. Romantic nationalism, an outcome of interest in the ancient world, had ‘universalistic, cosmopolitan and humanitarian roots’. Romantic nationalists were ‘an internationale of nationalists’ who saw individual peoples as part of the Weltvolk. The main proponents of this type of nationalism, the educated classes, were necessarily anti-elitist in their romanticization of the folk. Romantic nationalists performed a valuable pedagogical task with political results: the movement involved nationalist education, art, monuments and museums, and history writing as well as aesthetic sympathies for the Church. The nationalization of nature, language, literature, schools, tales, history, symbols, music and monuments was intended to lead the masses to their new patriotic identity, one that undermined the establishment.175 The higher aim of the romantic nationalists was a common state based on ideas of popular sovereignty, self-determination, civil rights and individual liberty: ‘The accent which the romantic nationalists placed on the idea of the people had at first an outright democratic tendency’. So, notwithstanding the primacy of culture and its (secular) emphasis on Christianity and Gemeinschaft, romantic nationalism would always, according to Nipperdey, have certain revolutionary repercussions. ‘The romantic nationalists were all liberals politically’,

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he maintained, and romantic nationalism was much more open and intertwined with liberal nationalism than the advocates of the cultural Sonderweg suggested. Moreover, romantic nationalism was ‘fundamentally compatible with the three great political tendencies – democracy, liberalism and conservatism’. He thus concluded that ‘[t]he dichotomy put forward by Hans Kohn, of a progressive-democratic nationalism in the West and an illiberal-undemocratic authoritarian form in the east, does not hold true’.176 In the ethno-symbolist tradition, John Hutchinson followed Anthony Smith in taking a longue durée view of nationalism and stressing the fecundity of pre-modern ethnic communities, which would continue to endow nations with symbolic material in the modern context.177 Hutchinson did not see any hegemonic turn when ‘[h]istory replaced religion as the guide to collective identity and destiny’ and ‘[h]istorical scholars .  .  . became fathers of the nation . . . by identifying a golden age that authenticated innovation’. Instead, he took an interest in the concept of cultural nationalism from below, within which romantic nationalism was one important subcategory.178 Like Nipperdey, Hutchinson considered romanticism a European movement, and Germany its heartland.179 He described romanticism as an ‘ethnocultural movement’ that ‘rejected the biblical or “Trojan” origins of peoples to claim “national” descent from the vigorous barbarian peoples who had fought the Romans’. According to Hutchinson, however, a crucial feature of romantic nationalism was its ‘polycentric Weltanschauung . . . based on a conception of a living, not mechanical, universe in which all natural entities were animated by a force that individualized them and endowed them with a drive for self-realization’.180 Hutchinson explained that romantic nationalism encouraged the foundation of civil society organizations and liberal culture: the ‘[r]omantics revolutionized politics by transferring authority to a national community animated from below, thereby encouraging an upsurge of populist energies’. This movement facilitated an irrational but implicitly tolerant notion of the nation ‘as an organic unity differentiated by regional, gender, religious and occupational identities’. Though they rejected the centralized, bureaucratic state, the romantic nationalists can also be thought of as modernizers, in that they had altered traditions and made them subject to national will. New national symbolism; nationalized memories, history and education; heroic leadership cults; and the romanticization of the rural folk bound the old and new classes together, providing mobilization when the homeland was threatened from above or from outside.181 Nipperdey’s and Hutchinson’s treatments of romantic nationalism as a reforming force from below ignored the reality that some individuals have more agency in cultural change than others. The key agents of cultural nationalism have been intellectual elites, so the movement cannot be treated only as a force from below. Underestimating the role of cultural elites would ignore the complex ‘power relations that are constitutive to culture’.182 Cultures have always been a fundamental condition of human life, though only in the modern



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age have intellectual elites exploited this condition by claiming mass cultures or ethnicities as national and politically programmatizing them to maintain cultural hegemony.183 The same is true of political elites, who often form alliances with cultural elites, as Kohl’s geistig-moralische agenda demonstrated (see especially chapters 4 and 5). In the search for greater legitimacy, politicians have not shied away from stoking romantic, ethnic and racist notions of nationhood.184 Nationalism Studies, as Paul Brass pointed out, should thus engage with ‘politically induced cultural change’, ‘by which elites and counter-elites .  .  . select aspects of the group’s culture [and] attach new value and meaning to them as symbols to mobilize the [national] group’.185 When looking at nationalism as a cultural phenomenon, the analysis cannot exclude an elitist approach. Cultural nationalists have tended to position themselves within rival identity projects, evoking conservative narratives of the past. This allows them to manipulate the status quo, in which they see a threat to the allegedly natural order, and reevaluate national culture in the face of change, particularly when they feel a renationalization of the state is required. This is the hermaphrodite function of cultural nationalists, whom Hutchinson portrayed as progressive mediators between past and future.186 Cultural nationalists thus stimulate revivals of older national themes and symbols, placing their content into new contexts irrespective of the resultant alienation from their initial meaning. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Janus-image of nationalism drawn by Tom Nairn: [T]he substance of nationalism as such is always morally, politically, humanly ambiguous. This is why moralizing perspectives on the phenomenon always fail, whether they praise or berate it. They simply seize upon one face or another of the creature, and will not admit that there is a common head conjoining them. But nationalism can in this sense be pictured as like the old Roman god Janus, who stood above gateways with one face looking forward and one backwards.Thus does nationalism stand over the passage to modernity, for human society. As human kind is forced through its strait doorway, it must look desperately back into the past, to gather strength wherever it can be found for the ordeal of ‘development’.187

The German concept of Heimat that Kohl frequently used (see chapter 4) is paradigmatic of this dialectic function between (what its bearers have associated with) past antiquity, present modernity and future ideals. Heimat notions can thus be highly adaptable to modernizing ideas.188 Concepts of Heimat, like those of nation, vary greatly amongst individuals of the same regional and generational origin, depending on their (often ideologized) socialization and imagination. Like romantic nationalism, Heimat identities appear to be primarily apolitical yet can easily be ‘hijacked’ by political elites for ideological purposes.189 During its wider recovery in West Germany during the 1980s, the conservative mainstream presented Heimat as part of the reaction against the alleged post-1968 cultural uprootedness and the perceived symptoms of life in an economic powerhouse, evoking notions of community and traditions without doubting the legitimacy of the FRG system.

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Celia Applegate sensed that Heimat would carry ‘a burden of reference and implication that is not adequately conveyed by the translation .  .  . For almost two centuries, Heimat has been at the centre of a German moral – and by extension political – discourse about place, belonging and identity’.190 Like nation, it conjured a transcendental solidarity across time and formed the basis of a utopia connection between two worlds: ‘it is a term that dwelt in one world, that of the self-conscious centralizers, modernizers, and nationalists of the General Estate, while evoking another’.191 Generally speaking, Heimat is often a sentimental term, and its allusion to cultural, geographic and biological belonging renders it distinctively Janus-faced: it nostalgically gazes over an imaginative past and creates exhortatory hopes for the realization of a utopian future without renouncing its apolitical appearance, pretending to mediate between the ideal of perfect nativeness and challenges intrinsic to modernity. Peter Blickle argued that Johann G. Herder became the ‘the intellectual father of the modern idea of Heimat as it relates to nationalism’ after writing patriotic poems to rescue German culture from the ‘Seine’s ugly slime’.192 Blickle asserted that ‘[t]he German idea of Heimat is, strangely, an antinational construct that historically has always served to support a broad and not clearly defined nationalism, but arguably a rather cultural nationalism’ and that ‘German nationalistic sentiment and the German notion of Heimat have always played into each other’.193 Karl Popper, who was categorically opposed to any form of nationalism, sustained this tacit conflation between Heimat and nation when he failed to distinguish between the two concepts.194 Heimat, in Popper’s view, was a ‘psychological notion’ internalized during one’s childhood, in contrast to a definite, logical notion. It referred to objective factors and things, like place of birth and known persons, that were entangled by spiritual imaginations, blurry pictures of memory and personal feelings of intimacy. Put more simply, it was the romantic image of a person’s origin – the personal romanticization of homeland – and thus perhaps not exclusively German.195

The Historian as Poppy Grower: A Canberran Perspective In the final analysis, nations can exist only when individuals think they do. The creative act of writing national history fulfils an important task in this regard. In 1882, Ernest Renan reflected at the Sorbonne that notions of national belonging depend on the supply of memories of heroic, glorious events and common sacrifice.196 A century later, Benedict Anderson saw nations’ subjective continuity, from an ‘immemorial past’ via the present to the future, as one of their key features.197 In the age of nationalism, historians have brought cultural, political, social and individual networks of memory into nationalist platforms.198 Kohl well understood the instrumentality of history when he sought to promote ‘historical consciousness’, realizing that belief in a common past was required



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to assure the persistence of the German nation. He was concerned about other forces in Germany – generational, postnational, communist – that claimed interpretive sovereignty of ideas of his nation that differed from his own. The work of historians provides members of nations with a transcendental sense of a common past, present and future across generational, class and spatial anonymities. And not only is nationalism present in the tense spaces between mass, group and personal consciousnesses, but is also anti-epochal. National history might be interpreted differently amongst the members of a national group, and over time, but a persisting national paradigm connects their consciousness of the past. Meanwhile, public discourse, banal or cognizant, is dominated by historicizations of things along national boundaries, rather than along pasts of other human groupings. This often happens unconsciously in the mass media, politics, social sciences and the humanities.199 This study is no exception, even if written from a more critical perspective, and mainly in Australia. I am not offering a systematic comparison between German and Australian nationalism, but it is relevant that my experiences abroad have shaped my conceptualization of nationalism and perspective on Germany.200 After all, several scholars in this field have found being an outsider very helpful in theorizing nationalism, as Paul James recently pointed out.201 Prasenjit Duara warned against disregarding the fluid nature of different human networks within and amongst nations: ‘national history secures for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same national subject evolving through time. This history derives from the linear teleological Enlightenment History’, which Duara wrote with a capital H ‘to distinguish it from other modes of figuring the past’.202 Duara saw national history as dangerous, as it was not just designed to legitimize a common present and future by suggesting a common past, but also to promote the commonness of a national self and to draw a sharp distinction from the other.203 Stefan Berger saw this ‘historiographical nationalism’ as an export of Western imperialism,204 critically observing that historians have legitimized xenophobia, acts of war and ethnic cleansing.205 The scientificity of historical Wissenschaft, as prominently represented by Leopold von Ranke, gave historians the authority ‘to speak on behalf of their nation’.206 Berger recognized the ‘constructivist turn’ of the 1980s and a subsequent trend towards comparative and transnational historiography, including numerous volumes on global history, over the past two decades.207 Still, he remained concerned about the revival of historiographical nationalism, not only in Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism but among the West European mainstream as well.208 It will be interesting to see whether the globalization of public discourses, including comparative, transnational and ultimately non-national history writing, will prove powerful enough to dissolve national barriers in the future, and whether a history without nations will be a better one. Given the record of history with nations, it may be worth trying.

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To date, however, the creation of national history continues to serve the maintenance of nations. John Hirst’s book The Sentimental Nation is a good example of traditional history writing in search of a national character.209 National museums, monuments and mausoleums also remain popular tools for assuring the persistence of nations and provide historians with prestigious workplaces to boot.210 Most noteworthy is the fact that nationalist historians now engage frequently with the mass media, which has further democratized their identity projects: more than five million Germans watched Guido Knopp’s series about the roots of German nationhood.211 The instrumentality of this kind of ‘scientific’ history as edutainment continues to be alarming.212 The situation today suggests that neither the mainstream’s susceptibility to nationalism nor Eric Hobsbawm’s withering critique has lost any ground: ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market’.213 Hobsbawm and Ranger intended the critical constructivist model in The Invention of Tradition to expose the fabrication of the historic symbolism required to maintain national belonging. Nationalism, they argued, should foremost be seen as an elitist, statist movement enlisting allegedly ancient material for novel purposes of political legitimacy. Invented tradition comprises ‘both traditions actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period’. Ritually repeated symbolic practices are designed to suggest ‘continuity with a suitable historic past’, and have different purposes: to suggest social cohesion; to create and legitimize ‘institutions, status or relations of authority’; or to impose ‘socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour’.214 From a more neutral anthropological viewpoint on nationalism, such as that taken by Jonathan Hearn, it is unclear whether any distinction between ‘invented’ and ‘non-invented’ symbolism makes sense, or whether power and culture should be seen as conceptually more related than Hobsbawm implied, without depriving either of its authenticity.215 The problem in writing national history – and in cultivating nationalism more generally – is that because the observed object (the nation) and the subjective observer (member of a nation) are both part of the same national world, the observer may tend to excuse intellectually and politically elitist nationalism. In a political context, however, nationalist symbolism lulls the democratic mind to sleep by imposing a standardized reality without a fire exit. For example, with the exhibition Australian Democracy: More than 2000 Years in the Making, the foundation of the Museum of Australian Democracy (established in 2009) attempted to endow the national representation of an unloved capital with the legitimacy of a beautified past, blurred by liberal nationalist motifs to legitimize the status quo (with some potential for minor, republican variations).216 This new museum opened in the Old Parliament House only eight years after, and several hundred metres away from the Australian National Museum, which is



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situated on the so-called Uluru Axis on the other side of an artificial lake.217 The Museum of Australian Democracy itself is located to the south-west of ANZAC Parade, overlooking the humble Aboriginal Tent Embassy218 and facing the venerable temple of the War Memorial, which houses the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier dating from 1941.219 Overshadowing the scene, a mound constructed to accommodate the (new) Parliament of Australia is topped by a monstrous metallic scaffold flying the national flag emblazoned with the stars of the Southern Cross.220 Commuting public servants cannot but see this monumental orgasm of nationalist symbolism daily on their way to work and reflexively internalize the splendid history of their liberal nationstate. In this manifestation, nationalism is reminiscent of Thomas More’s Utopia and Andrew Niccol and Peter Weir’s Truman Show; in both instances it was hard to escape.221 It is instructive to observe nationalism from outside. National history, like culture in general, becomes ‘sticky’ when politically materialized or taught in the public sphere, becoming an integral part of the nation-state’s inventory that is understood as normal. History, or the culture of memory, thus becomes vulnerable to exploitation by the politicians who use it to legitimize the power of their class, institutions and ideologies.222 Politicians often function as temporary historians on the public stage, forming alliances with professional historians who conform to their political ideology, to secure their prerogative of interpreting the past.223 Here again, the German example is striking. As Berger noted, ‘from Heinrich von Treitschke to Michael Stürmer, the highly public role of historians has often been informed by a scarcely hidden desire to serve as policy advisers to Germany’s political class’.224 Stürmer himself frankly admitted that for him, history was a very ‘political’ science.225 Against the overwhelming backdrop of the Nazi past, this interplay between politics and history gained a new dimension in the Federal Republic: Norbert Frei referred to Vergangenheitspolitik (politics with the past); Peter Reichel described it as Politik mit der Erinnerung (memory politics); and Edgar Wolfrum sought to establish the concept of Geschichtspolitik.226 During his chancellorship, Kohl was a paragon of the Geschichtspolitiker (as outlined in chapter 5). He strove not only to strengthen Federal Republican society’s identification with the German nation, but also to impose an image of the German past that accorded with his personal nationalism. At the same time he campaigned to improve his nation’s international reputation. National history also serves purposes other than identifying a golden age. Some historians try to provoke collective embarrassment by identifying less golden moments in their national past. Geoffrey Blainey distinguished between the ‘Three Cheers’ and ‘Black Armband’ views of history.227 Those politicians and historians who wish to foster existing forms of national identity tend to prefer the former type of narrative, insisting that ‘we were once great’. However, it is not clear whether any history that admits that ‘we did terrible things’ would fundamentally deconstruct the national paradigm, as it still involves a

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methodological nationalism. Those accused of writing Black Armband history may feel a nationally infused shame about positivist Three Cheers histories, which they see as false accounts of their national history.228 ‘History wars’ arise at moments when the ‘morality of the nation is seen to be at stake’.229 A prime minister may state today that ‘amongst the nations of the world we have a remarkably positive history. I think there is a yearning in the [national] community right across the political divide for its leader to enunciate more pride and sense of achievement in what has gone before us’.230 Contrariwise, his successor may argue tomorrow that ‘[t]he time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in [our nation’s] history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future’.231 Identification with the nation underpins both uses of the past for present action: the glorification of the past and the revision of shameful moments are both instruments with which to adjust the representation of the nation. It is thus a fallacy to view attempts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung – ‘coming to terms with the past’ – as naturally opposed to nationalism, for one’s own nation often remains the framework of identification. Regardless of whether the implied past is positive or negative, what matters is that a common past is suggested. John Hutchinson believed that these cultural wars between rival conceptions of history within nations would have an ultimately ‘therapeutic’ character, in that they let ‘societies perceive the problems they face as well as the strategies they might use to overcome them’.232 As an example of such clashing ‘symbolic and political projects’, he mentioned the divide ‘between Western and liberal and Eastern “organic” nationalists in Germany’, which eventually found synthesis in today’s Berlin Republic.233 But is such a consensus in fact desirable? Since the 1960s, Germany’s national history – the past of the ancestors and their institutions – has been contested in the light of 1945. 234 Berger, however, has expressed concern about a return to a nationalist consensus in German historiography and attempts to normalize the Berlin Republic235 or German history after (re)unification. He has also remained wary of the fact that the post-nationalism of left-liberal scholars is almost a thing of the past.236 Should Germans come to a reading of history that historicizes the Bonn Republic as only a Provisorium and legitimizes the Berlin Republic as the outcome of a natural process, they will find the ideal conditions for a return to the ‘German conception of history’, in which heroes, nations and states are sacrosanct stars in the otherwise chaotic universe of human history – and in which subjects can reach freedom only through service to the representation of the nation-state.237

Nationalism and Germany’s Second Unification This chapter has provided working definitions of nation and nationalism. It has argued that nationalism should be studied as a contemporary, mainstream



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phenomenon capable of producing great quantities of personal imaginations of nationhood across time and space. It has also suggested that individual biography is a helpful method for researching ideas in context, one that accounts for the individuality of the nationalist concerned as well as the external structure of personal nationalism. Four perspectives on nationalism were introduced: the interplay of religion and nationalism, the contrast between liberal nationalism and constitutional patriotism, romantic nationalism and Heimat as a form of cultural nationalism, and historism’s importance to the endurance of nationalism. The next chapters will demonstrate that Kohl’s representation of Germany conflates Catholic, liberal, romantic and historist forms of nationalism. As a final point for this chapter, it makes sense to conceptualize unification, a prime example of a nationalist incident. Numerous domestic and international factors besides nationalism contributed to the making of the new German nation-state in 1989/90, and other options besides a reunified Germany conforming to the standard nation-state format were still possible as late as early 1990. Yet (re)unification required a nationalist underpinning, not just to be historicized as such, but to be feasible.The Federal Republic has never really been the completely ‘post-national democracy among nationstates’ that Karl Dietrich Bracher suggested.238 Hans-Ulrich Wehler tried to sustain the common image of Germany as an exceptional example, claiming that nationalism between 1945 and 1990 had neither served as a basis of legitimacy to the state nor held any appeal for the masses.239 This view seems somewhat overstated, even though it is hard to overlook the strength of post-nationalist, pro-European tendencies in West Germany (to which Wehler referred) or Germany’s ability to critique the national past, which from the 1960s onwards was in some ways more developed than in other nations. Further, the memory of Germany’s first nation-state, which existed for seventy-four years, cannot be easily overcome. The legal fiction of the Federal Republic as a provisional state calling for reunification and representing the territory of 1937 persisted, affecting the subsequent political culture in Germany. In the end, no West German chancellor from 1949 to 1990 could afford to renounce claims for unification, not only for constitutional reasons, but because it would have cost him votes. Unification nationalism remained, at least to some extent, an instrument to legitimize political action, and Federal Republican existence was at the same time legitimized in opposition to its communist counterpart.240 A pro-European attitude should not be interpreted as anti-national. As Gerard Delanty noted, ‘nationalism does not necessarily imply a rejection of Europeanism. An important aspect of the new nationalism is its malleability, its ability to wear many hats, which is not in itself anything new, since nationalism was always a protean phenomenon’.241 Nationalism persisted and evolved in the old Federal Republic before (re)unification. Kohl epitomized this dubious development: he had always portrayed nationalism as something nonexistent in the FRG and proudly

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demonstrated his European identity, seeking meanwhile to eliminate the postnational elements of his society. Kohl’s life as a mainstream politician demonstrates that nationalist symbolism and nationalist historiography staunchly endured the break of 1945 and adapted to the new spirit of the Federal Republic, where a ‘good’, westernized nationalism was promoted.242 The construction of a positively charged nationalism was indeed severely constrained by the memory of the Holocaust and the division of the nation.243 However, the national identity of the Germans was too strongly contested to conclude that a thoroughly postnational society had emerged.244 Moreover, new sources of national pride such as sports and the economy were discovered, providing a range of positively charged old and new lieux de mémoire (places of memory) that mainstream citizens could resort to in cultivating their national identity without violating the boundaries of the socially acceptable.245 Not all West Germans felt equally ashamed of the past, German-German contacts differed on the personal level, and what Germany meant territorially was unevenly interpreted.246 The Nazi past itself was often suppressed or bypassed by constructing allegedly positive continuities, and has been processed differently across society and over time.247 The rise of post-nationalism in the 1960s could also be regarded as a form of ‘negative nationalism’ implying a distinction from other nations. This, however, emerged primarily among intellectual elites, whereas the mainstream and the law maintained an ethnic conception of nationhood.248 As discussed above, the identity projects pursued by mainstream intellectuals themselves were poles apart within the framework of Federal Republican patriotism, ranging from complete rejection of national traditions to rehabilitation of German nationalism under Western formulas.249 The Ostpolitik of the 1970s, which continued under Kohl in the 1980s, was a realistic response to structural realities during the Cold War (see chapter 3).250 At the same time, however, the division encouraged West German leaders to resort to the ethnic-romantic categories of Volk and Kulturnation, which they finally were able to mobilize in support of the reestablishment of a nation-state.251 Furthermore, the GDR never lost its special status in West German foreign policies: Deutschlandpolitik aimed at cultural, scientific and economic exchange, as well as a further easing of restrictions on travel between the two German states, to limit the alienation between the two societies. Success in this arena served to maintain political power.252 Even though identification with the nation had decreased, especially among the younger generations and the left, towards the end of the division West Germany experienced a strong conservative reaction to the postnational ‘aberration’ in German history, which politicians and historians sought to exonerate from the burden of the Third Reich.253 Thus, a tendency towards a nationalist revival existed before (re)unification in the Federal Republic.254 Unification nationalism is a non-normative type of nationalism that refers merely to the process of nation-state formation rather than to the ideological background that inspired this development. Although nations’ division into



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different state territories is nothing unusual, successful unification nationalism has been relatively rare. German historiography, however, has illustrated at least two examples of unification, namely in 1871 and 1990. The annexation of Austria in 1938 – despite its popularity – has seldom been historicized as unification,255 while the outcome of the Saarland’s entry into the Federal Republic of Germany is remembered as a ‘Little Reunification’.256 Michael Hechter explained that unification, as opposed to separatism, ‘involves the merger of politically divided but culturally homogenous territory into one state .  .  . In this case, the effort to render cultural and governance boundaries congruent requires the establishment of a new state encompassing the members of the nation’.257 The degree of cultural homogeneity in Germany’s unifications is debatable.258 However, what ultimately matters in nationalism is subjective belief, not the objective factors that constitute a nation.259 Hechter’s definition displays another limitation, in that the second German unification did not lead to the making of a new state but to the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and its integration into the continuously existing Federal Republic.260 John Breuilly and Ronald Speirs thus defined unification more adequately as ‘a process by which a plurality of sovereign states is rapidly reduced to a single state, an outcome legitimated, either in advance or in retrospect, by the argument that this process brings together a divided nation’. As the editors of a comparative volume on 1871 and 1990, they stressed that unification will always involve the decline of sovereignty. It will, finally, be ‘the word “national” that gives meaning to the idea of “unification”’ and thus circumvents the terminology of ‘annexation’, ‘conquest’ or ‘expansion’.261 The repertoire of the ‘national’ remained crucial in legitimizing the German unification processes, even if it was instigated by extra-nationalist motivations. Neither Bismarck’s striving for Prussian hegemony in the first unification nor GDR citizens’ demands for democracy and prosperity were primarily motivated by nationalism.262 And the international constellation of power mattered a great deal in both cases. However, both unifications drew on previously existing national imaginations in society, irrespective of their strength, heterogeneity or popularity. The driving actors sought to propagate and reinforce a particular idea of Germany, independent from the idealist or realist nature of their nationalism.

Notes 1. For a discussion of Bourdieu’s critique of biography see 1990. BIOS: Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung und Oral History 1, especially L. Niethammer. 1990. ‘Kommentar zu Pierre Bourdieu: Die biographische Illusion’, in the same issue, 91–94. 2.  For some good introductions to Nationalism Studies, see D. McCrone. 1998. Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow’s Ancestors, London: Routledge; J. Hutchinson and M. Guibernau (eds). 2001. Understanding Nationalism, Cambridge: Polity; P. Spencer and H.Wollman. 2002. Nationalism:A Critical

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Introduction, London: Sage; J. Hearn. 2006. Rethinking Nationalism, Basingtoke: Palgrave MacMillan; U. Özkirimli. 2000. Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, Basingtoke: Palgrave MacMillan; U. Özkirimli. 2005. Contemporary Debates on Nationalism: A Critical Engagement, New York: Palgrave MacMillan; G. Day and A. Thompson. 2004. Theorizing Nationalism, New York: Palgrave MacMillan; P. Lawrence. 2005. Nationalism: History and Theory, New York: Pearson Education. For a very concise and valuable introduction to this field of study see John Breuilly’s introduction to Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. A substantial amount of literature published long before the rise of Nationalism Studies in the 1980s is worth exploring; see, e.g., K.P. Pinson. 1935. A Bibliographical Introduction to Nationalism, New York: Columbia University Press; K.W. Deutsch. 1956. An Interdisciplinary Bibliography on Nationalism 1935-1953, Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of MIT. 3.  A.Vincent. 1995. Modern Political Ideologies, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 241. 4.  M. Freeden. 1998. ‘Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?’, Political Studies, 46(4), 748–65. 5.  R. Wuthnow. 1987. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis, Berkeley: University of California Press, 159, 161–62, chapter 6. 6. I am trying to avoid the exhausted primordialist-modernist debate; see, e.g., Hearn, Rethinking Nationalism, chapters 2–5; A. Ichijo and G. Uzelac (eds). 2005. When Is the Nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories of Nationalism, Oxon: Routledge. 7.  M. Hroch. 2000. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, New York: Columbia University Press, 3. 8. See for example U. Özkirimli. 2003. ‘The Nation as an Artichoke? A Critique of Ethnosymbolist Interpretations of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 9(3), 339–55; cf. A.D. Smith. 2009. Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach, Oxon: Routledge. 9. Hroch, Social Preconditions, 13. 10. J. Hearn. 2013. ‘Nationalism, Biography and the Ecology of Identity’, Humanities Research, 19(1), 5. 11. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 12.  E. Kedourie. 1974. Nationalism, 3rd ed., London: Hutchinson University Library, 9. 13.  H. Seton-Watson. 1977. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism, London: Methuen, chapter 4. 14.  G.L. Mosse. 2001. The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany, from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich, New York: Howard Fertig. 15.  B. Yack. 2001. ‘Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism’, Political Theory 29(4), 517–36; L. Greenfeld. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; M. Mann. 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, New York: Cambridge University Press. 16. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; J. Breuilly. 1982. Nationalism and the State, Manchester: Manchester University Press; C.Tilly (ed.). 1975. The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; J. Hall. 1995. ‘Nationalism, Classified and Explained’ in S. Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism, Budapest: Central European University Press. 17.  M. Mann. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2. 18.  P. Nora. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26, 7–24. 19. G. Sluga. 2005. ‘What Is National Self-Determination? Nationality and Psychology during the Apogee of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 11(1), 1–20; J. Kennedy and L. Riga. 2009. ‘Tolerant Majorities, Loyal Minorities and “Ethnic Reversals”: Constructing Minority Rights at Versailles 1919’, Nations and Nationalism 15(3), 461–82. 20. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 21.  See M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno. 2002 [1944]. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 22. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 6. 23.  Cf. D. Chernilo. 2006. ‘Social Theory’s Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality’, European Journal of Social Theory 9(1), 5–22.



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24.  N. Elias. 1989. Studien über die Deutschen: Machtkämpfe und Habitusentwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 194–95. 25.  J. Habermas. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 107. 26.  E. Hobsbawm. 1994. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, London: Michael Joseph; R. Brubaker. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 27.  C. Geertz. 2000 [1973]. ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Politics in the New States’ in C. Geertz (ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, 259. 28. J. Spinner-Halev and E. Theiss-Morse. 2003. ‘National Identity and Self-Esteem’, Perspectives on Politics 1(3), 515–32. 29. Elias, Studien über die Deutschen, 196–97. 30. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 474–75. 31. L. Khazaleh. 2005. ‘Benedict Anderson: “I like nationalism’s utopian elements”’ (interview with Benedict Anderson), trans. M. Whiting, Stavanger, 15 December. Retrieved 9 October 2014 from https://www.uio.no/english/research/interfaculty-research-areas/culcom/ news/2005/anderson.html. 32.  See Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow. 33. O. Bauer. 1907. Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, Part 1 (Die Nation), Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand; G. Balakrishnan (ed.). 1996. Mapping the Nation, London: Verso, 39–77; see also J.C. Alexander et al. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. 34.  M. Billig. 1995. Banal Nationalism, London: Sage. 35.  Ibid., 10. 36.  A. Giddens. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 38. 37. Billig, Banal Nationalism, 8. 38.  E. Gellner. 1964. Thought and Change, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 168. 39. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 38. 40. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 6. 41.  J. Hutchinson. 2005. Nations as Zones of Conflict, London: Sage, 5; D. Miller. 1995. On Nationality, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 4; Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, 228; N. Yuval-Davis. 1997. Gender and Nation, London: Sage; G. Sluga. 1998. ‘Identity, Gender, and the History of European Nationalisms’, Nations and Nationalisms 4(1), 87–111. 42.  A.D. Smith. 1991. National Identity, Reno: The University of Nevada Press, 144. 43. J. Hearn. 2007. ‘National Identity: Banal, Personal and Embedded’, Nations and Nationalism 13(4), 657. 44.  Pierre Bourdieu applied Max Weber’s concept of ‘elective affinities’ very practically in P. Bourdieu. 2010. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, London: Routledge [Classics]. 45. Cf. B. Yack. 1999. ‘The Myth of the Civic Nation’, in R. Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism, Albany: SUNY Press; E. Renan. 2009. ‘Qu’est ce qu’une nation?’ (Speech delivered at the Sorbonne, 1882), in Discours et Conférences, Charleston, SC: BiblioLife. 46. Billig, Banal Nationalism, 7. 47.  M. Mann. 1993. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States 1769-1914, , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1, 6. 48.  M. Weber. 1985. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, ed. J. Winckelmann, Tübingen: Mohr, 28. 49.  Geertz, ‘The Integrative Revolution’, 314. 50.  L. Greenfeld. 2005. ‘Nationalism and the Mind’, Nations and Nationalism, 11(3), 325, 327; J. Snyder. 2000. From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict, New York: Norton. 51. Cf. K.W. Deutsch. 1953. Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 51.

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52.  J. Curran. 2004. The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 23. 53. T. Nairn. 2003. The Break-up of Britain: crisis and neo-nationalism, 3rd ed., Melbourne: Common Ground, 335. 54.  O. Figes. 2002. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, New York: Metropolitan Books. 55.  Cf. C. Calhoun. 1999. ‘Nationalism, Political Community and the Representation of Society: Or, Why Feeling at Home Is Not a Substitute for Public Space’, European Journal of Social Theory 2(2), 217, 223. 56. A.P. Cohen. 1996. ‘Personal Nationalism: A Scottish view of Some Rites, Rights and Wrongs’ , American Ethnologist, 23(4), 802, 803–5; A.P. Cohen. 1996. ‘Owning the Nation, and the Personal Nature of Nationalism: Locality and Rhetoric of Nationhood in Scotland’, in V. Amit-Talai and C. Knowles (eds), Re-situating Identities: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Peterborough: Broadview, 280. 57.  Cohen, ‘Personal Nationalism’, 804. 58.  Ibid., 803. 59.  Ibid., 809; Cohen, ‘Owning the Nation, and the Personal Nature of Nationalism’. 60.  E.g., this case study on Helmut Kohl will devote attention to factors like generation, family background, education, religion, political affiliation and profession. 61.  Hall, ‘Nationalism, Classified and Explained’, 9. 62.  For several good reflections of these dichotomies see, e.g., P. Spencer and H. Wollman. 1998. ‘Good and Bad Nationalisms: A Critique of Dualism’, Journal of Political Ideologies 3(3), 255–74; B. Anderson. 2001. ‘Western and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a difference that matters?’, New Left Review 9, 31–39; D. Brown. 1999. ‘Are there any good and bad nationalisms?’, Nations and Nationalism 5(2), 281–302; Yack, ‘The Myth of the Civic Nation’; A. Patten. 1999. ‘The Autonomy Argument for Liberal Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 5(1), 1–17; O. Zimmer. 2003. Nationalism in Europe: 1890-1940, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 177. The German case’s frequent portrayal as the archetype of the latter category underpinned its Sonderweg image; see, e.g., H. Kohn. 1944. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of Its Origin and Background, New York: Macmillan; R. Brubaker. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; cf. J. Plamenatz. 1973. ‘Two Types of Nationalism’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism, Canberra: ANU Press, 22–37. Plamenatz placed Germany in the Western category. In Greenfeld’s typology of nationalism, which centred around the different interpretations of popular sovereignty from nation to nation, for instance, Germany was assigned to the ‘collectivistic-authoritarian, ethnic category’; see Greenfeld, Nationalism, 10–11. Hans-Ulrich Wehler later attacked Greenfeld for reassembling ‘all clichés about the philanthropic English and American nationalism in relation to the barbaric racist German nationalism (from “Herder to the Holocaust”)’; see H.-U. Wehler. 2007. Nationalismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen, 3rd ed., Munich: C.H. Beck, 51. Liberal nationalism will be discussed separately below. 63.  G. van den Bossche. 2003. ‘Is there any Nationalism after Ernest Gellner? An exploration of methodological choices’, Nations and Nationalism 9(4), 491–509. For Quentin Skinner’s ‘ideas in context’ approach, see J. Tully (ed.). 1988. Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, Cambridge: Polity; G. Bock et al. (eds). 1990. Machiavelli and Republicanism: Ideas in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Skinner. 2000. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Q. Skinner. 2002. Visions of Politics, vol. 1, New York: Cambridge University Press. See also R. Ashcraft. 1996. Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; R. Ashcraft. 1971. ‘Hobbes’s Natural Man: A Study in Ideology Formation’, The Journal of Politics 33, 1076; For an effective classification of idealist, elitist and structuralist approaches to nationalism, see D.G. Rowley. 2001. ‘Imperial versus National Discourse: The Case of Russia’, Nations and Nationalism 6(1), 30–31. 64.  Cf. D.Wrong. 2006. Persistence of the Particular, New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction, 9, 23; R. Monk. 2007. ‘Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding’, Poetics Today 28(3), 527–70.



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65.  Cf., e.g., H. Kohn. 1946. Prophets and Peoples: Studies in Nineteenth Century Nationalism, New York: Macmillan; H. Kohn. 1961. The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation, London: Macmillan; K. Schwedhelm. 1969. Propheten des Nationalismus, Munich: List; R. Szporluk. 1991. Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 66.  B. Pimlott. 1999. ‘Is Contemporary Biography History?’, The Political Quarterly 70(1), 31, 34. Pimlott used the same words again in B. Pimlott. 2003. ‘Is Political Biography Art?’ in W.R. Louis (ed.), Still More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Cultures in Britain, London: I.B.Tauris. 67.  Pimlott, ‘Is Contemporary Biography History?’, 34. For a very good discussion on the recent revival of biographical method in modern history, see Volker R. Berghahn and S. Lässig (eds). 2008. Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, Oxford: Berghahn Books. For debate more specifically focused on Germany, see H.-E. Bödeker. 2003. ‘Biographie: Annäherung an den gegenwärtigen Forschungs- und Diskussionsstand’, in H.-E. Bödeker (ed.), Biographie schreiben, Göttingen: Wallstein, 9–63. 68. Wrong, The Persistence of the Particular. 69.  Cf. E. Gentile. 2005. ‘Political Religion: A Concept and its Critics – A Critical Survey’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6(1), 19–32. 70.  M. Geyer. 2004. ‘Religion und Nation: Eine unbewältigte Geschichte’, in M. Geyer and H. Lehmann (eds), Religion und Nation, Nation und Religion: Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte, Göttingen: Wallstein, 16. 71. J.J. Shanley. 2010. ‘The Story of Carlton Hayes’, The University Bookman, 47(1). Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/ the-story-of-carlton-hayes/. 72.  C. Hayes. 1926. Essays on Nationalism, New York: Macmillan, 104. 73.  Ibid., 107–8. 74.  C. Hayes. 1960. Nationalism: A Religion, New York: Macmillan, 45. 75. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, 3, 14–15; Leo Baeck Institute, Biographical Note to the ‘Guide to the Hans Kohn Collection’. 2000. December. Retrieved 9 October 2014 from http:// findingaids.cjh.org//HansKohn02.html. 76. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses; G.L. Mosse. 1989. ‘Fascism and the French Revolution’, Journal of Contemporary History 24(1), 5–36; see also G.L. Mosse. 1985. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, 2nd ed., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. For his autobiography see G.L. Mosse. 2000. Confronting History: A Memoir, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 77. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 10. Modernist theorists of nationalism have stressed the economic, political and cultural discontinuities in history that gave birth to nations as mass conscious groups over the past few centuries, rather than looking at the proto-nationalist tendencies of pre-modern societies.The most famous theoretical tension existed between Ernest Gellner and his former Ph.D. student Anthony Smith. For the Warwick Debates on Nationalism, see A.D. Smith et al. 1996. ‘The Nation: Real or Imagined? The Warwick Debates on Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 2(3). 78. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 23. 79.  Ibid., 7, 10, 65. 80.  B. Anderson. 1998. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World, London:Verso, chapter 17. 81. E. Hobsbawm. 1990. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 68. For Hobsbawm’s autobiography see E. Hobsbawm. 2003. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-century Life, New York: Pantheon Books. 82. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 85. 83.  J. Armstrong. 1982. Nations before Nationalism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 84. Those three experts on nationalism belong to the ethno-symbolist/primordialist camp. For a neutral decription of primordialism and ethnosymbolism, see Hearn, Rethinking Nationalism, 20–66, 172–82.

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85. A. Hastings. 1997. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 86.  Ibid., 187. 87.  A. Hastings. 1999. ‘Special Peoples’, Nations and Nationalism 5(3), 381. 88. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 186, 190–97. 89. Also Liah Greenfeld introduced England as the first nation; see Greenfeld, Nationalism, chapter 1. Greenfeld also stresses Pietism’s role in shaping the character of nationalism at page 314ff. 90. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 187–89, 200, 202. 91. S. Grosby. 2002. Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern, Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. 92.  S. Grosby. 2003. ‘Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism: The Uncertain Perennialism of Adrian Hastings’, Nations and Nationalism 9(1), 7–13. 93. S. Grosby. 1995. ‘Territoriality: The Transcendental, Primordial Feature of Modern Societies’, Nations and Nationalism 1(2), 143–62; S. Grosby. 1999. ‘The Chosen People of Ancient Israel and the Occident: Why Does Nationality Exist and Survive?’, Nations and Nationalism 5(3), 357–80. 94.  S. Grosby. 1991. ‘Religion and Nationality in Antiquity: The Worship of Yahweh and Ancient Israel’, Archive of European Sociology, 32(2), 229–365. 95.  A.D. Smith. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford: Blackwell. 96. A.D. Smith. 1999. ‘Ethnic Election and National Destiny: Some Religious Origins of Nationalist Ideals’, Nations and Nationalism 5(3), 331–55. 97. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 15, 173. 98. A.D. Smith. 2003. Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, New York: Oxford University Press, 49, 60–64, 134–37, 34–49, 40–42. 99. T. Nipperdey. 1994. Deutsche Geschichte 1800-1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat, Munich: C.H Beck, 300, 27 ff. 100. Wehler, Nationalismus, 16ff, 27–35. 101.  M. Weber. 1994. Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917-1919/Politik als Beruf 1919, Tübingen: J.B.C. Mohr, 9. 102.  C. Taylor. 1998. ‘Modes of Secularism’, in R. Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics, Delhi: Oxford University Press; C. Taylor. 2007. Modern Social Imaginaries, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 103. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, 15. 104. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 68–69. 105.  M. Juergensmeyer. 1996. ‘The Worldwide Rise of Religious Nationalism’, Journal of International Affairs 50(1), 1–20; P. van der Veer. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Moslems in India, Berkeley: University of California Press; P. van der Veer and H. Lehmann (eds). 1999. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 106.  H.A. Winkler. 1982. ‘Einleitende Bemerkungen’, in H.A. Winkler (ed.), Nationalismus in der Welt von heute, Göttingen:Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 7–11, 9. 107.  D.J. Sorkin. 2008. The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, Catholics from London to Vienna, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 108. M. Printy. 2009. Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 109.  F. Schnabel. 1976 [1910]. Der Zusammenschluss des politischen Katholizismus in Deutschland im Jahre 1848, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint. 110.  D. Hastings. 2010. Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 111.  H.W. Smith. 1995. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture Ideology, Politics, 1870-1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press; W. Altgeld. 2001. ‘Religion, Denomination and Nationalism in Germany’, in H.W. Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800-1914, Oxford: Berg; H.-U. Wehler. 2008. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, revised ed., vol. 2:



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(1815-1845/9), 458–77; vol. 3: (1849-1914), 1171–181; vol. 4: (1914-1949), 435–45; vol. 5: (19491990) 363–73, Munich: C.H. Beck; M.B. Gross. 2004. The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. For a good study of political Catholicism in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, see E.L. Evans. 1981. The German Center Party, 1870-1933, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 112. V.P. Pecora. 2006. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: religion, nation, and modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 113.  C. Taylor. 2009. ‘Foreword: What Is Secularism?’ in G.B. Levey and T. Modood (eds), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; T. Asad. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, chapter 6. 114. T. Asad. 1999. ‘Religion, Nation-State, Secularism’, in P. van der Veer and H. Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, Princeton: Princeton University Press; T. Asad. 1993. ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religions: Reflection on Geertz’, Man 18(2), 237–59. 115.  S. Mihelj. 2007. ‘Faith in nation comes in different guises: modernist versions of religious nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 13(2), 265–84. 116. P. Berger (ed.). 1999. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics,Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center; P. Norris and R. Inglehart. 2004. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; cf. S. Bruce. 2002. God Is Dead: Secularization in the West, Oxford: Blackwell. 117.  John Paul II. 2005. Memory and Identity: personal reflections, London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 73–74, 77, 78, 79, 81. 118.  Ibid., 83, 87, 104, 110, 122ff, 121, 126, 122, 123. 119.  D. Eggel et al. 2007. ‘Was Herder a Nationalist?’, The Review of Politics 69(1), 75. 120. E. Kedourie. 1993. Nationalism, 4th ed., Oxford: Blackwell, xvi. 121. M. Hechter. 2000. Containing Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. For a more critical historical treatment of nationalism from the same year see M. Mazower. 2000. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, New York:Vintage Books. 122. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7, 11. 123.  Khazaleh, ‘Benedict Anderson: “I like nationalism’s utopian elements”. 124. Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 365; T. Nairn. 1997. Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited, London:Verso. 125.  N. MacCormick. 1982. Legal Right and Social Democracy: essays in legal and political philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 256–60, 253, 261. 126.  F. Fukuyama. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press. 127. See, for example, J.A. Armstrong. 1990. ‘Contemporary Ethnicity: The Moral Dimension in Comparative Perspective’, The Review of Politics 52(2), 163; I. Bremmer and R.Taras (eds). 1993. Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; R.G. Suny. 1993. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; G. Schöpflin. 2000. Nations, Identity, Power:The New Politics of Europe, London: C. Hurst. 128.  M. Canovan. 1996. Nationhood and Political Theory, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 129. See, e.g., E. Haas. 1997. Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress: The Rise and Decline of Nationalism, vol. 1, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; C. Taylor. 1999. ‘Nationalism and Modernity’, in R. Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism, Albany: SUNY Press. Craig Calhoun’s recent work makes the strongest claim for nationalism as a progressive force in the twenty-first century: C. Calhoun. 2007. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream, London: Routledge. For a liberal nationalism and multiculturalism approach, see W. Kymlicka. 1995. The Rights of Minority Cultures, Oxford: Oxford University Press;W. Kymlicka. 1999.‘Misunderstanding Nationalism’, in R. Beiner, Theorizing Nationalism; W. Kymlicka. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship, Oxford: Oxford University Press. For a liberal writer who in contrast remained strongly sceptical of nationalism, see M. Ignatieff. 1993. Blood and

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Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism, London: BBC Books; M. Ignatieff. 1999. ‘Nationalism and the Narcissism of Minor Differences’, in R. Beiner, Theorizing Nationalism; M. Ignatieff. 1999. ‘Benign Nationalism? The Possibilities of the Civic Ideal’, in E. Mortimer & R. Fine (eds), People, Nation and State:The Meaning of Ethnicity and Nationalism, London: I.B.Tauris; see also J. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation. 130.  Y. Tamir. 1993. Liberal Nationalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 3–4, 145, 166, 130, 145–46, 163, 6, 8, 33, 73–75. 131.  Ibid., 148, 54, 73, 149–50, 163, 90. 132. Miller, On Nationality, 193. For a critical discussion of Miller’s views see the papers around the 1996 ‘Symposium on David Miller’s On Nationality’, Nations and Nationalism, 2(3), 407, including D. Miller, M. More, B. Barry, K. Knight, J.G. Kellas and B. O’Leary. Also see H. De Schutter and R. Tinnevelt (eds). 2011. Nationalism and Global Justice: David Miller and His Critics, London: Routledge. 133. Miller, On Nationality, 195, 189, 184, 10, 11. 134.  Ibid., 6, 11. 135.  Ibid. Michael Mann provided a critical perspective on the relationship between democracies and the ethnic cleansing that can occur when ethnos and demos are perceived as congruent; see Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. 136. Miller, On Nationality, 191–92. 137.  Ibid., 185–86, 12. 138.  R.D. Putnam. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 139. Miller, On Nationality, 187. 140. For different applications of liberal nationalism, see J. Kennedy. 2007. ‘Contrasting Liberal Nationalists: the Young Scots Society and the Ligue Nationaliste Canadienne’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13(1), 39. 141. A. Vincent. 1997. Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity, New York: Cambridge University Press, 280. 142. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism; Miller, On Nationality. 143. J. Habermas. 1996. ‘Citizenship and National Identity’, in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg, Cambridge: MIT Press, 491–515. 144.  D. Sternberger. 1990. Verfassungspatriotismus, Frankfurt: Insel, 16, 13, 12, 16. 145.  Ibid., 13. 146.  Habermas, ‘Citizenship and National Identity’, 494. 147. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, 74. Habermas’s dream of a ‘post-national constellation’ has been criticized as undemocratic and elitist, restricted to the participation of few global actors; see K.G. Giesen. 2004. ‘The Post-National Constellation: Habermas and “the Second Modernity”’, Res Publica 10(1), 1, 3, 6. 148.  Habermas, ‘Citizenship and National Identity’, 495, 500, 507. 149. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, 107. 150.  F. Schuller, J. Habermas and J. Ratzinger. 2004. ‘Vorpolitische moralische Grundlagen eines freiheitlichen Staates’, Zur Debatte 34(1), 3. For a recent work on the concept of constitutional patriotism, see J.-W. Müller. 2007. Constitutional Patriotism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 151.  J. Habermas. 1987. ‘Eine Art Schadensabwicklung’, Die Zeit, 11 July 1986, reprinted in R. Augstein (ed.). Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der national-sozialistischen Judenvernichtung, Munich: Piper. 152. Ibid. 153.  A. Assmann. 2007. Geschichte im Gedächtnis: von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung, Munich: C.H.Beck, 36–39. 154.  Habermas, ‘Eine Art Schadensabwicklung’, 75. 155.  J. Habermas. 1995. Die Normalität der Berliner Republik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 170.



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156.  Schuller et al., ‘Vorpolitische moralische Grundlagen eines freiheitlichen Staates’, 3. 157.  Ibid., 4. 158. W. Bialas. 2002. Die nationale Identität der Deutschen, Bern: Peter Lang, 10, 11. For the relationship between Heimat and nationalism, see: Alon Confino. 1993. ‘The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory and the German Empire, 1871–1918’, History and Memory 5(1), 42–86. 159.  D. Brown. 1999. ‘Are There Good and Bad Nationalisms?’ Nations and Nationalism 5(2), 281. 160. F. Meinecke. 1911. Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaats, 2nd ed., Berlin: R. Oldenbourg. 161. F. Meinecke. 1946. The German catastrophe: reflections and recollections, trans. S. Fay, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 162. A comprehensive review of the different interpretations of the Sonderweg thesis is outside of the scope of this chapter. This theme will be addressed again in chapter 3. For the cultural Sonderweg see, e.g., P.Watson. 2010. The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century, New York: HarperCollins, 28ff. For early cultural Sonderweg explanations of Nazism, in which Protestantism (‘from Luther to Hitler’) also played a role, see, e.g., F. Stern. 1961. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, Berkeley: University of California Press; P.Viereck. 2004. Metapolitics: from Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler, expanded ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction; W.L. Shirer. 1962. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, London: Secker and Warburg. For the antagonism between Kultur and Zivilisation see T. Mann. 2009 [1918]. Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 4th ed., Frankfurt: Fischer; and O. Spengler. 1922–23. Der Untergang des Abendlandes – Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, Munich: C.H. Beck. The slogan ‘from Herder to Hitler’ is borrowed from a book by H. Dahmen. 1934. Die Nationale Idee von Herder bis Hitler, Cologne: Schaffstein. 163.  E. Lemberg. 1950. Geschichte des Nationalismus in Europa, Stuttgart: Schwab, 211. 164.  H. Kohn. 1950. ‘Romanticism and the Rise of German Nationalism’, The Review of Politics 12(4), 443. 165. Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 56–57. 166. Greenfeld, Nationalism, chapter 4. 167.  G.L. Mosse. 1964. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 4. 168.  For Ritter see, e.g., G. Ritter. 1948. Europa und die deutsche Frage: Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des Deutschen Staatsdenkens, Munich: Münchner Verlag; G. Ritter. 1962. Das Deutsche Problem: Grundfragen deutschen Staatslebens gestern und heute, Munich: R. Oldenbourg. For Rothfels, see H. Rothfels. 1953. ‘Zur Krise des Nationalstaats’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1(2), 138–52; H. Rothfels. 1952. ‘Grundsätzliches zum Problem der Nationalität’, Historische Zeitschrift 174(2), 339. In 1961, Fritz Fischer was the first historian in Germany to publish a book sustaining the thesis of a negative Sonderweg in German history since the Reformation; see F. Fischer. 1961. Griff nach der Weltmacht: die Kriegszielpolitik des Kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914-18, Düsseldorf: Droste. Ritter played an important role on the right wing of this mini-Historikerstreit; see Moses, The Politics of Illusion. The German past subsequently became increasingly contested; see also Berger, The Search for Normality, chapter 3. 169. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 315–16. As already mentioned above, Mosse, in his later and very popular book The Nationalization of the Masses, traced the ‘new style of politics’ (based on popular sovereignty and national symbols) back to the origins of the Enlightenment; see Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses. 170. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 2–3. 171.  Ibid., 2, 15, 4, 18, 5, 1, 7. 172.  Nipperdey reacted vehemently against the Sonderweg thesis of Hans-Ulrich Wehler; see T. Nipperdey. 1975. ‘Wehler’s “Kaiserreich”: Eine Kritische Auseinandersetzung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1, 539–60; Nipperdey also very explicitly argued against any Sonderweg thesis

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in T. Nipperdey. 1995. Deutsche Geschichte, 1866-1918, vol. 2: Machstaat vor der Demokratie, 3rd revised ed., Munich: C.H. Beck. Nipperdey insisted that German nationalism was rooted in the French Revolution, and that generally the nationalism in nineteenth century Germany had been liberal; see Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat, 300–313. For his engagement with the Historikerstreit, see T. Nipperdey. 1987. ‘Unter Herrschaft des Verdachts: Wissenschaftliche Aussagen drüfen nicht an ihrer politische Funtion gemessenwerden’, Die Zeit, 17 October 1986, reprinted in R. Augstein, Historikerstreit, 215–19; see also T. Nipperdey. 1990. ‘Die Deutschen wollen und drüfen eine Nation sein: Wider die Arroganz der Post-Nationalen’, FAZ, 13 July. 173. T. Nipperdey. 1983. ‘In Search of Identity’, in J.C. Eade (ed.), Romantic Nationalism in Europe, Canberra: ANU Press, 1, 11, 7–8. 174.  Ibid., 2–3, 4, 15. 175.  Ibid., 11–12, 2–3, 13. 176.  Ibid., 11–14. 177.  J. Hutchinson. 2000. ‘Ethnicity and Modern Nations’, Ethnic and racial studies, 24(3), 651–69. 178. Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict, 112. 179. Ibid., 45. Ethno-romantic concepts of nationhood have also been studied, particularly in Poland; see, S. Bilenky. 2012. Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; J. Skurnowski. 1981. Romantic Nationalism and Liberalism: Joachim Lelewel and the Polish National Idea, New York: Columbia University Press; A. Walicki. 1982. Philosophy and romantic nationalism: the case of Poland, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 180. Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict, 47. 181.  Ibid., 57, 58, 54. 182. Hearn, Rethinking Nationalism, 206. 183.  G. Bollenbeck. 1996. Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 216. 184.  N. DeVotta. 2002. ‘Illiberalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka’, Journal of Democracy 3(1), 84. 185.  P.R. Brass. 1979. ‘Elite Groups, Symbol Manipulation and Ethnic Identity among the Muslims of South Asia’, in D. Taylor and M. Yapp (eds), Political Identity in South Asia, London: Curzon Press. 186.  J. Hutchinson. 1999.‘Re-Interpreting Cultural Nationalism’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 45(3), 392–409; Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict. For a critical discussion of Hutchinson’s book, see G. Delanty et al. 2008. ‘Debate on John Hutchinson’s Nations as Zones of Conflict’, Nations and Nationalism 14(1), 3–29; J. Hutchinson. 2008. ‘In Defence of Transhistorical Ethnosymbolism: A Reply to My Critics’, Nations and Nationalism 14(1), 18–27. 187. T. Nairn. 1975. ‘The Modern Janus’, New Left Review 1(94), 3. 188. See M. Umbach. 2009. German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 189.  M. Umbach and X.M. Nunez Seixas. 2008.‘Hijacked Heimats: National Appropriations of Local and Regional Identities in Germany and Spain, 1930-1945’, European Review of History/ Revue Europeenne d’Histoire 15(3), 295–385. 190. C. Applegate. 1990. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat, Berkeley, University of California Press, 4. 191.  Ibid., 8. 192.  P. Blickle. 2004. Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Rochester: Camden House, 55–56. For Herder’s romantic nationalism see also Eggel et al., ‘Was Herder a Nationalist?’; V. Spencer. 1997. ‘Herder and Nationalism: Reclaiming the Principle of Cultural Respect’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 43(1), 1; R. White. 2005. ‘Herder: On the Ethics of Nationalism’, Humanitas 18(1–2), 166. 193. Blickle, Heimat, 47.



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194.  K. Popper. 1927. ‘Zur Philosophie des Heimatgedankens’, Die Quelle 77(10), 899; A. Vincent. 2006. ‘Popper and Nationalism’, in I. Jarvie et al., Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment, vol. 1, Hants: Ashgate. 195.  Popper, ‘Zur Philosophie des Heimatgedankens’. 196.  Renan, ‘Qu’est ce qu’une nation?’ 306. 197. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11. 198. A. Assmann. 2006. ‘Memory, Individual and Collective’, in R.E. Goodin and C. Tilly (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 199.  See U. Beck. 2005. Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy, trans. K. Cross, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 43–50. 200. For some interesting comparisons between Australia and Germany see A. Schwarz and R. West-Pavlov (eds). 2007. Polyculturalism and Discourse: German Monitor, New York: Rodopi; A.G. Bonnell and M. Crotty. 2004. ‘An Australian “Historikerstreit”?’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 50(3), 425; see also A.D. Moses. 2003. ‘Revisionism and Denial’, in R. Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Melbourne: Black, 337. 201.  James, ‘Closing Reflections’, 137. 202.  P. Duara. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Chicago: University of Chicago, 4. 203.  Ibid., 15. 204.  S. Berger. 2007. ‘History and National Identity: Why They Should Remain Divorced’, History and Policy, 5. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/ policy-paper-66.html. 205. Ibid., 2–3; S. Berger. 2007. ‘Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies’, in S. Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 24. 206. Berger, ‘History and National Identity’, 5; Berger, ‘Introduction’, 32. For a recent concise introduction to Ranke, see G. Iggers. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. G. Iggers, Oxon, Routledge, xi. Ranke has been associated with the historian’s task of writing about the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, which should be translated as ‘how it essentially was’; see R.J. Evans. 1997. In Defence of History, London: Granta Books, 17. For the emergence of scientificity in history see H. Feldner. 2003. ‘The New Scientificity in Historical Writing around 1800’, in S. Berger et al. (eds), Writing History:Theory and Practice, London: Arnold. 207.  Berger, ‘History and National Identity’, 6. 208.  S. Berger. 2007. ‘The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe’, in S. Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 56. 209. J. Hirst. 2000. The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 210. See for example, C.S. Wilson. 2007. ‘The Persistence of the Turkish Nation in the Mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’, in M. Young et al. (eds), Nationalism in the Global Era: The Persistence of Nations, Oxon: Routledge; S.M. Grant. 2005. ‘Raising the Dead: War, Memory and American National Identity’, Nations and Nationalism 11(4), 509; O. Tappe. 2011. ‘From Revolutionary Heroism to Cultural Heritage: Museums, Memory and Representation in Laos’, Nations and Nationalism 17(3), 604; D.A. Brading. 2001. ‘Monuments and nationalism in modern Mexico’, Nations and Nationalism 7(4), 521. 211.  ZDF. 2008. ‘Pressemappe - 5,45 Millionen Zuschauer sahen “Napoleon und die Deutschen”: ZDF-Reihe “Die Deutschen” bleibt weiter zuschauerstark. Achte Folge am Dienstag über die Revolution von 1848’ (press release), 17 November. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.presseportal.de/pm/7840/1302763/zdf?search=deutschen,zdf. 212.  P.J. Geary. 2002. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 15. 213.  E. Hobsbawm. 1992. ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today’, Anthropology Today 8(1), 3.

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214. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds). 1992. The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1. 215. Hearn, Rethinking Nationalism. 216.  Cf. M. Sawer. 2011.‘The Museum of Australian Democracy’, reCollections 6(1). Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_6_no_1/exhibition_reviews/ museum_of_australian_democracy/. 217.  C. Dauber. 2009. ‘Imagining Australia: The Architecture of the National Museum of Australia Asks “What Community?”’ in R. Summo-O’Connell (ed.), Imagined Australia: Reflections around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity between Australia and Europe, Bern: Peter Lang, 373. 218. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.aboriginaltentembassy.net/. 219. The Australian War Memorial. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.awm. gov.au/. 220.  Parliament of Australia. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.aph.gov.au/. 221. T. More. 2002. Utopia, ed. G.M. Logan and R.M. Adams, revised ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;A. Sabbadini,‘The Truman Show : How’s it going to end?’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89(2), 433. 222.  S. Cohen. 2006. History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. 223. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 8. 224.  S. Berger. 1995. ‘Historians and Nation-Building in Germany after Reunification’, Past and Present 148(1), 187. 225. M. Stürmer. 1987. ‘Geschichte in einem Geschichtslosen Land’, FAZ, 25 April 1986, reprinted in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 36–38; J. Hacke and M. Steinbach-Reimann. 1999. ‘Neubeginn und Entwicklung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft in den 1950/60er Jahren’, 25 March. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/beitrag/ intervie/stuermer.htm. 226.  N. Frei. 1997. Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit, 2nd ed., Munich: C.H. Beck; P. Reichel. 1999. Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedächtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit, revised ed., Frankfurt: Fischer; E. Wolfrum. 1999. Geschichtspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Der Weg zur bundesrepublikanischen Erinnerung 1948-1990, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft; see also A. Assmann. 2006. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, Munich: C.H. Beck. 227.  See G. Blainey. 1993. ‘Drawing Up a Balance Sheet of Our History’, Quadrant 37(7–8), 10. 228.  See H. Reynolds. 1999. Why Weren’t We Told? Melbourne: Penguin Books. 229.  A. Curthoys and J. Docker. 2006. History Wars, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 234. 230.  See Prime Minister John Howard (30 October 1996) in M. McKenna. 1997. ‘Different Perspectives on Black-Armband History’, Research Paper No 5, Parliamentary Library. 231.  Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 13 February 2008 (Kevin Rudd). 232. Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict, 112. 233.  Ibid., 78, 109–10. 234. G.G. Iggers. 1984. New Directions in European Historiography, revised ed., London: Wesleyan University Press, part 3; A. Rabinbach. 1988. ‘Introduction: Special Issue on the Historikerstreit’, New German Critique 44, 3–4; F. Stern. 1996. ‘The Goldhagen Controversy: One Nation, One People, One Theory?’, Foreign Affairs 75(6), 128; M. Brumlik et al. (eds). 2004. Umkämpftes Vergessen:Walser-Debatte, Holocaust-Mahnmal und neuere deutsche Geschichtspolitik, 2nd ed., Berlin: Hans Schiler; H. Heer. 2004. Vom Verschwinden der Täter: Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner war dabei, Berlin: Aufbau;V. Ullrich and B. Erenz. 2010. ‘Das Ende der Weizsäcker-Legende’ (interview with Norbert Frei), Die Zeit, 8 October. Retrieved 13 October 2013 from http:// www.zeit.de/2010/44/Interview-Frei.



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235.  Berger distinguished between historism and historicism as follows: ‘Historism is a confusing term. Historicism, the far more common term in English, is even more confusing because the one word refers to two quite separate set [sic] of ideas. On the one hand it describes a notion, criticized and rejected by Karl Popper, that history develops towards a particular end according to predetermined laws. On the other hand it refers to a concept, represented most prominently by Leopold von Ranke, which understands all political order within its own historical context. Hence I propose to use “historism” for the German Historismus (in contrast to the German Historizmus)’, Berger, The Search for Normality, 3. 236. S. Berger. 1999. ‘Historians and the Search for National Identity in the Reunified Germany’, in S. Berger et al. (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800, London: Routledge, chapter 20. 237. See G.G. Iggers. 1968. The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 8–9, 16, 35, 53, 62, 71, 88. 238. K.D. Bracher. 1986. ‘Politik und Zeitgeist: Tendenzen der siebziger Jahre’, in K.D. Bracher et al. (eds), Republik im Wandel 1969-1974: Die Ära Brandt, Stuttgart: DVA, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 406. 239. Wehler, Nationalismus, 88. 240. Cf. M. Sabrow. 2005. ‘Herrschaftslegitimation im geteilten Deutschland’, in C. Kleßmann and P. Lautzas (eds), Teilung and Integration, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 58–77. 241.  G. Delanty. 1995. Inventing Europe: idea, identity, reality, Basingstoke: MacMillan, 141. 242.  P. Reichel. 2005. Schwarz-Rot-Gold: Kleine Geschichte deutscher Nationalsymbole, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung; Berger, The Search for Normality; S. Berger. 2004. Inventing the Nation: Germany, London: Arnold, chapter 6. 243.  M. Fulbrook. 1999. German National Identity after the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press. 244. S. Rossteutscher. 1997. ‘Between Normality and Particularity: National Identity in West Germany: An Inquiry into the Patterns of Individual Identity Construction’, Nations and Nationalism 3(4), 607. 245.  É. François and H. Schulze (eds). 2005. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte: eine Auswahl, Munich: C.H. Beck. 246.  G.L. Schweigler. 1975. National Consciousness in Divided Germany, London: Sage. 247. Herf, Divided Memory. 248.  K. Jarausch. 2004. Die Umkehr: Deutsche Wandlungen 1945-1995, Munich: DVA, 86–94. 249. Moses, Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. 250.  Fink and Schaefer, Ostpolitik, 1969-1974; Clemens, Reluctant Realists. 251.  M. Fulbrook. 2005. ‘Nationalism in the Second German Unification’, in Breuilly and Speirs, Germany’s Two Unifications, 247. 252.  See K.R. Korte. 1998. Geschichte der Deutschen, vol. 1: Deutschlandpolitik in Helmut Kohls Kanzlerschaft: Regierungsstil und Entscheidungen, 1982-1989, Stuttgart: DVA. 253.  See, e.g., G. Wiegel. 2001. Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit: Konservativer Geschichtsdiskurs und kulturelle Hegemonie, Cologne: Papyrossa. 254.  W.J. Mommsen. 1999. ‘The Rennaisance of the Nation-State and the Historians’, in H. Lehmann and H. Wellenreuther (eds), German and American Nationalism: A Comparative Perspective, Oxford: Berg. 255.  M. Kraske. 2008. ‘Wiedervereinigung auf Alpenart’, Der Spiegel, 7 March. 256.  H. Elzer. 2007. Die Deutsche Wiedervereinigung an der Saar. Das Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen und das Netzwerk der prodeutschen Opposition 1949-1955. St Ingbert: Röhrig. 257.  Breuilly and Speirs, ‘The Concept of Unification’, 2; Hechter, Containing Nationalism, 16. 258.  See J. Habermas. 1985.‘Introduction’, in J. Habermas (ed.), Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age”, 3rd ed., trans. A. Buchwalter, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 17.

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259. See W. Connor. 1994. Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 260.  C.S. Maier. 1997. Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 261.  Breuilly and Speirs, ‘The Concept of Unification’, 2. 262. For the second unification see Fulbrook, ‘Nationalism and the Second German Unification’.

CHAPTER

2

Kohl as Catholic Nationalist

This chapter studies Kohl as a Catholic nationalist. Kohl’s personal nationalism was shaped by his Catholic socialization, and his notion of Germany contained religious content.This religiosity endowed him with a characteristic authenticity as he attempted to personify normality to his stigmatized nation and the world. His background was an asset in mobilizing an (auto)biographical image of the guiltless German, whom he saw as predestined to lead the nation towards its just place within a Europe of self-determined peoples bound together by their shared Christian heritage, which Kohl philosophized as underpinning their common liberal values. The first part looks at Kohl’s religious upbringing. He owed one of his sobriquets – der schwarze Riese (the Black Giant) – not just to his gigantic body size but also to his upbringing in the so-called black milieu of German Catholicism, which stood in opposition to the red milieu of the socialist workers. He believed nobody should fear the new Germany, as represented by the Federal Republic, the Christian Democrats and, last but not least, himself. In the postwar era of the FRG, when German history was diagnosed with a precarious Prusso-Protestant Sonderweg, Catholics appeared less burdened with Nazi guilt than their Lutheran rivals. Despite the controversial role of German Catholicism and the Vatican in Hitler’s coming to power, Catholics could expose their previous restraint as a desirable quality. With the Protestant heartland relegated to the territory of the GDR, Catholics in the Bonn Republic were no longer second-class Germans. To stress his embodiment of Notes for this section begin on page 88.

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a de-radicalized, Western, pro-European nationalism that should rehabilitate Germany’s reputation by overcoming its image as a rogue nation, Kohl emphasized his religious and denominational belonging. Kohl’s Catholic parents, his political education at the parish of Father Finck and his assimilation into the ideology of Adenauer’s CDU endowed him with a personal repertoire useful to his quest for national normality: his personal Catholic background was part of his public verkörperte Entwarnung (embodiment of the ‘all-clear’). The second part deals with Kohl’s propagation of Christian Democracy as the ideal ideology to embody German normality within the context of the Cold War and the memory of the Nazi past. In his view, Christian Democracy had the capacity to conflate conservative, social and liberal values, which still required validation through transcendental ethics provided by Christianity. Kohl presented his political party as opposing any pure form of ‘ideology’, which in his view always contradicted the image of God that was fundamental to the Basic Law. He marketed Christian Democracy as the Germans’ most patriotic force and the only party to effectively realize the Christian essence of the Federal Republic. Though he believed the institutionalization and communication of Christian principles would have to take place in a primarily secular manner, Kohl was convinced Germans could not afford complete secularization. He saw Christianity as both the provider of security against Nazism and communism, and the protector of the nation’s cultural heritage. German culture, for Kohl, was essentially Christian and therefore European and undeniably Western.

The Black Giant Catholicism, as a clerical friend of his explained, was constantly present in Kohl’s life, culturally and ideologically.1 Kohl sought to portray himself as rooted in his Catholic origin and thus personifying the Christian Democratic remedy to the ideological and structural aberrations of his time. His Catholic background informed his depiction of the guiltless German and lent him an appearance of authenticity when acting as a representative of Christian Democratic ideology more generally. Kohl was instructed in political ideology and policymaking in the Catholic milieu of the Palatinate. Later, as the Christian Democrats became the dominant conservative force in West Germany, Catholicism was at last rehabilitated and freed of the lasting effects of the Kulturkampf. It offered an alternative, occidental notion of Germany in line with the new, liberal requirements of the Federal Republic in the context of the Cold War. This new and somewhat liberalizing conservatism paved a way out of Bismarck’s shadow, opening an exit from the Sonderweg without overcoming conservatism as a mainstream force in German society.2 Kohl enjoyed his image as the Black Giant and emphasized the importance of Catholicism throughout his life.3 Directly after being elected Chancellor in



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1982, Kohl attended the Sunday service at his local parish with his wife and sons.4 In his memoirs Kohl stressed that the Church had played a role in his life from the Catholic kindergarten to his political heyday, when in drafting the Ten-Point Programme for German unification he sought advice from the local cleric, Erich Ramstetter, and his brother Fritz.5 Kohl’s loyalty to the Vatican was part of his self-image as the embodiment of German normality, which he sought to convey to the public. He wrote about his admiration for Pope John XXII, whose grave he had visited several times.6 He also highlighted the ‘good personal relationship’ he had developed over his years in politics with John Paul II, who prayed for Kohl’s dying mother in 1979.7 ‘As a Pole’, Kohl explained in 1980, the Pope knew ‘what it means when the Heimat is violently cut up. He, however, also [knew] that an unflinching consciousness of national unity proves stronger than any political power’. Kohl insisted that the Pontiff wanted ‘to honour the whole [German] nation’, Catholics and Protestants, West Germans and East Germans.8 Kohl saw John Paul II’s two official visits to Germany in the 1980s as acts of reconciliation with Poland, responses to cultural competition between the two German states over the Lutheran heritage, and also as a form of resistance against communism, including the resulting division of Germany and Europe.9 He maintained his public attachment to the Holy See for a long time: in September 2011, the former Pope Benedict XVI gave Kohl a personal audience at the Freiburg Priest Seminary. Kohl developed his fervent interest in politics only after the downfall of the Third Reich, which also marked the beginning of the phenomenal rise of Christian Democracy, the strongest conservative force in the Federal Republic since 1949.10 Catholicism, as demonstrated further below, gave Kohl an advantage during his mission to disseminate a ‘normal’ nationalism in postwar Germany: his notion of the nation contrasted with Nazism as well as the traditional PrussoLutheran idea of Germany, which was associated with the nation’s negative historical path via the First World War to 1945.11 It is important to note, however, that the German Christian Democrats sought to foster unity between Protestant and Catholic Christians after the collapse of Nazism. Thus, despite the importance Kohl attached to his denominational socialization, in his political rhetoric he rarely mentioned the contrast between the two major Churches in Germany (the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Church). He rather described his ideology as Christian per se and not as particularly Catholic. In his autobiographical self-representation, however, he emphasized his Catholic background.12 In ideal-historical terms, Catholic nationalism in Germany differed in some ways from the nationalism of the Lutheran compatriots. Catholic associations had been increasingly active during the emerging German nationalism of the nineteenth century. Their notion of Germany tended to contrast with the more kleindeutsch ambitions of the Protestant, pro-Prussian bourgeoisie. Catholic nationalism comprised romantic imaginations of a pre-Napoleonic, Holy Roman Reich and thus initially favoured a more decentralized großdeutsch

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option. This option encompassed a larger part of the German Volk and was prepared to transfer greater power to the Catholic Habsburg monarchy.13 Following the first German unification, on 18 January 1871 the Prussian King Wilhelm I was made German Kaiser under the influence of Otto von Bismarck.14 Early in the Second Reich, Bismarck sought to exclude Catholics from the predominantly Prusso-Lutheran representation of Germany. The Iron Chancellor, whose life and world view bore the stamp of Pietism, launched the Kulturkampf in Prussia while trying to limit the Catholic Church’s influence during the early years of the first German nation-state.15 The Second Reich’s somewhat forceful composition through war between Prussia and Catholic Austria – in which Austria’s defeat in 1866 ended the lengthy rivalry for dominion over the German Confederation known as German dualism – was interpreted as a victory over Catholicism. Protestantism was represented as German Christianity, whereas Catholicism was Roman Christianity and therefore unGerman. Martin Luther and the Reformation were instrumentally historicized as a German kind of revolution, purer than the French Revolution and directed against Catholic Rome.16 The official, cultural nationalism of the embryonic nation-state was thus directed against both France and Rome, as was most explicitly expressed by the Hermann Monument of 1875, in the Teutoburg Forest, at the place where Herman the German was believed to have beaten the Roman army in 9 ce. Similarly, Kaiser Wilhelm was monumentally portrayed as the successor to Frederick Barbarossa, who had once struggled against the Roman papacy and was held in high esteem for his attempts to unify the Reich in the twelfth century. This teleological connection was explicitly illustrated in the paintings of Hermann Wislicenus at the restored Kaiserpfalz of Goslar from 1880, and even more prominently in the Kyffhäuser Monument of 1896.17 The first Chancellor of Unity, Bismarck, defamed the CDU’s forerunner, the Catholic Centre Party, as an enemy of the Reich.18 Carrying the memory of the Kulturkampf, German Catholics subsequently entered the nationalist twentieth century with a sense of inferiority. Nevertheless, Catholicism had been nourished by its former exclusion from the official national culture and thriving Prusso-German identity.19 This exclusion endowed German Catholics, unlike their Lutheran counterparts, with a long-lasting reputation for not constituting an active force in German nationalism.20 At the outbreak of the First World War, the denominational demarcations had not yet been overcome. Catholics were still accused of being enemies of the Reich and saw this situation as a chance to prove themselves as good German patriots. However, Protestants embraced the war as their war, and by the end Pope Benedict XV had declared Luther defeated.21 German Catholics’ nationalism – their articulation of ethnic imaginations and loyalty to the fatherland – had not been enough to make them first-class Germans. Catholics were among the scapegoats for Germany’s problems in the revanchist atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, particularly following Matthias Erzberger’s involvement, as the leader of the Centre Party’s left-wing faction, in



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the peace resolution of 1917 and armistice of 1918, along with Centre deputy Johannes Bell’s signature under the abhorred Treaty of Versailles – signed in the Hall of Mirrors, where the Kaiser had been crowned in 1871.22 Kohl admitted in his Ph.D. thesis that Catholic politicians’ support of Hitler’s Enabling Act in 1933 had caused feelings of guilt,23 but he would later conceal the controversial positions of the Holy See, Centre Party and conservative German mainstream in the making of the Nazi dictatorship. Instead he blamed both the extreme left and right for the catastrophe (as I shall outline in the following chapters). It is worth noting here that as recently as 2007 Kohl delivered the laudation for a book by Theo Schwarzmüller that stressed the contrast between the pro-Hitlerite Protestant branch of his Palatine compatriots and the region’s unsusceptible Catholics during the early 1930s.24 To be sure, Christianity in general, including Protestantism, had sometimes served as a spiritual and ideological force of resistance under the Nazi regime, as most famously demonstrated by the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.25 And although Nazism had a greater affinity with German Protestantism than with German Catholicism, the Nazi movement itself should not be historicized as completely anti-Christian.26 Richard Hamilton illustrated differences between Protestants’ and Catholics’ voting behaviours across Germany near the end of the Weimar Republic, a contrast that was particularly stark in the countryside: Catholics, who were firmly attached to their confessional milieu, favoured the Centre Party, while Protestants preferred the Nazi Party.27 However, Catholicism played a delicate role in the Führer’s coming to power. During the First World War, in 1917 – the year of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia – the Vatican issued its Codex Juris Canonici in an attempt to unify all Catholics worldwide under one body of canonical law through bilateral concordats with the individual state authorities.28 Klaus Scholder showed that in the following years, the perception of an advancing Communist threat and the desire to secure the codex in the Reich proved stronger than the Curia’s aversion to Nazi dogmas.29 The Pope frowned on any cooperation between the Centre Party and the SPD, whose significant alliance had secured the stability of the Weimar Republic. Several times throughout the Weimar period, the Vatican tried to coerce the Centre Party to ally itself with right-wing forces and implement its concordat, but these attempts failed until 1932. Catholic forces in Germany initially opposed any cooperation with the Nazis, but in the meantime this option was being considered in Rome. The Vatican’s emissary to Germany, Pope-to-be Pacelli (Pius XII), and his adviser, Ludwig Kaas (Centre Party), suggested modelling Hitler’s liaison with the Pope on the treaty between the Holy See and Italian Fascism.30 By 1929, Hitler had concluded ‘that the fascist world of thought is more closely related to Christianity than the Jewish-liberal or even the atheist-Marxist one, to which the so-called Catholic Party of the Centre feels bound at the expense of Christianity and our German Volk’.31 Under Chancellor Heinrich

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Brüning (Centre) at the beginning of the next decade, Germany’s economic situation worsened, further undermining Weimar’s legitimacy.32 When Brüning refused to obey Rome and was held responsible for the deteriorating relationship between his party and the Vatican, Pacelli declared the rising Nazis to be a Christian party that should cooperate with other Christian groups to boycott Germany’s bolshevization.33 In the interim Kaas lobbied his party to support Hitler’s quest for power if he agreed to a concordat between the Holy See and the German state. In 1932, the Prussian Centre politician Franz von Papen, whose extreme right-wing attitudes provoked great opposition within the party, replaced Brüning as Chancellor. Papen was concerned, not only about a potential Kulturkampf revival and increased anti-Roman sentiment but also about communism, which motivated him to side with Kaas and mediate between Hitler and the Pope.34 Significantly, all Centre representatives approved Hitler’s Enabling Act on 23 March 1933. Hitler in turn accepted the long-awaited treaty of the Reichskonkordat with Pius XI.35 Under pressure from the Nazis, the Centre Party was dissolved in July 1933.36 The subsequent relationship between the Catholic Church, including the Vatican, and the Holocaust during the Third Reich and Nazism remains a controversial question.37 Kohl, celebrating his third birthday a few days later in the semi-rural, petty bourgeois, Catholic milieu of Friesenheim, was unaware of the regime change.38 From his suburb in the heavily industrialized Ludwigshafen in the Palatinate, it was less than an hour’s drive to France and a few minutes’ walk to the Rhine. For Kohl, the Catholic symbols of the Palatine border region were simultaneously German and European lieux de mémoire: ‘especially the Cathedral of Speyer, built in the eleventh century as the greatest church in the occident [was for him] a symbol of unity of the German and European history’. ‘[T]he Roman-German Kaisers’ who once resided in this region, Kohl wrote, ‘did not rule over a nation-state, but over an early house of Europe, which reached from Sicily to the North Sea. They contained the consciousness of the occidental world in themselves, this ancient and Christian Kulturkreis’.39 As a child, Kohl was sent to church several times a week and sang in the choir.40 He often sneakily tried to skip his service as an altar boy,41 but his sister reported his great pleasure in playing bishop.42 His father, Hans (b. 1887), came from a family of Franconian farmers whose property had burned down. He was the oldest of thirteen children, seven of whom died before reaching the age of ten.43 Hans began work in a mill at fourteen and later became a professional soldier in the Bavarian army based in the Palatinate, where he met Kohl’s mother, Cäcilie Schnur (b. 1890). After receiving a battlefield commission, during the First World War Hans was promoted to lieutenant, a rank he would otherwise not have achieved with his social and educational background.44 After the war he worked for the finance office in Bavaria and became a member of the anti-democratic, revanchist Stahlhelm veterans’ association (which he left in 1933).45 In 1921, Hans married Cäcilie,



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and a few years later they moved to her family’s property in Friesenheim, where they raised three children. Interestingly, Kohl referred in his memoirs to the competition between Centre and the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP). In the early 1920s, the Palatinate, as an administrative part of Bavaria, was affected by the brotherly battle between these two main Catholic parties. Kohl wrote that in the presidential election of 1925, his mother had voted for the Centre politician and democrat Wilhelm Marx, whereas in the second round his father voted for the monarchist Paul von Hindenburg, who was endorsed by the BVP.46 Like Hans’s Stahlhelm membership, his preference for Hindenburg can be interpreted as an indication of right-wing tendencies. Nevertheless, Kohl’s father never joined the Nazis, even though it would ultimately have helped his career, as Werner Maser pointed out.47 Hans remained loyal to the political Catholicism of his region.48 Werner Filmer and Heribert Schwan portrayed Hans as a silent patriarch who was bureaucratic, orderly and serious about his patriotic duties, no matter which party ruled. Kohl’s biographers mention an episode when his sister, Hildegard (b. 1922), got slapped in the face by Hans in 1939 when he was conscripted and could not find his draft card, which his daughter had hidden in a casket with her love letters.49 Kohl was eight when his father left for Poland as a captain in the Wehrmacht. After the campaign in Poland he became mayor of a Polish locality. One day, Kohl remembered in his memoirs, Hans returned home for a short leave and said to Cäcilie: ‘God have mercy, if we’ll have to atone for this’.50 Hans was later relocated to the border with Luxembourg but soon laid off due to a heart condition. Despite his attachment to Catholicism, Hans’s worldview left enough room for great patriotic loyalty to army, state and nation; he had even once encouraged his first son, Walter (b. 1925), to aspire to his own example and become a reserve officer.51 Kohl’s older brother fought against the British at the Dutch-German border and was killed at a railway station by a falling electric mast hit by a low-flying aircraft that his comrades shot down.52 Kohl’s father regarded this as the ‘defeat of his life’.53 When the war was almost over, Hans was once more conscripted to command the Volkssturm militia in Friesenheim – a hopeless undertaking. Patricia Clough mentioned that he defied orders and he sent his comrades home before the Allies arrived.54 Hans, who never recovered from the war, retired and continued to work in his little practice as a tax adviser.55 As a former Centre/BVP voter, he joined the CDU in Ludwigshafen but really was no longer interested in politics. Reportedly, his religious background was his main motivation for joining.56 However, Helmut later wrote: ‘after the Second World War, my parents were highly political; otherwise my father would not have become founding member of the small CDU chapter in LudwigshafenFriesenheim, very much with the support of my mother’. Kohl stated that also his own motivation to join the CDU in 1946 was ‘the “black” milieu that I come from’.57

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Kohl emphasized the religiosity of his parents, whom he took as examples of good German Catholics, without indicating any sense of generational conflict between his and their world views. He especially highlighted his mother’s devoutness. Cäcilie, who came from a family of teachers and well-off farmers, was described as fanciful and curious, very pious but tolerant, and sceptical of the Nazi ideology. Her father was educated as a Catholic schoolteacher in one of the poorest regions in Germany. During the Kulturkampf, he had escaped Prussian discrimination in Speyer and Trier and left for the Palatinate.58 Cäcilie’s mother, Maria, Helmut Kohl’s grandmother, was the daughter of a Palatine farming family from whom the Kohls inherited the property where young Helmut was brought up. Maria was educated by the Dominicans and known for her caricatural engagement. Her husband, Helmut Kohl’s grandfather, played the organ at the church and conducted the choir.59 Upon Hans’s conscription in 1939, Cäcilie became the leader of the family and undertook a desperate attempt to maintain normality.60 Her Christian faith was, according to Kohl, ‘the centre of her existence’. She confessed and regularly attended service at the local church. In his memoirs, Kohl wrote that Cäcilie, who was aware of all Catholic saints, avowed that ‘from my mother I still maintain the custom to light a candle in the church, or to make the cross on the bread before I cut it’.61 Kohl stated that he used this gesture himself in July 1990 during the (re)unification, when he negotiated Germany’s continued status as a NATO member with Mikhail Gorbachev in the Caucasus.62 Kohl stressed his parents’ religious tolerance. Despite her conformity with Catholic rites, his mother had ‘respected Protestantism, which dominated the Palatinate, as much as Catholicism, and thought much of Jews, even if hardly any personal contacts existed’.63 Furthermore, Kohl found it important to mention that she listened to the Protestant service on the radio because she felt ‘that the sermons were more sound, deeper and better’.64 Kohl himself was tolerant enough to later marry a Protestant, Hannelore Renner (b. 1933). Hannelore was born in Berlin and came from a secular background. Her father had been a member of the Nazi Party and worked as a proxy for a large armaments company during the Third Reich.65 Kohl, however, made sure that his wife ‘raised their sons in the Catholic faith’:Walter (b. 1963) and Peter (b. 1965) were baptized, had to attend church on Sunday and took Communion.66 Kohl sought to present himself as the average German: innocent, harmless and unburdened by Nazi ideology. He described his parental home as ‘a typical civil servant household like millions of others’.67 Hans Bardens (b. 1927), however, a political opponent from the SPD in Ludwigshafen and, with Kohl, co-founder of the local Working Group for European Reality after the war,68 assigned great importance to Kohl’s particular family background. According to Bardens, he and Kohl had been ‘brought up in completely different milieus: he in a strictly Catholic-conservative public servant family, and I, as far as it was



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materially possible, in a more liberal working-class family with very different social contacts’.69 Jörg Lau succinctly described Kohl’s background as ‘the conservative spirited Catholic petty bourgeoisie of South Germany’, in which ‘the fathers were supportive of the state and the mothers were pious’. According to Lau, ‘one thought highly of public respectability and thriftiness’ in Kohl’s class: ‘having risen from a peasant society into officialdom they tried to keep a distance from the rabble and its bad manners’. Moreover, Lau asserted, ‘one was nationally spirited in these circles, but the passionate Catholicism of the mothers and the basic aversion of the fathers against the rude SA-tone helped to immunize against fascism’. The nationalism of Kohl’s parents, in Lau’s view, went only as far as their Catholicism allowed.70 Kohl used exactly this image of his family to represent the Entwarnung at the Israeli Knesset in 1984 (see chapter 5). These observations about his background were central to his autobiographical claims. He defined the ideology inherited from his exemplary parents as ‘Catholic, but at the same time liberal, and modestly national, without ever courting the danger of drifting into nationalistic channels.71 Underlining his parents’ innocence, he explained: That one was national was self-evident. The national feeling that dominated at home, however, was free from nationalistic or sectarian elements. My parents felt themselves bound to the fatherland they were born into, they identified with its interests, without denying the ones of ‘the others’, they had the dates of German history in mind, they were proud of the cultural achievements of their Volk, they loved their Heimat, its customs, its traditions, its language, and they naturally used the word ‘fatherland’. Their scale of values was clearly dominated by Christianity.72

In 1946, a local priest encouraged Kohl to attend the political Sunday school at a neighbouring parish, where Father Johannes Finck warned of a break-up of Germany and preached against its disintegration.73 Finck’s students immersed themselves in the political theories of Catholicism, liberalism and socialism as well as policymaking as such. The conservative cleric, who called for German patriotism and loyalty to the crucifix, introduced Kohl to the principles of Christian Democracy and facilitated his decision to join the party at the remarkably young age of sixteen:74 when the local branch of the CDU youth organization Junge Union was founded under his mentor, Kohl joined immediately. In this way, as Filmer and Schwan argued, Kohl was granted membership of Ludwigshafen’s Christian Democratic Party in December 1946, despite being underage.75 The precise date on which Kohl joined his party has been disputed, but clearly the Church initiated Kohl’s political life.76 Kohl claimed he had ‘consciously joined the CDU because its programme is built upon the Christian image of the human’, although he also admitted that he had had another incentive to join: Finck’s cousin always had a piece of cake or some sandwiches for the boys.77 Nevertheless it is evident that Kohl’s political interest was present at a very early age and closely connected to the Catholic milieu.

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Kohl was not only affiliated with the Christian Democrats but also temporarily headed the Catholic Youth in his suburb, and listened to Catholic Social Teaching at a pro-European society.78 Kohl was probably too young to completely understand the instruction in Catholic Social Teaching during his lessons at Finck’s parish. However, the political lessons there were an important source of Kohl’s aversion to socialism and communism. He internalized certain key principles that were taught and presented as essential for sustaining normality – for example, the Catholic idea of subsidiarity to federalist ideas, which would prevent any regression to Prussian centralism and its fascist subsidiary, as well as any socialist overreach.79 As instructed, Kohl became convinced of Christianity’s importance for the new state and believed the new system should be firmly based on the image of God in humankind.80 In Finck’s authorization of denazification certificates, he also saw that granting absolution to former Nazis was an act of Christian magnanimity in recognition of human fallibility.81 The atheist failures of Nazism were taught as equally prevalent in socialist materialism, which threatened occidental culture from the East.82 Although Kohl was the youngest attendee, he was asked to present a paper on some challenging literature by Victor Cathrein on the relationship between socialism and Christianity.83 Facing the rise of socialism, Cathrein had demanded a revival of Christianity which he believed was the only force that could resolve class tensions. Cathrein attacked the atheisticmaterialistic worldview of Social Democrats who ‘viewed the human merely as a more highly developed animal’,84 and their utopian vision of the future state, where they intended the human being to be totally different from his God-given state of nature.85 This was in keeping with the Catholic reading of the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno.86 Kohl’s Ph.D. dissertation referred to Finck’s reading of this document, according to which ‘religious socialism, Christian socialism are contradictions in themselves. It is impossible to be a good Catholic and a real socialist at the same time’.87 Equality of classes and a balance of property seemed desirable to Kohl and his teachers, although ‘the system of planned economy must be in accordance with the occidental idea of the free and responsible individual’.88 His mentor, Johannes Finck, was an experienced Centre Party politician and brother of the journalist and politician Albert Finck, whom Kohl equally admired. In a book dedicated to Albert Finck in 2002, Theo Schwarzmüller also mentioned Kohl’s family. Kohl, in return, gave a speech at the book launch (see also chapter 4).89 Both Finck brothers were experts on Catholic thought and had been politically active from a young age. During his years at university, Albert Finck was a member of the Catholic student association Alemannia München and wrote his dissertation on natural law.90 He was a founder of the Palatine Centre Party and a member of the Bavarian Parliament until 1933. During the Third Reich he was banned from his profession and temporarily imprisoned. The Finck brothers issued the Centre



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newspaper Neue Pfälzische Landeszeitung, which was banned by the Nazis in 1936. After the Second World War, the Fincks helped found the Christian Democratic Union in their region. Albert Finck, moreover, worked on the Federal Republican constitution and has been recognized for his drive to restore the German national anthem after the Second World War: at a public assembly in the Palatinate in 1949, he initiated the singing of the third stanza (Unity and Justice and Freedom) of the ‘Song of Germany’, which would become the anthem of West Germany.91 Kohl remembered this event as one of the most important occasions in his life: ‘many had tears in their eyes – and nobody doubted anymore that the Palatinate would remain in Germany. These were not nationalists or chauvinists, but patriots’.92 Like his parents, the Finck brothers struck Kohl as embodying archetypes of the unsuspicious Catholic tradition in German nationalism. They symbolized the moral obligation to fight for the unity of the nation: ‘in their national feeling the brothers Finck represented generations of my Palatinate compatriots, who lived in the border regions and stood self-evidently behind their fatherland’.93 In this respect it is interesting that Kohl particularly valued the good contacts the Finck brothers maintained with Jakob Kaiser in the late 1940s (see also chapter 4). Unlike Adenauer, Kaiser belonged to the Christian Socialist branch of the Christian Democrats and demanded a neutral, unified Germany.94 In his Ph.D. thesis on the political reconstruction of the Palatinate, Kohl wrote about a ‘direct line’ that led ‘from the Catholic faction in the Prussian Parliament, and the German Centre Party under Bismarck to the foundation of the CDU’.95 His dissertation, as an early document, is very valuable for a biographical analysis of Kohl’s nationalist world view. For the first time, he was writing extensively about his favourite story, to which he would refer frequently thereafter: Germany’s renewal on the basis of established ideological traditions, or what Jeffrey Herf called ‘multiple restoration’.96 In the chapter on the CDU, Kohl portrayed Finck’s parish as the centre of the restoration of Catholicism in the Palatinate.97 His study drew widely on the papers of his political mentor and described familiar settings of Kohl’s life. The autobiographical undertone of his Ph.D. thesis can be interpreted as his claim to be a witness of, and participant in, a positively charged historical culture, which he thenceforth sought to prolong. After the downfall of the Third Reich, Kohl believed the moral authority of the Churches to be very important for the unsettled German society. According to him, the Churches’ organization and reputation had remained intact, so their international relations and relations with the rest of the occupied and divided country were an important constant in the reconstruction of state and society. They were, Kohl argued, the only continuing German representation under the American and French authorities in the Palatinate. But in contrast to Protestantism, he wrote, Catholicism had the particular advantage of looking back at a long tradition of political interference:

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The Catholic Church knows a Christian natural law, which is neither part of the Revelations nor determined by churchly dogma. Within this sphere, which is detracted from dogma and to which also the social questions belong, the Church is able, if necessary, to permanently develop counter-forces, such as its Social Teaching, and therefore to interfere into the laic world. Finally, Catholicism has an old and effective communal tradition available that Protestantism does not know. In any period of its history, the Catholic Church developed a historically important form of political influence.98

Kohl referred to ‘chaotic conditions’ in Germany after the downfall of the Nazi regime.The draft programme of CDU-to-be in the Palatinate was, in his view, primarily a reaction against the previous,‘atheist’ failures.The Christian Democrats thought of the state as a God-willing arrangement – a community based on natural order, responsible for worldly wellbeing and founded on a Christian ethos and laws.They regarded the principle of laicism – strict separation of religion and state – as a Nazist fallacy. A Christian disposition was presented as a guarantee of social acquittal, and cooperation between church and state was viewed as essential for ‘the renewal of the abendländische Kultur (occidental culture)’. Moreover, Kohl’s local party intended to ‘restore the good name of the German people in the world and to win confidence in the German people’.The four cornerstones of the party programme were: Christian Weltanschauung, German patriotism, German unity and a socially responsible attitude. Kohl summarized this as an anti-Nazi stance built on German self-confidence.99 Furthermore, Kohl described the relationship between religion and politics after ‘the loss of the unity of the occident’ as problematic: in modern times, it would be difficult to distinguish between specifically Christian policies and quasi-Christian motives. In Kohl’s view, however, the Third Reich had revealed the contrast between Christian and non-Christian politics, even if justified as being in accordance with God’s will. Kohl took the fact alone that Christian clerics had been persecuted as conclusive evidence that ‘one can justly talk about a Christian defence front in the Third Reich’.100 His religiosity thus had a strong impact on his interpretation of national history (which will be more intensively discussed in chapter 5). In his memoirs, which invoked the ideology Kohl attributed to the founding fathers of his party, he described the Nazi era as ‘apostasy from God’: Yet first it had poisoned the spirit. The rulers were menials of lawlessness. With their arrogance and gluttony they blinded the people and ruined the whole continent. The work of destruction flowed from a decline in values and morality. In the end, the totalitarian Unrechtsstaat presupposed an apostasy from God. The hypocritical reference of the rulers of the Nazi regime to ‘divine destiny’ only served to cover up their own arbitrariness. It was and remains in reality the worst perversion of religious belief: a derision of the living God, as the great religions acknowledge and witness him.101

After the downfall of the Third Reich, Centre politicians realized that reliance on the Catholic population – which had also voted for other parties



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– had proved insufficient to sustain their power.102 To cover a wider electorate, Catholic politicians such as the Fincks and Konrad Adenauer demanded closer cooperation with Protestantism.103 CDU partisans were now forced to refer to Christianity or Judeo-Christian culture in general lest they regress to the old denominational front lines. Protestantism’s dominance had been institutionalized since Bismarck’s kleindeutsch unification, but with the establishment of the FRG the balance automatically shifted towards Catholicism: for geographic and demographic reasons, the historical Prussian-Protestant centre now lay in the GDR.104 Though Catholicism remained the major driving force of the conservative movement, Protestants and Catholics were united in the newly founded CDU. In the post-Kulturkampf era, the memory of a cultural (and political) fault line persisted. This time, however, ‘the former [Catholic] Reichsfeinde turned their exclusion from power in Berlin into a virtue, allowing them to reject both Prussian militarism and its National Socialist stepchild’, as Ronald Granieri put it.105 With Konrad Adenauer’s rise, the new ruling party emphasized its embodiment of an occidental vision of Germany and Europe, which Kohl himself would express throughout his life as the quintessence of Germany’s Entwarnung normality. In the context of the perceived communist threat from the East, Adenauer called for ‘salvation of Christian culture’ through European integration.106 The old Centre politician, now Chancellor, in many ways personified what Kohl himself later sought to represent:‘Adenauer was Rhinelander, citizen of Cologne, Catholic and thanks to his background an opponent of anything to do with Prussia, which he blamed for the unfortunate development of the German Reich into a nationalistic military state’.107 Most importantly, Adenauer embodied the alternative to the Sonderweg. He condemned Prussian statism, materialism and militarism, which he saw as deriving from German idealism and the stylization of the state as a godlike being that constituted the reason, morality and Volksgeist of the German people. And he blamed the decrease in religious faith for the dehumanization inherent in Nazism.108 For Adenauer, the break with the Nazi era meant a reshaping of political legacies and national identity in accordance with Western standards, legitimized by Christian heritage. In Jeffrey Herf ’s view, Adenauer not only replaced antiWestern with pro-Western conservatism, he also ‘introduced a new individualist and anti-statist element into what had been the statist tradition of German conservatism’.109 Of all the reviving political traditions after 1945, it was the emergence of a deradicalized, liberalized conservatism under Adenauer that Herf saw as the most important shift in Germany’s ideological tradition at that time. Given that Adenauer’s ideas were heavily based on a particular interpretation of older Catholic teachings from the late eighteenth century, Herf ’s description of Adenauer as a revolutionary of conservatism appears somewhat odd. Adenauer (and later Kohl) continued to represent socialism, together with Nazism, as antithetical to political Catholicism. Reminiscent of Kohl’s portrayal

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of Finck, Charles Williams said of Adenauer that ‘by far his most important reading, in the context of his future political life, was the two Papal Encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno’.110 In 1891, Leo XIII had criticized the disastrous conditions of the working classes while also condemning socialism and its aims of confiscating private property and centralizing state power. Only the church – not the state – would resolve class struggles, and only religion could solve the moral dilemmas of redistribution.111 Pius XI sought to correct his predecessor by relativizing the Church’s position on private property and the role of the state, though he continued to shun socialism: ‘Religious socialism, Christian socialism are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist’.112 As the leader of his party, Kohl would later stress that both encyclicals had been crucial to the foundation of the CDU in the British zone of occupation.113 Adenauer’s use of Catholic teachings enabled him to signal a broader deradicalization of German nationalism, and Kohl resorted to this same tactic throughout his career as a politician.114 Adenauer translated his Catholic reading directly into the new CDU programme based upon ‘dignity and inalienable rights of the individual’, ‘principles of Christian ethics and culture . . . which must pervade the life of the state’ and the condemnation of socialism and communism. The new state, Adenauer believed, could only be built upon a foundation of Western Christendom.115 To terminate the historical trajectory from German idealism via Prussian militarism to 1945, he sought to build a new German identity around the liberalism of the European and Atlantic West (Westbindung) to ensure that Germany was cleansed of the preceding anti-Western nationalism. Foreign policy would hence be projected as ‘the protection of das christliche Abendland [the Christian occident]’, a phrase meant to evoke memories of Europe’s pre-secular past and the importance of its continuity given the communist threat from the East.116 Williams noted an episode in early 1946, when British authorities seeking to establish cooperation with Adenauer complained: ‘He keeps on insisting that the future must lie with “occidental Christianity”. That’s no good to us’.117 Adenauer maintained this vision, expressing it again in his government declaration of 1955, the year of the FRG’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, when he insisted that ‘Germany’s belonging to the West lies much deeper than in the political constellation, that is in its unalienable belonging to the Christian-Occidental cultural circle’.118 As city councillor of Ludwigshafen, Kohl pursued a similar style of foreign policy on a very local scale: in 1962, at an assembly set up to arrange the city twinning between Ludwigshafen and Lorient, Kohl reminded the audience of the common ‘Christian-abendländisch tradition’ among the German and French peoples.119 After the demise of Nazi rule, the legacy of left-wing Catholicism and Christian trade unionism was promisingly positioned in the initial negotiations on the programmatic future of the Christian Democrats, who articulated



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ideas of social justice based on Christian natural law.120 With Adenauer’s CDU chairmanship and chancellorship in 1949, however, Christian Socialist voices quickly lost favour. Adenauer’s rejection of Christian Socialism as a viable path for the Christian Democratic movement demonstrates that even though the Christian Democrats of the British zone of occupation had agreed on Christian Socialism as their economic vision for the new state with their Ahlener Programm in 1947, a strong liberal shift was visible in the federal party programme of the Düsseldorfer Leitsätze (Düsseldorf principles) in 1949.121 It packaged anti-socialism under the leitmotif of ‘freedom’ and advocated the free market economy as a ‘social market economy’, which symbolized the rejection of Christian Socialism in favour of liberal premises.This programmatic decision was marketed as the ‘precondition for the primary goal of re-establishing an organic, Christian society [in opposition to] the godless East German regime’, as Mark E. Spicka explained.122 Adenauer was the popular prophet of Christian revivalism in Federal Republican politics, and Kohl staged himself as his messenger. Adenauer, not Bismarck, remained Kohl’s major national hero, representing an ‘example of a politician who understood himself primarily as a Christian’.123 The first Federal Republican Chancellor supported Kohl’s rise to power in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, and Kohl saw it as his duty to represent the ideology of the founding father of his party and the republic for the rest of his political life.

Christian Democracy: The German (Anti-)Ideology? Kohl presented Christian Democracy as a distinctly patriotic set of values, as opposed to any ‘ideology’. He sought to use the nation’s Christian heritage and its liberal corollary to correct the atheist disorders of modern societies.124 Kohl’s Catholic background thus endowed him with a precious asset for articulating a conservative but westernized patriotism aimed at a new German normality that nobody should fear: rehabilitated from the Nazi past, strong enough to resist communism, and self-confidently nationalist within a unifying Europe. Portrayed as a man without ideology, Kohl worked successfully to manifest this anti-ideological public self-image. Biographers both authorized and critical, journalists and political scientists have tended to describe him as a Machtmensch – a career politician to the core who, though talented in the ruthless political art of power and survival, lacked the external appearance, profile, intellect and charisma usually associated with such a person.125 Günter Gaus wrote as early as 1967 about Kohl’s rise: ‘the political power and the way to use it are of interest to him – not the faded, mutual ideological reservations of the fathers’.126 Jan Phillipp Reemtsma found retrospectively that ‘Kohl does not need any ideology; he is the self-evidence’.127 Also very recently, the enormous public attention paid to Kohl’s dysfunctional family life has reinforced the image of a

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power-hungry man unable to apply the conservative principles of his politics to his own life.128 His actual ideology has drawn little attention. The events of 1945 had bolstered Christian Democracy, which – as Luigi Sturzo, one of the Italian fathers of this political ideology, wrote – helped the Catholic population ‘to accept the way of liberty in modern political institutions as a common basis for reform according to Christian ethics’.129 In Germany, this rising form of conservatism also eased the integration of millions of Protestants into the new political culture.130 The triumph of Christian Democracy reflected the allegedly anti-ideological zeitgeist that emerged as West German society became sensitized to communist and fascist totalitarianism and new opportunities opened for catch-all parties.131 Besides striving to attain denominational consensus, the CDU and its Bavarian sister Party, the CSU, aimed to become the cross-strata counter-force against Social Democrats and Communists. The traditional fear of revolutionaries in the East helped it achieve this goal.132 The union of both large confessions included former members of other parties, such as the German National People’s Party, the German People’s Party, the German Democratic Party and the Nazi Party.133 Christian Democrats thus fulfilled their vision of becoming the most popular Volkspartei of the postwar era, comprising different religious denominations, classes, generations and political ideologies.134 Frank Bösch, however, made the apropos observation that the CDU maintained ‘its greatest constituency among Catholics, the self-employed and in rural regions, and it had the fewest supporters among the Protestant workers of the trades unions’ over the following decades.135 Kohl sought to preserve the zeitgeist of the Adenauer era, arguing that the Christian component of the CDU’s political philosophy prevented his participation ‘in an ideological narrowing, or even an ideological rape’.136 As early as 1846, Marx and Engels critiqued ‘ideologies’ in Germany as harmful systems of thought that reflected the unjust, material world with the paradoxical outcome of concealing reality and alienating people from the truth. Similarly, all ‘ideologies’ – including Social Democracy – were anachronistic, intrinsically dogmatic and utopian, in Kohl’s opinion.137 He referred to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, where he read ‘that the infinite evil will only become possible through ideology’.138 With reference to Karl Dietrich Bracher’s work The Age of Ideologies, Kohl later explained that the history of the Weimar Republic had shown that any value relativism would undermine the defence of open societies and their democratic system.139 Kohl insisted, however, that Bracher had proven the need for strong values to defend open societies, and their democratic systems.140 Consequently, Kohl’s language distinguished between sets of ‘values’ and ‘ideologies’ without further qualifying this difference, implicitly assuming that religion and ideology were two separate categories, the former good and the latter bad. Kohl commended Christianity itself as a political force with the capacity to filter and blend the good ideas otherwise intrinsic to ideologies. The Christian



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ethos of the CDU provided security by offering a fruitful mix of social, conservative and liberal ideas.141 At the federal party congress of 12 June 1973, when Kohl was elected as federal chairman of the CDU, he defined the ideological role of the CDU as follows: ‘to secure progress of society in freedom, as based on the Christian and liberal heritage; protecting and maintaining freedom of the people, that is our conservative task; and to further develop the conditions of society; that is our social duty’.142 Kohl thus presented Christian Democracy as a pillar of the German normality that would immunize the people against any secular utopia, specifically regression to the Nazi past or temptation by the communist East. His party, which stood for a ‘politics of Christian responsibility’, was based on the realization that ‘the one who has tried to create Heaven of earth has always made hell out of it in history’.143 When he became Chancellor in 1982, Kohl recalled in his first policy statement that the early, allegedly anti-ideological years of the Federal Republic under Adenauer had been a success story mostly written by his party: ‘the connection of social, Christian and liberal thought was the formative feature of an epoch, which is justifiably regarded as the most successful era of postwar politics in Germany’.144 In an interview in September 1989, Kohl further defined the ideological composition of the CDU: ‘as a major party, as the driving force in European integration it has never been a classically conservative party. We are Christian Democrats’.This would entail nothing other than social conservatism: ‘a social conservative is incapable of being reactionary. In simple words: I try to recognize the persisting values in the world in which I live.’ He explained that ‘with regard to all questions concerning the basics of our coexistence and the teachings of our history, I am socially conservative (wertkonservativ)’.This would also mean that, ‘regarding the question of the solidarity within our society and the solidarity with the weaker one, I am a social Christian’. However, with regard to ‘liberal rights of the citizen, especially also the relationship between the citizen and the state, I am a liberal’.145 When discussing Kohl as a political leader who placed such value on Christianity, it is interesting to note that today Kohl is sometimes remembered for his resistance to religious hardliners in his party and the clergy in the 1960s.146 Indeed, Kohl promoted the abolition of denominational schools for years,147 and his first great constitutional reform, after he replaced Peter Altmeier (CDU) as Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate in 1969, aimed to eventually convert more than 1,500 Konfessionsschulen into Christian nondenominational schools.148 His clerical friend Monsignor Erich Ramstetter, however, attributed this political act of 1970 to Kohl’s ecumenical conviction rather than to any rebellion against the ecclesial authorities.149 As regional Party Whip in Mainz early in his career, Kohl had stressed the Christian character of his party and the Churches’ importance to the wellbeing of the state. At an assembly of the CDU Rhineland-Palatinate in 1964, he argued that close contact with representatives of the Churches was needed

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to maintain their special status in society as intended by the Basic Law.The ideology represented by the CDU should, in his view, underpin the untouchable values of the Federal Republican constitution, whereas the ideology of its main rival, the SPD, represented German society’s dangerous, atheist tendencies: the CDU, ‘very much in contrast to Social Democracy, never wanted to be a form of Ersatzreligion’. In this way Kohl used other political ideologies as negative examples to distinguish the Christian style of politics on the political spectrum. Pure forms of socialism and liberalism would respectively ‘turn or want to turn either the collective existence, or the individual alone without any social bond, into the all-ruling norm of social and political life’.The young leader, therefore, insisted that the CDU was not an ideological party but a Weltanschauungs-Partei, a party entrenching the world view of the Christian religion.150 In 1968, as the young chairman of the CDU in Rhineland-Palatinate, Kohl declared that political engagement itself was a Christian obligation: ‘the force of this divine duty is to supervise worldly areas of life, which must not become independent’.151 He then explained that being a politician was an essentially Christian task; ultimately, only Christian natural law could be the standard to solve disputative questions in politics.152 That same year he also demanded greater representation of the Churches in the political sphere and expressed a desire to bring clergymen back into politics (they were still banned from political parties on the basis of the Concordat of 1933).153 Kohl recognized that the Lutheran and Catholic Churches were both important resources for his party, providing a pool of potential future politicians drawn from the ecclesiastical youth organizations.154 Kohl’s laicist efforts to limit the influence of the two major Churches in Germany should therefore be seen in relation to his usual party-political rhetoric, which sounded far from secular. Much more interesting, however, is Kohl’s view of Christianity as something quasi-omnipresent characterized by institutions, ideas and actions beyond the actual confessional communities. This more abstract sense of religiosity not only suited his ecumenical ideal but also was fundamental to Kohl’s political ideology and, in the end, his idea of the Federal Republic of Germany, which he sought to protect from the alleged secularization associated with the post-1968 period, when younger generations fundamentally questioned the Western establishment.155 After taking over the federal chairmanship, Kohl, charged with profiling his party at the top level, deployed a reactionary rhetoric that frequently resorted to religious oratory. This is most evident in his 1973 book Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus (Between ideology and pragmatism), which drew on previous speeches and overlapped with subsequent ones. In it, Kohl described the liberal system as threatened by the re-ideologization of a society he considered to be (mis)represented by the Social Democratic government and radical youth. Kohl wrote that ‘the Christian, in his analysis of social reality, is not subject to any ideological restriction’ and is ‘obliged to undertake creative and political actions’. Christians, he believed, were naturally open to science and progress,



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opposed to any dogmatism, and capable of maintaining a balance between individualism and social duties in state and society. Kohl conceded that the Churches had lost power, but rejected the notion that Federal Republican society had begun a process of de-Christianization: ‘the Christian spirit and Christian principles go beyond the institutionalized Christianity of the churches’. Indeed, his sometimes ambivalent position towards the Churches is partially explained by his conviction that Christianity was more than an institutionalized religion: it was the core of West Germany’s liberal culture, as carried by Protestants, Catholics, and potentially even atheists. All Germans could consequently be seen as a common product of this all-pervading, occidental spirit, which they were also obliged to preserve. In practical terms, Kohl insisted, ‘our contemporary society is perhaps not Christian as such, but it features Christian convictions’.156 According to Kohl, ‘political science in the West had proven that religion was a historical factor of immense significance for the emergence of modern society’.157 This was especially true of Christianity’s impact on modern democracy.With reference to Arnold Brecht’s Political Theory, Kohl believed that democratic institutions needed a common, Christian belief to enhance the functioning of societies.158 Kohl also referred to a 1955 work by Ernest S. Griffith when he argued that the Judeo-Christian religion had served as the best foundation to maintain democratic institutions. This religious platform facilitated the realization of the social obligations, trust and morality, which Kohl regarded as essential for liberal societies, and for which ‘reason and patriotism were no sufficient replacement’.159 In that sense, Kohl’s Catholic enhancement of his personal nationalism went beyond liberal nationalist theory in that he factored religion into the assumption that liberalism would be sufficient to tame, and ultimately perfect, nationalism (see chapter 3). Kohl understood liberalism as vital to the projection of German normality after the experience of Nazism, but he also felt liberalism itself was in dire need of greater cultural and spiritual authenticity to be sustainable. Only the Christian ethos could provide this. In Kohl’s theory, ‘the Christian politician is, because of his open attitude and his critical application of rationality, predestined to find the answers for the future. Because this future does not follow any historical law’. Hence he merged religious and liberal language: ‘values like freedom, equality and justice [are] fruits of the Christian spirit [and] are simultaneously the basic social values and postulates of the 1970s’. Kohl found that ‘for the present, the pluralist society, in which we live, appears as the best form of society for the development and realization of the values that arise from the Christian context’. The CDU’s notion of democracy was based ‘on the Christian image of the human being’, which always recognizes the nature of human fallibility. He emphasized that in his Christian worldview, ‘the individual on his own, as well as together with others, is able to actively shape his own fate and to turn it to the better. That is his freedom’. Unlike the SPD,

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Kohl assured his readers, the CDU thus would not aim to ‘change the individual, but the institution, so that more freedom becomes political and social reality for more people’.160 That is, the CDU’s notion of democracy would ‘assume the human being as he is in reality, not how he could or should be as a “new human being”, as envisaged by dogmatic philosophies’.161 In 1974, only a year after his election as federal chairman, Kohl received the Catholic Order of St. Gregory the Great. The German Cardinal Hermann Volk explained the decision as based on Kohl’s adherence to his Christian conviction as a principle for political action and his facilitation of a positive relationship between the politics and the Churches. Kohl presented this honour as indicating the importance of the partnership between state and Church, which he had perceived as absent during his travels in East Germany.162 Kohl sought to draw a clear line between the Christian and socialist notions of solidarity, which he believed ‘had nothing to do anymore with the revolutionary and revolutionising notion of love in the New Testament’, as he stated shortly thereafter at Georgetown University.163 In an interview from 1975, Kohl described the two main Churches in Germany as anti-socialist allies,‘contributing to the common task of defence against radical ideologies’. He demanded great contributions from them to counter the leftist challenges of the 1970s in the FRG.164 From Kohl’s perspective, a liberal state could not, in the long term, afford any complete secularization because even ‘the ideologically neutral state – yes even a militant, anti-churchly state – had to recognize that the churches will have to fulfil the last tasks, and cannot be compared with, for example, a labour union, a party, a social or cultural association’. In Germany, he believed, the Churches had traditionally played a vital role in fulfilling the civil duty to provide welfare and charity for the state and society, and in promoting the ‘truths, conceptions of values, and meanings on which the history and culture of our Volk largely rests’. For that reason he found ‘the chit-chat of the socalled post-Christian age’ absurd.165 Kohl did not deny that ‘the secular state, which is ideologically neutral, [was] obliged to keep its distance from the Churches and their representatives. However, it must never be indifferent about the transcendental values that it represents’. Liberal politics, in Kohl’s view, needed a component of transcendence to be viable, as he warned: Where the transcendental dimension .  .  . is underdeveloped or even repressed, the state becomes absolute and an instrument of totalitarian oppression. Without any transcendence there were in fact no unalterable values from which the standards of constitution, state and society could derive. Without transcendence we had no valid reason “to respect human dignity, human unavailability or life itself ”. Transcendence enables the individual to shape and criticize the state order. It provides rear cover against the demands of the state and unjustified powers in society.166

Interestingly, in this conversation with the Herder Korrespondenz, Kohl brought up a particular critique of the liberal tradition in Germany, reminding readers



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that liberals ‘had taken an increasingly anti-religious stance against the Churches over the decades since the 1848/49 revolutions’. Only rarely did such critical statements crop up in his account of Germany’s national history. Kohl also reminded his predominantly Catholic readership that there was ‘a noteworthy difference in the preconditions’ between Catholicism and liberalism: ‘Catholic Social Teaching is determined by a notion of the human as a member of a supra-personal, more inclusive community’, whereas ‘classical liberalism assumes autonomy and independence of the individual and does not emphasize the social character explicitly’.167 Consequently, while Kohl’s reading of Christianity informed his regular condemnation of Nazism and socialism, occasionally he was also inspired to suggest its capability to contain liberalism by curbing its secular premises and furnishing social ideals. To prevent the ‘totalization’ of society, one would have ‘to reintroduce the value of human dignity with reference to God into the consciousness of the citizen’, as Kohl demanded at the Catholic Academy in Hamburg in 1976, the year of his first, unsuccessful candidature for chancellorship. Only this Christian rationale could guarantee balance between social and liberal ideals: ‘for the CDU, freedom is neither an individual, nor a collectivistic category’. Kohl assured the audience that ‘for us Christians, solidarity is the political consequence of the Christian Commandment of Charity’. However, unlike ‘some socialist reformers’, his party would not pursue the ideal of equality to an extent ‘which robs the person of his right to individuality’.168 Christian Democrats, according to Kohl, had a particular idea of the individual and society. Unlike other parties, they did not assess ‘basic values’ positivistically by looking at the ‘bare factuality of society’. According to Kohl, ‘basic values’ were not a matter of interpretation; they were incontestable, engrained in ‘the nature of the human being’, which the state would have to accept.169 Because the liberal welfare state of the Federal Republic, as developed under Adenauer, reflected this acceptance, Kohl sought to elevate the West German model to a sphere beyond ideological contestation. In this context, he implied that that the absence of Christian belief would threaten application of the Basic Law. Article 1 stated that ‘human dignity is inviolable’.170 Thus, Kohl marketed Christian Democracy as Germany’s most constitutionally patriotic (anti-)ideology.171 In 1982, when his party gained the power from the SPD and he was able to form a new coalition between the CDU/CSU and FDP, he diagnosed a spiritual-political crisis among West Germans. Kohl quoted a liberal politician who had said that ‘the liberal idea of the human is deeply connected with the Christian truth. The human has his dignity in Godlikeness .  .  . as a unique and unmistakable personality. To maintain this dignity in worldly life is the liberal duty’.172 Speaking to the CDU’s Protestant working group in 1984, the Chancellor continued to trace the Federal Republic’s liberal culture back to its Christian origin: ‘we in the CDU commit to the basic values of freedom,

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solidarity and justice, to the inalienable dignity of the human being, to Human Rights. This order of values has deep roots in Christian faith’.173 Beyond this sublimation of the liberal principles required to sustain the image of German normality, Christian Democracy also fulfilled the socialpsychological task of fighting . . .those who stroll through our country to make a deal with angst, and who are no good advisors about the future of our Fatherland. And those false prophets standing at lecterns and pulpits to spout their late Spenglerism, their late cultural pessimism, over their contemporaries. . .174 Only the one who is able to take on the challenge of these difficult times – whether as a Christian, or as my compatriot and fellow citizen Max Bloch [sic] in “The Principle of Hope” suggested as a Marxist – only the one who takes this maxim as the foundation of a world view will have the energy to creatively deal with the problems of our time.175

What Kohl sought to express then was part of the romantic, conservative revivalism he wished to ignite, as I shall further discuss in the course of this study. It will transpire that Kohl marketed his chancellorship as a turn in West German society towards overcoming the godless ideology of 1968 and evoking the idyllic world of the early years of the Federal Republic. Beyond the atheist threat from ideologies, Kohl constructed the more structural threat of secularism to legitimize Christian Democratic salvation. Thus Christian faith and national identity were both important ideals in Kohl’s attempt to guide a conservative transformation of Federal Republican culture. A relaxed national identity, free of shame and postnational anomalies, was key to providing emotional security and a transcendental bond. However, in Kohl’s world view, nationalism could not replace religion as a source of transcendence. If taken conceptually apart – religion and nationalism – nationalism was yet another undeniable, timeless source of mental well-being. If seen as mutually constitutive, Kohl’s notion of Germany was directly imbued with religious content, which shall be demonstrated below in the context of Kohl’s European patriotism. Further, in more practical terms, he felt that Germany urgently needed faith as a binding national force to compensate for the absence of national unity. Against the backdrop of the perceived implausibility of achieving unification in the near future, Kohl believed his religion could provide hope: ‘help us to ensure that not pessimism but the belief in the future of our country, as deriving from our trust in God, determines our actions. That is lived patriotism in 1984!’176 Kohl’s ‘Christian patriotism’ responded to the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and 1980s, when the West German mainstream sought remedy for its self-perceived anomic, atomized and overly technologized social organization.177 The Black Giant wished to personify the remedy for the symptoms of ‘this secularized world, where the search for the meaning of life has become more difficult, and the fear of life ever greater’. He found himself in a mission to de-ideologize



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the FRG and provide new meaning based upon Christian Democratic values. Whilst ‘nations of the world are becoming interdependent and people long for a country of their own and for clearly defined conditions’, Kohl portrayed himself as rendering assistance to the Germans who ought to develop a new sense of ownership of their religious, national, Federal Republican heritage.178 No one need fear the national revival; being Christian meant Entwarnung. Crucially, in this respect, any understanding of Kohl’s notion of Germany must recognize that he was simultaneously making the case for greater identification with Europe, which he perceived as being culturally united, predominantly on the basis of Christianity. As shall be established during this study, Kohl’s emphasis on European integration was key to his representation of German normality. Kohl has been internationally perceived as not only a major actor in Germany’s (re)unification but also one of the most important historical figures in the European integration process.179 During the recent euro-crisis, Kohl made a plea for European unity; Der Spiegel informed its readers that he had accused the current Chancellor, Angela Merkel (CDU), of ‘destroying my Europe’.180 Like Germany, the idea of Europe was primarily a cultural and ‘spiritualmoral one’ for Kohl, not a political or geographic concept.181 With other Christian Democrats in Western Europe, he followed Pope Paul IV’s call to promote ‘a united Europe in the spirit of Christ’, politically unified on the ideological foundations of occidental culture and its Christian legacy, and under the patronage of Benedict of Nursia.182 In his 1984 Report on the State of the Nation, Kohl presented European integration as a matter of national destiny, prophesizing that ‘by further pushing the work of European unification, we prepare – in historical perspective – the path for a later abolition of the division of the continent’.183 In Kohl’s rhetoric, German history was predetermined (even if he occasionally denied the existence of natural laws in history): ‘our historical achievement will one day be measured on whether we maintained nation and freedom and simultaneously realized the greater fatherland in Europe.’184 Christianity was the cultural underpinning of European unity, in his understanding. He thus complained not only about the atheist tendencies within his own society, but also about the more general decline of religiosity all over Europe. He contrasted this to the United States, where ‘faith is lived in a very simple, deep, and pure way, which is for a European often hardly understandable. This should make us think, here in the old world, which calls itself occident’.185 Though support for Christian Democracy had declined in other Western European countries with the end of the Cold War, as Bösch remarked, the Germans spent some time celebrating Kohl’s achievements during the (re)unification process before voting him out in 1998.186 In the meantime, Kohl used his position to define the European Union as ‘a community of values and culture. We have to sharpen again the consciousness of the spiritual-moral dimension of Europe. That is also the task for our own [Catholic] Church’, he appealed at the Katholikentag in Johanniskreuz in June 1991, during the final

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months of Soviet Union. At the time, Kohl saw in the former communist states an even greater threat of secularism than in the Federal Republic: ‘in wide parts of Europe the people have been systematically alienated from Christianity’. Anti-socialism remained intrinsic to Kohl’s language after the end of the Cold War, when he could finally proclaim: ‘today we can assert that Marx erred in his prediction that the days of religion were numbered. It all happened differently. Under communist dictatorship the people realized that Marxism does not have an answer to the meaning of life’.Yet with Pyrrhic caution, he also warned that ‘no totalitarian teachings of salvation must stream into the spiritual vacuum which communism left in the East of Europe’.187 A ‘homecoming’ to a conciliated Europe would at this moment offer the nations from behind the former Iron Curtain not only the opportunity for democratization, but also a chance at re-Christianization, ‘to give them new orientation’. Recalling the millennial anniversary of Russia’s Christianization, the Chancellor of Unity remarked that ‘the long tradition of historic-cultural solidarity between the many peoples in the Soviet Union and Europe can now – finally again – be revitalized’. His European vision was ‘about drawing an ecumenical bow from the monasteries and chapels of Ireland to the churches and cathedrals of Kiev and Moscow’.188 Further, at the CDU congress on Europe at the Polish-German border in October 1991, he stated it was time to think about ‘the question of what unites us Europeans in spirit, from Crete to Iceland, from Lisbon to Moscow, about the question of our common cultural heritage – and thus also about the chances of a European patriotism’. Kohl himself gave the obvious answer: ‘Europe is underpinned by almost two thousand years of Christian tradition’.189 Kohl never believed that a European identity should dominate the national one; it was a quasi-federal matter. Regarding questions of social and political organization as well as matters of identity, Kohl believed in the principle of subsidiarity that he had learned from Finck’s instructions in Catholic Social Teaching: ‘everywhere in Europe, the love of one’s own Fatherland has to be wedded to the love of freedom – and thus the respect for one’s neighbour.That is the foundation of the European order of peace’.190 Having parallel identities was natural to him: ‘where we feel Heimat, where our mother language is spoken, we remain rooted. We remain Germans, Italians or Frenchmen and are at the same time Europeans’.191 Whereas each European nation had its own cultural core, they all shared a common religious heritage: ‘it is good when we Christians always reiterate their realization that the foundations of the united Europe rest on deep, common religious and cultural roots of the peoples of our continent’.192 After the signing of the Maastricht Treaty – which aimed at ‘creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity’193 – Kohl was convinced that European integration was functionally impossible without Christianity: ‘the contribution of the Christians is



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indispensible. Primarily Christians, deeply engrained in their belief, had gone up after the end of the Second World War to build the European Community in the free part of our continent’.194 Thus, Kohl regarded Christian Democracy as the midwife of not only the Federal Republic and German (re)unification, but also united Europe. This genuine Europeanism, which Kohl presented as proof of his antinationalism, was meant to elevate his appearance as the verkörperte Entwarnung: ‘our “yes” to Europe is at the same time a refusal of any form of chauvinism and nationalism’. Kohl sought to represent a nationalism based on Christian values and opposed to the atheist nationalism that had caused two world wars: ‘for the Christian in any case, patriotism means not only a positive attitude towards one’s own fatherland, but always also the respect for one’s neighbour’s love of the fatherland and thus the rejection of any form of national arrogance’.195

Concluding Remarks on Kohl’s Catholic Nationalism Religion was constitutive to Kohl’s nationalism. His upbringing in a Catholic milieu was central to the development of his political ideology and notion of Germany. Kohl used this biographical asset in his representation of German normality. He portrayed his religious parents as positive examples in his nation’s shattered history, pious and patriotic, and the Catholic founders of his local party as benevolent persons who cared about national unity and construction of a democratic state. In 1946 he began attending the political Sunday school of Father Finck, who helped him internalize the Christian Democratic ideology. With the end and division of the Prussian-dominated nation-state – and the incorporation of much of the Protestant population into the GDR – Catholics found themselves in the West German centre of power.They concealed the rightward shift of the Catholic Centre Party and the Pope’s dubious role during Hitler’s dictatorship. The official nationalism under Adenauer offered an alternative to the fatal Prusso-Lutheran notion of Germany associated with the Sonderweg, and symbolized the end of the Catholics’ patriotic inferiority. After the fall of the Third Reich, former Centre politicians confidently demanded a return to Christianity as the only way to correct the atheist aberrations of Nazi rule, which they considered just as dangerous as the persisting communist temptation. In the Cold War context, Christian Democracy emerged as the greatest conservative force in West Germany, covering a broad electorate – including liberal Protestants. The Christian Socialist branch of the party mostly fell silent, and the benign capitalism of the social market economy was believed to be Christian enough.The German nation was presented as part of the Christian Abendland, and Adenauer articulated his foreign policy on this ground. Kohl completed his Ph.D., climbed the career ladder of his party and followed Adenauer’s ideological principles throughout his political life (see chapter 3).

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To sustain the image of normality, Kohl articulated his party’s Christianity as a political force in opposition to ‘ideologies’, which he saw as equivalent to the dangerous, utopian ideas of the Third Reich and the communist East, and which he also associated with Social Democracy. Furthermore, he generated a reaction against the alleged secularization in more general intellectual and structural developments affecting the Federal Republican mainstream, which he depicted as undergoing a ‘spiritual-moral’ crisis. In guaranteeing the containment of German politics and society, Kohl believed Christian ethics could save the Germans from ideological aberrations on the right and left alike, and supply them with emotional stability in a changing world. Christian Democracy was thus a defining feature of Kohl’s notion of German nationhood: the emergence of this most appropriate, patriotic ideology was a logical consequence of the continuities and breaks in Germany’s national history. This Christian anti-ideology in his eyes reflected the essence of the FRG’s political system. It was the most representative expression of the nation’s Christian culture, which ideologies, like communism, were unable to sustainably suppress. Moreover, in Kohl’s view, his party’s principles were bound to the cultural foundation of Europe’s political unity – namely, he believed, Christianity – and consequently could withstand suspicions that they were overly conservative and nationalistic.

Notes Parts of this chapter have been published in C. Wicke. 2013. ‘Helmut Kohl’s Catholic Nationalism’, in J. Jose and R. Imre (eds), Not So Strange Bedfellows:The Nexus of Politics and Religion in the 21st Century, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. 1. E. Ramstetter. 2005. ‘Die Christlichen Wurzeln des Politikers Helmut Kohl’, Politische Meinung 424, KAS. Retrieved 9 October 2014 from www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_6327-544-1-30. pdf?070925122145. 2.  R.E. Frankel. 1945. Bismarck’s Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and The Transformation of the German Right, 1889-1945, Oxford: Berg. For a concise introduction to the controversial concept of the Sonderweg, see J. Kocka. 1988. ‘German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German “Sonderweg”’, Journal of Contemporary History 23(1), 3. For this study it makes little sense to distinguish between Sonderweg and Sonderbewußtsein (special mentality) as Karl D. Bracher suggested; for this discussion see K.D. Bracher (ed.). 1982. Deutscher Sonderweg: Mythos oder Realität? Munich: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 53. 3.  The colour black referred to his religious-ideological background of political Catholicism; see Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 338; see also Ironismus (ed.). 1976. Der schwarze Riese: Helmut Kohl in der Karikatur, Munich: Molden. 4.  Ludwigshafener Rundschau. 1982. ‘Bundeskanzler beim Gottesdienst in der Heimatkirche’, 4 October. 5. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 991. 6. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 140–41. 7. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 495–96, 516–17; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 446–47, 512–13. 8.  H. Kohl. 1980. Ehrung der ganzen deutschen Nation (article on the visit of John Paul II.), media release. St. Augustin: Deutschland-Union-Dienst 34(213), 10 November. 9. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 512–13.



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10.  F. Bösch. 2002. Macht und Machtverlust: Die Geschichte der CDU, Stuttgart: DVA. 11.  See F. Fischer. 1951. ‘Der deutsche Protestantismus und die Politik im 19. Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift 171(3), 473; K. Große Kracht 2003. ‘Fritz Fischer und der deutsche Protestantismus’, Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 10(2), 224. Fischer advocated the negative Sonderweg thesis early on in reaction to conservative historians like Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter, who portrayed Nazism as merely a historical accident. Although primarily circling around the question of German guilt for the First World War, the Fischer Controversy that responded to Fischer’s 1961 book Griff nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf: Droste) contributed to the tendency of ‘coming to terms with the past’ in West German public culture; see Moses, The Politics of Illusion. 12.  H. Kohl. 1986. ‘Katholisch, liberal, patriotisch’, in R. Pörtner (ed.), Mein Elternhaus: Ein deutsches Familienalbum, Berlin: Econ, 311–16. This article was copied almost identically into his memoirs twenty years later; see Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, chapter 1. 13. For a succinct, very valuable introduction to Catholicism in the context of Ger­ many’s nationalism before the First World War, see R. Richter. 2000. Nationales Denken im Katholizismus der Weimarer Republik, Münster: LIT, 21–29. See also H.-U. Wehler. 2008. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, revised ed., Munich: C.H. Beck, 1379–396. 14.  L. Gall. 2000. Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutionär, Munich: Ullstein, 434–529. 15. Gross, The War against Catholicism, chapter 5; K. Lerman. 2004. Bismarck: Profile in Power, London: Pearson, 9. 16. H. Gramley. 2001. Propheten des deutschen Nationalismus: Theologen, Historiker und Nationalökonomen, 1848-1880, Frankfurt: Campus, 140, 151, 157, 93. 17. R. Koshar. 2000. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990, Berkeley: University of California Press, chapter 1. 18. D. Blackbourn. 1983. ‘Die Zentrumspartei und die deutschen Katholiken während des Kulturkampfes und danach’, in O. Pflanze (ed.), Innenpolitische Probleme des Bismarck-Reiches, Munich: Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquium 2, 73–94. Once Bismarck perceived socialists to be the greater threat to the state and needed Catholic support, the cultural battle between Berlin and Rome ended in 1878 and was officially declared over in 1887; see R.J. Ross. 1998. The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 18711887, Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America Press. 19. Richter, Nationales Denken im Katholizismus, 24–25. 20.  See T. Nipperdey. 1990. Deutsche Geschichte, 1866-1918, vol. 1: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist, Munich: C.H. Beck, 456. 21. K. Scholder. 1977. Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, vol. 1: Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen, 1918-1934, Berlin: Econ, 7. 22.  H.A. Winkler. 2010. Der Lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 1: Deutsche Geschichte vom Ende des Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer Republik, 7th ed., Munich: C.H. Beck, 401. 23.  H. Kohl. 1958. ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, copied from the Bibliothek des Niedersächsischen Landtags, 80. 24. U. Kulke. 2007. ‘Zwei Dörfer und der Stolz Adolf Hitlers’, Die Welt, 5 November. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.welt.de/politik/article1331531/Zwei_Doerfer_ und_der_Stolz_Adolf_Hitlers.html; T. Schwarzmüller. 2007. Hauenstein gegen Hitler: Die Geschichte einer konfessionellen Lebenswelt, Kaiserslautern: Bezirksverband Pfalz, Institut für pfälzische Geschichte und Volkskunde. 25.  For Bonhoeffer see, e.g., J. Moses. 2009. The Reluctant Revolutionary: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Collision with Prusso-German History, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009; M.P. DeJonge. 2012. Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation: Berlin, Barth, and Protestant Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 26.  R. Steigmann-Gall. 2003. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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27.  R.F. Hamilton. 1982. Who Voted for Hitler? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 40–41. 28.  Code of Canon Law. 1983. Vatican. Trans. Canon Law Society of America. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_INDEX.HTM. 29.  See Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich. 30. Ibid., 65–66, 189–90, 202–6; see also A. Rhodes. 1973. The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, London: Hodder and Stoughton; I. Kershaw. 1990. Weimar: Why did German Democracy Fail? London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 31.  Cited in Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, 207. 32. W. Patch. 1998. Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic, New York: Cambridge University Press; see also H.U.Wehler. 2008. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, revised ed., vol. 4, Munich: C.H. Beck, 515–30. 33. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 449. 34.  L.U. Jones. 2005.‘Franz von Papen, the German Center Party, and the Failure of Catholic Conservatism in the Weimar Republic’, Central European History 38(2), 191. 35. Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, 192–93, 198, 200, 307, 312. 36.  R. Morsey. 1977. Der Untergang des politischen Katholizismus: Die Zentrumspartei zwischen christlichen Selbstverständnis und “Nationaler Erhebung” 1932/33, Stuttgart: Belser. The Centre Party was re-founded after the Second World War and hence stood politico-economically left of the CDU. It has never become a significant political force again. 37. See D.J. Dietrich. 1988. ‘Catholic Resistance in the Third Reich’, Holocaust Genocide Studies 3(2), 171; J. Cornwell. 2000. Hitler’s Pope:The Secret History of Pius XII, New York:Viking; D. Kertzer. 2001. Popes against the Jews:The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, New York: Knopf; J.M. Sanchez. 2002. Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America; M. Kringels-Kemen and L. Lemhöfer (eds). 1982. Katholische Kirche und NS-Staat: Aus der Vergangenheit lernen? Frankfurt: Knecht. For Kohl’s hometown of Ludwigshafen, see E.Wetzlar. 1994–1995. Die Katholische Kirche und der Nationalsozialismus in Ludwigshafen 1933-1945, vols 1 and 2, Speyer: Archiv des Bistums. 38.  In Ludwigshafen overall, Protestants made up only a marginally greater percentage of the population than Catholics did, but in Kohl’s district the ratio favoured the Protestants. For the denominational divide in the Palatinate, as based on a census from 1925, see W. Winkler. 1935. Pfälzischer Geschichtsatlas, Neustadt: Verlag der pfälzischen Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, map 22/23; for Ludwigshafen see T. Hofäcker (ed.). 1989. Evangelische Kirche in Ludwigshafen 1919-1945, Ludwigshafen:Veröffentlichungen des Stadtarchivs, 423. 39. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 25, 26. 40.  Ibid., 22. 41.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 46. 42.  P. Clough. 1998. Helmut Kohl: Ein Porträt der Macht, Munich: dtv, 28. 43. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 17. 44.  Ibid., 17–18. 45. This association of former front-line soldiers had extreme right and paramilitary tendencies, opposed the Weimar Republic and eventually supported the Nazis in their takeover; see Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 391f. 46. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 51. 47. Maser, Helmut Kohl, 23. 48. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 23. 49.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 20. 50. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 33. 51. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 18; J. Lau. 2001. ‘Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Normalität: Helmut Kohl und Hans Magnus Enzensberger als Generationsgenossen’, Eurozine [first published in Mittelweg 36], 5. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/200109-03-lau-de.html.



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52.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 25. 53. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 18; Lau, ‘Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Normalität’, 5. 54. Clough, Helmut Kohl, 27. 55. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 18. 56.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 47. 57. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 57. 58. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 19, 20. 59.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 19. 60. Kohl in Pörtner, Mein Elternhaus, 315; Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 25. 61. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 21, 23. 62. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 3, 172. 63. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 21. 64. Ibid. 65.  For books on Hannelore Kohl see P. Clough. 2003. Hannelore Kohl: Zwei Leben, extended ed., trans. P. Torberg, Munich: dtv; D. Kujacinski and P. Kohl. 2003. Hannelore Kohl: Ihr Leben, Munich: Knaur; Schwan, Die Frau an seiner Seite. 66. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 185. 67.  Kohl in Pörtner, Mein Elternhaus, 312. 68.  H. Kimpinsky. 1966. ‘Helmut Kohl glaubt an das “Abenteuer des Lebens”’, Mannheimer Morgen, 27 August. 69. H. Bardens. ‘Collage’ (Ludwigshafen a.R., n.d.) Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://hans.bardens.de/collage.pdf. 70.  Lau, ‘Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Normalität’, 4. 71.  Kohl in Pörtner, Mein Elternhaus, 315. 72.  Ibid., 316. 73. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 50–55. 74. T. Schwarzmüller. 2002. Albert Finck und die Nationalhymne: Eine Lebensreise vom Kaisserreich zur Bundesrepublik, Annweiler: Plöger, 104. 75.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 47. 76.  See ‘Anfrage bezüglich des Beitrittsdatums von Dr. Helmut Kohl zur CDU’ (Request concerning the date of Kohl’s CDU membership). 1997. StALu/PGV 02/45. 77. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 50, 57. 78.  Bardens, ‘Collage’, 48. 79.  It is worth noting that Kohl spoke about the Catholic principle of subsidiarity in his first Policy Statement as Federal Chancellor on 13 October 1982 at the Bundestag; see H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Koalition der Mitte: Für eine Politik der Erneuerung’ (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 13 October 1982), in Reden 1982-1984, Bonn: BPA, 9, 38–40. 80. H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Unabhängig aber partnerschaftlich kooperieren’ (Interview with the Herder Korrespondenz, March 1975), in P. Hintze and G. Langguth (eds), Helmut Kohl: Der Kurs Der CDU, Reden und Beiträge des Bundesvorsitzenden 1973-1993, Stuttgart: DVA, 105; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 54; Ramstetter, ‘Die christlichen Wurzeln des Politikers Helmut Kohl’. 81. Schwarzmüller, Albert Finck und die Nationalhymne, 88. 82.  See also M. Mitchell. 1995. ‘Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945-1949’, Journal of Modern History 67(2), 278. 83. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 49–50. 84.  V. Cathrein. 1906. Sozialismus: eine Untersuchung seiner Grundlagen und seiner Durchführbarkeit, Freiburg i.B.: Herdersche, 141. 85. Cathrein, Sozialismus, 278. Cathrein, however, was still convinced that the origins of socialism lay in liberalism, which he presented as the foundation of ‘atheist’ Marxist philosophy. It was liberals who had first began to fight and deride Christianity. The ‘fanaticism of equality’ in socialism, he maintained, was originally promoted by liberals in the French Revolution, and the materialistic theory of value derived from classical liberal economists. Also, in Cathrein’s view, in

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practice liberalism was to blame for implementing a reckless system of economic competition that led only to individualization, atomization, classes and exploitation. Liberalism had prepared the political ground for socialism as it centralized the state; ibid., 266–72. 86.  Quadragesimo Anno (Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on the Reconstruction of Social Order). 1931. Vatican. Trans. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_ quadragesimo-anno_en.html. 87.  Cited in Kohl, ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’, 86. 88.  Cited in ibid., 87. 89.  H. Kohl. 2002. (Recorded speech, delivered at the launch of Theo Schwarzmüller’s book Albert Finck und die Nationalhymne, Stadthalle of Landau), StALu/PGV2/598. 90. Schwarzmüller, Albert Finck und die Nationalhymne, 162. 91.  A. Finck. 1949. ‘Das Deutschlandlied’, Die Rheinpfalz, 9 August. 92. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 72–73. 93.  Ibid., 55. 94. Ibid., 64; W. Conze. 1996. Jakob Kaiser: Politiker zwischen Ost und West, 1945-1949, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 95.  Kohl, ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’, 79. 96. Herf, Divided Memory, 3; see also Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 49–55. 97. Kohl, ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’, 62–88. 98. Ibid., 82, 78–79. 99. Ibid., 44, 73, 84, 85. 100.  Ibid., 77. 101. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 340. 102. G. Pridham. 1977. Christian Democracy in Western Germany: The CDU/CSU in Government and Opposition, 1945-1976, London: Croom Helm, 27. 103.  For the political roles of Protestantism and Catholicism in the CDU and in postwar Germany in general, see M.D. Mitchell. 2012. The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 104. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 5, 205–7, 366–73. 105.  R.J. Granieri. 2004. ‘Thou shalt consider thyself a European: Catholic Supranationalism and the Sublimation of German Nationalism after 1945’, in M. Geyer and H. Lehmann (eds), Religion und Nation, Nation und Religion: Beitrage zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte, Göttingen: Wallstein, 340. 106.  Cited in Granieri, ‘Thou shalt consider thyself a European’, 336. 107.  K. Sontheimer. 1991. Die Adenauer-Ära: Grundlegung der Bundesrepublik, Munich: dtv, 17. 108.  J. Herf. 1993.‘Multiple Restorations: German Political Traditions and the Interpretation of Nazism, 1945-1946’, Central European History 26(1), 21–55, 40, 41–42. 109.  Ibid., 42. 110.  C.Williams. 2000. Adenauer:The Father of the New Germany, London: Little, Brown, 221. 111.  Rerum Novarum (Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labour). 1891. Vatican. Trans. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.vatican.va/ holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html. 112.  Quadragesimo Anno (Encyclical of Pope Pius XI). 113.  See H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Das Erbe von Ahlen’ (26 February 1977), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 175–88. 114. Muller wrote about the post-1945 taming of Germany’s conservative nationalism; see J.Z. Muller. 1987. The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 115. Williams, Adenauer, 308, 314. 116.  Granieri, ‘Thou shalt consider thyself a European’, 341–42.



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117. Williams, Adenauer, 306. 118. K. Adenauer, Policy Statement from 22 September 1955, Deutscher Bundestag (Plenarprotokoll 2/101), 5644. 119.  Report of the public assembly of the councils of the cities Lorient and Ludwigshafen on 15 September 1962 in Fontainebleau, in Niederschriften zu den öffentlichen Sitzungen des Stadtrates Ludwigshafen am Rhein, vol. 2, StALu, 554. 120.  See M. Schneider. 1982. Die Christlichen Gewerkschaften 1894-1933, Forschungsinstitut der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Reihe Politik- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 10, Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft. 121.  See R. Uertz. 1981. Christentum und Sozialismus in der frühen CDU: Grundlagen und Wirkungen der christlich-sozialen Ideen in der Union, 1945-1949, Stuttgart: DVA. 122. M.E. Spicka. 2007. Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1947-1957, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 18; Pridham: Christian Democracy in Western Germany, 21–34. 123.  FAZ. 1998. ‘Ich stelle mich in eine Ecke, wo man gar nicht bemerkt wird’ (interview with Kohl), 17 September. 124.  For a very good, very concise introduction to the concept of ideology, see M. Freeden. 2003. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. For a valuable summary of the origins and nature of Christian Democracy, see S.N. Kalyvas and K. van Kersbergen. 2010. ‘Christian Democracy’, Annual Review of Political Science 13, 183. 125.  See, e.g., Bickerich and Noack, Helmut Kohl, 7; Bahners, Im Mantel der Geschichte, 20, 22, 55; Engelmann, 1998, Schwarzbuch Helmut Kohl;W. Dettling. 1994. Das Erbe Kohls: Bilanz einer Era, Frankfurt: Eichborn; Appel, Helmut Kohl im Spiegel seiner Macht; Henscheid, Helmut Kohl; Maser, Helmut Kohl; Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl. 126.  G. Gaus. 1967. ‘Helmut Kohl: Machtantritt in Etappen’, Christ und Welt, 23 June. 127. J.P. Reemtsma in U. Greiner (ed.). 1994. Meine Jahre mit Helmut Kohl, Mannheim: Bollmann, 91. 128.  For a helpful outline see the front-page story of Der Spiegel. 2011. ‘Die Familie Kohl: Ein Deutsches Drama’, 11 July; for two books that contributed to the recent media boom in information about Kohl’s private life, see W. Kohl, Leben oder gelebt werden; Schwan, Die Frau an seiner Seite. 129.  L. Sturzo. 1947. ‘The Philosophic Background of Christian Democracy’, The Review of Politics 9(1), 3, 5; S.N. Kalyvas. 1996. The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 130. M. Klein. 2005. Westdeutscher Protestantismus und politische Parteien, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 131. See for example H. Arendt. 1975. Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, Berlin: Ullstein; D. Bell. 1960. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Glencoe, IL: Free Press; O. Kirchheimer. 1965. ‘Der Wandel des westeuropäischen Parteiensystems’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 6(1), 20. 132. The Christian Social Union in Bavaria is the continuation of the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), mentioned above. It operates only in Bavaria; the CDU works in the other Federal Republican states. The word ‘union’ refers to the fusion of Catholics and Protestants. 133.  P. Lösche. 1993. Kleine Geschichte der deutschen Parteien, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 134.  See H. Kohl. 1981. Die CDU: Ein Porträt einer Volkspartei, Schwieberdingen: Günter Rüber; D. Buchhaas. 1983. Die Volkspartei: Programmatische Entwicklung der CDU, 1950-1973, Düsseldorf: Droste. 135. Bösch, Macht und Machtverlust, 267. 136.  Evangelische Kommentare. 1971. ‘Mit dem “C” die Welt verändern’ (Interview with Helmut Kohl), October, KAS/Kohl/Interview, 587. 137. K. Marx and F. Engels. 1970. The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers; H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Aufbruch in die Zukunft’ (Speech delivered at the 21 parteitag der CDU, Bonn, 12 June 1973), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 53.

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138.  H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Wir kämpfen für Freiheit und Menschenrechte’ (Speech delivered at a rally of the Junge Union, Gelsenkirchen, 10 April 1976), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 157; A. Isayevich. 2002. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, New York: HarperCollins. 139. H. Kohl. 1986. ‘Gedanken zur Amerikakritik und transatlantischen Partnershaft’ (Speech delivered at the Atlantik-Brücke, Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 25 June 1985), in Reden: Zu Fragen unserer Zeit, Bonn: BPA, 21, 39; K.D. Bracher. 1984. The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 140.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Garant für die Würde des Rechts und die Autorität des Rechtstaates’ (Speech delivered to the Federal Constitutional Court on the occasion of the change of the President of the Court, Karlsruhe), in Reden 1982-1984, 309. 141. For some of Kohl’s statements on the ideological conflation of his party see, e.g., H. Kohl. 1964. ‘Rheinland-Pfalz im neuen Europa’ (Speech delivered at the 12th assembly of the CDU-Rhineland Palatinate, Trier, 29 August), KAS/Kohl/Reden; Kohl, ‘Aufbruch in die Zukunft’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl; FAZ, ‘Ich stelle mich in eine Ecke, wo man gar nicht bemerkt wird’. 142.  Kohl, ‘Aufbruch in die Zukunft’, 55. 143.  Ibid., 41. 144.  Kohl,‘Koalition der Mitte: Für eine Politik der Erneuerung’, 15. 145.  FAZ, ‘Ich stelle mich in eine Ecke, wo man gar nicht bemerkt wird’. 146. See ZDF TV programme ‘Kirche, Staat und Katholiken’ from 19 November 1967: ‘Der katholische CDU-Nachwuchspolitiker Dr. Helmut Kohl zum Verhältnis von Politik und Kirche’ . 147.  Der Spiegel. 1967. ‘Konfessionsschulen auf dem Rückzug’, 8 May. 148. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 90, 276. 149.  Ramstetter, ‘Die christlichen Wurzeln des Politikers Helmut Kohl’, 57. 150.  Kohl, ‘Rheinland-Pfalz im neuen Europa’, 11–12. 151.  Rhein-Zeitung. 1968. ‘Politik und Kirche aus der Sicht der CDU’, 11 January. 152. Ibid. 153.  J. Neander. 1968. ‘Katholische Geistliche sollen in die Parlamente: Kohl appelliert an die deutschen Bischöfe’, Die Welt, 2 December. 154.  Evangelische Kommentare, ‘Mit dem “C” die Welt verändern’. 155. I. Gilcher-Holtey. 2008. Die 68er Bewegung: Deutschland – Westeuropa – USA, 4th ed., Munich: C.H. Beck; H. Lehmann. 2004. Säkularisierung: der europäische Sonderweg in Sachen Religion, Göttingen: Wallstein, chapter 1. 156.  H. Kohl. 1973. Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus: Aspekte und Ansichten zu Grundfragen der Politik, ed. A. Rummel, Stuttgart: Bonn Aktuell, 20–24. 157. Ibid., 24. 158.  Ibid.; see A. Brecht. 1959. Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 159. Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 24–25. 160. Ibid., 25, 26, 93. 161. Ibid., 94. Kohl repeated almost exactly the same words at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Basic Law, see H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Das Grundgesetz – Verfassung in Freiheit’ (Speech delivered at the Frankfurt Paulskirche, 23 May 1974), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 73–74. 162.  Hoher Pabstorden für Ministerpräsident Kohl, media release. 1974. St. Augustin: DeutschlandUnion-Dienst 28(210), 5 November, 587. 163. H. Kohl. 1974. ‘Solidarität – Grundlage unserer Politik’ (Speech delivered at Georgetown University, Washington, 12 February), KAS/Kohl/Rede/USA. 164.  Herder Korrespondenz, ‘Unabhängig, aber partnerschaftlich kooperieren’ (Interview with Helmut Kohl), March 1975, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 101, 103–5, 108. 165. Ibid., 101, 103. 166. Ibid., 103, 101–2.



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167. Ibid., 115, 113. 168. See also H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Freiheit, Solidarität, Gerechtigkeit, Grundlage und Auftrag unserer Politik’ (Speech delivered at the Catholic Academy Hamburg, 13 June 1976), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 170, 172, 173. 169.  Ibid., 171. 170.  Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland. (Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany). 1949. art 1. Official Translation retrieved 11 October 2014 from https://www.btgbestellservice.de/pdf/80201000.pdf. 171. This argument will be restated in the next chapter. See in particular Kohl’s speech at the Frankfurt Paulskirche on 23 May 1974: Kohl, ‘Das Grundgesetz – Verfassung in Freiheit’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl. 172.  Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte’, 15–16. 173. H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Christliche Verantwortung für eine menschliche Zukunft’ (Speech delivered at the 33rd Federal Assembly of the Protestant Working Group of the CDU/CSU, Wuppertal, 12 February 1984), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 228–46, here 230. 174. Ibid., 231. Kohl was implicitly criticizing Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922. For English translation, see O. Spengler. 1991. The Decline of the West, ed. A. Helps and H. Werner, trans. C.F. Atkinson, New York: Oxford University Press. 175.  Kohl, ‘Solidarität – Grundlage unserer Politik’, 232. Kohl was referring to his fellow Ludwigshafener, Ernst Bloch. See E. Bloch. 1986. The Principle of Hope, Oxford: Blackwell. Earlier in this speech he cited Frankfurt School member Max Horkheimer, arguing that ‘politics without any reference to transcendence merely becomes business’; see Kohl ‘Christliche Verantwortung für eine menschliche Zukunft’, Helmut Kohl, 230. 176.  Kohl ‘Christliche Verantwortung für eine menschliche Zukunft’, 246. 177. This was especially clear in his Policy Statement of 1987, see H. Kohl. 1987. Preserving Creation, Mastering the Tasks of the Future: Government Policy 1987-1990 (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 18 March), trans. BPA, Bonn: BPA. 178.  Ibid., 7. 179.  See, e.g.,T.Weber. 2000. ‘Kohl’s Mark on History’, BBC News, 3 October. Retrieved 11 October from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/543955.stm. 180. J. Dempsey. 2011. ‘Kohl Makes Plea for European Unity’, The New York Times, 7 May. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/world/ europe/18iht-germany18.html; P. Müller et al. 2011. ‘Chancellor Merkel’s Dangerous Lack of Passion for Europe’, Der Spiegel, 18 May. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http:// www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,775085,00.html. Kohl disclaimed the statement quoted in Der Spiegel; see also Süddeutsche Zeitung. 2011. ‘In Sorge um Europa’, 17 July. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/euro-krise-kohlkritisiert-merkel-die-macht-mir-mein-europa-kaputt-1.1121173. 181. Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 62. 182.  P. Blechschmidt. 1977. ‘Die katholische Kirche hat Europa entdeckt’, General-Anzeiger, 19 September. 183.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Bericht zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag, 15 March 1984), in Reden 1982-1984, 344, 359–60. 184. Ibid. 185.  H. Kohl in Reden: Zu Fragen unserer Zeit, 32. 186.  F. Bösch. 2004. ‘Two Crises, Two Consolidations? Christian Democracy in Germany’, in S. Van Hecke and E. Gerard, Christian Democratic Parties in Europe since the End of the Cold War, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 55. 187.  H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Christen in Verantwortung für Europa’ (Speech delivered at the 57th Katholikentag, Johanniskreuz, 23 June 1991), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 360, 368, 367, 369. 188. Ibid., 261, 365, 369.

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189.  H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Die Idee Europa – Die Zukunft des Kontinents’ (Speech delivered at the Kulturgemeinschaft Europas Congress of the CDU, Frankfurt/Oder, 31 October 1991), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 371, 373. 190.  Kohl ‘Christen in Verantwortung für Europa’ in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 364. 191.  H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Wir gewinnen mit Europa’ (Speech delivered at the 3rd Party Congress of the CDU, Düsseldorf, 27 October 1992), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 442, 444. 192.  H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Als Christen auf dem Weg ins geeinte Europa’ (Speech delivered at the 33rd Federal Assembly of the Protestant Working Group of the CDU/CSU, Wittenberg, 26 September 1992), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 418. 193.  Preamble to the Treaty on European Union, opened for signature 7 February 1992, OJ C 191/1 (entered into force 1 November 1993) and Treaty Establishing the European Community, opened for signature 7 February 1992, OJ C 224/6 (entered into force 1 November 1993). 194.  Kohl ‘Als Christen auf dem Weg ins geeinte Europa’, 427. 195. Ibid.

CHAPTER

3

Kohl as Liberal Nationalist

This chapter treats Helmut Kohl as a liberal nationalist. His synthesis of liberal and nationalist traditions was based on the assumption that functioning liberal societies were still reliant on nationalist ideals that merely needed domesticating under the hegemony of liberal values. This characteristic was most fundamental to his representation of a benign, trustful, Western nationalism in Germany during his quest to correct its old and new Sonderweg. The first part of the chapter will deal with Kohl’s liberal nationalist socialization. Like his Catholic upbringing, Kohl’s specific generational belonging – his generationalism – endowed him with a powerful biographical identity from which to articulate an authentic image of German normality. He was able to portray himself as an innocent witness of the transition from Third Reich to Federal Republic, which was perceived as a positive, existential movement of normalization. On the spectrum of the new Federal Republicanism then internalized by the mainstream of Kohl’s age group, he represented an idea of Germany that, qualified by a liberal nationalism, aimed to sublimate nationalist traditions, not abort them. However, Adenauer’s doctrine of Westbindung (strategic attachment to the capitalist West), which emerged in the context of the Cold War, became the dominant rationale in Kohl’s conceptions of society, state and nation throughout his career. The second part will focus on Kohl’s reaction against ‘1968’ and other, related changes in the Federal Republic while the Christian Democrats were in opposition. Kohl presented his party’s loss of power, the leftist challenge to Notes for this section begin on page 126.

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the conservative atmosphere of the 1950s, the government’s new Ostpolitik (policy of rapprochement with the Warsaw Pact states) and the rising postnationalism in West Germany as intertwined threats to the legacy of Adenauer, who had tamed German nationalism under the primacy of ‘freedom’. Kohl often revealed his liberal nationalist theory, with its contradictions and its limitations, when he felt that his notions of the Federal Republican state and of the German nation had been undermined and should proliferate among the masses. At these times he presented himself and his party as the guarantor of Germany’s belonging to the West. The third part deals with Kohl’s chancellorship, which aimed to restore Adenauer’s heritage in combination with a national revivalism. Kohl continued the Ostpolitik of his Social Democratic predecessors without deviating from his liberal nationalist ambitions. During the (re)unification process, he successfully mobilized his vision of a German nation-state integrated within Europe and the West, and was thus able to promote Germany’s new normality.

The ’45er: From the War to the West Kohl’s articulation of the idea of freedom, which enjoyed primacy over ‘unity’, was a product of his ideological orientation within his generational identity. Born on 3 April 1930, Kohl could use his generational background to sustain an authentic image of the innocent German patriot too young to be held guilty for the Nazis’ atrocities, but old enough to have accrued greater wisdom than still younger generations that had not experienced two crucial, antagonistic episodes of the German past: the ‘aberration’ of the Hitler era, and the golden age of the Adenauer era, against which the 1968 generation had reacted.1 Dirk Moses argued that Kohl’s generation in Germany had their ‘primal experience of liberalism’ only after the fall of Nazism.2 Until then, liberalism in Germany was often seen as a failure, unlike in France, Britain or the United States. James Sheehan pointed to the problematic relationship between liberalism and nationalism before 1945: ‘[j]ust as much as the search for a free and united Germany had been part of liberalism’s rise, so the search for a mythic national community was closely linked to the decline of liberal ideas and institutions’.3 Although liberal traditions should be studied at political levels besides that of the nation-state, Dieter Langewiesche reminded his readership that ‘[t]he Federal Republic is the first state in German history in which the majority of the population has learned to accept liberalism as an ensemble of political, social and cultural values, and whose institutions are committed to liberal standards’.4 Langewiesche thus challenged the FDP’s claim to be the sole representative of liberalism in the new republic.West Germany’s liberal state and society emerged out of an anti-communist consensus and the French, British and U.S. occupation, which limited opportunities for political self-determination. The



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CDU managed to accommodate ‘the middle-class Protestant milieu of traditional liberalism and its programmes incorporated many liberal positions’. Seen against the shadow of the Kulturkampf, this alliance symbolized a significant turn in Germany’s political history. The CDU’s social market economy, as announced with the Düsseldorf principles of 1949 (mentioned in chapter 2), united liberals with others striving for social reform: ‘neo-liberalism asserted itself in the CDU against the concept of a planned economy, the autonomy of the market was pushed through, despite many reservations, [and] the cornerstone of the economic constitution of the Federal Republic [was laid]’.5 Kohl’s generation in Germany were teenagers by the end of the Third Reich and during the phase of (re)construction after its downfall. This timing affected their attitude towards the Federal Republic and Germany’s historical culture: they represented the new system as fundamentally superior to the previous one and thus worth defending. This perspective reveals an interesting interplay among the discursive categories of generation, ideology and nation. A prominent analysis of Kohl’s contemporaries, Helmut Schelsky’s Die Skeptische Generation, described this generation as less political, revolutionary and conservative than the older, ‘ideologized’ one.6 The drastic experiences of social insecurity, physical danger and the ideological errors of their parents had made them into a generation focused on survival, one that accepted that Germany’s time of world politics was over. The youth, Schelsky suggested, were more careful, pragmatic, realistic and conformist – and often very successful within the new liberal framework of the FRG. They had suffered a loss of respect for authorities and ideals, and grown up believing that political systems were highly vulnerable. The conservative sociologist Schelsky concluded they deserved not attacks for their lack of idealism but respect for mastering their life in banality, where the old structures could no longer be taken seriously.7 Irrespective of a certain loss of respect for authorities and his outstanding success within the new structures, Kohl had internalized a new heroism under the hegemony of his political party and Federal Republican patriotism. He became strongly ideological within his anti-ideological attitude, especially in opposing communism, and he sought to impart a strong sense of the ideals he associated with Adenauer’s articulation of Christian Democracy. With regard to Kohl’s biography, Schelsky’s views seem therefore overstated.8 Moses referred to this generation as the ’45ers.9 Once the West German state was successfully established, they developed a ‘republican consensus’ that they perceived as increasingly threatened after 1968. While Moses agreed to some extent with Schelsky on their ‘anti-ideological’ attitude, especially with regard to their opposition to the ’68ers, he still did not present them as antipolitical. Having seen Nazism as teenagers, most ’45ers could genuinely assimilate into the new liberal system, which they saw as fundamentally superior to the previous one. This generation would not have contested the legitimacy of the Federal Republican model of ‘representative democracy, the social market

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economy, intellectual pluralism, and Westbindung’. Regarding the intellectuals of this generation, Moses characterized two ideal-typological factions with diverging missions: those who were committed to a ‘redemptive republicanism’ and ‘sought rupture and regeneration’; and those pursuing an ‘integrative republicanism, who imagined ‘the new state [as based] on positive cultural and intellectual continuities, whether that of the German cultural nation or liberalism’.This dichotomy between ‘rival identity projects’ can be seen in the context of the competition between nationalists and postnationalists. The latter ideological camp, which Moses called ‘German Germans’, understood the criminal quality of the Nazi regime without any feelings of personal guilt. 10 Unlike the ‘non-German Germans’, whose major protagonist was Habermas (b. 1929),11 they did not feel 1945 should mark the end of Germany’s national history. Though vehemently opposed to the Nazis, they ‘sought to rehabilitate German traditions’ as independent from this accidental outgrowth, which needed to be abolished.12 Kohl’s beliefs accorded with this liberal-conservative memory regime of the ‘German Germans’.13 ‘The earth is longing for silence . . . humanity for peace, and history does not want to chronicle actions of violence and hatred, but actions of love’. Kohl included this quote from the novel Ardistan und Dschinnistan in his memoirs, as ‘this was in accordance with my wishful thinking when I was reading Karl May during the Third Reich and the Second World War’.14 Eckard Henscheid, in a humorous biography of Kohl’s youth, tried to downplay Kohl’s encounter with the War and the Third Reich. The New Frankfurt School satirist’s irony appeared ethically legitimate, considering that Kohl was a politician who used autobiographical examples to portray himself and the Germans in general as victims, and as apologetics to rehabilitate German history and nationalism.15 However, irony would be inappropriate when writing the life story of a child soldier who had lost his brother and was searching for food, security and his parents. The war and its aftermath were a fundamental experience that would substantially influence Kohl’s representation of his ideology, which was then only just beginning to take shape. Kohl was ten years old when the Western Offensive began. The French air force flew the first raids on Ludwigshafen, and an unexploded bomb landed in the front garden of his parents’ home. He remembered that after the campaign in France, ‘most believed the War would be all but won and would now end soon’.16 Destined to become the master race, Kohl’s generation was drilled for the final victory, subject to permanent control and indoctrinations by Nazi organizations even after downfall was clearly imminent.17 His teachers were sent to war, his school was bombed and ever more time had to be spent in the bunkers. He was then deployed by the pupils’ fire team and retrieved victims after the attacks. According to Klaus Dreher, this was Kohl’s ‘first conscious confrontation with death’.18 In 1944, he and his classmates were brought to an evacuee camp for city children in Erbach (Odenwald), and subsequently



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to Alsace to construct entrenchments. Though relatively secure physically, the children were subject to indoctrination by their leaders in the Hitler Youth. Kohl and his schoolmates were subsequently transferred to a camp near Berchtesgaden, just below Hitler’s Berghof (Eagle’s Nest), to be trained as soldiers of the anti-aircraft artillery. The war ended only a few days after Kohl was sworn in as a soldier by Hitler Youth leader Arthur Axmann.19 His final letter from his parents included 2,000 Reichsmarks and ended, ‘Take care of yourself! Warm regards from Mama and Papa’. ‘[I]n this moment’, Kohl recalled, ‘I experienced my personal breakdown and could not stop crying’. He was not involved further in combat but was ordered to bring important documents to Munich, which he found in a ‘heap of ruins’. Another duty was to camouflage the area with smoke against air raids. All was to no avail; British bombers succeeded in destroying the Führer’s country estate on 25 April 1945. After the attack, the last belief in the final victory conclusively vanished and the units demobilized themselves. Court-martials by the SS did not stop Kohl and three other malnourished boys from Ludwigshafen from beginning their long walk homewards, off the main roads, through the forests and along the rail lines. In a signalman’s lodge, they heard on the radio that the war had ended. Kohl then ‘felt liberated from the angst of being eventually killed. But how was my family?’ While seeking shelter for the night in an old hangar, the boys got caught by recently freed Polish forced labourers, who beat them up before taking them to the U.S. military police. Kohl and his group were subsequently forced to work on a farm for three weeks. In June they finally reached Mannheim, where across the Rhine they could see the ruins of Ludwigshafen: ‘I will never forget the harrowing picture of my hometown’. After marching for 400 kilometres, they were halted at a temporary bridge controlled by Americans, who would not let them pass without a permit. Kohl still did not know whether his parents were alive or dead. The next day he queued up for delousing and finally attained the permit to cross the bridge. His parents and sister embraced him at home, but his brother Walter had perished. Kohl survived the war, but great uncertainties remained. The normality of his childhood was past – materially, politically, nationally and within the immediate surroundings of his family and hometown. Kohl wrote that the angst he felt during the war dominated his entire life.20 The search for normality that began with his walk from Berchtesgaden would become his life’s task. At first, normality meant peace to allow for a return to daily life. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who was less than four months older than Kohl, described the era of reconstruction as a collective act of defying a patently hopeless situation. According to Enzensberger, it would have been the .  .  . renitency of the majority, a renitency which is even harder to besiege as it does not root in any idea, but operates indeed materially, not to say materialistically. How insistently the normality pursues its goals can be very well shown with the help of an obvious example. German fascism can be understood as a

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large-scale attempt to make a clean sweep. At the end of the Second World War the experiment seemed successful: the whole country was a tabula rasa. Hitler’s (and Morgenthau’s) plan still did not work . . . because a silent majority insisted on reconstructing Germany.21

The young Kohl was especially eager to reestablish normality. Realizing that his idea of becoming a farmer was not a very promising one, he decided to go back to school.22 He had missed two years of classes and wanted to catch up.23 The building was surrounded by rubble. Its windows were boarded up, its roof leaked, its paint was peeling and it was bitterly cold inside in winter. Kohl had the idea of restoring a classroom in return for the guarantee that he and his classmates could keep it until they completed their final year. The headmaster approved, and the necessary materials were ‘organized’ by the students themselves.24 Within this environment, Kohl developed ambitions of leadership.25 The class was divided into his group, which had been based at the Berchtesgaden camp by the end of the war, and another group of boys previously based at Gotha. Patricia Clough noted that the Gotha group regarded the downfall of the regime predominantly as a catastrophe, whereas Kohl’s group supported the development of a new democracy.26 When a class representative had to be chosen, Kohl first ensured that one of his friends from the Gotha group was appointed before he himself took over the office.27 From then until the end of his high school career, it was mainly Kohl, rather than the teachers, who organized the class and solved conflicts. He ensured an equal distribution of food and kept the class register: those who came late had to pay a fine. Backstabbers and overachievers were not tolerated, but his friends were always privileged. He influenced his teachers’ agendas and organized excursions. It was Kohl’s initiative to travel to Wiesbaden to watch Le Soulier de satin, a play by Paul Claudel, a right-wing Catholic. Kohl also organized a trip to Mannheim to see Carl Zuckmayer’s political play Des Teufels General, which dealt critically with the Nazi past.28 In his autobiography, Kohl explained that he saw Zuckmayer’s work as a critique of Prussian militarism and statism as well as an homage to the liberality of the Rhenish population.29 He felt comfortable in this new environment, where he was more successful than in the structures of the Hitler Youth. Kohl enjoyed the Americanization of West German youth culture and organized rock’n’roll nights.30 People said he was a very good dancer, which impressed his future wife, Hannelore Renner (b. 1933), who had arrived in Kohl’s hometown in 1945 as a fugitive girl from Saxony.31 Ultimately, the transition from Nazism to Federal Republicanism was a positive, progressive experience for Kohl. In class, he sometimes acted in an anti-authoritarian manner while also developing important skills to become an authority. Once, when a new teacher was introduced to the students, Kohl reminded him that times had changed and his authoritarian affectation would not be tolerated anymore.32 A classmate elaborated on this episode: not long before,



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students ‘had to translate from Latin dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. Now the fatherland did not exist anymore, we lived and hoped for the future . . . To resist any initiation, we rejected whichever authority’.33 However, the presence of a generational conflict between Kohl’s generation and that of his parents is doubtful.34 As outlined in chapter 2, Kohl portrayed his parents as positive examples who represented the legitimacy and continuity of the ‘good’ German tradition and personified German normality. (After all, he had joined the same political party as his father.) Hans and Cäcilie were part of his personal myth of the ideal German: patriotic, Catholic, relatively liberal and by no means fascist.35 Noteworthy in this respect is that during the Third Reich Kohl had not shown much ambition to advance in the hierarchy of the Deutsches Jungvolk (the Hitler Youth subdivision for ten- to fourteen-year-olds). He only made it to Jungenschaftsführer, heading a group of ten to fifteen boys,36 which was not much for someone of his social and educational background or for a boy who later showed strong leadership skills. It remains unanswered whether this had more to do with his lack of discipline and bold temper than with his parents’ ideology and the ‘black’ milieu of Catholicism in his region, which, as Kohl liked to suggest, provided him with a stronger source of identification than did the ‘brown’ environment of Nazism.37 Dreher described how ‘the awakening of Kohl’s political interest began naturally with the perception of these new opportunities and historical horizon’.38 The city archive in Ludwigshafen holds some originals of Kohl’s readings from those times, which reflect his interest in a democratic, constitutional, federal state integrated into Europe.39 After returning to school, Kohl was fascinated by the idea of a united Europe and discussed this vision in the schoolyard.40 Other students were aware that this idea emerged out of a critique of the past, in opposition to his Nazi educators.41 Kohl and his friends joined a pro-European organization and ripped out boundary-posts at the border with France before the French authorities eventually banned the group.42 Kohl also led a group to Verdun and Douaumont to visit the battlefields.43 In his memoirs, moreover, he wrote about an occasion in 1950 when he was the youngest participant in a CDU delegation from Ludwigshafen to Paris received by Robert Schumann.44 Even before he came of voting age, Kohl worked as a billsticker for the first Ludwigshafen Council elections and as a canvasser helping to count the votes. Politics loomed large in the teenager’s life, and his opinions were increasingly influenced by the guidelines of his party.45 Unlike Konrad Adenauer, whose life had not constantly been dominated by party politics, Kohl would make the CDU the pivotal community of reference for most of his life. Interestingly, in 1947 Kohl went to Mannheim to hear Kurt Schumacher speak. At the time he admired the SPD chairman, who was the strongest voice for unification. But irrespective of this, Kohl by then was exclusively loyal to the Christian Democrats.46 While Schumacher’s SPD continued to present itself as the guardian of national unity after 1949,47 Kohl accepted and defended Adenauer’s

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policies of Western integration and rearmament, which rendered unification as geopolitically utopian.48 ‘After the war’, as Peter Bender pointed out, ‘German unity was for the Germans not a question but a matter of course’.49 The relatively short-lived nation-state from 1871 had become normality. An ‘all-German national consciousness’ comprising the territories cut off after the war persisted after the foundation of the two German states. Germany was defeated, but the dissolution of the Reich was morally unacceptable to the vast majority, who saw themselves as entitled to be ruled by one single government.50 The Basic Law sought to reflect this consciousness: the FRG was founded in 1949 as a provisional state, and its citizens were legally obliged to achieve reunification.51 On both sides, however, the Cold War turned the Germans and their governments into outposts of their respective ideological blocs and offered them the opportunity to exploit the geopolitical confrontation as a replacement for the legitimacy that nationalism would otherwise have provided them. Adenauer, who mistrusted his nation and sought to preempt any prevailing of its anti-Western traditions, thus made Westbindung the primary reason of state.52 In 1952, the European Coal and Steel Community was established , initiating the process of European integration. After West Germany joined NATO in 1955, application (though inconsistently) of the Hallstein Doctrine officially forbade any diplomatic relations with states that recognized the GDR’s sovereignty.53 The official nationalism of the FRG was increasingly conflated with anti-communism. Fear of communism was deep-seated in the people, an image projected by the annual Day of German Unity celebrations commemorating the annihilation of the 1953 uprising in the GDR. As Kenneth Dyson explained: ‘anti-Communism [was] almost a doctrine of state for the Federal Republic in the 1950s’.54 Adenauer sought to reinforce this perception, and Kohl upheld this tradition throughout his career. In early 1956, at the age of twenty-five, Kohl suggested at a local party assembly that the day of unification was not far away. Referring to the thousands of refugees streaming into West Berlin, he called on West Germans to be friendly to their ‘brothers in Middle Germany’.55 Still, Cold War rhetoric overshadowed his unificatory ambitions. He argued that the bolshevization of the Soviet Zone had already been planned before the Russian invasion, and the pseudo-democratic institutions in the GDR would merely camouflage this quest. The real problem, according to Kohl, was that after twelve years of National Socialism and ten years of communism, young people in the other German state had never experienced any ‘freedom’. Moreover, Kohl explained, ‘real democracy’ was still in its infancy in the FRG, and its stabilization should be the first task. The achievement of a common nation-state was not his first goal; democratization and Westernization came first.56 Young Kohl had internalized Adenauer’s principle of ‘freedom before unity’: belonging to the West was more important than achieving the nation-state.



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Preserving Adenauer’s Heritage Under Konrad Adenauer, unity and freedom – the old, twinned leitmotifs of the 1848/49 revolutions – were reinserted into a new, hierarchical relationship: ‘freedom’ enjoyed primacy over unity. Adenauer sought to correct Germany’s anti-Western Sonderweg, and Kohl believed it his duty to preserve this legacy, which he perceived as the paramount and allegorical representation of the Federal Republic, his party and, ultimately, himself.57 Kohl, however, connected his reaction against the supposedly illiberal trajectory in German history with a reaction to what Stefan Berger referred to as a ‘new Sonderweg’58 and what Konrad Jarausch described as a post-national Sonderbewußtsein (special mentality).59 Kohl saw the Federal Republic and its belonging to the West as a significant step towards normality. He solemnly believed that only within the Western framework should Germans reinstall their nation-state and rediscover their national pride. Andrew Heywood explained liberalism as ‘the ideology of the industrialized West. So deeply have liberal ideas permeated political, economic and cultural life that their influence can be hard to discern, liberalism appearing to be indistinguishable from “Western civilization” in general’.60 Before the collapse of Nazism, however, the German intelligentsia had been able to portray the deviation of German history from the West as something positive.61 German Kultur was defined in contrast to Western Zivilisation.62 In the course of the two World Wars, a sort of negative abnormality from inside and outside was attributed to Germany. Helmuth Plessner wrote about the illiberal mindset of the Bürgertum as opposed to the modern ideology of Western societies,63 and Franklin Roosevelt eventually presented the war against Hitler as a ‘crusade’ to safeguard civilization.64 Prussian militarism was identified as the root cause of Nazism, which had to be overcome to allow for a recivilization of German society.65 After the decline of Nazism, the ‘German mind’ was increasingly associated with an intellectual-historical trajectory – from Protestantism, idealism and romanticism to conservative thought in Weimar Germany – that had paved the path to the catastrophe.66 With the occupation, the emergence of two German states and the Cold War, Germans perceived their ‘exclusiveness’ as a burden. Being German had become an international stigma, so good behaviour was required. Anti-communism, Americanization and European integration could fill some of the identity gap.67 West Germans now had to demonstrate complete departure from the Sonderweg and subordinate their nationalism to liberal principles associated with the West within the context of the Cold War.68 By the late 1950s,West Germans realized that unification had become illusionary. Few West Germans believed Adenauer’s ‘politics of strength’ would lead to reunification.69 In August 1961, when the Berlin Wall was erected, Adenauer failed to react immediately, delaying a trip to Berlin for two weeks. On 15 September, one day before the federal elections, Kohl defended Adenauer against

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the opposition’s claims that the Chancellor had gambled away the chances for reunification.70 Regarding Adenauer’s decision not to travel to Berlin, Kohl argued that the Chancellor had to stay in Bonn to organize his foreign policy at this critical moment in history. Moreover, Kohl stated, the Soviet Union would have never accepted unification without claiming hegemony over West Germany: ‘anyone who maintains today that he had the plan for reunification lies’.71 Kohl predicted that communism would steadily become more dangerous and warned against strategic neutrality, which he saw as propagated by the SPD.Young people in the GDR had never experienced any ‘freedom’, and West Germans should show their solidarity by staying in contact with their compatriots in the East.72 As already mentioned in chapter 2, Jeffrey Herf saw Adenauer as a paradoxical but positive figure: ‘this oldest and most conservative of the leading political figures of the post-war era implemented the most decisive break in German political culture’.73 Thus, in Herf ’s view, the public memory of Adenauer’s restorative character had to be improved by taking into account that he not only united Protestants and Catholics through Christian Democracy but also replaced ‘the anti-Western German conservatism of pre-1945 Germany with a Western-oriented and liberal democratic “West German” conservatism’. In that sense, Kohl could see himself as a member of the most progressive party in his country. Herf stressed that Adenauer openly blamed German idealism and Prussian authoritarianism for the intellectual development towards Nazism in Germany and still viewed the German mind with suspicion.74 Under the semi-authoritarian style of Adenauer’s Kanzlerdemokratie, however, insecurity persisted regarding the sustainability of the FRG’s liberal culture.75 By the end of Adenauer’s chancellorship in 1963,76 Hans Kohn had voiced great doubt about the success and nature of liberalism in the Federal Republic hitherto, and noted the potential continuity of anti-Western thought. Even the disaster of the First World War had not produced a revision of the German mind but rather a thirst for revenge against what were perceived as the weakening Western liberal societies. Kohn warned of ‘the overemphasis put upon the military integration . . . The main issue is the spiritual and political integration of Germany into the West’. In his eyes, questions of unification and German expellees remained more problematic than the outcome of Versailles in 1919. Still, Kohn recognized Adenauer’s great achievements: ‘the Germans . . . have become accustomed to the game of parliamentary life . . . [and] for the first time in their modern history associated themselves unquestioningly with the West’.77 At this point in time, Kohl himself had had enough of Adenauer’s totalitarian attitude within the CDU and criticized him during a federal board meeting in late 1964. In reacting against this old style of leadership, Bösch explained, Kohl was a reformer despite also being strongly influenced by Adenauer, and would carry this attitude over to his own chancellorship.78



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By the late 1960s and early 1970s, four interrelated changes were making Kohl very nervous: (1) his party had lost power; (2) the ‘republican consensus’ was broken by generational conflict; (3) the new government implemented the new Ostpolitik, which undermined the idea of the FRG’s exclusive mandate to represent Germany; and (4) post-nationalism was on the rise. At this time Kohl perceived the Federal Republican project, with which he had so genuinely identified after the experience of 1945, as threatened, and he revealed his personal ideology more frequently, amply and resolutely in his speeches and writing. In 1969,Willy Brandt (SPD) was elected, and Kurt Kiesinger’s grand coalition of SPD and CDU/CSU was dissolved and replaced by an FDP-SPD alliance that lasted until Kohl’s chancellorship in 1982. Kohl periodized the third decade of the republic as a fundamental break in German history, declaring it the end of the phase of postwar reconstruction, ‘which in many points continued the traditions of the Weimar Republic and stood in reaction to the Nazitime’.79 Though the general population had but weak respect for the founding fathers, Kohl promised to ‘not betray Adenauer’s heritage’.80 InWest Germany, the rise of leftist thought, then perceptible in manyWestern societies, can also be seen in the particular context of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the culture of coming to terms with the Nazi past. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and the Auschwitz trials between 1963 and 1965 increased awareness that many parts of the past were still concealed.81 Kohl’s friend, Chancellor Kurt G. Kiesinger (1966–69), CDU member and former member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945, personified the bitter continuities from the Third Reich to the politics of the Federal Republic.82 While Kohl sought to uphold the attitude of the 1950s, when anticommunism was presented as a form of ‘rectified resistance’ or ‘ex-post resistance’ to its past totalitarian counterpart, Nazism, he perceived the country as terrorized by a generation that he considered as dogmatic as the Nazis. 83 He thought the state should have cracked down harder on the 1968 rebellion, which in his view wanted to ‘destroy – and not improve – the existing state order’; this, however, should happen ‘by means of the courts and with the possibilities that are offered by the Rechtsstaat’.84 ‘[F]or heaven’s sake’, the ’45er thundered, ‘let’s not get impressed by the new Disciples, who proclaim their doctrinal theory, following Herbert Marcuse, and want to tell us the future’. He cautioned his audience about ‘illusions and false consciousness’ while advocating stability in general values to maintain the ‘liberal democracy’ in Germany.85 He argued that ‘the protests of the young ones, the wave of radicalization within the political debate, but also the fashion to demonstrate’ would bring ‘nothing but the crisis of the legitimacy of our democracy’.86 Kohl warned West Germans of a socialist revolution, of being ‘hijacked’ by a Soviet-style democracy, and called for a ‘battle against the enemies of the constitution’. Against the leftist challenge,

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Kohl exhorted his audience to ‘expose and create structures and references of the Federal Republican identity’.87 In his first speech as CDU federal chairman in 1973,88 Kohl alerted his audience to a decline of ‘the democratic defence-front against the enemies of the democratic order’, stating that the ‘enemies of democracy’ were equally dangerous on the left and right. His generation, which experienced the Federal Republic as a direct response to the downfall of the Nazi regime and the Second World War, was committed to the state, but younger generations lacked such an understanding. Kohl, as an educator of the Federal Republican foundation myth, attributed its achievement – ‘that this country developed out of the zero-point of its history into a respected, modern, free and social Rechtsstaat’ – largely to his own party. The CDU’s loss of popularity was thus commensurate with the ‘ahistoricity’ (Geschichtslosigkeit) of the younger generations, something that needed remedying through education and would also require clear positions on the unresolved German Question.89 In response to Brandt’s motto of ‘mehr Demokratie wagen’ (daring more democracy),90 he accused the SPD of illiberal dogmatism in seeking an impossible merger between democracy and socialism, and of being undercut by totalitarian groupings.91 At the same time, he defended the government’s reactionary politics in justifying the Berufsverbot:92 because ‘the democratic state is based, more than any other form of state, on the persuasiveness of its idea’, parents had the right to see their children educated ‘within the framework of the basic liberal order’.93 Kohl also used this occasion to react to the anti-American sentiments arising in the course of the Vietnam War: ‘the Alliance is the core of German reason of state’. NATO, to him, was primarily ‘based on values which determined the reconstruction of German democracy in the Federal Republic, and on which our constitution rests’.94 Seeing the enemy stereotype declining in the context of a relaxation of the East-West conflict, he appealed to the public: You are not a cold warrior if you say today in 1973: this common order of values is still threatened .  .  . The ideological aggression has come next to the military one. The conflict is pursued today less with weapons than with words and ideologies. The new order of the Atlantic Community must account for this change. Next to the community of weapons we need the community of values and concepts. Decisively, the idea of disputatious democracy remains the constitution of the Atlantic Community and the European integration movement, an idea that is simply a great part of this alliance.95

With the rise of critical public culture in West Germany, Kohl realized the disadvantage of the CDU’s alienation of West German intellectuals, who favoured the SPD.96 He argued that the real needs of the people were distorted and dominated by what Ralf Dahrendorf had called a Lehrerklasse (a class of teachers).97 ‘[T]he left radicals,’ he claimed, ‘want to eliminate our liberal, democratic order in service of their utopia’. Conversely, Christian Democracy was the only force able to fill the ‘vacuum of authority and growing difficulties of



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orientation’. Historical education was, in his view, urgently required to make West Germans realize that they were living in ‘the freest order of state and society that has ever existed in German history’. Kohl would have needed considerable political calculation and creativity to exploit the left-wing violence of the time in order to argue that the revolutionary ideas of a ‘fanatic aberrance of bomb planters’ had infiltrated the party organizations of the governing coalition. He saw the government’s alliance with the intellectuals and their banner of ‘democratization’ merely as an attempt by privileged groups to claim a monopoly over knowledge and politics.98 A few days after Helmut Schmidt (SPD) became Chancellor, Kohl stated at the Frankfurt Paulskirche that the Basic Law was ‘the result of democratic tradition of the past 125 years’ and embodied ‘the results and ideals of the two great Western revolutions: the French one of 1789 and the American one of 1776’.99 Despite this long tradition, however, the constitution could not automatically enforce the people’s loyalty, which it needed to be effective.100 Fearing absence of consensus among the Federal Republican mainstream, he voiced his concern: [W]e can no longer resort to common political concepts and cannot rely anymore on a common political language when we want to describe the basics of a free commonwealth as binding for everyone. The loss of means of communication, because of the missing agreement about the content of the most important political concepts, affects the viability of the constitution. For this reason, efforts are necessary today to protect the political concepts from their occupation by authoritarian and dogmatic contents.The absolute claim to truth of dogmatic politics leads inevitably to a polarization of society.101

Kohl was convinced that ‘there must be an accepted order accepted by all’ and sought to impart and defend this order:‘here it becomes visible what special role our schools are accorded to maintain the agreement about the content of political concepts and respect for the constitution’. As a liberal nationalist, Kohl stressed the importance of social context for individual freedom: ‘the individual has to be free, to realize his distinctiveness and individuality . . . he will yet only be aware of his distinctiveness and can only realize it by living together with other individuals’. Again, West Germans had to come to terms with certain questions: ‘[W]hat is it actually that binds us, the citizen of the Federal republic; what is common to us Germans? What is our common political goal; what is the meaning of our national existence?’ The Basic Law, ‘without which state and society had no substance’, would provide answers to these existential questions: ‘we conceive ourselves out of the aims of our constitution, which direct our state inside and outside: securing and developing the democratic and social Rechtsstaat; towards a politics which is based on the reunification of Germany and the free cooperation of free peoples’. Kohl viewed the constitution as the spirit of the Federal Republican state, which itself appeared as a God-like body in his language. Its legitimacy was beyond discursive practice. Kohl’s language limited democratic pluralism to the benefit of the state, which he idealized as

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a higher, transcendental entity that would embody liberal values. The state was not merely a bureaucratic administration but ‘a community of free citizens, a community of the ones alive, the dead ones and the ones coming after us’.102 By the late 1960s, the German Staatsnation (political nation) was merely a legal fiction. Willingness to recognize the ‘other Germany’ as an independent state was on the rise.103 The GDR was increasingly being regarded as hostile territory, and West Germans often felt stronger identification with the FRG than with the German nation.104 In line with the easing of the Cold War, a new foreign policy approach aimed at normalization of relations with the Eastern bloc conflicted with Adenauer’s Hallstein Doctrine, which isolated Bonn from the rest of the world that had recognized the GDR. Under Brandt’s chancellorship as of 1969, the West German government pursued the new Ostpolitik while the Christian Democratic opposition still clung to the FRG’s exclusive mandate to represent the German territory of 1937 (Alleinvertretungsanpruch). 105 Kohl presented the new policies as embedded in a wider challenge to Federal Republican and national identity. He feared that FRG acknowledgment of the GDR leadership would lead the world to assume that German-German relations had ‘normalized’.106 Such normalization would prompt a return to the old Sonderweg and undermine the achievements of western integration.107 By confirming the GDR’s statehood and putting the German-German border on equal footing with other European borders, Kohl and his party argued, Ostpolitik would support the status quo and thus endanger both European and German unification as demanded by the Basic Law.108 He interpreted the government’s failure to acknowledge the constitutional objective of reunification and the international right to self-determination as a victory for the Soviet Union.109 Seeing that unification had become impossible in the current context, and feeling that competition between the two states over the prerogative to represent the ‘true’ Germany was increasing, Kohl criticized the new policies for encouraging East Berlin to one day claim unification ‘in the reversed sense’, under the hegemony of the communist system.110 To him, the Federal Republic was the only, ideal and legitimate German model state: ‘the theoretically founded and politically experienced superiority of the Federal Republic of Germany against the GDR rests on certain values and principles on which we organize state and society as a liberal democracy within an open society’. West Germany would have to prove itself more humane and progressive than socialism to ‘legitimize the right to self-determination of all Germans’. This liberal advantage needed to be expressed, domestically as well as internationally, ‘without causing fears of a new German nationalism’. Therefore, he asserted, the ‘understanding of the unity of the nation [should be] based not on the primacy of territorial unity but on the primacy of freedom’. Kohl thus articulated his nationalism as closely linked to his Federal Republican patriotism and contributed to the imaginary persistence of the Staatsnation, whose sole legitimate representative was the FRG. Despite there being no German nation-state,



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Kohl insisted that ‘state consciousness and national consciousness are identical’. However, the ‘central content of German political consciousness’ was, according to him, ‘not the nation-state, but the liberal political order’.111 ‘Unity and freedom’ did not play a zero-sum game, from Kohl’s perspective: a completely normal country needed both. The post-nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s thus threatened his conviction that the Federal Republic should represent all Germans and the ideal German state.The events of 1968 and their aftermath had ‘contributed to a significant shift in national consciousness; for the younger generation the notion of a German nation seemed to have lost its meaning’, as Wolfgang J. Mommsen pointed out.112 Meanwhile, critical elites sought to morally justify the national division.113 Kohl at this time wished to stimulate a national revival while simultaneously promoting Adenauer’s legacy of Westbindung. According to him, ‘Adenauer’s historical accomplishment was to repatriate the German national consciousness to a legitimate basis through his politics of integration into the Western alliance, by reconciling it with the democratic-liberal way of life’.114 Kohl saw Adenauer as the man who had led Germany out of the ‘age of nation-state politics’. The lessons taught by the two world wars had changed the notion of political sovereignty, and the Federal Republic was subsequently ‘designed in opposition to national isolation. By doing so we achieved the cutback of disputable German traditions, namely the anti-Western effects of nationalism’.115 Kohl was therefore very careful to avoid any nationalist terminology. Like most other contemporary politicians, Kohl was a nationalist for whom the word nationalism was a faux pas. He preferred nationalism’s usual euphemisms: patriotism, love of the fatherland (Vaterlandsliebe), national consciousness (Nationalbewußtsein) or national feeling (Nationalgefühl). These enjoyed more positive connotations among the mainstream, which was exactly Kohl’s objective. Emphasizing his generational experiences, he promoted a restoration of nationalism under Federal Republican, European and transatlantic formulas. He cautioned against particularistic nineteenth-century thinking but presented the UN’s principle of national self-determination as untouchable.116 He also used his Europeanness as evidence of his anti-nationalism and assured that German unity was a self-evident aim,117 encouraging Germans to understand themselves anew as a nation. As a liberal nationalist, Kohl was convinced it was time for more enthusiasm, feelings and solidarity, because ‘a liberal democracy is very much dependent on its citizens’ love for the country’.118 In his patriotic campaign for more patriotism, he pleaded for a ‘cosmopolitan openness’ (Weltoffenheit) that would critically assess ‘national conceptions of values’.119 In this way, Kohl sought to suggest a nationalism domesticated by Western liberalism – an understanding of liberalism that conflicted with the constitutional patriotism and postnational constellation promoted by his contemporary, Habermas, who found that for Germans, nationalism was not requisite but rather counterproductive to being Western.120

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At this point Kohl, conscious of his patriotic duty, began also to dabble in liberal nationalist theory: ‘since the French Revolution, the notion of nation has not been detachable from the notion of state’.121 He explained that ‘the identity of nation and state emerges out of the self-realization of a Volk as nation through political self-determination within the framework of a sovereign state’.122 In keeping with the liberal nationalist tradition, Kohl regarded the common ‘will’ of the people as decisive in a nation’s formation: ‘the awareness of common history, common ancestry, finds a specific component in the desire for common political action’.123 Similar to his idea of the liberal state, however, the voluntaristic aspect of the will to be a nation was subject to strong limitations in Kohl’s world view: ‘national consciousness is not an optional value, which one can accept or not’. He defined the concept of nation as an extension of the idea of the Volk ‘in the sense of a definitely contoured entity. Common history, common fate, experience in common religion or religious wars, geographical, linguistic, economic, cultural commonality can also construct a nation’. Kohl knew that new identities were developing in East and West Germany: ‘different nationalities can live together in one state. A nation can however also break into different states. The respectively formed political order provokes new community-references’. He still insisted that ‘the people who live in both partial states belong undisputedly to the German Volk, although they live as Germans in two different social orders’.124 Kohl thus effectively propagated the Volk as a ‘community of destiny’ so that national belonging could hardly be conceptualized as elective, and the Renanian idea of Kohl’s nationalism ultimately looked somewhat twisted. As a liberal nationalist, however, Kohl found an instrumental way to present the nation as an a priori fact, without failing to guarantee the good, liberal, Western nature of his nationalism: ‘Our consciousness of state and nation are identical, because we connect the will for national unity with the will for a very specific form of state, that is the liberal as opposed to the illiberal. In accordance with the historical development of the Anglo-Saxon countries, today the values of our national consciousness are most closely connected to basic democratic values.’125 In the early 1970s more and more West Germans, including Christian Democratic voters, accepted the new Ostpolitik.126 Kohl had already sought to break a Christian Democratic taboo in 1966, when he suggested establishing better relations with the GDR.127 Yet Kohl remained bound to the former position of his party and had to be careful to not exclude important, internal rightwing voices.128 Behind the scenes, however, he became more susceptible to the government’s policies towards the socialist states in the East.129 After the 1976 elections, Kohl initiated the CDU’s drift towards the government’s position of accepting existing treaties as the basis for future Ostpolitik.The internal compromise for the gradual improvement of relations with the GDR was to continue to put more rhetorical emphasis on national unity, liberal values and the ideological demarcation from the regime in East Berlin and socialism per se.130



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However, Kohl’s ideological notion of Germany remained constant, and his liberal nationalist rhetoric barely changed. He asserted that the one ‘who wants the unity of the nation is not a nationalist’ but ‘quite simply a German patriot, who accepts his historical duty’.Yet genuine patriotism could not be expected from any socialist: ‘the bad thing about the socialists is that their notion of history is limited. They believe that history is only a chain of economic developments [and] they do not want to believe that humans consist of both reason and heart’. Socialists, according to Kohl, would lack the emotionality necessary for the life of the republic: ‘citizens will only be combat-ready to defend this republic as free citizens in a free country, if they are not only convinced by their reason, but also by their heart, by their emotion, and if they are convinced by their feeling that this is their republic’.131 ‘Freedom’, which should prevail over ‘unity’, remained an ideological principle of demarcation in Kohl’s language, congruent with his idea of the West and portrayed as steadily under threat. The Allied troops remained in Germany to defend ‘freedom’. He distinguished between the free and the nonfree world: ‘for this part of the world, the words “freedom”, “democracy”, “Rechtsstaat” and “human dignity” have the same meaning’.The zero hour, the starting point of the republic, was meant to mark a departure from the illiberal past towards Western freedom. This break with the Nazi past needed to be demonstrated internationally: ‘nothing hits us Germans harder than the accusation that we had not forever renounced Hitler’s violent ideology’. Adenauer had instructed the Germans that ‘there is only one place for us in the world: beside the free peoples’ and that they were expected to work for a European federal state: ‘if the free peoples of Europe do not want to lose their right to self-determination, they have to affiliate politically.’ This integration would be ‘a necessity for all of us. It is necessary for our security, for our freedom, for our existence as a nation and as an intellectually creative community of peoples.’132 Kohl pursued this combination of nationalism and Westernization to signal German normality with brilliant talent. According to Daniel Cohn-Bendit (The Greens), once known as Dany le Rouge, Kohl came to France in summer 1980 to see the German football team and decided to bathe in the sea with some other supporters. Cohn-Bendit, then among the delighted journalists, finally realized ‘why this man was the most underestimated politician of the republic’. As the former revolutionary explained, Kohl ‘brimmed over with self-assuredness, self-doubt was a foreign word to him, and he is all around a German amongst Germans’. Retrospectively, Cohn-Bendit attributed great agency to Kohl: ‘this “relaxed” German identity, which means being a patriot without any pangs of conscience, deeply anchored in the Western alliances, that is Europe, enables the Germans’ return to civilized history’.133 In the 1980 election, the Bavarian conservative hardliner F.J. Strauß (CSU) was chosen for Christian Democratic candidature. Similar to Kohl’s run for chancellor four years before, Strauß won most of the votes but was still unable

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to form the coalition with the FDP that was necessary for majority government. The elections weakened the right faction within the party, and Kohl, still chairman, reaffirmed the need to maintain the dialogue with the East to make the division more bearable and promote German-German exchange.134 Nonetheless, Kohl never forgot to highlight Western superiority over the allegedly false ideology in the East that would deprive Germans of their natural right of belonging to a liberal nation-state. When General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) Erich Honecker declared that the question of unity need not be considered until West German workers began a socialist transformation, Kohl took this as another warning not to allow for any misconstruction of the liberal notion of Germany and nationhood as such.135 The idea of the nation had emerged with its ‘promise of happiness’ when it ‘replaced the estate-based society’, and it had ‘remained, since its modern beginnings 200 years ago, until today, the most meaningful shell . . . of all civil liberties’. Therefore, Kohl argued, it was ‘as old and as new as the ethical foundations on which it rests’. Declaring that ‘the nation is not a value in itself ’, he expressed his awareness of its potential to ‘turn into a false god’ and ‘unfurl a terrible force of destruction’. According to him, the nation would ‘source its ethical content from very modern human and civil rights, out of the heritage of Christianity and Enlightenment. This ethical content of the abendländisch notion of the nation, however, can only unfold through a free constitution’. For this reason Kohl found that ‘the national claim of the GDR leadership sounded perfidiously empty’, not only because they lacked the consensus of the citizens, but also because their notion of nation lacked the necessary ethical content, ‘as long as the Leninist one-party-dictatorship remained’.136 During his own Ostpolitik, Kohl also continued to hold the SPD responsible for polarizing the Federal Republican society, betraying the constitutional demand for reunification and neglecting the GDR’s dangerous attempts to monopolize the notion of Germany: ‘communism was always successful in history when it successfully combined its ideology with the national idea’.137 The SPD-led government would fail to provide education in ‘historical truths’ and the assurance of a ‘value-based’ Deutschlandpolitik in order to preempt the GDR’s nationalist agenda.138 The CDU, in contrast, represented Adenauer’s tradition of ‘a normative binding of the nation to freedom and self-determination’.139 Whereas Social Democrats would misread European realities, Kohl contended, only the Christian Democrats could prevent Germany’s return to the Sonderweg. They realized that ‘the state consciousness of our citizens, gesamt­ deutsch [whole-German] national consciousness, and European consciousness are three forms of one Gemeinschaftsbewußtsein [community consciousness]’.140 Kohl was convinced that Germans could not afford a regression to the ‘Bismarckian nation-state’ and needed Europe more than any other country ‘because the unnatural partition of our country eats into the body of our



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Volk’.141 Kohl recognized ‘Bismarck’s achievement in integrating the newly founded German Reich into the European concert of powers’, but his successors had failed to do this. Only ‘Konrad Adenauer connected the national consciousness of the Germans for the first time most closely to democracy . . . which was the precondition for reconciliation with the Western neighbours’.142 This was Kohl’s most dominant image of Adenauer’s heritage, which he presented as being unprotected under Schmidt’s government. Later Kohl would stage himself as its saviour when he himself became chancellor in 1982.

Restoration and Unification: Prologue to Complete Normality? When the social-liberal coalition broke over economic policies, Kohl seized his chance to initiate the conservative restoration: on 1 October 1982, the Bundestag elected him Chancellor after a motion of no confidence and formed a coalition with the FDP, which the West German electorate confirmed in 1983, 1987, 1990 and 1994. Kohl staged himself as Adenauer’s apostle while pursuing his mission of the renationalization of the masses. He connected his quest to achieve a normal nationalism in Germany to the Federal Republican tradition of Western integration. This combination allowed him to appease some of the domestic and international suspicions during the (re)unification process and subsequently facilitated his image of normality. Moses described Kohl’s campaign of the ‘geistig-moralische Wende’ (spiritual-moral change) as aiming ‘to repair the cultural damages of “1968”’ and ‘the culmination of some ten years of reaction to the cultural transformations.’143 In his first policy statement in the Bundestag, Kohl sought to appear as a new leader, who would endow his ‘Volk [with] new hope, new optimism and new self-confidence’.144 He announced his government to be a ‘coalition of the centre to set a historical recommencement. What was possible in 1949, under heavy emotional wounds and material burden, is also possible and necessary today’. Adenauer had ‘led the Germans into the community of free peoples’, and Germany had become ‘a respected partner in the alliance of the West’. Now the Germans were someone in the world again; they had ‘learned again – to speak with the words of Ernst Bloch – the dignity of walking upright. Ladies and Gentlemen, we may build upon this heritage, from which we derive energy to do what is needed for today’. Kohl finished this declaration with a quote from Adenauer’s first policy statement of 1949: ‘we hope – that is our goal – we can succeed, with the help of God, to lead the German Volk upwards and to contribute to peace in Europe and the world’.145 While promoting a national revival in collaboration with other conservative forces in the FRG, as will be explained further in the next chapters, Kohl constantly assured the world of his loyalty to the ideas of the first Federal Chancellor. His nationalism was thus always packaged as a ‘Christian

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Democratic Federal Republicanism’ that facilitated his representation of a deradicalized German nationalism that no one should fear anymore. He emphasized his personal experiences of Adenauer’s accomplishments as a young student,146 when policies of Western integration could successfully contain any potential resurrection of German nationalism.147 In Kohl’s view, West Germans still did not properly recognize this legacy, which should be revived in order to forearm the population to defend ‘freedom’. Harking back to his rhetoric in the 1970s, Kohl continued to present ‘freedom’ as a concept of ideological demarcation and civil duty associated exclusively with the West: ‘we believe that it is the prime obligation of free citizens, not to omit any effort to defend freedom and to maintain the hope of other people for freedom’.148 True ‘freedom’ could exist only inside a liberal democracy, open society, and social market economy, which he saw embodied in the FRG and represented by the CDU. As an admirer of Karl Popper, Kohl espoused an idea of ‘freedom’ that hovered between determinism and insecurity: because ‘the human is characterized by the ability to replace false ideas and theories by others, history would be determined by ‘the idea of freedom that will one day prove stronger than any ideologies’.149 At other moments in Kohl’s rhetoric, however, the course of time was less preordained. Kohl repeatedly expressed his fear of the decline of ‘freedom’. Fifty years after power was handed over to the Nazi party, he reminded his audience that ‘the republic has to be newly achieved every day’ and that ‘the political culture of freedom is not self-evident’.150 Kohl therefore sought to stimulate a ‘daily plebiscite’151 from above by repeatedly calling on teachers to instruct the new generations in accordance with his own ideology, because ‘none of us knows the goal of history’.152 Kohl’s chancellorship sought to challenge the hegemony of ‘leftist and left-liberal intellectuals [who] had gained signification beachheads in the media, universities, school, museums – in other words, in the commanding heights of the public institutions of cultural transmission’ as Moses pointed out.153 Kohl complained about the anti-authoritarian legacy of 1968 and the indoctrination of children by left-wing teachers who had failed to pass the democratic political culture on to younger generations. Better instruction in Federal Republican history was required to get students to realize the value of liberal society and the danger ‘of ideologies and utopias [that] displace the intellectual confrontation with reality’. He decried the lack of knowledge about the foundation of NATO, which to Kohl was primarily ‘a community of values of Western democracies’, and the failure to promote European identity in response to centuries of ‘fratricidal wars’ in Europe. School administrations did not ‘think enough about what they could do with regard to the unity of the nation. Unity of the nation means not giving up the commonness during hard times in history, with which we now have to cope, perhaps for generations’.154 Unlike himself, Kohl believed, the younger generations lacked understanding of the



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true origins of the republic and its founding fathers. He recalled that in his time as a student, ‘what then incredibly impressed me were these men, who believed in the future although they came from the nothing, from the Stunde Null’,155 – an enthrallment that had served as the meta-narrative for his Ph.D. thesis.156 Kohl’s angst over the decline of the postwar spirit always implied the potential for return to the Sonderweg – in other words, the de-Westernization of the FRG.To signal the FRG’s unconditional commitment to the West, he supported Schmidt’s controversial decision to station further NATO missiles on German soil, which he would later historicize as a precondition for (re)unification.157 To underline his image of normality, however, Kohl maintained that ‘none of our weapons will ever be deployed, unless as a response to an attack’.158 Historical experiences had turned Germans into a peace-loving people.159 After all, ‘peace’ – like ‘freedom’, a leitmotif in Kohl’s rhetoric – was always associated with the West. In line with the later writings of his advisor Michael Stürmer,160 Kohl had internalized the concept of Germany’s Mittellage (geographically central position) in Europe, which he believed would remain perilous. He thus continued to warn against any geopolitical isolation, as this would mean regression to the historical peculiarity that had been overcome under Adenauer.161 Loyalty to NATO would thus have to be steadily renewed in Federal Republican society: ‘the alliance is the core of German reason of state’. The Transatlantic Alliance would reflect and uphold ‘the basic values of our constitution, for which we stand, the socioeconomic order, in which we live, and security, which we need’. His mission as Chancellor, therefore, was ‘to liberate the German-American friendship from its twilight, to affirm and stabilize this friendship’.162 Kohl saw the United States as the guardian of Western Europe and especially of the FRG in the NATO framework: ‘American soldiers defend German freedom and German soldiers also defend the American one’. Kohl knew that Alexis de Tocqueville had prophesied Russia and America as the globe’s main determining powers, the former in bondage and the latter in freedom.163 In response to the Bitburg controversy, which chapter 5 will address, Kohl outlined three traditional approaches of anti-Western Amerikakritik in Germany: ‘the collectivistic, the self-righteous anti-materialistic and the cultural-critical/ anti-technological’. Regarding the first approach, he rejected the critique that the U.S. was a country of oppression and exploitation: ‘the preconditions of the American system cannot be understood, where people search for salvation by an all-comprising power of the state’. The second, according to Kohl, questioned the value of multiculturalism and capitalism. The different ‘peoples and races’ living in the U.S. would ‘find their commonality in a constitution and in their system of values’. Kohl criticized the persistence of Oswald Spengler’s false presumptions about the ‘Snob and Mob’ of the West – that the U.S. had ‘neither a real Volk nor a real state’, and was a country where the sheer reckless pursuit of dollars ruled: ‘we Germans have twice experienced the absurdity of this claim’. As for the third approach, Kohl shot down cultural pessimism about

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the U.S.: ‘still today, despite all appearances, are they presented as culturally adversary and flattened, although the extraordinary cultural creativity of the American society is highly visible’. He concluded: ‘here romanticizing, backward looking, and anti-technological tendencies conflate’.164 While trying to look like a committed transatlanticist, Kohl sought at least as energetically to mobilize his representation as a genuine European so as to contest the Sonderweg image of Germany – an important element of Kohl’s identity collection throughout all chapters of this study. William E. Paterson argued that during his chancellorship, Kohl combined Adenauer’s ‘Rhineland European vision’ with his own, characteristic vision of German history and unity, endowing himself with a certain external and domestic legitimacy, though he sometimes favoured vision over public opinion.165 When he came to power, he announced that ‘our goal remains the political union of Europe’,166 and over the following years he called for a ‘European patriotism’ as part of his conservative identity project serving to foster Federal Republican, German and Western self-conceptualizations among the population.167 Kohl embedded his German and European dreams in the transatlantic discourse and criticized the tensions between Europe and the U.S.168 From a statist point of view, Kohl’s nationalist image was thus much more moderate than that of CDU hardliners like Alfred Dregger, who stressed that ‘Europe cannot replace Germany’.169 Kohl, in contrast, contributed heavily to the European integration process.170 Thus he has to date sustained a historic image as the Chancellor of both German and European unity.171 Despite Kohl’s nationalist agenda, in the 1980s the West German population increasingly accepted the division of Germany,172 a development that inspired him to promote further cultural nationalism (see chapter 4) and nationalist historism (see chapter 5). With regard to Deutschlandpolitik, he operated on two levels, as Karl-Rudolf Korte explained.173 On the normative level, Kohl continued reminding citizens of the legal obligation to achieve unification and assured them he would never renounce his representation of all Germans. He admitted that Germany was still far from ‘normalization’, that ‘overcoming the [German] division will only be thinkable in historical periods of time’, and that this could only happen within the larger European context. However, he prophesied, ‘wall, barb wire and firing order cannot be the last word between East and West, in Germany, Europe and the world’.174 He defined ‘freedom’ as ‘the core of the German Question’, which he always presented as legally, culturally and historically open. The ‘consciousness of national unity’ was, in Kohl’s view, naturally self-evident.175 Only one ‘single German nationality’ had ever existed.176 Moreover, he tried to sharpen the ideological contrast with the GDR and Eastern bloc states by distinguishing upfront ‘between democracy and dictatorship’.177 On the operational level, Kohl showed pragmatic cooperation with the East German regime, aiming to mitigate the consequences of the division and



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increase German-German contacts and communication, which he presented as a means to hearten national consciousness.178 Kohl was committed to upholding the existing treaties of the former governments and acknowledged that ‘any government has to realize its special responsibility that emerges out of the division of the country and the location at the interface with the East’.179 Kohl explained that the governments in Bonn and East Berlin had formed a Verantwortungsgemeinschaft (community of responsibility) ‘for peace and security in Europe’.180 Until November 1989, Kohl successfully intensified the previous Deutschlandpolitik of the two former governments. According to Konrad Jarausch, Honecker’s visit to Bonn in 1987 after several postponements signalled the ambiguity of the discourse of normalization in West Germany: the GDR leader presented this event as a manifestation of double statehood, whereas Kohl strove to portray it as a demonstration of national unity.181 He later claimed that the meeting’s practical outcome for German citizens in both states was its contribution to the maintenance of national identity.182 On the occasion of Berlin’s 750th anniversary, Kohl took Ronald Reagan to the Berlin Wall, where the U.S. President called out: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’183 Though this demand still sounded utopian in summer 1987, it only took until 9 November 1989 for East Berliners to suddenly decide to dismantle the Cold War’s former epicentre on their own. Although Gorbachev’s perestroika was not intended to overcome communism but to reform it,184 or rather to correct some of the Stalinist aberrations from Lenin’s methods,185 towards the end of the decade his ‘Sinatra Doctrine’ allowed the Europeans in the Warsaw Pact states to do things their own way.186 This was most prominently symbolized by the success of the Solidarnos´c´ movement in Poland. The negative example of the Tiananmen Square Massacre was not repeated on Asia’s western peninsula: Europe now faced its most radical transformation since 1945, and Kohl – against expectations – soon experienced his most glorious moment in power. On 25 August 1989, Kohl recounted in his memoirs, Hungarian government representatives introduced him to their plans to open the border to Austria at a secret meeting held at Gymnich Castle. Kohl offered a credit of DM 500 million and a larger debt relief package in exchange. That same day, Kohl called Gorbachev, who did not object to the Hungarian decision.187 Hungary proceeded to open the border, and Kohl took the arrival of thousands of GDR refugees in the Federal Republic as final proof of his truism that ‘against all orations and auguries . . . we Germans belong together and the will to unity of the nation is not just a will, but a deep, also morally moving force’.188 The legitimacy of the regime in East Berlin, which faced rising domestic opposition, crumbled even further. Gorbachev refused to back Honecker, who remained opposed to Moscow’s policies of reconstruction and glasnost.189 At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Kohl congratulated Václav Havel on the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and argued, with reference to Popper, that people in the East had been forcefully hindered from using their natural ability

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to discard ‘false ideas and theories’.190 Now, however, ‘the idea of freedom, which had begun its triumphal march two hundred years ago in Europe – and subsequently worldwide – seems to move our neighbours in the east and south-east of Europe more than the ones in the western part of our continent’, who in his eyes had been privileged to live ‘on the sunny side of history’. According to Kohl, interventionism was compulsory when human rights were at stake.191 However, he continued reassuring the West that there could be no German Sonderweg under his government and was very reluctant to change his Deutschlandpolitik until late November 1989.192 At the federal congress of the Junge Union on 5 November, Kohl warned Christian democratic youth against generating fear of a revival of pan-Germanism or of prioritizing national interests over European integration.193 In his ‘Report on the State of the Nation in the Divided Germany’ of 8 November, Kohl addressed the current situation in the GDR, the demonstrations and the mass escape. Yet he did not deviate from his careful mix of normative calls for self-determination and a pragmatic agenda of cooperation and coexistence with the GDR.194 In a press conference on the following day, SED official Günter Schabowski surprisingly announced on live TV that GDR citizens would be allowed immediately to travel to West Germany.195 Kohl interrupted his visit to Poland upon hearing about the situation in Berlin, where what he later called ‘the left mob’ received him with protests.196 He appealed to the GDR government: ‘renounce your monopoly of power now . . . Give way to the rule of the Volk through the Volk and for the Volk’.197 He also called on all his ‘compatriots’: ‘we want to be one in our hearts to design the future in solidarity . . . to walk this way with an ardent heart and a cool mind. It is about Germany, about unity, justice and freedom. Long live a free, German fatherland. Long live a free, united Europe!’198 So far, however, Kohl’s unification nationalism consisted primarily of lip service: it was a liberal nationalism of ideas rather than of real actions. Kohl’s close foreign policy advisor and speech writer Teltschik documented the process from 9 November 1989 to 3 October 1990 in a public diary.199 He showed that that ‘reunification’ became part of the Chancellor’s agenda only on 20 November, when he was informed about opinion polls and the increasing public support for unification.200 Teltschik then also informed his boss that this option had already been discussed in Moscow, and that U.S. support was relatively secure. Only in response to this advice, Teltschik wrote, did Kohl set up a working group to use unification nationalism for propaganda purposes in the upcoming 1990 elections.201 He remained careful to communicate his Western conviction and pro-European attitude to appease any fears of a revival of German nationalism.202 A few days later, however, he improved the shining hour with the Ten-Point Programme for overcoming German and European division.203 This may be regarded as a cynical act of political expediency that sustained the Chancellor’s avidity for power. His own authority within the party and his party’s supremacy in Germany were both extremely high values



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for Kohl. At the same time, however, his choice to act this way accorded with his personal ideology and self-image, comprising the particular kind of liberal nationalism that he had articulated throughout his political life.204 Only close consultants were involved in the preparations, to ensure nobody could steal Kohl’s show. Over the weekend of 25 and 26 November he took the draft home to Ludwigshafen, where he changed some sections concerning the step from confederation to federation between the two states.205 On 28 November he revealed it to the public, and the next day Kohl announced his roadmap for unification to the Bundestag. In West Germany, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher supported the Ten Points despite reservations about the question of the Oder-Neisse border, which Kohl had not addressed in his speech lest he lose important conservative votes. At the party summit in Celle on 4 December, however, FDP chairman Otto Graf Lambsdorff attacked Kohl for his ‘deceptive’ foreign policy.206 Shortly thereafter, FDP delegates defended Kohl in the Bundestag against attacks by the opposition.207 Antje Vollmer (The Greens) called Kohl a ‘provincial politician’ and a ‘dreamer’ who had tried to write world history. The Greens then still opposed the idea of reverting to the nation-state. Large parts of the SPD offered cooperation. However, Günter Verheugen (SPD) criticized Kohl for causing mistrust among the close allies of the Federal Republic.208 Saarland’s Minister-President Oskar Lafontaine, who was the SPD’s next candidate for chancellor in 1990, represented the strongest political voice challenging Kohl’s patriotic run.209 The swing from revolution to (re)unification in the GDR was largely attributable to the economic appeal of the West, and Kohl understood how to exploit this superiority. In early 1990, the March elections in the GDR became a top priority for Kohl. On 5 February, with Kohl’s help, an opposition coalition under the banner Allianz für Deutschland (Alliance for Germany) was forged among the East German CDU, Demokratischer Aufbruch and German Social Union. A day later, Kohl surprised the CDU/CSU faction again by announcing the rapid introduction of economic and monetary union.210 German and Federal Republican identity was largely defined by its economic performance: the deutschmark stood for postwar recovery and could be regarded as the most powerful national symbol.211 Excluding the East Germans from this source of national identity would have conflicted with Kohl’s appeals to national solidarity and his vision of extending the Federal Republican model state to the territory of the GDR. Kohl also realized that introducing the deutschmark was the only way to stem the mass exodus from the GDR. Despite criticism from the Bundesbank and financial experts, Kohl subordinated economic concerns to his unification nationalism and pressed for one-for-one conversion from the East German mark to the deutschmark.212 Bösch speculated that Kohl’s engagement with the (re)unification process was not driven by political expediency alone. According to Bösch, Kohl’s own experience of postwar reconstruction endowed him with great enthusiasm

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about the feasibility of unification.213 Kohl’s idea of a unified Germany implied ‘extending proven western formulas – the Basic Law’s representative democracy and social-market economics’, as Clay Clemens said succinctly.214 Teltschik also confirmed that the Chancellor genuinely believed that a united Germany would ultimately be more prosperous.215 But at the time, the currency decision was a brilliant move to gain votes. Kohl began to rally in East German cities, where he personally reached a significant share of the electorate. At his first appearance in Erfurt, Kohl was already promising the ‘betrayed’ citizens of the GDR that it would not take long to create a ‘flourishing country’.216 In the meantime, Kohl opted for Article 23 of the Basic Law as the legal basis for (re)unification, which meant extending the FRG over GDR territory, and not for Article 146, which would have allowed for the creation of a new constitution.217 Defying expectations, Kohl’s Allianz clearly won the elections on 18 March, and Lothar de Maizière (CDU) became Minister-President of the GDR. From then on, domestic hindrances to unification seemed to be ruled out. While Günter Grass still accused Kohl of Bismarckian arrogance, the German majority found that nationalism was not of immediate concern.218 The world had to come to terms with the ‘democratic’ legitimation of the prospective Kohlian nation-state. Thus, against common expectations, Kohl secured his power within the CDU. At the same time, he unexpectedly emerged as a talented statesman, staging himself as what Habermas called verkörperte Entwarnung: to achieve unification, Kohl had to convince not only the Germans but also the U.S., French, British and – last but not least – Soviet governments. All of them supported his plan retrospectively. U.S. support hinged on Kohl’s commitment to NATO. Washington used fear of Germany’s potential regression to neutrality between East and West in order to sustain this position.219 President George H.W. Bush invited Kohl to Camp David in February 1990. Genscher was excluded from the meeting due to his ‘soft’ attitude towards the Soviets. Kohl was told that a neutral Germany was out of question; a unified Germany must be full member of NATO and not follow the French example of withdrawing from the military structure. The territory of the GDR, however, could be considered to have special status within NATO. Kohl never deviated from this principle, and Bush believed U.S. interests to be completely represented by Kohl: in Bush’s eyes, Kohl embodied Entwarnung. Seeing a reliable ally in Kohl, the U.S. President began to lobby for the Chancellor’s vision of German normality.220 The French President showed less trust than Bush did. To some extent, however, Kohl could appease Mitterrand’s panic about German unification with his solemn commitment to European integration.221 Mitterrand shared Kohl’s European patriotism, without failing to put French interests first.222 Together they orchestrated a historic gesture of reconciliation at Verdun in 1984 (which I shall discuss in chapter 5), and both had worked on the Single European Act,



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which paved the way to Maastricht.223 According to Kohl’s memoirs, however, Mitterrand confessed to him in January 1990 that if he were German he would want unification as soon as possible, but as a Frenchman he saw things differently. A disappointed Kohl quoted Adenauer in response, noting that the German Question could only be solved ‘under a European roof ’.224 Most convincingly, Kohl was prepared to press ahead with the introduction of the European Economic and Monetary Union in order to gain French support.225 This meant eventually sacrificing the most significant national symbol in Germany, the deutschmark, which he had just granted to Germans in the GDR. Although he became slightly less euphoric about European integration in the 1990s,226 Kohl clung to his promise to push through the unpopular euro,227 which contributed to his loss in the elections of 1998.228 British Prime Minister Thatcher did not see any Entwarnung in Kohl. Her private secretary remembered an episode from April 1989, when Kohl invited her to Ludwigshafen and tried very hard to convince her of his benign character. Kohl then asked Charles Powell: ‘Now she’s seen me here in my home-town, right at the heart of Europe and on the border with France, surely she will understand that I am not just German, I am European. You must convince her.’ Thatcher was not convinced, and Kohl’s art of persuasion failed to make his image more pleasing to her. Powell recalled that when Thatcher could finally board the aircraft, she complained: ‘my God, this man is so German’.229 Suspicious of the German ‘national character’, the Iron Lady in London feared a return of the Iron Chancellor of 1871.230 Like Mitterrand, she felt that Kohl and Genscher’s nationalist ambitions would disturb the balance of power in Europe when unification became a real option.231 Unlike the French President, however, Thatcher was a Eurosceptic who, as Ben Wellings pointed out, believed ‘containing post-War Germany within the framework of European unity was not a way to solve “the German problem” but was only bound to exacerbate it’.232 Mitterrand was unwilling to form an entente against reunification with Thatcher. Both felt forced to show reluctant support under the assumption that Gorbachev would slow down the unification process, without informing Kohl about their real attitude.233 The greatest foreign policy obstacle to unification was indeed the question of Germany’s future strategic alliance, which ultimately depended on Gorbachev.234 His personal relationship with the reformer in Moscow, however, combined with the Soviet Union’s direly needed economic support, ultimately facilitated Kohl’s becoming of the ‘Chancellor of Unity’ in a remarkably short time. Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs that Kohl’s late but positive response to perestroika and their meeting in Moscow in October 1988 opened a new chapter of German-Soviet relations determined by mutual affection between the two politicians.235 In front of his new friend, Kohl never failed to insist on Germany’s right to national self-determination,236 which Gorbachev perceived as erroneously distorted by Stalinism.237 Kohl also symbolized definite Entwarnung to Gorbachev, who described Kohl as someone

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whose vision for peace across Europe was emotionally engrained in his entire biography.238 More important, however, were the Soviet Union’s revelation of its enormous economic problems in January 1990 and the increasing popularity of unification nationalism in the GDR. Kohl was consequently informed that the Soviet officials had become more sympathetic to the prospect of a unified German nation-state, even though its NATO membership was still out of question in Moscow.239 On 5 May 1990, negotiations between the Four Powers and the two German states began in Bonn.That month, Kohl promised the Soviets further financial help while insisting on NATO membership.240 In July 1990, Kohl visited Gorbachev again. In his own memoirs he recalled how he cited Bismarck upon his arrival in Moscow: one had to wait for the right moment in history, ‘until you see God striding through the events, [then] leap in and catch hold of his coattail’.241 In the subsequent talks, Kohl remembered, Gorbachev accepted ‘full sovereignty’ for a united Germany but still ruled out any NATO extension to the territory of the GDR.242 Kohl and Gorbachev then travelled to the Caucasus Mountains to continue the negotiations in a more private atmosphere. In his autobiography, Kohl romanticized this moment by referring to his Christian background: ‘in the old, rural tradition of his Caucasian Heimat, Gorbachev kissed the bread, broke it and passed it around. I made three signs of the cross on the loaf. That is how my mother always did it, when I was still a child’.243 According to Kohl, Gorbachev congratulated him on West Germany’s success in the football World Cup but continued to stress his unwillingness to make any concessions on a NATO Germany.244 However, in the next day’s negotiations Gorbachev accepted Germany’s full NATO membership.245 Kohl subsequently presented his party as the ‘party of German unity’ that had ‘kept awake the consciousness of the unity of the nation’, and the SPD as the party that had never been able ‘to cope with the fateful questions of our nation.’246 The night of unification, Kohl remembered, ‘was the fulfilment of a dream when under the sounds of the Deutschlandlied . . . the black-redgolden flag was hoisted . . . whilst I stood under the portal of the Reichstag and half a million people cheerfully celebrated with us’.247 For Kohl, this was ‘the triumph of freedom’.248 Konrad Jarausch saw this celebration of a united Germany within the EC and NATO frameworks as marking the nation’s return to normality.249 Heinrich A. Winkler, however, argued that there could be no return to normality because it had not existed before: although (re)unification did finally mark the end of the postnational, anti-Western Sonderweg and solve the German Question, German questions will still be asked about the singularity of Auschwitz, which cannot go away.250 In Winkler’s view, Kohl’s greatest wish – ‘that things will normalize . . . that we become a wholly normal country, not ‘singularized’ in any question . . . that we simply don’t stick out (sic)’251 – was thus doomed to undergo further disenchantment.



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Habermas, who was, next to Grass, the leading intellectual opponent of the Kohlian way of unification,252 blamed the Chancellor’s ‘deutschmarknationalism’ for a national revival that would threaten the postnational achievements since the Second World War, including the participatory principles of liberal democracy.253 Habermas remained concerned that the new Berlin Republic would forget that Auschwitz was the reason the Germans had turned towards this new political culture.254 In 1996, he warned the South Koreans about the German experience: ‘something of the ethno-national world of the nineteenth-century imagination must have been in the minds of our politicians’.255 Nevertheless, Kohl’s ‘non-German’ German contemporary saw the Chancellor’s great accomplishment in his harmlessness, which allowed the philosopher to ‘reconcile with the (old) Federal Republic’.256 Kohl seemed to him ‘neither dangerous nor intimidating’; therefore, he characterized Kohl as ‘die verkörperte Entwarnung’.257

Concluding Remarks on Kohl’s Liberal Nationalism As Nazi propaganda reverberated on the radio, Kohl’s neighbourhood was bombed and his father, older brother and teachers went off to fight for German greatness. The leaders of the Hitler Youth sought to turn him and his friends into the master race of tomorrow, whilst in reality Kohl sat in bunkers, collected dead bodies and constructed trenches. Shortly before the Allies invaded and the Führer killed himself, the fifteen-year-old became a child soldier protecting the Eagle’s Nest. He missed his parents, crying, without knowing whether they were alive or not. His escape after an air raid was no less traumatic. It took him weeks to walk home through a land of chaos, hunger and destruction. His hometown had turned into a pile of ruins, his brother had lost his life, and the nation was divided. Kohl was able to resort to this narrative to sustain his representation of an innocent German who longed for peace and freedom, and whom nobody should fear anymore. Young Kohl subsequently became politically active and established himself successfully within an atmosphere of restoration, renewal and insecurity. He witnessed the miraculous accomplishment of the Federal Republican project, the adaptation of the West German mainstream to the ideology of the industrialized West and the new state’s rehabilitation within transatlantic and Western European frameworks. He attributed these achievements to his chief national hero, Konrad Adenauer, and to the ideological rightfulness of his own party. The Federal Republic of the 1950s then partially fulfilled his search for normality, which he continuously sought to defend in the context of the Cold War and the aftermath of 1968. The permanent defence of Adenauer’s Westernization facilitated Kohl’s appearance as die verkörperte Entwarnung as he tried to stimulate a national revival.

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Once he emerged as an opinion leader during the (re)unification process, Kohl was able to mobilize the convictions of Western superiority and European integration that he had articulated throughout his political career and achieve the next step towards normality: the instalment of a German nation-state. Ultimately, his successful unification nationalism did not harm his representation of the new normality but, on the contrary, advanced it. Kohl’s generational identity shaped his representation of the Federal Republican state and his theoretical concept of the nation as such. His ideas of German nationhood can be seen as a reaction to the allegedly Eastern, illiberal, romantic, Sonderweg-nationalism that had led to Nazism in Germany. However, Kohl’s liberal nationalism contrasted with the Habermasian demand to depart completely from any nationalist tradition so as to secure the FRG’s place in the West. Kohl perceived the citizens’ love of their fatherland as prerequisite to sustaining a liberal society. He interpreted the liberal principles of the Federal Republican constitution, the idea of a united Europe and the maintenance of the German nation as categories that were not opposed but mutually reinforcing. His liberal nationalist notion of Germany thus left room for Catholic, romantic and historist traditions in German nationalism, as outlined in the other three empirical chapters of this study, as long as they served his image of German normality.

Notes 1.  Kohl’s controversial expression of ‘grace of late birth’ and the related aspects of his nationalism will be discussed in chapter 5. 2. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 64. 3.  J.J. Sheehan. 1982. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 278. 4.  D. Langewiesche. 2000. Liberalism in Germany, trans. C. Banerji, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 306. 5.  Ibid., 308, 312, 316. 6.  H. Schelsky. 1957. Die Skeptische Generation: Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend, Dortmund: Eugen Diederichs. 7.  Ibid., 488–89. Kohl’s generation has had several names, e.g., Heinz Bude’s use of the more common term Flakhelfergeneration (i.e., the generation of anti-aircraft warfare helpers in Germany who were conscripted as child soldiers between 1943 and 1945) in his portrait of an ambitious, career-oriented generation that greatly contributed to the wealth of West Germany; see H. Bude. 1987. Deutsche Karrieren: Lebenskonstruktionen sozialer Aufsteiger aus der Flakhelfer-Generation, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Born in 1930, Kohl was amongst the youngest of this generation. For more recent work on the Flakhelfer, see also M. Herwig. 2013. Die Flakhelfer. Wie aus Hitlers jüngesten Parteimitgliedern Deutschlands führende Demokraten wurden, Munich: DVA. 8.  For a critique of Schelsky see also J.-W. Müller. 2000. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity, London:Yale University Press, 8. 9. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past; see also A.D. Moses. 2002. ‘Das Pathos der Nüchternheit: Die Rolle der 45er-Generation im Prozess der Liberalisierung der Bundesrepublik’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 2 July. 10. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 5, 9, 32, 71, 73.



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11. For the Habermasian concept of constitutional patriotism as a liberal alternative to liberal nationalism, see chapter 2. Moses dedicated chapter 5 of his book to the ‘non-German Germanism’ exemplified by Habermas. For the division within this generation, see also S. Schlak. 2008. Wilhelm Hennis. Szenen einer Ideengeschichte der Bundesrepublik, Munich: C.H. Beck, esp. 164ff. 12. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 71. 13.  I would usually not treat Kohl as an ‘intellectual’, though he had a Ph.D. and engaged in intellectual debates as a politician. Against the backdrop of Kohl’s strong views on history, national identity and outstanding appearance as a Geschichtspolitiker – a politician who frequently employed historical narratives and gestures for ideological purposes, as I will demonstrate in chapter 5 – Moses’ model is very valuable for this study. 14. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 28. 15. Henscheid, Helmut Kohl, 35, 77. 16. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 34. 17.  Lau, ‘Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Normalität; Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 30. 18. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 23. 19.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 29. 20. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 39–45. 21.  H.M. Enzensberger. 1982. ‘Verteidigung der Normalität’, Kursbuch 68, 51. 22.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 31–32. 23. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 30. 24.  Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 32. 25.  Ibid., 32–36. 26. Clough, Helmut Kohl, 27. 27. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 27. 28.  Ibid., 30. 29. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 30. 30. Schweigler, National Consciousness in Divided Germany, 185. 31. Two biographies of Hannelore Kohl appeared after her suicide in 2001: Kujacinski and Kohl, Hannelore Kohl: Ihr Leben; Clough, Hannelore Kohl: Zwei Leben. 32.  K.O. Freisberg, ‘Unser Klassenprecher’, in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 37. 33.  F. Schillinger, ‘Klassenkamerad, Freund und politischer Gegner’, in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 39. 34. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 30. 35. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 15–37; Kohl in Pörtner, Mein Elternhaus, 311–16; see also chapter 2 of this volume. 36. Maser, Helmut Kohl, 24. 37. Clough, Helmut Kohl, 28; Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 25–26. 38. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 19. 39. The books and brochures in young Kohl’s collection included: F.A. Kramer. 1945. Vor den Ruinen Deutschlands: Ein Aufruf zur historischen Selbstbesinnung [Facing Germany’s ruins: An appeal for historical self-determination], Koblenz: Historisch-Politischer Verlag; J. Radermacher. 1946. Knüppel auf dem Weg zur Demokratie [Obstacles on the way to democracy], Krefeld: Scherpe; E. von Aretin. 1946. Die Verfassung als Grundlage der Demokratie [The Constitution as the basis for democracy], Munich: Kurt Desch; J. Hundt. 1947. Das Menschenbild der Demokratie [The image of humanity in democracy], Düsseldorf: Merkur; F. Thiess. 1947. Geistige Revolution: Deutsches Theater – Europäisches Theater [The Intellectual revolution: German theatre – European theatre], Bremen: Friedrich Trujen; B. Dennewitz. 1947. Der Föderalismus:Wesen und Geschichte [Federalism: Its essence and history], Hamburg: Drei Türme; R. Aron. 1948. Hat Europa noch Aufbaukräfte? [Does Europe still have strength for reconstruction?], Frankfurt: Schulte-Bulmke; H. Piper. 1950. Was wird aus Europa? [What will Europe become?], Hamburg: Bramstedt; G. Radbruch. 1946. Der Geist des Englischen Rechts [The spirit of English law], Heidelberg: Adolf Rausch. See ‘Broschürensammlung von Dr Helmut Kohl in der CDU-Geschäftsstelle’, StALu, PGV 02/473. 40. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 56.

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41. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 32. 42. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 76; Bardens, ‘Collage’. 43.  F. Nitsch, ‘Er zeigte Flagge’, in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 57; Kohl’s meeting with François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984 will be briefly discussed in chapter 5. 44. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 74. 45.  Schillinger in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 40. 46. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 62–63. 47.  H.A. Winkler. 2010. Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2: Deutsche Geschichte vom “Dritten Reich” bis zur Wiedervereinigung, vol. 2, 7th ed., Munich: C.H. Beck, 126. The SPD ultimately amended its stance in 1960, when it accepted Westbindung as the basis for Ostpolitik; see P. Bender. 1997. Episode oder Epoche? Zur Geschichte des geteilten Deutschlands, 3rd ed., Munich: dtv, 160–61. 48. Gabbe, Parteien und Nation. 49. Bender, Episode oder Epoche? 135. 50. Schweigler, National Consciousness in Divided Germany, 144; see also Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 83–84. 51.  For the relevant sections of the Basic Law see K.H. Jarausch and V. Gransow (eds). 1994. Uniting Germany: Documents and Debates, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 6–8. 52. Bender, Episode oder Epoche? 27. 53.  W.G. Gray. 2003. Germany’s Cold War:The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949– 1969, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 54.  K.H.F Dyson. 1974. ‘Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany: The Case of the “Berufsverbot’’’, Parliamentary Affairs 28, 51. 55.  Die Rheinpfalz. 1956. ‘Errungenschaften der Sowjetzone unter der Lupe: Versammlung der CDU im Haus der Jugend’, 16 January. 56. Ibid. 57.  For a concise introduction to the controversial concept of the Sonderweg, see Kocka, ‘German History before Hitler’, 3; for this study it makes little sense to distinguish between Sonderweg and Sonderbewußtsein (special mentality) as Karl Bracher suggested. For this discussion see Bracher, Deutscher Sonderweg, 53. 58. Berger, The Search for Normality, 176–91. 59. Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 88–89. 60.  A. Heywood. 2007. Political Ideologies: An Introduction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 26. 61. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 102–3. 62. Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. 63.  H. Plessner. 1935. Das Schicksal des Deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche, Zurich: Max Niehans, 190. 64. R. Jewett and J.S. Lawrence. 2003. Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The dilemma of Zealous Nationalism, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 75. 65. Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 34–35. 66. Kohn, The Mind of Germany. 67. Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 85–88. 68.  K. Sontheimer. 1989. ‘Rede über das eigene Land: Deutschland’, in W. Bleek and H. Maull (eds), Ein ganz normaler Staat? Perspektiven nach 40 Jahren Bundesrepublik, Munich: Piper, 309. 69. Bender, Episode oder Epoche? 167. 70. Willy Brandt, then mayor of West Berlin, campaigned for the office as Chancellor. The Christian Democrats lost their absolute majority in the September election but still obtained more than 45 per cent of the votes and subsequently formed a coalition government with the liberal FDP. 71.  Der Pfälzer. 1961. ‘Politische Geschäfte mit der Furie des Krieges’, 15 September. 72. Ibid. 73.  Herf, ‘Multiple Restorations’, 40. 74.  Ibid., 40–41.



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75. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 314–15. 76. Adenauer was replaced by Ludwig W. Erhard (CDU) as Chancellor but he remained Federal Chairman. 77. H. Kohn. 1963. Reflections on Modern History: The Historian and Human Responsibility, Princeton, NJ: D.Van Nostrand, 260–62, 267–71. 78. Bösch, Macht und Machtverlust, 7, 8. 79.  H. Kohl. 1970. ‘Über die Zukunft der deutschen Demokratie’ (Speech delivered at the Übersee-Club, Hamburg, 15 January). Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.ueberseeclub.de/resources/Server/pdf-Dateien/1970–1979/vortrag-1970–01–15Dr.%20Helmut%20 Kohl.pdf. Kohl’s mission to establish positive, liberal, historical continuities in German history will be a key focus of chapter 5. 80.  Fuldaer Zeitung. 1970. ‘Helmut Kohl: Wir werden Adenauers Erbe nicht verraten’, 26 September. 81.  P. Reichel. 2007. Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland: Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur in Politik und Justiz, 2nd ed., Munich: C.H Beck, chapter 9. 82. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 103–4. Philipp Gassert’s biography of Kiesinger tried to rehabilitate Kiesinger’s reputation, which had suffered due to his engagement with the Nazis; see P. Gassert. 2006. Kurt Georg Kiesinger, 1904–1988: Ein Kanzler zwischen den Zeiten, Munich: DVA. 83. F. Trommler. 1992. ‘Between Normality and Resistance: Catastrophic Gradualism in Nazi Germany’, Journal of Modern History 64, 82; Müller, Another Country, 31. 84.  Der Spiegel. 1968. ‘Versöhnung mit Uhus und Pinschern’ (Interview with Helmut Kohl), 7 October. 85.  Kohl, ‘Über die Zukunft der deutschen Demokratie’. 86.  H. Kohl. 1970. (Report to the 16th annual assembly of the CDU Rhineland-Palatinate, Ludwigshafen a.R., 23 and 24 May 1970), KAS/Kohl/Reden. 87.  H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Verfassung und Nation als Auftrag der Unionspolitik’ (Speech delivered at the Catholic Academy, Munich, 8 December 1973), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 56–66, 58, 62. 88. The 1972 federal elections were overshadowed by emotional controversy about Ostpolitik and CDU Chairman Rainer Barzel’s failed attempt to overturn Willy Brandt with a vote of no confidence. The Social Democrats enjoyed their best results in history, whereas the CDU faced the worst outcome since the first elections in 1949. With their slogan, ‘Deutsche seid stolz auf Euer Land. Wählt Willy Brandt’ (Germans, be proud of your country.Vote for Willy Brandt), the SPD stole the show from the CDU/CSU. Kohl replaced Barzel half a year later. 89.  H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Aufbruch in die Zukunft’ (Speech delivered at the 21st Federal Assembly of the CDU, Bonn, 12 June 1973), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 54, 39, 43, 47. 90. W. Brandt, copy of the unedited manuscript of his first policy statement, Deutscher Bundestag, 28 October 1968. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.radio-utopie.de/ wpcontent/uploads/2010/10/mehr_demokratie_wagen.pdf. 91.  Kohl, ‘Aufbruch in die Zukunft’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 53. 92.  From January 1972 onwards, the Brandt government tried to expunge so-called radicals from public service. This included schoolteachers as well as officials and intellectuals in various other occupations; see Dyson, ‘Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany’, 52. 93.  Kohl, ‘Aufbruch in die Zukunft’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 54. 94.  Ibid., 48. 95.  Ibid., 48–49. 96.  H. Kohl. 1973. ‘Für einen produktiven Konflikt: Die Intellektuellen und die CDU’, Die Zeit, 4 May. 97. Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 14. 98.  Ibid., 51, 70–71, 74–75. 99. H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Das Grundgesetz – Verfassung der Freiheit’ (Speech delivered at the Paulskirche of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, 23 May 1974), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 68–77, 69; in April 1974, Brandt’s close advisor, Günter Guillaume, was exposed as a Stasi spy, which,

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along with an economic crisis that had undermined the government’s legitimacy and ill health, prompted Brandt to resign. On 16 May the Bundestag approved Schmidt as his successor. 100.  Kohl, ‘Das Grundgesetz – Verfassung der Freiheit’, 70. 101.  Ibid., 71. 102.  Ibid., 70–71, 76, 55. 103. Schweigler, National Consciousness in Divided Germany, 18–19.156. 104.  B. Weisbrod. 1997. ‘German Unification and the National Paradigm’, German History 14(2), 193. 105.  See, e.g., Fink and Schaefer, Ostpolitik 1969–1974; Clemens, Reluctant Realists. 106.  Ostblockgespräche. Kohl: erst Chancen für innerdeutsches Gipfelgespräch erkunden, media release. 1970. Hamburg: DPA, 15 February. 107.  Ministerpräsident von Rheinland-Pfalz, zur Ostpolitik und parteipolitischen Fragen der CDU (Interview with Helmut Kohl on Süddeutscher Rundfunk), media release. 1970. Bonn: BPA, 30 August. 108.  CDU. 1971. ‘Bundesparteitag Saarbrücken: Diskussionsbeitrag Dr Helmut Kohl MdL’, 4 and 5 October, KAS/Kohl/Reden; Politische Bedenken und rechtliche Zweifel, media release. 1972. St. Augustin: Deutschland-Union-Dienst 26(26), 7 February. 109.  Süddeutsche Zeitung. 1972. ‘Verträge mit dem Keim künftiger Konflikte’, 10 February. 110.  Kieler Nachrichten. 1972. ‘Kohl sieht kaum eine Chance für baldige Wiedervereinigung: Wahlkampfveranstaltung mit Naries in Kiel’, 4 November. 111. Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 50, 53, 56. 112. W.J. Mommsen. 1999. ‘The Renaissance of the Nation-State and the Historians’, in Lehmann and Wellenreuther, German and American Nationalism, 283–300, 284. 113. Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 90. 114.  Kohl, ‘Verfassung und Nation als Auftrag der Unionspolitik’, 64–65. 115. Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 62. 116.  Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. 1970. ‘Kohl zu CDU-Jugend: nationalistische Politik undenkbar’, 26 September. 117.  Staats-Zeitung. 1969. ‘Dr. Helmut Kohl neuer Regierungschef ’, 25 May. 118. E.W. Scherer. 1971. ‘Plädoyer für ein neues Nationalbewußtsein. Ministerpräsident Helmut Kohl: Mehr Solidarität und mehr Engagement für die Demokratie’, Die Rheinpfalz, 2 July. 119.  H. Kohl, ‘Plädoyer für Weltoffenheit’, Europa Union 8 (August 1972), KAS/Kohl/Artikel. 120.  See chapter 1 for the Habermasian relationship between liberalism and nationalism. 121.  Kohl, ‘Verfassung und Nation als Auftrag der Unionspolitik’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 63; Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 46. Relevant sections in Kohl’s book Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus are almost identical with his speech at the Catholic University in December 1973. His speech on national identity in the Federal Republic at the Political Seminar of Bad Godesberg also echoed large sections of his book; see H. Kohl. 1973. ‘Deutsche Nation – Bundesrepublik Deutschland’ (Speech delivered at Politisches Seminar, Bad Godesberg, unedited manuscript), 23 January 1973, KAS/Kohl/Reden. 122.  Kohl, ‘Verfassung und Nation als Auftrag der Unionspolitik’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 63; Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 46. 123. Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 46. 124.  Ibid., 45–47. 125. This section of Kohl’s book, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, is identical to Kohl’s speech ‘Verfassung und Nation als Auftrag der Unionspolitik’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 64. 126. Clemens, Reluctant Realists, 152. 127.  Pirmasenser Zeitung. 1966. ‘CDU-Chef Kohl: Union muß mit der Zone reden! Der Pfälzer rührt an einem Tabu’, 15 November. 128. Clemens, Reluctant Realists, 176. 129.  J.A. McAdams. 1993. Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 120, 127.



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130.  M. Zimmer. 1992. Nationales Interesse und Staatsräson: Zur Deutschlandpolitik der Regierung Kohl 1982–1989, Paderborn: Schöningh, 73–75; Clemens, Reluctant Realists, chapter 6. 131.  H. Kohl. 1979. (Speech at a local CDU assembly, Lahr, 28 April), unedited manuscript, KAS/Kohl/Reden, 15–16. 132.  CDU. 1979. ‘Zum 40. Jahrestag des Kriegsbeginn’ (Media Release, Bonn, 24 August). 133.  D. Cohn-Bendit, in Greiner, Meine Jahre mit Helmut Kohl, 42–44. 134. Zimmer, Nationales Interesse und Staatsräson, 75–84. 135.  H. Kohl, ‘Europa und die deutsche Frage’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 200. 136.  Ibid, 204, 200–201. 137.  H. Kohl. 1979. ‘Realitäten in Deutschland’ (Speech delivered for the 30th anniversary of the GDR), media release. St. Augustin: Deutschland-Union-Dienst 33(129), 15 October. 138. Deutscher Bundestag, 154th Parliamentary Sitting, 17 May 1979 (Plenarprotokoll 8/154), 12253; Kohl was responding to Helmut Schmidt’s report Zur Lage der Nation at the Bundestag. 139.  Ibid., 12268. 140.  Ibid., 12227–2272. 141.  H. Kohl. 1980. (Speech at Wirtschaftstag, Frankfurt, 19 July), KAS/Kohl/Reden. 142.  H. Kohl, ‘Perspektiven deutscher Außenpolitik für die achtziger Jahre’, in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 191–92. 143. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 220, 222. For an interesting discourse analysis on the terminology of ‘geistig-moralische Wende’ see P. Hoeres. 2013. ‘Von der “Tendenzwende” zur “geistig-moralischen Wende”: Konstruktion und Kritik  konservativer Signaturen in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 61(1), 93–119. 144.  H. Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte: Für eine Politik der Erneuerung’ (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 13 October 1982), in Reden 1982–1984, Bonn: BPA, 1984, 47. 145.  Ibid., 15, 16, 48. 146.  Kohl,‘Die Deutsche Außenpolitik – Das Erbe Konrad Adenauers’ (Adenauer Memorial Lecture, Oxford, 2 May 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 378. 147. Ibid., 380; see also H. Kohl. 1986. ‘Herausforderung und Chancen deutscher Außenpolitik’, (Lecture at the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Conservative Association, 27 November 1985), in Reden: Zu Fragen unserer Zeit, 111–33. 148.  H. Kohl. ‘Koalition der Mitte: Für eine Politik der Erneuerung’ (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 13 October 1982), in Reden 1982–1984, Bonn: BPA, 1984, 47. 149. H. Kohl. 1985. ‘Kontinuitiät und Fortschritt’ (Speech delivered at the Deutscher Bankentag), media release. Bonn: BPA Bulletin 37, 2 April, 313, 315. 150.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Mahnung und Verpflichtung des 30. Januar 1933’, in Reden 1982–1984, 106. 151. An expression borrowed from Ernest Renan, who found that nations that had to be reaffirmed through ‘un plébiscite de tous les jours’ would exist on the basis of a common will. See Renan, ‘Qu’est ce qu’une nation?’. 152.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Verantwortung des Lehrers in der Demokratie’ (Speech delivered to the Deutscher Philologenverband, Bonn, 1 June 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 441. 153. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 219. 154.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Verantwortung des Lehrers in der Demokratie’ (Speech delivered to the Deutscher Philologenverband, Bonn, 1 June 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 441–45; see also H. Kohl. ‘Erziehung zur Demokratie’ (Speech delivered at the Congress ‘Verantwortung für die Jugend – Erziehung im demokratischen Staat’, Bonn, 11 October 1985), in Reden: Zu Fragen unserer Zeit, 57. 155.  Kohl, ‘Kontiuitiät und Fortschritt’, 317. 156.  Kohl, ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’. 157. Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte’, i, 27; H. Kohl. 2009. ‘Der Triumph der Freiheit’, FAZ, 9 November. Retrieved 14 October 2014 from http://www.faz.net/s/ RubA91992BFFBF84DB3B4EBE604A92D275B/Doc~E1B0C84195AD94E549AD4CA852B0 7720A~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html. .

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158.  Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte’, 26. 159.  Ibid., 29–30. 160.  See M. Stürmer. 1992. Die Grenzen der Macht: Begegnung der Deutschen mit der Geschichte, Berlin: Siedler. 161.  Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte’, 27; H. Kohl. ‘Bericht zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag, 15 March 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 358. 162.  Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte’, 27. 163. H. Kohl. 1985. ‘Gedanken zur Amerikakritik und transatlantischen Partnerschaft’ (Speech delivered at Atlantik-Brücke, Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 25 June 1985), in Reden: Zu Fragen unserer Zeit, 22, 38, 29. 164.  Ibid., 30–32. 165. W.E. Paterson. 1998. ‘Helmut Kohl, “The Vision Thing” and Escaping the SemiSovereignty Trap’, in Clemens and Paterson, The Kohl Chancellorship, 17–36. 166.  Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte’, 30. 167.  See H. Kohl. 1987. Preserving Creation, Mastering the Tasks of the Future: Government Policy 1987–1990, trans. BPA, Bonn: BPA (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 18 March 1987). 168. Kohl, Preserving Creation, Mastering the Tasks of the Future, 41. 169.  U. Reitz. 1989. ‘CDU ringt um künftigen Kurs: Nationale Konturen gefordert’, Die Welt, 15 March. 170. See for example H. Meyer. 2004. Deutsche Europapolitik unter Helmut Kohl: die Auswirkungen des politischen Umfeldes auf die Integrationsbereitschaft der Bundesregierung, Berlin: Köster. 171.  G.P. Hefty. 2010. ‘Der Ehrenbürger Europas’, FAZ, 1 October. 172. Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 286. 173. Korte, Deutschlandpolitik in Helmut Kohls Kanzlerschaft: Regierungsstil und Entscheidungen, 1982–1989, vol. 1: Geschichte der Deutschen Einheit in Vier Bänden, 9–10. 174.  H. Kohl. 1984.‘Koalition der Mittte: Für eine Politik der Erneuerung (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 13 October 1982), in Reden 1882–1984, 9, 43, 44, 46. 175.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Bericht zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag, 15 March 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 344–45, 348–49. 176. Kohl, Preserving Creation, Mastering the Tasks of the Future, 38. 177. Ibid., 8. 178. Korte, Deutschlandpolitik in Helmut Kohls Kanzlerschaft, vol. 1, 9–10, 479–80. 179.  Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte’, 31. 180. H Kohl. 1984. ’Zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland (Report to the Bundestag), 15 March 1984, 355. 181. Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 288; H. Kohl. 1989. ‘Ein Maximum an Miteinander und Begegnungen’ (Speech delivered during Erich Honecker’s visit, Bonn, 7 September 1987), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 121–29. 182.  H. Kohl. ‘Deutsche Wiedervereinigung und Europa’ (Report ‘zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ to the Bundestag, 1 December 1988), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 237–59. 183.  G.M. Boyd. 1987. ‘Raze Berlin Wall, Reagan Urges Soviet’, New York Times, 13 June. 184.  M. Gorbachev. 1987. Report by the General Secretary to the CPSU Central Committee et al., Moscow, 2 November 1987, in October and Perestroika: The Revolution Continues, Surry Hills: New Age. 185. Gorbatschow, Erinnerungen, 353. 186.  Los Angeles Times. 1989. ‘“Sinatra Doctrine” at Work in Warsaw Pact, Soviet Says’, 25 October. 187. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 921–23. 188.  H. Kohl. 1990. ‘Dank an Ungarn für Menschlichkeit und Solidarität’ (Statement on the decision of the Hungarian government to allow GDR citizens to travel to the FRG, 10 September 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, 21. 189. Maier, Dissolution, 155–56; Gorbatschow, Erinnerungen, 928–39.



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190.  H. Kohl. 1989. ‘Bekenntnis zu den Werten von Freiheit und Menschenrechten’ (delivered at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, 10 October 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, 22–30, 25. 191.  Ibid., 25. 192. W.J. Bell. 1989. ‘Kohl: Kein deutscher Sonderweg. Kanzler sprach mit USVerteidigungsminister Cheney’, General-Anzeiger, 28 October. 193.  A. Hölscher. 1989.‘Kohl warnt vor Pangermanismus: Hermann Gröhe zumVorsitzenden der Jungen Union gewählt’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 November. 194. H. Kohl. 1990. ‘Das Recht aller Deutschen auf Selbstbestimmung’ (Report ‘zur Lage der nation im geteilten Deutschland’ to the Bundestag, 8 November 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, 48–69. 195.  K.H. Jarausch. 1994. The Rush to German Unity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3. 196. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 968. 197. H. Kohl. 1990. ‘Im Bewußtsein nationaler Verantwortung. Ein historischer Tag für Berlin und Deutschland’ (Speech delivered in front of the Rathhaus Schöneberg after the opening of the Berlin Wall, Berlin, 10 November 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, 70–73, 71–72. 198.  Ibid., 72–73. 199.  H. Teltschik. 1991. 329 Tage: Inneneinsichten der Einigung, Berlin: Siedler, 329. 200.  Ibid., 40–41. 201.  Ibid., 40–42. 202. H. Kohl. 1990. ‘Verantwortungsbewußte Politik für Freiheit und Selbstbetimmung’ (Speech delivered to the diplomatic corps, Bonn, 17 November 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, 91–98; H. Kohl. 1990.‘Arbeit für eine gerechte und dauerhafte Friedensordnung in ganz Europa’ (Statement at the European Parliament, Strasbourg, 22 November 1990), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, 99–111. 203.  H. Kohl. 1990. ‘Zehn-Punkte-Programm zur Überwindung der Teilung Deutschlands und Europas’ (Speech delivered to the Bundestag, 28 November 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, 112–25. 204. The thesis that Kohl did not want unification appears somewhat absurd; see Pruys, Helmut Kohl – der Mythod vom Kanzler der Einheit. 205. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 990–91. 206.  FAZ. 1989. ‘Auch die FDP kritisiert die zehn Punkte Kohls’, 4 December. 207.  Opposition attackiert erneut Zehn-Punkte-Plan von Kohl, media release. 1989. Hamburg: DPA, 14 December. 208. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 57. 209. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2, 571–72. 210. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 129. 211. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 8; M. Kaelberer. 2005. ‘Deutschmark Nationalism and Europeanized Identity: Exploring Identity Aspects of Germany’s Adoption of the Euro’, German Politics 14(3), 283, 291–93; Weisbrod, ‘German Unification and the National Paradigm’, 200–201. 212. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2, 548; Teltschick, 329 Tage, 129–33; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 1059; see also M. Hujer and G.P. Schmitz. 2010. ‘Es ging um den Jackpot’ (interview with Condoleeza Rice), Der Spiegel, 27 September. 213. Bösch, Macht und Machtverlust, 54–55. 214.  C. Clemens. 1998. ‘Introduction: Assessing the Kohl Legacy’, in Clemens and Paterson, The Kohl Chancellorship, 10. 215. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 131. 216.  Ibid., 154. 217.  Ibid., 167; see also Winkler, Der Lange Weg Nach Westen, vol. 2, 553–56. 218.  Neue Zeit. 1990. ‘In der Anmaßung Bismarcksches Format’ (interview with Günter Grass), 19 May. 219. Gorbatschow, Erinnerungen, 716, 723.

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220. Winkler, Der Lange Weg Nach Westen, vol. 2, 550–51; Hujer and Schmitz, ‘Es ging um den Jackpot’, 53–55; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 1079–83. 221.  Der Spiegel. 2009. ‘German Reunification: Thatcher and Kohl “Quarrelled Terribly”’ (interview with former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas), 14 September. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,648927,00.html. 222. A. Cole. 1994. François Mitterand: A Study in Political Leadership, London: Routledge, chapter 10. 223. Meyer, Deutsche Europapolitik unter Helmut Kohl, 81–174. 224. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 1035–36. 225. M. Sauga et al. 2010. ‘The Price of Unity: Was the Deutsche Mark Sacrificed for Unity?’ Der Spiegel, 30 September. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.spiegel.de/ international/germany/0,1518,719940–4,00.html; Teltschik, 329 Tage, 150–51. 226. Meyer, Deutsche Europapolitik unter Helmut Kohl, 367–68. 227. K.H.F Dyson. ‘Chancellor Kohl as Strategic Leader: The Case of Economic and Monetary Union’, in Clemens and Paterson (eds), The Kohl Chancellorship, 37–63. 228.  J. Anderson. 1999. German Unification and the Union of Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 46–50. 229. C. Powell. 2008. ‘Tales from Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Travels’, The Telegraph, 14 April. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/themargaretthatcheryears/1585111/Tales-from-Margaret-Thatchers-foreign-travels.html. 230.  C. Volkery. 2009. ‘The Iron Lady’s Views on Reunification: “The Germans Are Back!”’, Spiegel International, 11 September. Retrieved 14 October 2014 from http://www. spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,648364,00.html. 231. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 115–16. 232. B. Wellings. 2010. ‘Losing the Peace: Euroscepticism and the Foundations of Contemporary English Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 16(3), 488, 496. 233. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 956–58. 234.  In his memoirs, Kohl wrote that until mid-July 1990, he himself had believed that the negotiations would take much longer than they actually did. See Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 3, 164. 235. Gorbatschow, Erinnerungen, 705. 236.  H. Kohl. 1989. ‘Die Chancen Guter Nachbarschaft zu nutzen’ (Speech delivered at the Kremlin, 24 October 1988), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 211–24, 220; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 889. 237. Gorbatschow, Erinnerungen, 477–48. 238.  Ibid., 636. 239. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 109, 120, 168; Gorbatschow, Erinnerungen, 714. 240.  Ibid., 245. 241. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 3, 166. 242.  Ibid., 169. 243.  Ibid., 172. 244.  Ibid., 174. 245.  See Jarausch and Gransow, Uniting Germany, 175–78; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 3, 174–80; Gorbatschow, Erinnerungen, 724–25; see also T. Judt. 2007. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Pimlico, 642–43. 246. H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Eine CDU für ganz Deutschland’ (Speech delivered at 1st CDU Assembly in Hamburg, 1 October 1990), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 338–39. 247. Kohl, Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit, 9. 248.  Kohl, ‘Der Triumph der Freiheit’. 249.  See Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 300, 301. 250. H.A. Winkler. 2001. ‘Ende Aller Sonderwege’, Der Spiegel, 11 June. Retrieved 11 October 2014 from http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-19383801.html. 251.  S. Schmemann. 1990. ‘Kohl, the Man for the German Movement’, New York Times, 1 July.



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252.  See M. Pensky. 1999. ‘Universalism and the Situated Critic’, in S.K. White (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 67–95. 253.  Habermas, ‘Der DM-Nationalismus’. 254. Habermas, Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik, 170. 255.  J. Habermas. 1996. ‘National Unification and Popular Sovereignty’, trans. P. Camiller, New Left Review 219(1), 3. 256.  Habermas in Greiner, Meine Jahre mit Helmut Kohl, 10. 257.  Ibid., 11.

CHAPTER

4

Kohl as Romantic Nationalist

This chapter looks at Kohl as a romantic nationalist who articulated his concept of nation in cultural and ethnic terms detached from the idea of the nationstate. This kind of nationalism has often been portrayed as something typically German and ultimately – as part of the cultural Sonderweg and in opposition to the nationalism of the West – dangerous.1 However, Kohl exemplified a romantic nationalism that was reconciled with, and eventually subordinated to, his liberal nationalism and belief in the primacy of the West, as outlined in chapter 3. Romantic nationalism, as part of Kohl’s personification of the new German normality, did not harm this condition but substantiated it. Kohl’s rhetoric thus demonstrated how romantic conceptualizations of German nationhood could be maintained after 1945 and rehabilitated in the course of normalizing German nationalism. The first part of this chapter places Kohl’s regional socialization in its historical context by focusing on the development of Palatine identity in relation to German nationalism. As much as he used his religious and generational background to strengthen his own appearance as the ‘all-clear’ incarnate, Kohl displayed his Palatinate origin as representative of the Western nature of his unthreatening nationalism and the German character in general. His Heimatidentity was part of a romantic nationalism that went beyond his belief in Germany’s political and territorial unity. It was embedded in his relatively decentralized vision of Germany, Europe and the West as conglomerates of distinct yet interdependent cultural entities. Notes for this section begin on page 163.



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The second part deals more closely with Kohl’s philosophy of Heimat, which can be seen as part of the wider reaction to the post-1968 changes in West Germany. It reveals that Kohl’s promotion of Heimat contained strongly conservative and ethnic nationalist components. To reinforce the de-radicalized representation of German nationalism, Kohl subordinated his romanticization of German Heimat to the political and cultural primacy of the Federal Republic and the West. To be like Westerners, however, he did not think Germans should not live in postnational societies but rather should develop a stronger emotional attachment to their language, history and culture. In Kohl’s world view, this relationship between nation and culture was reserved primarily for ethnic Germans. The third part discusses further aspects of Kohl’s romantic nationalism, which should be seen as both stimulated and constrained by the structural and ideological conditions of his political life. Kohl promoted an idea of Germany as a durable cultural unit that would not be eclipsed by momentary political circumstances. While claiming to represent all ethnic Germans and seeking to lure voters from the extreme right, Kohl was careful not to lend credibility to any territorial revivalism beyond the territories of the GDR and FRG. Furthermore, anti-communism strongly affected his romantic nationalism during the era of division, revealing politics and culture to be interwoven concepts in his world view.The connection between Kohl’s romantic and liberal nationalisms thus brings out an interpenetration of nationalist discourses often thought of as logically opposed.2 To signal normality, he sought to come to terms with the culture of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) without really coming to terms with the singularity of the Holocaust, which had stimulated post-nationalism in Germany in combination with the territorial and political constraints of the era of division. To achieve complete normality, in Kohl’s view, Germans should not only live together in one state but also eventually love their nation as much as other nations in the West did theirs.

The Palatine Kohl’s Palatine background endowed his biographical repertoire with an additional exonerating feature to suggest his embodiment of Germany’s inoffensive normality. He used his regional roots to indicate his Westernness and Europeanness, as well as a kind of Germanness that transcended the Prussiaoriented Sonderweg. To sustain this image, he emphasized the Rhenish mentality of his origin, referred to its geographic location between the Rhine and the French border, evoked the liberal nationalist tradition of Hambach, and romanticized the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire, which had once centred on this region.

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Kohl’s extroversion of Heimat is an interesting phenomenon for one of the most significant political leaders in contemporary European historiography. Before his engagement with the (re)unification process, Kohl’s public (self-) image as the ordinary German from a Western province contrasted with what is usually perceived as charismatic. His Palatine identity conflicted with Max Weber’s definition of a charismatic leader with ‘an uncommon quality of an individual personality . . . with supernatural, superhuman or at least specifically extra-ordinary powers which are not accessible to other individuals’.3 Ignoring the importance of Heimat identity among the people would have proved difficult for any successful politician in the Federal Republic. Still, no other Federal Chancellor showcased his regional origin as strongly as Kohl did. It was a way to idealize German culture and past, and his biography, on the domestic and international stages. He was the man in the street, not from the Sonderweg in Berlin but from the Weinstraße of the Palatinate, which he used as his personal catwalk to represent German normality.4 He sought to signal a typically Palatine habitus when he spoke to the public in a strong local dialect, brought world leaders to Speyer Cathedral and Hambach Castle, and forced them to eat Saumagen in Deidesheim.5 This aspect of Kohl’s identity caught the attention of several biographers. In 1969, Karl G. Simon presented short biographies of the ’45er generation and their career paths in his work Die Kronprinzen (The Crown Princes). The section on Kohl, titled Der Pfälzer (The Palatine) – a title Kohl would later use for himself on election posters – portrayed his regional background as his most significant feature.6 Many ridiculed this aspect of Kohl’s self-representation.The Ludwigshafen journalist Klaus Hofmann later wrote, in defence of his friend, that Kohl ‘had always been proud to be from Ludwigshafen . . . without caring about those who accuse him of being a provincial. Instead, Kohl suspected they are incapable of establishing personal ties’.7 This mediocrity, the personification of West German normality and the allegedly apolitical politician, appealed to the Federal Republican mainstream.8 Werner Maser wrote that Kohl felt himself to be ‘with “heart and soul” as a Palatine’, and marketed this throughout his political career at the federal level.9 In the style of Adenauer, Kohl effectively borrowed the cliché of his westward-looking Rhenish Heimat to embody the Christian Democratic spirit of the 1950s. From today’s perspective, Kohl successfully turned this political self-image into a persistently historic image, as a very recent film about him suggests. Der Mann aus der Pfalz (The Man from the Palatinate),10 which was co-produced by the prominent contemporary filmmaker Nico Hofmann, son of the abovementioned journalist, portrays the young Kohl as ‘idealist, Francophile, and European’.11 Kohl’s regional identity was part of his personal notion of Germany. Historically, the idea of Heimat should not be seen as completely detached from German nationalism. The cultivation of regional identities paralleled and infiltrated the making of German nationhood. As Jürgen Habermas wrote,



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‘given the background of German history, the concept of the nation preserves ties to regionally rooted folk cultures more strongly than is the case with older nation-states’, even Italy.12 Kohl stressed this German attribute in his memoirs: ‘Heimat and fatherland belong together’.13 However, as he used his RhenishPalatine origin to lift Germany out of its Sonderweg image and draw it into a new, European frame, it was thus also part of his idea of Europe, which was primarily a Europe of related nations and regions, rather than a Europe of autonomous states. In Kohl’s personal nationalism, regional, national, European and occidental identities were not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive. In a section of his memoirs entitled ‘Heimat Europa’, Kohl explained his triadic concept of Heimat, consisting of the Palatinate, Germany and Europe.14 In a later interview he explained: ‘my nearer Heimat is not Germany, but the Palatinate. And my fatherland is Germany. Unmistakably, I am German, if you like, even a thoroughly typical German’.15 At the same time, he was, as Thomas Mann wrote, ‘a European German and a German European’. This identity fusion was, in Kohl’s view, ‘the most important change of the modern period’ and today a ‘matter of course’.16 Celia Applegate used Kohl’s home region as a case study to understand the German idea of Heimat, which she considered an integral part of nationalism in Germany over the last two centuries.17 After Napoleon overthrew the territorially splintered Holy Roman Empire and himself was subsequently overthrown, Germany remained a particularistic hotchpotch, despite its reduction to only 38 (later 39) states and free cities belonging to the German Confederation. At that time the Palatinate belonged to Bavaria, though it was not physically attached to this state. Factions of the Palatine bourgeoisie then combined their appreciation of French liberalism with German nationalism as an umbrella for their regional identity, which emerged in opposition to the Bavarian state. The Palatine bourgeoisie’s claim to be liberal and German – and not Bavarian – became most explicit at the Hambach Festival of 1832.18 Kohl wrote about this event in his memoirs: ‘only a few Germans today know that in Hambach our black-red-golden flag was carried for the first time as a symbol of democracy and fatherland’.19 To further emphasize the Westernness of Germany’s early nationalism, he historicized the Hambach Festival as not only a Palatine and national event but also part of the international movement of this revolutionary era in Europe, which aimed, in Kohl’s view, at a ‘federation of European nations’. Kohl wrote that he had arranged to display an original flag at the parliament in Mainz when he was MinisterPresident of Rhineland-Palatinate.20 Interestingly, this memory conflicts with the statements of the Landtag, which note that this flag was previously displayed under Kohl’s predecessor in 1954 to symbolize the uprising of 17 June 1953 in the GDR.21 Kohl should have been perfectly aware that the former ministerpresident, Peter Altmeier, had handed this flag to the Rhineland-Palatine parliament, an event reported in the local Ludwigshafen newspaper, Die Rheinpfalz.22

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However, personal myths matter for the self-image and representation of nationalists, probably even more for politicians. Kohl’s former adviser, the conservative historian Michael Stürmer – who was involved in planning the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) and was also a leading conservative voice during the Historikerstreit – noted, in a section entitled ‘The Grandson of Adenauer’, that ‘in Kohl’s national feeling, Hambach Castle is more important than the Brandenburg Gate, 1848 more alive than 1871, and the Human Rights of the Paulskirche constitution more important than the foundation of the Reich by Bismarck’.23 During the revolutionary upheavals in 1848/49, the twinned leitmotifs of ‘unity’, which meant the demand for a nation-state, and ‘freedom’, which symbolized the claim for liberal reforms, were both situated in resistance to the reactionary particularism that held sway over the loose federation.24 Palatine nationalism was then still opposed to Prussian domination. The Prussian army defeated the radical democrats of the Palatinate, and all Palatine representatives at the Frankfurt Parliament voted against the election of the Prussian king as German Kaiser in March 1848, as Applegate stressed in her history of Kohl’s Heimat.25 However, after the disunited revolutionaries and parliamentarians had failed to reach their objectives and the old order was reinstated in the 1850s, Palatine identity moved from a political towards a more cultural gestalt. Subsequently, the romanticization of German culture as a conglomerate of local history, folklore and landscape gained in popularity.26 At the same time, liberals in the Palatinate, where Protestants constituted a marginal majority, became more supportive of Prussia’s hegemonial ambitions. Austria’s loss in the War of 1866 made großdeutsch visions unrealistic. In 1870/71 the Franco-German War heightened Bismarck’s kleindeutsch nationalism in the region, and the National Liberals of the Palatinate subsequently won all possible seats in the Reichstag of the first German nation-state.27 Kohl himself, however, never mentioned that his Heimat then became a stronghold of the new Bismarckschwärmerei, expressed in the mushrooming of Bismarck monuments in the region.28 As addressed before in chapter 2, Catholics, as a minority in the new, Second Reich of the Germans, were marginalized from the official nationalism.29 Kohl’s Palatine and Catholic identities, however, should be seen in a traditional correlation. As shown before, Kohl could resort to a Catholic tradition of German nationalism. Against this backdrop it is noteworthy that Applegate compared the Palatinate to the bordering region of the Rhineland in the north, where Catholics were in the majority and the local identity was more strongly opposed to Prussian supremacy in Germany. Conversely, the Palatinate the population had a Protestant and liberal majority and a substantial Catholic and conservative sector. Applegate suspected that religious denomination and ideology overlapped not only with class – the bourgeoisie was largely Protestant – but also with people’s general conception of Germany: the poorer Catholics and their clergy mostly abstained from both political agitation and



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local patriotism, tending to favour the old monarchist or großdeutsch models. Catholics’ exclusion from new identities both regional and national was reinforced during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in the newly established nation-state.30 However, Applegate implied, this would be merely an ideal-typological observation. Johann Lukas Jäger (founder of the Konservative und Großdeutsche Partei in the Palatinate) and his son Eugen (representative of the Centre Party in the Reichstag) were examples of Catholics working on the image of their beloved Heimat: they published the Pfälzer Zeitung, including the local history and literature supplement Palatina, which became a central organ of the region’s Catholic Centre Party in 1878.31 This political Catholicism, from which Kohl’s ideological thinking and the later Palatine CDU originated, could thus draw on a tradition of Heimat activism to convey a notion of a diverse, federal Germany opposed to Prusso-German centralism. The cultural regionalism of the Palatine Heimat movement was reinforced in the course of industrialization and the manifestation of the nation-state. Local history and the invention of traditions were increasingly popular in Germany in the late nineteenth century. Various groups focused on nature and culture participated in apolitical romanticization of their local identity, often aiming to mark a contrast to what they associated with modernity and urbanism. Folklore became part of the taste and behaviour of the Palatine bourgeoisie as they attempted to copy those whom they perceived as culturally purer than themselves.32 Activists perceiving their Heimat as original and exclusive amongst the Germans sustained their claims through ethnographic research, historical studies and literature in the local dialect. Applegate, however, pointed out that this neo-romanticism was connected to a general heightening of pride in anything German. German diversity was articulated as a national characteristic.33 Periodically reoccurring romantic revivalism seeking to correct the national image in response to structural changes has been a common theme in German nationalism, one Kohl himself tried to reinforce in response to the manifestation of German double-statehood, the Cold War and the changes associated with 1968, as already suggested in chapter 3. In 1900, the crypt of the Imperial Cathedral of Speyer was opened and large investments financed an exhibit of the findings in the Historical Museum of the Palatinate.34 As mentioned in chapter 2, Kohl took Speyer Cathedral as a symbol for Christian, European and German unity. The diocese has recently published a book about Kohl’s attachment to this site. Since 1967 he has often invited guests to the imperial cathedral, including international visitors such as the Spanish King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, George H. W. Bush and Václav Havel. Kohl was a member of two associations supporting the maintenance of the cathedral (Dombauverein Speyer and Europäische Stiftung Kaiserdom zu Speyer). At the end of his career as Chancellor, the German military played Kohl’s Großen Zapfenstreich (Grand Tattoo) in Speyer in honour of the occasion.35 Stürmer wrote of Kohl that ‘the

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old Reich, this supranational order of peace in the centre of Europe, appeared to him as historically lapsed and unrepeatable, when he looked at it as a whole. From a European perspective, however, [the old Reich] seemed trustworthier to Kohl’.36 The Reichsmythos, which Heinrich A. Winkler held responsible for the German Sonderweg, was in Kohl’s case disarmed and presented as a harmless romanticism of regional, national and European belonging.37 With the occupation of the Palatinate in 1918, the French authorities began to support separatist ambitions in the region.They propagated their own culture and the Palatine character as naturally Francophile and non-German.38 Although by 1924 there were violent uprisings for an autonomous republic, Applegate concluded that the French influence was counterproductive, as it inspired a Heimat consensus against France and in favour of being German. Francophile tendencies never eclipsed the identification with the German people during the interwar period. Even as they remained largely unsupportive of the Weimar Republic, Applegate argued, Heimat activists persistently evinced their solidarity with the German nation.39 Again, it is noteworthy here that, apart from sections of the Palatine clergy that supported the aim of an autonomous state within a national federation, the Catholic milieu of the Palatinate around the Centre Party/BVP predominantly rejected separatism, preferring a strengthened federalist stance, as Martin Schlemmer noted.40 Catholics along the Rhine did not deny their German identity, as Reinhard Richter also demonstrated, but they favoured a more occidental, European notion of their nation.41 Their romantic Lokalpatriotismus was based on the remembrance of the decentralized Holy Roman Empire, their federalism accorded with Catholic ideas of subsidiarity and their anti-Prussian attitude stemmed from the relatively fresh memory of the Kulturkampf. Ideologically, political Catholicism remained fragmented, not only between liberalism, conservatism and socialism, in terms of political ideology, but also between different notions of German nationhood, ranging from pro-Prussian Nationalkatholiken to the west- and backward looking Abendländler.42 The same held for the Rhineland at the political base of Cologne’s mayor and Kohl’s later hero, Adenauer. Francophilia and separatist aspirations in this region did not reach levels sufficient to substantially dilute German nationalism. Instead, the Catholic Rhineland was associated with a ‘special national consciousness’ that was focused on the German nation but at odds with Prussian centralism.43 Adenauer’s involvement in the attempt to establish the Rheinstaat after the First World War continued to cause controversy even after his death. Some West German historians asked whether he really was the German patriot he had pretended to be, or in fact a separatist. One speculated on whether Adenauer had envisaged the Rhineland’s incorporation into France and rejected the Reich outright, or seen only a chance to finally get out from under Berlin.44 Richter argued that in the early 1920s, Adenauer acted as a kind of mediator between anti-Prussianism in the Rhineland and anti-Rhineland



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sentiments in Berlin after he realized that the Rheinstaat was a hopeless undertaking.45 However, the anti-Prussian attitude, rooted most strongly in the predominant Catholicism, großdeutsch visions and Prussian occupation, persisted in the Rhineland. Even after more than a century of Prussian citizenship, the Rhenish population had not developed genuine patriotism towards Berlin. Meanwhile, German nationalism had emerged amongst them as an irrevocable force.46 As demonstrated in the two previous chapters, Kohl modelled himself on Adenauer’s Rhenish-Catholic Westernization, though with a noteworthy geo-ideological variation: Kohl the Palatine managed to impart a greater sense of loyalty to the heritage of the Berlin-centred nation-state than Adenauer the Rhinelander. Both chancellors, however, drew confidence from their Catholic and Rhenish origins to maintain their genuinely pro-European position. When the French left the Palatinate in 1930, the Rhine had become a powerful national symbol.47 A few years later, the Nazis began to impose their idea of Germany, presenting this region as a bulwark against the West. With the Gleichschaltung from 1933 onwards, Heimat organizations were synchronized under the Nazi ideology. In 1935, the Saar region became part of the Reich again to form, together with the Palatinate, the Reichsgau Pfalz-Saar. At the same time, the Nazis invented the Wine Route along the Palatinate Forest. The following year, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. From 1937 to 1940, the Palatinate was part of the Gau Saarpfalz of the Nazi Party; then it became part of the Westmark. At least in the official and the public sphere, the notion of the Palatine Heimat was steeped in the Nazis’ ‘blood and soil’ ideology.48 Kohl contrasted the Rhenish character of the Palatinate to this. In line with the transformation of German nationalism via the downfall of the Third Reich, his idea of Heimat adapted to the Rhenish vision of the new republic. In his memoirs, he quoted from Carl Zuckmayer’s anti-Nazi drama Des Teufels General: From the Rhine. That mill of the peoples of Europe. That great European winepress. And just think of your own ancestors . . . since the birth of Christ . . . They were the best, my dear! The best in the world – and why? Because the peoples have mixed there . . . From the Rhine – that means: from the Occident. That is natural nobility. That is race. Be proud of it, Hartmann!49

In his view, the Palatine’s superiority, which Kohl himself sought to personify, lay in the naturally Western, cosmopolitan character that all Rhenish regions had in common.To be from the Rhine meant to be German and European. For Kohl, the Rhine was a natural force of reconciliation between Germany and neighbouring countries, symbolizing an unchallengeable force for liberty that had turned the population of the Rhenish landscapes into a particular kind of people with an essentially European character.The culture and traditions of the Rhenish people, in his view, refuted the theory of ‘those prophets that wander through our country and claim that being without history (Geschichtslosigkeit) is progressive’.50 He sought to explain this, both to his fellow countrymen at the local level and to Mikhail Gorbachev in June 1989. In his memoirs, Kohl

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remembered a sunny evening that June when he invited the Soviet head of state to the banks of the Rhine to explain to him the inductive logic of its ideological hydropower: ‘look at this river, as it passes by. It symbolizes history, it is not static. You can dam it up – that is technically possible – but it will still find its way to the sea’, the Palatine prophet warned his visitor from Moscow. ‘As surely as the Rhine flows to the sea, just as surely will German unity come – and also European unity’.51 In his Ph.D. thesis, which itself could be regarded as a kind of local history (or Heimatgeschichte), Kohl had described the Palatines as ‘a cheerful and tolerant people, with a strong appreciation for social life and the joys of the time, disliking any kind of dogmatic thinking. The Rhine-Frankish heritage and the . . . French influences may have had an impact’.52 However, he admitted that besides having a largely tolerant sensibility, Palatines were also noisy and had an ‘unpleasant self-assurance’. According to Kohl, moreover, the people of his Heimat had a pragmatic character and little sense for art and intellectual activities.53 Although Kohl did not see the reconstruction of political parties there after the Second World War as fundamentally different from the situation in other German regions, he noticed a typically Palatine atmosphere in relations among the parties after the war. He referred to a delegate who had said, ‘[F]ortunately, even in situations of extreme political conflicts, we were always able to scrape home and agree with a good glass of our good wine’.54 Kohl thus associated his political self-image with the character of his Heimat. He embedded the image of his home region into his ‘anti-ideological’ ideal of the Federal Republican consensus. Furthermore, he used his Heimat identity to suggest that Germans had suffered enough and learned from their shattered history. As he stated during his visit to Czechoslovakia in 1988: ‘I am from the Palatinate, my Heimat has experienced more misery and death than many other regions of my fatherland’.55 To be Palatine meant to embody normality. In 1945, Kohl’s home region came briefly under the control of the U.S. authorities and, that same year, a French military regime. The RhinelandPalatinate Land, founded the next year, did not reflect the cultural and administrative boundaries that had existed earlier. Applegate noted a revival of the Palatine Heimat movement in the 1950s that presented itself as unburdened of the Nazi past, German and culturally Western. New organizations, museum exhibitions, literature, journals and research groups arose.56 Heimat reemerged as a primarily cultural, romantic, apolitical notion and simultaneously served to rehabilitate and revitalize the public sphere. Heimat now was peaceful, having survived the false cultural hegemony of Prussian militarism and the Nazi ideology, and was no longer anti-French. The Hambach Festival regained currency as a symbol of Palatine liberalism, and the old Reich and Charlemagne were recovered as expressions of Franco-German commonality.57 Kohl sought to reinforce this conciliatory mythology throughout his life: ‘both our countries find their common roots in the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne; both use



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the same spiritual sources’.58 In the postwar era, during the Cold War and the early stages of (Western) European integration, the relationship between the two countries was, according to Kohl, ‘not a question between governments, but became long ago a matter of the hearts and the people’.59 In 1976, Kohl stated in Speyer as Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate that the French military forces kept a base in the Palatinate ‘to defend our freedom’.60 After the Second World War, separatism had become an issue in the region again. Kohl focused on this theme in the last chapter of his dissertation.61 As with the other themes in his thesis, he devoted special attention to positive examples of German history – in this chapter, the voices that had opposed separatism in the Palatinate. According to Kohl, when the French took over control from the Americans, many Palatines feared this would be the moment of a separatist revival. He wrote that everyone was aware of the French goal to detach the left banks of the Rhine, or perhaps even annex the region, before the Marshall Plan of 1948. He emphasized that his political mentors, the brothers Finck, had fought against separatism back in the 1920s and continued to object to revived claims for an autonomous republic. The Fincks argued that the Palatines had the right and duty to sustain the unity of the German nation in their region. In his conclusion, Kohl explained the difficult relationship after the Second World War between the reviving political parties, which opposed the partition of their nation, and foreign authorities who were leery of a German central government. In his view, moreover, the French authorities had incorrectly surmised that the Palatines would support separatist ambitions in favour of France.62 The Saarland, which had been geographically and culturally connected to the Palatine region, was not detached from the other German territories to join the Federal Republic until the so-called little reunification finalized in 1957 (see also chapter 1).63 For Kohl, the Saarland referendum of 1955 meant that ‘the people opted for integration into the statist community of the Germans. It was a confession of national unity, of the German fatherland, of its history in good times as in bad’.64 Remarkably, despite Kohl’s usually amicable disposition regarding the French neighbours, he insisted in his memoirs that he and the Palatine CDU had sided with Jakob Kaiser (CDU), then Federal Minister of All-German Affairs, against Adenauer’s pro-French attitude and the ‘Europeanization’ of the Saar area.65 Within the Christian-Democratic spectrum, Kaiser stood ideologically in contrast to Adenauer. The Berlin-based Christian Socialist represented the primacy of unification and saw Germany as a bridge between East and West in Europe. Adenauer, in contrast, personified the Rhenish quest for unconditional Westbindung and the primacy of European integration.66 Until 1949, Kohl preferred Kaiser to Adenauer as CDU leader. Adenauer was twelve years older than Kaiser and seemed less progressive to Kohl.67 Kaiser, who met Kohl at Heidelberg Castle in 1949, ‘entertained close connections to [Kohl’s] mentors Johannes and Albert Finck, whom he supported in their battle against the French policies of secession at the Rhine’. Also

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Peter Altmeier, the Saarbrücken-born head of the Rhineland-Palatinate CDU, propagated the ‘homecoming of the Saar’. Kohl was meanwhile contributing to the CDU’s development in his region as an active member of the CDU’s youth organization Junge Union. Beyond politics, however, Kohl had a very private interest in maintaining national unity: his older sister, Hildegard Gertrey, was married to a Saarländer and lived in the detached territory. Hannelore, Kohl’s wife, helped him smuggle propaganda material into the Saarland via France when they were in their early twenties. According to Kohl, she enjoyed this activity ‘without any nationalistic resentment’; the country had been her ‘great love’ since she had gone there on exchange to study French.68 From an early age, Kohl thus accorded high status to the unity of his nation and sought to reconcile nationalism with Europeanism. Apart from Kohl’s nationalist deviation from Adenauer’s position, his Heimat consciousness familiarized itself with the Federal Republican identity project. On 9 August 1949, five days before the first free federal elections, Adenauer came to rally in the Palatinate. Kohl had promoted the event and sat in the audience. Albert Finck, the brother of Kohl’s mentor, gave a speech that he had published as an editorial in the local daily Rheinpfalz, declaring: ‘a nation has the need to express the ideals on which its political existence rests in form of a celebratory song’.69 Albert Finck proposed the third verse of the Deutschlandlied from 1841, which ‘aimed at the creation of a real national unit’, and described the author, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, as a ‘liberal and nationally thinking poet’ and ‘democratic patriot’. Finck saw the new state as merely provisional, declaring that ‘bringing in the remaining Germans of the Soviet Zone still remains a task in the future’.Yet Albert Finck praised the achievement of the Federal Republic of Germany as the ‘national key state in which fortyfive million Germans will be united’, convinced that they were ‘now founding the material and ideational basis for our fatherland’.70 This day in Laundau was ‘an unforgettable experience’ for Kohl.71 At the before-mentioned launch of Theo Schwarzmüller’s book on Albert Finck, Kohl praised the work of Schwarzmüller, then director of the Institute for Palatine History and Folklore, by stating,‘[D]on’t believe that globalization doesn’t have time and doesn’t leave room for all these traditions: being conscious of one’s Heimat and national feeling remains self-evident for human beings in the future’.72 Patricia Clough argued that, mentally, Kohl never escaped the province.73 He used his regional ties for national and world politics. His Palatine clique was still part of Das System Kohl when he reached the climax of his power during his chancellorship. Kohl always sought to maintain close ties to his Heimat, as his famous ‘Sauna-round’ suggested. Kohl met regularly with friends to relax and talk about current affairs at a Sauna in Ludwigshafen. A broad range of people sweated with Kohl, such as his doctor Helmut Gillmann, who could advice him on health policies, the clerics Erich and Fritz Ramstetter, who helped during the reunification process, and the chairman of the CDU Oggersheim,



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Albin Fleck, who could inform him about the atmosphere at the party base. His schoolmate, Waldemar Schreckenberger (Kohl called him Schrecki) became Kohl’s first Head of the Chancellery in 1982.74 In that sense, Kohl was like prisoner Karl May, who wrote about heroic adventures in landscapes to which he had never been. Like millions of German boys, young Kohl had followed the heroic stories about Winnetou and Hadschi Halef Omar in May’s novels.75 May’s alter egos, Kara Ben Nemsi, Arabic for “Karl the son of the Germans”, and a Saxon in America called Old Shatterhand, stood on top of a moral hierarchy in a world of German virtues. Ludwigshafen’s prominent Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch, still saw the revolutionary aspect of May’s anti-materialist and cosmopolitan moralism.76 Gertrud Oel-Willenborg, on the contrary, perceived May’s writing as ‘romantic flight and not revolution’.77 Kohl’s escape into the micro-nation of his Heimat was an important tool to gain power within his party, to stay in government, and to emanate Entwarnung to the West German electorate.78 His provincialism and performance of Palatine Gemütlichkeit quenched the mainstream’s thirst for normality. His leadership personified rootedness in local traditions as a balance to the cultural degenerations of the modern present. Kohl wanted to be Palatine and typically German, pro-Western but national in character, intellectually humble and tangible. Kohl sought to prove that certain principles would be valid as much at home as in world politics. In trying to embody the eternal warmth and security of Heimat, his conservative image of the eternal homeland conflated a schmaltzy, seemingly out-dated tradition, with the ostensibly progressive movement towards Europe and the West.

Kohl’s Philosophy of Heimat After Kohl had left grand politics, Volker Kronenberg asked the Chancellor of Unity what ‘patriotism’ actually meant to him. Kohl gave a somewhat cryptic response, when he answered that patriotism was part of a basic, human emotion, which had not fundamentally changed ‘since Adam and Eve’. In Kohl’s view, patriotism was similar to the bond between mother and child as reflected by the term Muttersprache (mother tongue). Kohl mistakenly believed that this term could not be correctly translated into any other language but German and ‘reflects the relationship between mother and child as the closest relationship of humankind’. The same held for the uniquely German word Heimat: according to him, ‘where I have learned my Muttersprache, is my Heimat’. He further explained: ‘Muttersprache and Heimat lead to the expression, “I am German”, and ultimately result in patriotism . . . which has a lot to do with emotions’.79 Romanticizing Heimat was one of Kohl’s chief means of managing the structural and ideological challenges of his time. It was part of his conservative revivalism, which fit within his quest for Germany’s departure from the

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Sonderweg. It was also part of a compensatory nationalism that focused on ethnicity and culture in response to the effectively unchallengeable absence of the nation-state. Kohl’s Heimat nationalism should thus be seen as integral to his ideological self-image of German normality, in which national traditions, contained and normalized within the acceptable context of Federal Republicanism, were meant to persist. Regarding the transcendental, romantic implications of the term Heimat, Applegate noted that it ‘dwelt in one world, that of the self-conscious centralizers, modernizers, and nationalists of the General Estate, while evoking another’.80 The vision of the other world, however, varies amongst the imaginations of Heimat, a notion that can be ideologically charged, depending on the beholder. Kohl’s idea of Heimat was more conservative and less visionary than Ernst Bloch’s, even though they had the same geographic origin. Both evoked a communal spirit that had to be strengthened for the future, to cope with the challenges of modernity. However, Bloch conceptualized Heimat as a memory associated with childhood but at the same time with a place no one has ever been.81 In Bloch’s philosophy, Heimat was foremost something people hoped for, something to be realized in the future, in real democracy, in the absence of the working person’s alienation (Entfremdung) and externalization (Entäußerung). Kohl, however, sought to reconcile the intrinsic ambiguity of the ‘modern Janus’ by romanticizing history and destiny without any substantial social critique.82 In suggesting normality, he aimed to mediate between perfect nativeness and modern disaffection, looking into both an imaginative past and a quasi-utopian future. Kohl sought to mask the dark sides of his country’s nationalism and glorified its cultural image as an unprecedented German Gemeinschaft within the industrialized West. The conservative sociologist Helmut Schelsky, who wrote about Kohl’s ‘Sceptical Generation’, attacked Bloch for his ‘adolescent’ romanticization of utopian ideas, which he regarded as empirically dangerous against the previous backdrop of his own (Schelsky’s) delusional support of Nazism.83 Dirk Moses supported Schelsky’s thesis that the ’45ers ‘knew the dangers of utopianism and youthful romanticism because they had experienced them personally in the Hitler Youth’.84 Rüdiger Safranski affirmed also that Kohl’s age group represented a strictly unromantic attitude.85 He described German romanticism’s philosophical development in the last two centuries as a movement seeking aesthetic means to prolong the disenchanted, secularized religious world, a quest that became problematic when romantic ideas entered politics.86 Nevertheless, Kohl’s case shows that these judgements on his generation in the Federal Republic do not hold for certain apolitical notions of German nationhood, even those widely leavened by liberal thought and anti-communism. Kohl loved the symbolic gestures romantic nationalism had to offer, as he was able to reconnect them with the habitus of his political class. He thus went beyond the required conventions when he presented history as something organic and



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emphasized the irrational, emotional, religious, transcendental and moral world that connected politics with the people. He romanticized the world, the nation and ultimately himself – and knew he could thereby gain votes. The conservative Tendenzwende of the mid 1970s encouraged Kohl to develop his neo-romantic rhetoric. In support of Kohl’s first attempt to be elected chancellor in 1976, Frank Hermann wrote that he was one of ‘those politicians of the younger generation, who could risk again using words like Heimat and Vaterland’.87 Like nation and Volk, the Vaterland had by then lost more legitimacy than the seemingly apolitical imaginations and institutionalizations of Heimat. After 1945 and 1968, the public perception of Heimat was less burdened, less suspicious and morally more acceptable than other notions of nationhood. In the 1980s Heimat thus underwent rehabilitation in West Germany faster and more successfully than other, more controversial notions of national belonging, such as patriotism or national consciousness, which Kohl simultaneously sought also to revive.88 Before Kohl came to power in autumn 1982, the conservative paper Die Welt reported on a colloquium at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation under the demanding headline:‘Instead of Constitutional Patriotism – a turn toward Heimat, History and Fatherland’.89 This was exactly what Kohl’s ‘spiritual-moral’ agenda aimed to foster. The Heimat discourse in Germany has been very complex. Different social groups with distinctive visions of modern life appropriated it early on in the ‘short’ twentieth century.90 Similarly, towards the end it also included left-wing and environmentalist representations.91 In 1980, two years after Kohl’s coming to power, Edgar Reitz’s TV series about a fictitious village (near Kohl’s own Heimat) illustrated the ordinary German villager’s culture in a rather differentiated light.92 However, the then centre-left Spiegel concluded, there was ‘no more enthusiasm about progress, but the return to Heimat, regaining of Heimat, and the protection of Heimat: the consciousness of the West German population has changed across society’.93 In the liberal Zeit, the Pomeranian Graf von Krockow reflected: ‘Heimat is not only lie, kitsch, sentimentality. It is not the invention, but the discovery of Romanticism: the lost Paradise. It protects, warms, provides security’. To Krockow, the notion of Heimat always involved feelings of the loss of Heimat itself, which was why Heimat required its own preservation.94 ‘Heimat lies in between the network of the Autobahn’, Karl Korn wrote for the centre-right FAZ. Of the strange revival of Heimat and the question of German national identity as such, Korn observed that ‘under today’s conditions of life, Heimat is, in social-psychological terms, the last worldly refuge . . . Although Heimat is a syncretism, it can allow for a new feeling of commonness like “fatherland” or “state”’.95 Kohl was thankful for this development in Federal Republican culture, as it served to propagate his own personal vision of Heimat, which he sought to invigorate. Still, he was taking up a balancing act by suggesting normality while trying to lure voters from the extreme right and nursing Alfred Dregger’s

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national conservative faction within his own party, as well as the Bavarian CSU. Moreover, he had to be particularly careful with the associated organizations of ethnic German expellees who raised territorial claims under the banner of Heimat. In 1984, Kohl was received with great expectations at the Tag der Heimat of the Federation of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen, BdV) in Brunswick. He dealt with the dilemma by taming the hopes of regaining the eastern lands using purely theoretical, imaginary, romantic language that precluded any concrete revanchism.96 Reverting to his usual liberal nationalist rhetoric, he assured listeners that no further German Sonderweg or territorial claims towards Poland would occur; meanwhile, he adhered to the openness of the German Question, alluding to potential for unification with the lost lands east of the Oder-Neisse line and the constitutional provisions for this option. Kohl then theorized his philosophy of Heimat in more detail: Heimat is a German word which is not translatable into any other language. It makes us think of the compatriots and the landscape, the particularities of our language and our vernacular, of the social and cultural heritage, of history and stories, of tradition and custom, of many things that make life worth living and loving. Heimat is the place or the country where one is born and brought up or where one feels at home because of permanent residence [beheimatet ist]. To it belong people, like family and friends, solidarity with neighbours and cohabitants, familiarity with one’s village, city, region, memories of the parental home, school, and church. To it belong the commitments to values and the ancient ways of life of our Heimat. Heimat derives from the term Heim [home], house and yard, from inheritance and property. Beyond the claim of ownership, however, Heimat first reminds us of the inalienable rights of every human to have a place he feels belonging to and where he finds security. Heimat gives answers to the questions:Who am I, where do I come from, how did I become who I am? . . . Heimat thus means two things: the direct experience of a space and the spiritual relationship to anything that is distinct about that place.97

Thus, Kohl believed Heimat was something typically German, and it was still something very personal and existential in Kohl’s romantic nationalism. It was a community and place of destiny that he portrayed as essential to selfdefinition. This implied a conflict with the representation of the expellees’ loss of Heimat. Responding to the territorial constraints facing the German nation, Kohl therefore resorted to an imaginary, cultural unity and common history to call on all Germans to preserve the expellees’ heritage: their ‘spiritual-emotional relationship’ with their old Heimat would persist ‘also after the loss of its direct relationship – an unalienable memory, consolation and a continuing source of energy’.98 Particularly noteworthy in this respect is that Kohl then established a certain hierarchy of identities: ‘more important, however, is the fatherland. Fatherland – that is not only the Federal Republic of Germany. That is the country, in which our culture has grown over centuries. The diversity of its



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sources and ways of expression has to be preserved’.99 The structural difficulties imposed by the Cold War and the division of the nation therefore helped Kohl elevate the image of a new form of cultural nationhood, contained in both the liberal state of the FRG and the blurrier, primarily immaterial or territorial manifestation of Heimat. For some time this mechanism averted any greater suspicion about Kohl’s personification of normality in the West. In early 1985, however, his ambivalence sparked an international row that lasted for months. Kohl had agreed to speak at the 16 June assembly of the Silesian Exiles’ Organization in Hanover under the motto ‘Forty years of displacement – Silesia remains ours’, which caused nervousness in Germany and abroad.100 The chairman of the Silesian Landsmannschaft, Christian Democrat Herbert Hupka, eventually relented and changed the motto to ‘Silesia remains our future in a Europe of free peoples’. To recover his ideological countenance, Kohl excluded ‘left- and right-wing radicals’ from his representation of Germany and the Federal Republic and absolved the Germans of revanchist ambitions.101 He also asked for more toleration of the Silesian cause: ‘love of Heimat’ would be ‘a very natural, very personal, humane sentiment’ and a ‘source of our identity, of our individuation. It is by no means directed against anyone’. Kohl suggested that the German expellees had ultimately paid a much higher price than others for Hitler’s dictatorship. Meanwhile, Kohl evaded admission of guilt by reminding his audience of the Silesian resistance to Hitler and the injustice done to Germans in the course of the Second World War and its aftermath, mentioning that Catholic bishops had apologized for the wrong done to his compatriots. Further, he thanked the German Silesians for their postwar cooperation in rebuilding the West German state. Kohl compared them to the ancient Egyptians who had turned a desert land into fertile soil. He also stressed that the expellees were not, ‘as hoped by some, social dynamite to the new postwar order in Germany. They have taken the chance for freedom together with us’. Nevertheless, the FRG would remain the ‘custodian’ of the Germans who still lived in Poland. They had the right to maintain their German identity. Kohl thus exhorted the Silesians to ‘keep the memory of your Silesian Heimat awake. The spirit and culture of Silesia are an inseparable part of the history and the human heritage of the Germans and Europeans. They are inseparably connected to the spirit of the Abendland’. He next mentioned some prominent German names from Silesia: ‘such a heritage deserves loyalty and duty’. The preservation of Heimat would require more concern with culture, which, according to Kohl, ‘always means peace. Culture requires the spirit of reconciliation’.102 In Kohl’s rhetoric, the paradigms of Germany’s belonging to the occident, the commitment to peace and European integration overshadowed all four ideological components analysed in this study of his personal nationalism. In this chapter on Kohl’s romantic nationalism, his liberal nationalist method has mainly attempted to streamline persisting nationalist traditions associated with

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Germany’s cultural and political Sonderweg. Yet on this occasion in Hanover, Kohl’s normalization nationalism revealed its limitations. On the one hand, by expressing Bonn’s acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line he failed to offer a realistic hope of German recovery of the Eastern territories in Poland. This caused a furore amongst some neo-Nazis at the assembly and also dampened the mood among the BdV, an important base of CDU/CSU support. On the other hand, Kohl’s reluctance to deny Hupka’s claim that the Reich borders of 1937 were still valid, his affirmation that the German Question had not been answered yet, and his indication that this sensitive issue was beyond his sphere of influence left other countries with mistrustful feelings.103 It is worth noting that the Polish-German Border Treaty was not signed until November 1990. For party-political reasons, Kohl could not risk offending the expellees’ lobby and right-wing electorate within the CDU/CSU during the (re)unification process, as his advisor, Horst Teltschik, pointed out.104 By 1987, when Kohl was reelected, Heimat had become an integral part of his conservative agenda. His aforementioned policy statement was delivered under the slogan ‘Preserving Creation, Mastering the Tasks of the Future’ with a conservative focus on modernity, research and progress.105 Kohl did not fail to stress his belief in the liberal motifs of democracy, the rule of law and the social market economy, though ‘[p]rogress, we know, always had its price’.106 More would be needed to assure the Germans’ happiness: ‘In the modern mass society, as we see in the Federal Republic of Germany, there is a considerable danger of individual loneliness. The revival of local customs and traditions reflects the desire for things familiar, for clarity. The word Heimat has happily become for many the synonym for that desire’.107 According to Kohl,‘[t]he cultivation of regional traditions and local customs is one of the main reasons why our country, notwithstanding all the technological progress, has retained its human countenance’. He therefore thanked participants in ‘in the many local history and folklore associations, music groups and choirs’ and promised to support local sports clubs.108 Kohl’s Heimat romanticism thus not only accorded with the liberal ideal of civil society and could be interpreted as an effort to save the ‘public man’109 but also, Kohl found, helped him gain public sympathy. Heimat thus became a top priority on Kohl’s political agenda, as suggested by an occasion in Canberra in autumn 1988, when he declared: ‘Franz Josef Strauß has died. I have decided to fly back. We will shorten the Southeast-Asia programme. I only want to go to Adelaide, to the many German-Australians, who came and travelled for a thousand kilometres and more to celebrate their Heimat Day. But New Zealand has to be cancelled. We will fly back to Singapore on Wednesday’.110 Significantly in this respect, Heimat, like Volk meant more to Kohl than territory. Like his notion of the nation, Kohl saw Heimat as a vehicle for his self-image and ideology. As a politician, Kohl’s romantic nationalism could serve his image as die verkörperte Entwarnung only as long as it continued to



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fulfil the conventions set by his party, the discourse of the West German public and the international expectation that a German head of government should comply with the European order, which was dominated by a battle of two ideologies. His romantic nationalism, therefore, always intertwined with the liberal nationalism discussed in chapter 3. In March 1988, Kohl spoke at the BdV to celebrate the 200th birthday of the romantic Silesian poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. Kohl again asserted there was no justification for displacing people from their Heimat. In his rhetoric, though, Heimat was always subject to something more important: Germany’s place alongside of the ‘free peoples’ in the West. Kohl argued that ‘this ethically based location supersedes all arguments of geography and cultural history – no matter how bitter this may be’.111 After all, the expellees played only a peripheral role in the Federal Republican nationalism that was much more central to Kohl’s world view and political agenda than the problem of Poland’s western border. In early 1989, at the 700th anniversary celebration of the city status of Haltern, then a CDU stronghold of fewer than forty thousand inhabitants, Kohl repeatedly emphasized the importance of Heimat and community for the democratic and constitutional order. He theorized Heimat as ‘a basic human experience’ that would never go out of fashion.112 Kohl praised the preservation of tradition in the towns and villages, where ‘one still cares about the neighbourhood’ and the ‘anonymity and hastiness of the great cities are unknown’, as a service to the fatherland. In Kohl’s mind, Heimat was thus a quasi-communitarian form of belonging that functioned much like religion: ‘Heimat consciousness .  .  . provides orientation and foothold. It helps the human to find himself, and to recognize his pre-set path in the world. The one who is rooted in Heimat has personal ties, takes heart, and is looking forward’.113 At the same time, however, he maintained that ‘Heimat is so important for our democratic community because the citizens assess the human quality of their life primarily according to their experience within their close environment . . . Heimat and municipality are indispensable preconditions for our democratic constitutional order’.114 What the GDR citizens had experienced would stand in contrast to the natural right to Heimat, which the FRG, on the contrary, could secure by following the principle of subsidiarity. As Kohl explained in his first policy statement as Chancellor of the new German nation-state in January 1991: ‘the one who still believes in the superiority of the total planning from above, overlooks the deeply human meaning of local institutions that provide people with a sense of shelter, feelings of solidarity and with identity – in short: the experience of Heimat’.115 For the 1990s, Kohl once more prophesied that ‘Heimat is not an outdated term, and by no means a case for narrow-mindedness. Without the awareness of one’s own origin, there is no future. The one who has no roots is not capable of openness to others [Weltoffenheit]’.116 Kohl ultimately retained this comprehensive balance between the romantic and the liberal,

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the national and the cosmopolitan, the deeply German and the progressively Federal Republican, to signal the contingency of Germany’s turbulent move towards normality. Kohl’s attempt to portray the German Heimat as something essentially liberal and little short of cosmopolitanism was conspicuously limited in that he reserved it exclusively for ethnic Germans. Kohl upheld the official distinction between ethnic-German immigrants and non-ethnic German immigrants and would not risk exceeding the tolerable limit of Federal Republican nationalism. There are no indications that Kohl’s incumbency as CDU chairman, MinisterPresident or Federal Chancellor involved any representation of non-ethnic Germans. Meanwhile it was part of his duty to attach value to the expellees’ organizations of the and to demand minority rights for Germans abroad.117 Against this backdrop, he had to carefully assure everyone that no ‘fertile soil’ awaited nationalism in the Federal Republic.118 Nationalism was a faux pas, but a critical attitude to the Ausländer would not inflict serious damage on his all-clear image: ‘integration with the aim of assimilation leads to naturalization; integration with the aim of maintaining autonomy and national identity leaves the question of return open and favours their reintegration into their Heimat country’.119 To assure that the so-called Gastarbeiter (guest workers) drawn by the demand for labour during West Germany’s economic boom would eventually leave, Kohl proposed that they should enjoy ‘lessons in their motherlanguage, history, geography and culture of their Heimat country. To maintain the freedom of decision of the individual Ausländer, it is necessary to preserve the autonomy of the national groups’.120 Kohl explained that ‘many guest workers want to return to their Heimat after a few years’, and ‘greater numbers of naturalizations would go beyond the capacity of the Federal Republic’.121 Not only did Kohl demand further restriction of non-ethnic German immigration and encourage re-migration, but he once more thanked the ‘twelve million Heimat expellees and refugees’ of German background for their cooperation in reconstructing the Federal Republic.122 Unlike the Ausländer, Germans who had lost their old Heimat in the East would have the opportunity to find their new Heimat in the Federal Republic.123 At the Kremlin in 1983 and 1988, Kohl spoke of ‘Soviet citizens of German nationality’ who were willing to migrate to Germany.124 According to Kohl, the ethnic German Aussiedler were willing to come to ‘live as Germans amongst Germans’ in the FRG, where the West Germans should receive them ‘with open arms’ to ‘show them our solidarity and fulfil our responsibility that emerges out of common history and compatriotic bond’.125 Kohl demanded the same generosity be granted to the refugees from the GDR. In 1989, when East Germans sought to migrate via Hungary and Austria to the FRG, Kohl reminded his audience in the Bundestag that they deserved to be welcomed as Germans claiming their rights under the Basic Law, not treated as foreigners.126 After (re)unification, Kohl broadly admitted that ‘we owe the Ausländer



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a lot’, though he also repeated an assertion from the Coalition Treaty of 1982, which had sought to foster the myth that ‘the Federal Republic of Germany [was] not an immigration country’.127 Moreover, Kohl stated, the FRG was ‘an ausländerfreundlich (foreigner-friendly) country. That is what the millions of Ausländer who stay with us should know, whom we brought here to help us’.128 He condemned the violent attacks on them as ‘a disgrace for our country. They degrade the image of Germany in the world’. Nevertheless, Kohl clarified that foreigners were not welcomed to Germany anymore, as their ‘persistent influx’ would lead to unsustainable conditions in our cities and municipalities.129 Kohl and his government were later accused of negligence and expediency regarding attacks on asylum seekers in Rostock in August 1992. The journalist Jochen Schmidt argued that Kohl’s efforts to tighten Germany’s asylum law had contributed to the political climate and legitimization of popular anger at foreigners.130 As Hans-Ulrich Wehler pointed out, Germans were reluctant to realize that their country had been one of mass immigration since the late nineteenth century.131 In Kohl’s mind, the receptiveness of German Heimat was reserved for migrants of ethnic German origin, who came primarily from the GDR, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet states.This conformed with legislative provisions that encouraged a romantic perception of German nationhood and claimed national representation beyond Federal Republican statehood: even after the Brandt government’s new Ostpolitik,West Germany never completely recognized GDR citizenship and all East Germans remained entitled to FRG citizenship. According to Article 116.1 of the Basic Law, a German person was one who ‘has German citizenship or whoever lived as a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as his spouse or descendant on the territory of the German Empire on 31 December 1937’.132 Moreover, the Federal Expellees Act of 1953 stipulated that ethnic Germans in the categories ‘displaced person’,133 ‘expellee’,134 ‘Soviet-zone refugee’135 and ‘expatriate’ be granted citizenship.136 Being of German ethnicity required ‘commitment to the German Volkstum’, which had to be confirmed by ‘distinctive features, like ancestry, language, education, and culture’.137 Kohl thus managed to base his ethnic conception of German nationhood on Federal Republican law without greatly undermining his representation of normality.

A Subdued Romantic Kohl’s romantic nationalism was profoundly checked yet also elicited by the ideological and structural constraints of his time. Before a mix of unforeseen events opened the option of unification, West German politicians had resorted to an extra-territorial sense of nationhood, articulated in primarily cultural terms. Kohl took this role very seriously and sought to ignite a national

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revival under his leadership. His cultural perception of nationhood facilitated the romanticization of Europe and the West that he strove to link to the new German identity. Meanwhile, his heavily politicized idea of Germany, particularly regarding the ideological battle with the Communist East, was subject to the political correctness required to signify normality with respect to tolerable territorial boundaries of a united Germany as well as the problematic memory of the Nazi past. Kohl’s romantic nationalist attitude as such was hardly anomalous in West Germany’s political mainstream, which agreed that the unifying essence and authenticity of German nationhood lay in a common culture and volition. Leading West German intellectuals like Grass and Habermas, who opposed state (re)unification, still believed the cultural nation existed. Having emerged in reaction to the structural constraints of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation, German nationalism maintained its repertoire of the Kulturnation (cultural nation) grounded primarily in collective cultural experience. The Staatsnation (political nation), ‘based on the unifying force of a common political history and constitution’, was again absent after 1945.138 Memory of a common political history existed in postwar Germany, but it was not necessarily very pleasant. And as Austria was not considered German anymore, there were now two German constitutions and Staatsnationen: ‘while the West claimed to represent – at least in its citizenship laws – the all-inclusive ethnic Volksnation, both East and West laid claim to the heritage of the one and only Kulturnation’.139 After the shock treatment of the Second World War and the Holocaust, Germany’s official nationalism on both sides broke with the radicalism of the far right that had been increasingly popular since the late nineteenth century.140 But in the absence of a common German nation-state, the maintenance of traditionally apolitical, cultural and ethnic ideas of Germany easily developed anew into compensatory nationalism.141 Thus until 1989/90, West German leaders were inclined, as a last resort, to exploit German nationalism by propagating a common German culture and ethnicity. Somewhat paradoxically, this romantic pursuit for something deeper than geopolitical reality was thus stoked by politicians themselves, in the atmosphere of the Cold War. West German politicians were well aware that social communication was essential to the maintenance of the nation, as Karl Deutsch explained.142 Despite increasing efforts to stimulate German-German contacts in the course of Ostpolitik, however, the notion of Germany remained uncertain, as Karl Deutsch’s student Gebhard Schweigler demonstrated.143 The territorial ambiguity that left Germans struggling to locate their identity, historically and geographically, also allowed for an unusual but somewhat refreshing contestation of the notion of the nation from within.144 To fulfil their constitutional duty, Federal Republican chancellors had to make use of their ‘power of speech’ in Bonn and periodically stoke the flames of all-German nationalism in annual



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reports on the state of the nation.145 In 1968, Kurt Kiesinger (CDU) set the standard in the first report, arguing that German ‘compatriots’ were bound by ‘one language, one history, and one culture’.146 In 1970, Willy Brandt (SPD) declared in his first report that the oneness of the German nation would persist because ‘the notion of nation [that] builds a bond around the divided Germany’ was ‘founded upon the continuing feeling of solidarity of the people of one Volk’.147 Further, Helmut Schmidt (SPD), in his last report in 1982, referred to politicians in East and West Germany who were forced to live outside their original Heimats in West and East Germany as well as in East Prussia with the comment:‘German fates resemble each other’.148 Schmidt then cited Kohl, who came to power shortly thereafter: ‘when the willingness to unity in our Volk can be maintained, the wall and barbed wire will not last in the long run’.149 The romantic nationalist tendencies under Kohl’s chancellorship therefore do not represent a paradigm shift so much as an inflation of an existing nationalist atmosphere that elevated his image of normality.150 Kohl was very self-conscious about the effort he put into his role as the national educator. In early 1989 he reflected that ‘no leading politician during the last years has tried to bring the theme of “national unity” as much into the consciousness of the citizens as I have done’.151 Germany’s division conflicted fundamentally with Kohl’s idea of normality.At Oxford he warned ‘that genuine and lasting peace in Europe will be achieved only when the German people are given the same opportunity as almost all the peoples of . . . the whole world, to determine the course of their own history’.152 Until (re)unification, Kohl never forgot the aim of installing a German nation-state: it was ‘the historical task of all nations on earth to bring about the unity of their Volk. That is a piece of normality in people’s life’.153 However, ‘nation-state’ and ‘nation’ were two different concepts in Kohl’s rhetoric: ‘the nation-state of the Germans is broken. The German nation remains and it will continue to exist;154 moreover, ‘its existence was not at the disposal of governments and majority decisions’.155 He believed that ‘the German nation existed before the nation-state’ and that it had outlived its destruction, as ‘the commonality of history, of language, art and culture, of values and virtues makes unity inalienable’.156 In Kohl’s world view, there were inescapable historical norms.157 When people were reluctant to come to terms with the deeper verities, Kohl pressed forward to help them manifest their real will. This idea of democracy and nationhood drew on the imagination of general will, commonality and consensus. There was always a metaphysical truth, a fact the electorate also had to accept. As already outlined in chapter 3, Kohl thus had never seen the national will to unity as a voluntary or optional value: ‘the unity of the nation [was the] goal of all Germans, as the German national anthem says: we want to strive together for unity and justice and freedom’.158 Despite the realities, Kohl hence declared that ‘the consciousness of national unity is awake as ever – and the will to preserve it is undaunted.This unity finds its expression in common language,

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in common cultural heritage and a long and continuing common history’.159 After all, the ‘division is unnatural. And the solidarity among the Germans is a historical, a human reality, which even politics cannot circumvent’.160 Given the backdrop of Kohl’s romantic idea of Germany, it is interesting that Kohl never publicly mentioned Austria’s status. The state south of the FRG was his main holiday destination, he spoke the same language and had the same religious confession as his Austrian friend Kurt Waldheim, whose dubious past resembled that of many Germans.161 And the cultural differences between Austrian regions and the Palatine were probably no greater than the differences between his Heimat and Northern or East Germany.162 Nonetheless, Kohl never presented Austria as part of his notion of Germany – not even of the Kulturnation, as this would have severely deformed his representation of normality. For Kohl there were only two German states – the GDR and the FRG – and only one future German nation-state, which comprised them both. Oskar Lafontaine (then SPD), Kohl’s major opponent during the reunification process and the first federal elections thereafter, in contrast believed in the continuous existence of what could be called a ‘großdeutsche Kulturnation’.163 Lafontaine argued that common language, history and ideas did not necessarily have to lead to a united nationstate and that the division was an acceptable punishment for Germany’s guilt in the Holocaust. This was a fairly typical view among the critical intelligentsia in Germany, who hovered between cultural nationalism and post-nationalism.164 Noteworthy, however, was Lafontaine’s public portrayal of Germany’s cultural nation consisting of three German states – the FRG, the GDR and Austria – within a European framework. He presented this idea as more progressive than the unification of a ‘kleindeutsche Staatsnation’.165 While pushing the historical legitimacy of this latter option with Berlin as the capital, Kohl had always positioned himself in Adenauer’s powerful shadow, trying to follow his detour around the Prusso-German Sonderweg and assuring everyone that the days of the Bismarckian nation-state were numbered.166 Instead he suggested a cultural idea of Europe as a greater fatherland in which a united Germany would be naturally embedded.167 Traditional notions of national sovereignty had changed, and ‘not sovereign states, but sovereign peoples will accomplish the building of Europe’.168 Kohl later summarized: ‘Europe is, of course, primarily Abendland. Europe is history, the ancient times, Enlightenment and Christianity’.169 However, neither this romantic vision of Europe nor that of Germany can be understood as detached from the postwar and Cold War context.This political atmosphere stimulated Kohl’s firm belief in the Christian Abendland and liberal America as a protector of the old Europe, as indicated in chapter 3.170 The early, romantic idea of Europe and its occidental unity, once defended by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, had in Kohl’s case developed into a neo-romanticism inspired by the ideological, strategic and economic antagonism between East and West and the related absence of the German nation-state that had existed from 1871 to 1945. During Kohl’s life,



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then, the repertoire of German mythology differed fundamentally from that of the early romantics. Moreover, romantic nationalism in post-1945 Germany was no longer directed against the supposedly enlightened rationality of the West, which itself seemed to have been somewhat mythicized by anti-communist hysteria and the glorification of postwar achievements in the liberal FRG. Pursuing his dream of a spiritual-moral change, Kohl co-initiated the founding of two museums.171 In his first policy statement, Kohl had announced his plan to create a museum of Federal Republican history in Bonn: the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ‘dedicated to the state and the divided nation’.172 In 1983, in his next policy statement, Kohl, convinced that ‘keeping awake the consciousness of the unity of Germany and the common culture and history is our task and duty’, confirmed the objective of also creating a historical museum in Berlin, the DHM.173 Kohl’s Geschichtspolitik reflected his wish to strengthen national consciousness among the younger generations. His initiative can thus be seen as a reaction to the postnational trend in Germany.174 The DHM should be ‘a site for self-reflection and self-awareness’ and ‘where the young citizens of our country can feel – even if only subconsciously – where we come from, who we are as Germans, where we stand and where we will go’.175 Habermas accused Kohl and his helpers of advancing neoconservative, apologetic, revisionist tendencies in the guise of securing political legitimacy.176 The opposition also sought to dispel Kohl’s normality image by criticizing his museum projects as an attempt to normalize right-wing perceptions of German history.177 Overshadowing the debates over Kohl’s involvement in these projects was the politicization of the Historikerstreit.178 Kohl insisted he merely wanted to save Germans from a loss of national identity in these difficult times of political division. He maintained that it was his duty to preserve the prospect of unification: ‘the life of our nation has been forced into unnatural channels: politically and economically and, not least, culturally’. The one and only German culture would currently be ‘the strongest bond of common identity of all Germans’.179 According to Kohl, ‘independent from the form of state organization, Germany is always primarily a Kulturnation’.180 As Benedict Anderson remarked, ‘museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political’, so Kohl’s motivation to undertake these projects merits a closer look.181 Another important aspect of Kohl’s romantic nationalism was that it was charged with anti-communist ideology. Kohl believed himself to be continuously battling his antagonists in East Berlin over the prerogative to represent the Kulturnation. He admitted in late 1988 that there was a ‘competition about the values of the common past’ but denied he would claim any ‘monopoly on Luther or Bach, Lessing, Goethe or Heine’.182 Since his early chairmanship in the 1970s, he had realized that ‘the SED has well understood the significance of history. Not for nothing are they using the German Peasant War, the Lutheran Reformation and the French Revolution to legitimize their state’.183 He pointed to the danger that the rulers in East Berlin ‘want to draw a

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direct line . . . from Frederick the Great to Honecker, [presenting] the SED-state as the fulfilment of German history’,184 which would conflict with Kohl’s notion of the FRG as the last response to Germany’s ideological evolution: ‘we are the country of Hegel. We are the country of German idealism’.185 The celebration of Martin Luther’s 500th birthday in the GDR early in his chancellorship had thus been a major concern for Kohl, not because of his own religiosity but rather because of his ideologized nationalism: ‘[Luther] was not a man of the Renaissance and it was not about revolution. He wanted to reform the Church. His translations . . . have formed the German language in a lively and powerful way’. According to Kohl, Luther ‘stood at the beginnings of German culture and modernity.We Germans are not imaginable without the reformer’. 186 At the Luther exhibition of the Germanic National Museum, he stated: ‘the removal of political rule from God’s order would have appeared as a sin to [Luther], the elevation of the nation towards a new deity as an outrage [and] the erection of a state without God as the rebellion of man against his essential destiny’.187 Kohl blamed the GDR leadership for ‘a reinterpretation and appropriation of German history. But never, at any point in time, did the direction of German history point towards the socialist Germany, as the SEDpropagandists always claim’.188 Kohl thus excluded the GDR from the representation of German history in general. The essence of the German nation would be fundamentally opposed to socialist ideology: Whoever celebrates Luther, will in the long term not be able to deny his respect for the Christian conscience. Whoever honours Frederick the Great should follow his maxim that every man must go to heaven in his own way. And whoever wants to naturalize Goethe, must not reject the heritage of Enlightenment . . . Because the real existing socialism does not address the people, the communist one-partyrule seeks legitimacy in a one-sided utilization of German history . . .We must not leave German history and culture to those who want to misuse them. We do not want the people to be manipulated. We want them to get their own idea of who we Germans are and where we stand within the continuity of history.189

Therefore, an assessment of Kohl’s romantic nationalism cannot be detached from his Manichaean world view in the context of the Cold War and the related cultural competition between the two German states. His support for the museums aimed not to encourage appreciation of German history per se, but to preempt the Geschichtspolitik in the East.190 Ultimately, both aspects were necessary to legitimize Kohl’s cultural notion of Germany, in which the Federal Republic was the sole legitimate representative of the ‘positive’ aspects of its history – including the 1953 uprising against the GDR, which he connected to ‘the vision of the patriots of the Hambach Festival in 1832 and the Paulskirche Parliament of 1848’.191 Kohl selected and interpreted German lieux de mémoire in accordance with his liberal nationalist agenda. As chapter 5 will demonstrate, Kohl sought to limit the Nazi past’s ‘negative’ impact on German identity. However, he not only subordinated his



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romantic nationalism to his desire for Germany’s belonging to the West, but also managed to communicate a romantic nationalism that accommodated the memory of the Holocaust. Both virtues were somewhat necessary to assure the representation of normality. When Kohl’s favourite romantic nationalist Friedrich Hölderlin wrote his patriotic poems, he could not have foreseen the ‘catastrophe’ of the Third Reich, whereas Kohl himself had experienced facets of it and subsequently had the chance to reflect upon its greater dimension.192 The first book he bought after the Second World War was Eugen Kogon’s Der SS-Staat.193 Kohl conveyed a new romantic nationalism that adapted to the zeitgeist as the aversion to Nazism slowly infiltrated German culture. Forty years after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Kohl insisted that Germans had learned their lessons from the Nazi past and their ‘responsibility would be expressed in a shame which has no period of limitation’.194 Interestingly, however, Kohl then claimed that numerous murdered Jews, many of whom had been ‘German patriots’, were also ‘messengers of the German and abendländisch spirit’. The Nazi terminology had violated the German mother tongue, he argued; the regime had ‘poisoned the spirit’ and ‘perverted religious belief ’.195 Kohl thus claimed murdered German Jewry for his cultural notion of Germany while excluding Nazism from it. When the German-German rivalry over the official meaning of national history ended in 1990, Kohl’s quest for normality had not yet been totally realized. His hope for a normalized German nationalism entailed first and foremost a comparative element, as Stephen Brockmann suggested.196 Kohl’s idea of normality was in principle a reaction against German particularities in comparison to the West, as stressed in chapter 3. This normality also included a repressed longing for a more unashamed nationalism. He realized that Germans had good reason to be critical after the downfall of the Third Reich, despite his assurances that Germany’s national identity would normalize in the future. Kohl falsely believed that ‘we are the only country in the world where children do not learn the national anthem at school’. In his eyes it was ‘beyond doubt that is not right. The national anthem is the song which brings people together . . . it is a strong melody with a lot of symbolic power’. Kohl praised the emotional patriotism in the United States after the attacks of 9/11 as a positive example for Germany: ‘we, in contrast, are still burdened with complexes from the past’.197

Concluding Remarks on Kohl’s Romantic Nationalism Kohl used his role as a politician to act as a romantic nationalist. This aspect could be analysed as ideal-typologically distinctive from his liberal nationalism. Yet ignoring their correlations and mutual limitations would treat the substance of his normality representation too lightly. Kohl depicted German nationhood as something ethnic and cultural, though subordinated to his ideal of the

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Federal Republic as the symbol of Germany’s belonging to the West. His liberal nationalism was thus powerful enough to suggest the taming of Germany’s cultural Sonderweg, which in 1945 had experienced redirection but not absolute deadlock. Under the appearance of normality, Kohl was able to promote romantic nationalism in Germany. As with the representative repertoire offered by his religious and generational socialization, Kohl could draw on his regional background to personify German normality. He used his Palatine background to suggest an image of a harmless provincial from the Rhine, undogmatic and down-to-earth, looking westwards towards France and the occident. Kohl remembered the Palatinate as the centre of the old Reich, the cradle of German democracy and an epitome of Europe’s diversity. Emphasis on Heimat and regional identity was a key element of Kohl’s romantic nationalism, which suggested that Germany was not foremost a dangerous nation-state but a place of lovable culture. Germany, Europe and the West would each be decentralized, but united through their occidental spirit. Kohl’s emphasis on Heimat was part of his ‘moral-spiritual’ agenda, which reflected the conservative climate change in West Germany from the mid 1970s onwards. By retreating as much as possible into the sphere of the imaginary and allegedly apolitical, he could avert any damage to the fragile normality picture. Upholding this image was a balancing act for Kohl, especially when he sought to contain the voices of the expellees and the outer spectrum of the Federal Republican right wing. Still, he tried hard not to cross the boundary of the socially acceptable, warned against retrogression to Germany’s position outside the West and managed to retain the German Heimat as something ethnic and exclusive – and conforming with Federal Republican legislation. Kohl’s attempts to represent normality reveal a good deal of political instinct. However, when testing the boundaries of what was politically correct during this quest, he was also prepared to cross them. His example demonstrates that Germany never fully deviated from the ‘special path dependence’ on a cultural and ethnic conception of German nationality that found further fertile ground in the absence of the nation-state. Kohl entertained the benign but tenacious romantic nationalism of the West German mainstream, which had difficulty coming to terms with the territorial arrangements of the postwar era, the ideological context of the Cold War and the persistent memory of Nazism. This framework held sway over Kohl’s idea of Germany, Europe and the West. The united Germany Kohl dreamt of comprised only the territory of the FRG and GDR. However, he excluded socialism and the GDR regime from any representation of German culture and history. His romantic nationalism was thus highly charged with anti-communism and can hardly be seen as independent from his liberal nationalism.Yet at a lower level of abstraction, this focus on Kohl’s romantic nationalism reveals that his quest for normalization featured a paradoxical emphasis on particularities of German nationalism, national culture, language, history and associated emotions. At long last, the search for unique



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national characteristics in a world of nations was shown to be normal.To assure the world that these uniquely German features were no longer dangerous, Kohl continued to signal the ‘all-clear’.

Notes Parts of this chapter have previously been published as C. Wicke. 2013. ‘A Romantic Nationalist?: Helmut Kohl’s Ethnocultural Representation of his Nation and Himself ’, in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 19(2), pp. 141-62. 1.  See, e.g., Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism; Kohn, The Mind of Germany; Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. 2.  Patten, ‘The Autonomy Argument for Liberal Nationalism’, 1. 3. M. Weber. 1994. ‘Charismatic Authority’, in W. Heydebrand (ed.), Sociological Writings, trans. M. Black, New York: Continuum, 32–33. 4.  For a debate on the normalization of Germany and ‘Neue Unbefangenheit’, as announced by Kohl’s successor, Gerhard Schröder (SPD), see Taberner and Cooke, German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century. 5.  H. Crolly. 2010.‘Pfalz:“Deidesheimer Hof ”: Kohls zweites Wohnzimmer’, Die Welt, 4 April. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article7036286/ Deidesheimer-Hof-Kohls-zweites-Wohnzimmer.html. 6.  K.G. Simon. 1969. Die Kronprinzen: Eine Generation auf dem Wege zur Macht, Hamburg: Deutscher Bücherbund, 56–70; ‘Pfälzer für den Pfälzer’ (campaign poster). 1976. StALu/PGV 02/680. 7. Hofmann, Helmut Kohl: Kanzler des Vertrauens, 19. 8.  H.M. Enzensberger. 1991. ‘Mittelmaß und Wahn: Ein Vorschlag zur Güte’, in Mittelmaß und Wahn: Gesammelte Zertreuungen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 9. Maser, Helmut Kohl, 91–92. 10. T. Schadt (director). 2009. Der Mann aus der Pfalz, ZDF. 11.  P. Arens. 2009. ‘Der Mann aus der Pfalz: Charakterstudie als großer Fernsehfilm’, ZDF Jahrbuch: Programm des Jahres, 142–44. Retrieved 13 October 2014 fromhttp://www.zdf-jahrbuch. de/2009/_pdf/ZDF%20JB2009%20Programme%20des%20Jahres.pdf. 12. J. Habermas. 1985. ‘Introduction’, in J. Habermas (ed.), Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age”, 3rd ed., trans. A. Buchwalter, Cambridge: MIT Press, 17. 13. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 28. 14.  Ibid., 29–30. 15.  V. Kronenberg. 2006.‘Bundeskanzler a.D. Dr. Helmut Kohl’ , in Patriotismus in Deutschland: Perspektiven für eine weltoffene Gesellschaft, 2nd ed., Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 338. 16. Ibid. 17. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 3–4. 18.  Ibid., 26–27. 19. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 26. 20.  Ibid., 26–27. 21.  Der Präsident des Landtags Rheinland-Pfalz (ed.). 2007. Symbol für Freiheit, Einheit und Demokratie: Die Hambacher Fahne im Landtag Rheinland-Pfalz, Mainz: Landtag Rheinland-Pfalz. 22.  Die Rheinpfalz. 1954. ‘In tiefer Anteilnahme: Feier zum 17. Juni in Mainz – Hambacher Fahne im Landtag’, 16 June. 23.  M. Stürmer. 1990. ‘Der Enkel Adenauers’, in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 284. 24.  For a good study of the public debate and the different ideological strands that developed under the leitmotifs of ‘unity and freedom’, written from a Hanoverian perspective, see A.

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Bethmann. 2000. Freiheit und Einheit als Leitmotive in der öffentlichen Debatte um die Neuordnung Deutschlands: Eine Studie zur Geschichte der Revolution von 1848/49 im Königreich Hannover, Hamburg: Dr. Kovac. 25. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 27. 26.  Ibid., 31; see also J. Sperber. 1991. The Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1948–49, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 27. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 30. 28. Schwarzmüller, Albert Finck und die Nationalhymne, 21. 29. E. Lovell Evans. 1981. The German Center Party 1970–1933: A Study in Political Catholicism, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 20–21. 30. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 52–53. 31.  Ibid., 54–55. 32.  Ibid., 77–78. 33.  Ibid., 180. 34.  Ibid., 97. 35.  Archiv des Bistums Speyer (ed.). 2010. Deutschland, Europa und die Welt zusammenführen: Helmut Kohl und der Dom zu Speyer, Annweiler: Pilger. 36.  Stürmer in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 284. 37. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2. 38. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 123. 39.  Ibid., 126, 193. 40.  M. Schlemmer. 2007. “Los von Berlin”: Die Rheinstaatbestrebungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Cologne: Böhlau, 598–600. 41. Richter, Nationales Denken im Katholizismus der Weimarer Republik, 271. 42.  Ibid., 141–55, 263–353. 43.  Ibid., 266. 44.  Der Spiegel. 1976. ‘Mit einem ganzen Land auf dem Rücken’, 23 February. 45. Richter, Nationales Denken im Katholizismus der Weimarer Republik, 271. 46. Ibid. 47. Schlemmer, “Los von Berlin”, 513. 48. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 206. 49. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 29. 50.  General-Anzeiger. 1974. ‘Helmut Kohl: Linz birgt den Charme der rheinischen Lande und Menschen in sich’, 20 May. 51. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 889. 52. Kohl, Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945, 48. 53. Ibid. 54. Kohl, Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945, 160. 55.  Der Spiegel. 1998. ‘“Ich komme aus der Pfalz”: Helmut Kohls Aufritt in der Tschechoslowakei’, 1 February. 56. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 229–33. 57.  Ibid., 234–36, 240–43. 58. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 3, 604, 774–76. 59.  Die Rheinpflalz. 1976. ‘Kohl: Franzosen verteidigen unsere Freiheit: “Nicht mehr Sache der Regierungen” – Pfälzische Brigade übte Zusammenarbeit am Rhein’, 18 May. 60.  Die Rheinpflalz, ‘Kohl: Franzosen verteidigen unsere Freiheit’. 61. Kohl, Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945, 148–53. 62.  Ibid., 148, 152, 159. 63.  H. Elzer. 2008. Konrad Adenauer, Jakob Kaiser und die “kleine Wiedervereinigung”, St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag. 64. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 97. 65.  Ibid., 94–95. 66. Elzer, Konrad Adenauer, Jakob Kaiser und die “kleine Wiedervereinigung”, 65.



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67. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 72. 68.  Ibid., 64, 95–96. 69.  Finck, ‘Das Deutschlandlied’. 70. Ibid. 71. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 72. 72.  H. Kohl. 2002. Recorded speech, delivered at the launch of Theo Schwarzmüller’s book Albert Finck und die Nationalhymne, Stadthalle of Landau), StALu/PGV2/598. 73. Clough, Helmut Kohl, 37. 74.  For a detailed illustration of ‘Das System Kohl’ see H.P. Schütz. 1997. ‘Das System Kohl: Die kleine Welt des Helmut Kohl’, Der Stern, 20 February. 75. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 28. 76.  E. Bloch. 1959. Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 427; E. Bloch. 1962 [1935], Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 172; see also G. Dijkink. 1996. National Identity and Geopolitical Visions: Maps of Pride and Pain, New York: Routledge, 20–23; and B. Hüppauf. 2005. ‘Spaces of the Vernacular: Ernst Bloch’s Philosophy of Hope and the German Hometown’, in M. Umbach and B. Hüppauf (eds), Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 77.  G. Oel-Willenborg. 1973. Von deutschen Helden: Eine Inhaltsanalyse der Karl-May-Romane, Weinberg: Beltz, 146. 78. Bahners, Im Mantel der Geschichte, 20. 79.  Interview with Kohl in Kronenberg, Patriotismus in Deutschland, 338. 80. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 8. 81. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 16, 28. 82.  Nairn, ‘The Modern Janus’, 1; Nairn, Faces of Nationalism. 83. Schelsky, Die Skeptische Generation; H. Schelsky. 1979. Die Hoffnung Blochs: Kritik der marxistischen Existenzphilosophie eines Jugendbewegten, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. 84. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 64. 85.  R. Safranski. 2007. Romantik: Eine Deutsche Affäre, Munich: Carl Hanser, 377. 86.  Ibid., 13. 87. F. Hermann. 1976. Helmut Kohl: Vom Kurfürst zum Kanzler, Person, Politik, Programm, Stuttgart: Bonn Aktuell, 10. 88. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 246. 89. A. Schützsack. 1982. ‘Statt Verfassungspatriotismus Hinwendung zu Heimat, eigener Geschichte und Vaterland’, Die Welt, 14 September. 90. For example of the Deutscher Werkbund, see M. Umbach. 2005. ‘The Deutscher Werkbund, Globalization, and the Invention of Modern Vernaculars’, in Umbach and Hüppauf, Vernacular Modernism, chapter 4. 91.  A. Goodbody. 2002. ‘Environmentalism in Germany: Anxieties, Visions, Realities’, in A. Goodbody (ed.), The Culture of German Environmentalism, Oxford: Berghahn, 42. 92.  K. Barkin. 1991. ‘Film review of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat – Eine deutsche Chronik’, American Historical Review 96(4), 1124. 93.  Der Spiegel. 1984. ‘Sehnsucht nach Heimat’, 1 October, 252. 94.  C. Graf von Krockow. 1984. ‘Heimat’, Die Zeit, 5 October. 95.  K. Korn. 1985. ‘Verbundnetz Heimat’, FAZ, 27 April. 96.  H. Kohl. 1986. ‘Politik der Verständigung im Interesse des Friedens’ (Speech delivered at the Tag der Heimat, Braunschweig, 2 September 1984), in Zur Teilung Deutschlands und Europa: Zusammenhänge, Perspektiven, Aufgaben, Bonn: Europa Union, 51–70. 97.  Ibid., 52–54. 98.  Kohl, ‘Politik der Verständigung im Interesse des Friedens’, 54. 99.  Ibid., 51–70. 100.  The Economist. 1985. ‘Silesian Slip’, 2 February; C. Tréan. 1985. ‘Le chancelier Kohl s’expose à une nouvelle vague de critiques en participant au congres des Silésiens’, Le Monde, 15 June.

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101. H. Kohl. 1985. ‘Deutschlandtreffen der Schlesier 1985’ (Speech in the brochure by the Landsmannschaft Schlesien, Nieder- und Oberschlesien e.V.); Königswinter: Archiv der Landsmannschaft Schlesien, 40. 102.  Ibid., 40–42, 48–53. 103.  Ibid., 44–45; A.Tomforde. 1985.‘Neo-Nazis heckle Kohl at Silesian rally’, The Guardian, 17 June; Bundeskanzler Kohl hat sich praktisch mit dem revanchistischen Programm der Schlesier einverstanden erklärt, media release. 1985. Bonn: BPA/Ostinformationen [Radio Moskau], 24 June. 104.  H. Teltschik. 1996. 329 Tage: Innenansichten der Einigung, Berlin: Siedler, 14. 105. H. Kohl. 1987. Preserving Creation, Mastering the Tasks of the Future: government policy 1987–1990 (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 18 March), trans. BPA, Bonn: BPA. 106.  Ibid., 11. 107.  Ibid., 27–28. 108.  Ibid., 28. 109.  See, for example, J. Habermas. 1965. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Berlin: Hermann Luchterland; R. Sennett. 1976. The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Putnam, Making Democracy Work; R.D. Putnam. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon and Schuster. 110.  K. Hofmann. 1988. ‘Der Kanzler ringt um Fassung’, Die Rheinpfalz, 4 October. 111.  Kanzler Kohl gegen Sonderrolle Deutschlands zwischen Ost und West, media release. 1988. Hamburg: DPA, 10 March. 112.  H. Kohl. 1989. Die Bedeutung von Heimat und Gemeinde für die demokratische Verfassung, media release. Bonn: BPA Bulletin 13, 8 February, 125. 113. Kohl, Die Bedeutung von Heimat und Gemeinde für die demokratische Verfassung, 125; see also General-Anzeiger, ‘Helmut Kohl: Linz birgt den Carme der rheinischen Lande und Menschen in sich’. 114. Kohl, Die Bedeutung von Heimat und Gemeinde für die demokratische Verfassung, 125. 115.  Deutscher Bundestag. 1991. ‘Policy Statement’, 30 January (Plenarprotokoll 12/5) (Helmut Kohl), 78. 116. Ibid. 117.  Landtag Rheinland-Pfalz. 1975. 7th Parliamentary Sitting, 5 November (Drucksache 8/461), 221. 118.  H. Kohl. 1974. (Speech delivered at the Tag der Danziger, 5 May), unedited manuscript, KAS/Kohl/Reden, 6. 119. Kohl, Zwischen Ideologie und Pragmatismus, 80. 120. Ibid. 121.  Ibid., 81. 122.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Koalition der Mitte: Für eine Politik der Erneuerung (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 13 October 1982),in Reden 1982–1984, 16, cf. 25–26. 123.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Bericht zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag, 23 June 1983), in Reden 1982–1984, 222. 124.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Besuch inder Sowjetunion vom 4. bis 7. Juli 1983’ (Speech delivered at the Kremlin, Moscow, 4 July 1983), in Reden 1982–1984, 253–64, 263; H. Kohl. 1989. ‘Die Chance zu guter Nachbarschaft nutzen’ (Speech delivered at the Kremlin, Moscow, 24 October 1988), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, Bonn: BPA, 213. 125. H. Kohl. 1989. ‘Deutsche Wiedervereinigung und Europa’ (Speech delivered at the Bundestag, Berlin, 1 December 1988), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 237–60, 257. 126. H. Kohl. 1989. ‘Deutsche Frage auf der Tagesordnung der Weltpolitik’ (Speech delivered to the Deutscher Bundestag, Bonn, 5 September 1989), in Reden und Erklärungen zur Deutschlandpolitik, Bonn: BPA, 11. 127.  Deutscher Bundestag. 1991. ‘Policy Statement’, 30 January (Plenarprotokoll 12/5) (H. Kohl), 84. 128.  H. Kohl. 1991. ‘Report as CDU Chairman’, 15 December, Second Party Congress of the CDU Deutschlands, Dresden (Protocol), 34. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.kas.de/



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upload/ACDP/CDU/Protokolle_Parteitage/1991–12–15–17_Protokoll_02.Parteitag_Dresden. pdf. 129.  H. Kohl. 1992. ‘Als Christen auf dem Weg ins geeinte Europa’ (Speech delivered at the Evangelische Arbeitskreis der CDU/CSU, Wittenberg, 29 September 1992), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 426. 130.  J. Schmidt. 2002. Politische Brandsstiftung: Warum 1992 in Rostock das Ausländerwohnheim in Flammen aufging, Berlin: Edition Ost, 185. 131. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 5, 40. 132.  See Jarausch and Gransow, Uniting Germany, 7. 133.  Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge (Bundesvertriebenengesetz) (Federal Expellees Act, Germany, 19 May 1953). BGBL I, 1953, 1902 (BVFG), Art. 1. 134.  BVFG, Art. 2. 135.  BVFG, Art. 3. 136.  BVFG, Art. 4. 137.  BVFG, Art. 6(1). 138. F. Meinecke. 1928. Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des Deutschen Nationalstaates, 7th ed., Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 3. 139.  B. Weisbrod. 1996. ‘German Unification and the National Paradigm’, German History 4(2), 198. 140.  See G. Eley. 1980. Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust. 141. See O. Dann. 1995. ‘Nationale Fragen in Deutschland: Kulturnation, Volksnation, Reichsnation’, in E. Francois et al (eds), Nation und Emotion, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 66–82. 142. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication. 143. Schweigler, National Consciousness in Divided Germany. 144. W. Weidenfeld (ed.). 1983. Die Identität der Deutschen: Fragen, Positionen, Perspektiven, Munich: Goldmann. 145. For an interesting study of Australian Prime Ministers and their representation of nationhood see Curran, The Power of Speech. 146.  K.G. Kiesinger. 1968. Bericht über die Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland (Speech delivered to the Bundestag), media release. Bonn: BPA Bulletin 315, 11 March, 7–8. 147.  W. Brandt. 1970. Bericht zur Lage der Nation (Speech delivered to the Bundestag), media release. Bonn: BPA Bulletin 39, 14 January, 4. 148.  H. Schmidt. 1982. Erklärung der Bundesregierung zur Lage der Nation vor dem Deutschen Bundestag (Speech delivered to the Bundestag), media release. Bonn: BPA Bulletin 82, 9 September, 18. 149.  Ibid., 21. 150.  For an analysis of Kohl’s annual reports on the state of the nation, see M. Fröhlich. 1997. Sprache als Instrument politischer Führung: Helmut Kohls Berichte zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland, Munich: Schriftenreihe der Forschungsgruppe Deutschland 8. 151.  Süddeutsche Zeitung. 1989. ‘Wir müssen in schwierigen Zeiten unseren Weg gehen’ (Interview with Helmut Kohl), 3 February. 152.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Die Deutsche Außenpolitik- Das Erbe Konrad Adenauers’ (Adenauer Memorial Lecture, Oxford, 2 May 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 376–88, 385. 153.  H. Kohl. 1979. (Speech delivered at a local CDU assembly, Lahr, 28 April), unedited manuscript, KAS/Kohl/Reden. 154.  Kohl, ‘Koalition der Mitte’, in Reden 1982–1984, 9, 43. 155. H. Kohl. 1984.‚ ‘Zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag, 22 June 1983), in Reden 1982–1984, 221, 222. 156. H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag 15 March 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 344, 350, 363.

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157. Bahners, Im Mantel der Geschichte, 54. 158.  H. Kohl. ‘Ziel bleibt die Einheit der Nation’ (Speech delivered at the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, Berlin, 13 August 1986), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 35–46, 46. 159.  H. Kohl. ‘Ein Maximum an Miteinander und Begegnungen’ (Speech delivered during Erich Honecker’s visit, Bonn, 7 September 1987), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 121–29. 160.  Kohl in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 220. 161.  Kohl’s Waldheim affair will be addressed in the next chapter. 162. See R.J. Evans. 1997. Rereading German History 1800–1996: From Unification to Reunification, London: Routledge, 215. 163. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2, 538–41. 164. Even Habermas, the main advocate of ‘constitutional patriotism’, was not completely free from all forms of national imagination. He used the term Kulturnation during the Historikerstreit, thus revealing that his own form of nation imagination extended beyond mere national shame; see J. Habermas. 1987. ‘Eine Art Schadensabwicklung’, in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 75. 165. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2, 539–40. 166.  H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Die Deutsche Außenpolitik – das Erbe Konrad Adenauers (Adenauer Memorial lecture in Oxford, 2 May 1984) in Reden 1982–1984, 379–80; Kohl, ‘Kontiuitiät und Fortschritt’, 315. 167.  Deutscher Bundestag, ‘Bericht zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’, 122nd Parliamentary Sitting, 27 February 1985 (Plenarprotokoll 10/122) (Helmut Kohl), 9012. 168.  FAZ. 1989. ‘Nicht souveräne Staaten, sondern souveräne Völker werden den Bau Europas vollenden’, 2 September. 169.  Interview with Kohl, in Kronenberg, Patriotismus in Deutschland, 338. 170. See also A. Schildt. 1999. Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur westdeutschen Ideenlandschaft der 50er Jahre, Munich: Oldenbourg, 34. 171. For two valuable accounts on Kohl’s politics of the past, see S. Moller. 1998. Die Entkonkretisierung der NS-Herrschaft in der Ära Kohl, Hanover: Universität Hannover, and Seuthe, Geistig-moralische Wende? 172.  Kohl ‘Koalition der Mitte’ in Reden 1982–1984, 43–44. For a collection of opinions regarding the establishment of the museum in Bonn, see: H.W. Hütter (ed.). 1991. Einstellungen: Kritik, Kontroversen, Konsens. Bonn: Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 173.  H. Kohl. 1984.‘Programm der Erneuerung: Freiheit, Mitmenschlichkeit,Verantwortung’ (policy statement at the Bundestag, 4 May 1983), in Reden 1982–1984, 115–63, 159, 161–62. For a more detailed account of the debates surrounding the DHM, see C. Stölzl (ed.). 1988. Deutsches Historisches Museum: Ideen, Kontroversen, Perspektiven, Berlin: Propyläen, and also M. Mälzer. 2005. Ausstellungsstück Nation: Die Debatte um die Gründung des Historischen Museums in Berlin, Gesprächskreis Geschichte 59, Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Retrieved 13 October 2014 fromhttp://library.fes.de/pdf-files/historiker/02952.pdf. 174. H. Kohl. 1984 ‘Zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag, 15 March 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 344–64, 449. 175.  Deutscher Bundestag, ‘Bericht zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’, 9017. 176.  For the Protocol of the Hearing ‘zum Deutschen Historischen Museum’, organized by the SPD Bundestag faction in Bonn, see Stölzl, Deutsches Historisches Museum, 333–85. 177. This debate (Bundestag, 4 December 1986) offers an outstanding documentation and review of Kohl’s geschichtspolitisch scandals, which I shall discuss in the next chapter; see Deutscher Bundestag, 253rd Parliamentary Sitting, 4 December 1986, (Plenarprotokoll 10/253). 178.  For a collection of historical debates on the singularity of the Holocaust, see Augstein, Historikerstreit; for an English translation, see R. Augstein. 1993. Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. J. Knowlton and T. Cases, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. See also Maier, The Unmasterable Past, and G. Eley. 1988. ‘Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit 1986–1987’, Past and Present 121(1), 171.



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179.  H. Kohl. ‘Kultur und Geschichte als gemeinsames Erbe der Nation’ (Speech delivered during the ‘Kulturdebatte’ to the Bundestag, 4 December 1986, Bonn), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 65–72, 65. 180.  Ibid., 66. 181. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 178. 182. H. Kohl. 1989, ‘Deutsche Wiedervereinigung und Europa’ (Report ‘zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ to the Bundestag, 1 December 1988), in Reden: Zu Fragen der Zukunft, 248. 183.  H. Kohl. 1973. ‘Der 17. Juni 1953. 20 Jahre Danach’ (Speech delivered at CDU/CSU event, Berlin-Charlottenburg Sporthalle, Berlin, 17 June), KAS/Kohl/2/293. 184.  H. Kohl. 1980. ‘Perspektiven deutscher Außenpolitik für die 80er Jahre’ (Speech delivered to the Wirtschaftstag ’80, Frankfurt, 18–19 July) KAS/Kohl/Reden. 185.  Kohl, ‘Perspektiven deutscher Außenpolitik für die 80er’. 186. H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag, 23 June 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 221–39, 224–25. 187. H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Zum 500. Geburtstag von Martin Luther’ (Speech delivered at the exhibition ‘Martin Luther and the Reformation in Germany’, Nuremberg, 24 June 1983), in Reden 1982–1984, 240–47, 243. 188. Kohl, ‚Zur Lage der Nstion im geteilten Deutschland‘ (15 March 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 348. 189.  Deutscher Bundestag, 253rd Parliamentary Sitting, 4 December 1986 (Plenarprotokoll 10/253), 19659–9660. 190. See M. Fulbrook. 1998. ‘DDR-Geschichtswissenschaft und Geschichtspolitik’, in G. Iggers et al. (eds), Die DDR-Geschichtswissenschaft als Forschungsproblem, Historische Zeitschrift 27, Munich: Oldenbourg. 191.  Deutscher Bundestag, ‘Bericht zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’, 122nd Parliamentary Sitting, 27 February 1985 (Plenarprotokoll 10/122) (Helmut Kohl), 9011. 192. W. Kempowski. 1976. ‘Was lesen Sie Herr Kohl?’, Zeit Magazin, 20 August. This interview with Kohl concerned his favourite literature. 193. See E. Kogon. 1947. Der SS-Staat: Das System der Deutschen Konzentrationslager, Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer. 194.  H. Kohl. 1988. ‘Das Geheimnis der Erlösung heißt Erinnerung’ (Speech delivered at the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the inmates of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, 21 April 1985), in Die Unentrinnbare Gegenwart der Geschichte, Bonn: BPA, 5–18, 13, 16. 195.  Ibid., 8, 10. 196.  S. Brockmann. 2006. ‘“Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl’s Vision Been Realized?’ in Taberner and Cooke, Beyond Normalization, 17–29. 197.  Interview with Kohl, in Kronenberg, Patriotismus in Deutschland, 338.

CHAPTER

5

Kohl as Nationalist Historian

This chapter looks at Kohl as a nationalist historian who used history to legitimize his personal nationalism and political ideology, and actively sought to shape his nation’s historical culture by putting a particular historical consciousness into political practice.1 ‘History’ played a crucial, continuous role in his political rhetoric. He presented himself as understanding grand politics primarily in terms of historical processes, with the German nation as the principal category of interpretation. In Kohl’s world view, the nation was a fixed entity in the stream of history; any degradation of this unit was an ahistorical, unnatural aberration from the universal norm of the modern world. Thus, Kohl demanded, Germans must rediscover their ‘historical consciousness’ to be able to realize their actual essence as other nations had done. The world, and the Germans themselves, should finally recognize that the ‘all-clear signal’ was overdue, since German history was more positive than generally thought. Kohl strove to defuse the memory of Nazism in order to improve his nation’s reputation and discourage Germans from holding an overly critical, postnational idea of Germany. The first part examines the context of Kohl’s educational socialization, particularly his years at the University of Heidelberg in the 1950s. By 1958, when he received his Ph.D. in history on the postwar reconstruction of political parties in the Palatinate,2 Kohl had been actively engaged with the CDU for many years, and his primary interest was party politics, not historical science. However, each interest influenced the way he pursued the other. His thesis Notes for this section begin on page 198.



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highlighted allegedly positive continuities in German politics and concealed ‘negative’ features of German history. He wrote it within an atmosphere of restoration, renewal and adaptation that nonetheless was still overshadowed by the Cold War.There was no zero hour in most segments of the Federal Republican society, and Kohl’s alma mater was no exception. Former Nazis were whitewashed and remained part of academia, trying to justify or obscure the past. Kohl’s dissertation reflected this zeitgeist. It was an early attempt to suggest normality by presenting the political culture of the Federal Republic not as an essentially new development, but as a product of valuable ideological traditions that had existed throughout the German empire, the Weimar Republic and the resistance movement during the Nazi era. The thesis was not intended to discover the reasons for Nazism but rather to bolster the foundation myth of the West German state. The second part further demonstrates Kohl’s method of relativizing the Nazi past on the basis of allegedly positive continuities in German history, which reflected his desire to normalize German nationalism under Western formulas. This method was a crucial part of Kohl’s Geschichtspolitik.3 Kohl suggested that the Germans had suffered enough under Hitler and the perpetual memory of Nazi crimes. A more positive picture of the German past was needed to convince all people that German history was more than an abnormal historical trajectory leading to 1945. In fact German ideology was, in Kohl’s version of history, naturally opposed to Nazism. Kohl urged Germans to realize their liberal heritage by seeing it in the longue durée, unburden themselves from the genocidal past and remember their historical entitlement and legal right to be united. Instead of getting hopelessly lost in the chaos of their contemporary history, Germans should let the founding fathers of the Federal Republic inspire them and look forward with confidence. Kohl held that the foundation of the Federal Republic, as the unfinished fulfilment of German history, had compensated for most of the damage caused by Hitler. Ultimately, Kohl himself wished to set a positive example in Germany’s glorious national history as the Chancellor of Unity, whom the German people had given a greater mandate than Hitler ever possessed, and who would help realize the predetermined course of German history rather than further diverting his people from their path towards normality. The third part deals with another of Kohl’s methods to exonerate Germans from their negatively charged national history: he instrumentalized the Cold War to present the entire German nation as victims of Hitler and the communists. Kohl did not completely conceal the ‘terrible slumps’ in German history; he just sought to obscure the details. The memory of the Third Reich not only lent legitimacy to the Federal Republic and the CDU; it also supported Kohl’s personal myth. As outlined in chapter 3, Kohl portrayed his own biography as a symbol of the decency of German history: he

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was the ‘all-clear’ incarnate, the innocent Catholic Palatine who, though too young to be guilty, was old enough to know about the Nazi aberration and thus conscious of the golden era of the Federal Republican foundation years. Therefore, his quest for normality faced a dilemma: completely denying the abnormality of Nazism would severely damage his representation of normality. Kohl’s quest was thus doomed to failure as long as the major obstacle to normality remained remembrance of the Holocaust. He saw only one way out: to relativize the Nazi past’s ‘negative’ impact on German national identity by portraying the German nation as having been alienated from its true life by the combined forces of Hitler and the communists. This Manichaean world view was central to Kohl’s historism. He positioned the German nation as subject to the combined threat of these two ideological forces, both equally evil in the historical narrative.

Heidelberg: Between German and Eternal Spirit This section seeks to establish a sense of Kohl’s educational socialization between 1945 and 1958, when he submitted his thesis. He obtained his higher education in an atmosphere of not coming to terms with the past but rather hovering between suppression, restoration and renewal of German nationalism, all the while mindful to represent normality.4 There is no indication that his ideological introspection changed fundamentally after he wrote this valuable document, which I have already cited in the previous chapters. The thesis foreshadowed his later attempts to establish a liberal trajectory in German history that would compensate for the ‘accidental’ of the Nazi episode. His training as a historian, moreover, supplied the politician with the self-image of someone who knew history, its facts and its nature, someone capable of conducting politics from a historical perspective who had, as a Federal Republican, learned his lessons from the past and would assure that German normality endured. As Chancellor, however, Kohl found that this self-perception frequently led to scandalous outcomes. In the Western zones of occupation, the authorities pursued the denazification of West Germany only half-heartedly.5 At sixteen Kohl saw his mentor, Finck, issue Persilscheine (denazification certificate) to exonerate former Nazis.6 Many Germans, including Adenauer, demanded that the ‘fellow travellers’ should be left alone.7 Most of the population rejected accusations of collective and personal guilt. Instead, narratives of indoctrination, ignorance, victimhood and patriotism, used to whitewash their past, prevailed.8 ‘The Cold War with its shifting alliances and emphases ended the Nuremberg interregnum’, as Jeffrey Herf succinctly observed.9 With Nazism suppressed, as much as everyday politics of the everyday permitted, the new bipolarity became the ‘moral salvation’ of the Germans, as Peter Bender noted.10 The highest-ranking Nazis



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had little chance of surviving politically in the Federal Republic. However, the mainstream, which had supported the fascist regime, could easily transfer their old loyalty to the new authority of the liberal state. West Germans could thus adapt to the new situation of the Cold War while pursuing a process of ‘selfdenazification’.11 They were able to continue to assure themselves they were a European stronghold against the communist horde in the East.12 Not Germany but the persistent communist threat came to be portrayed as the real enemy of FRG citizens, while Hitler was reduced to a historical accident.13 Millions of former Nazis were mobilized to build the Federal Republic. Industries had to be reconstructed and their personnel rehabilitated.The chemical company BASF in Ludwigshafen, for example, had contributed significantly to Nazi weapons production, made possible by thousands of forced labourers. This large corporation was crucial to the economic recovery of Kohl’s hometown after the Second World War. Kohl himself worked for BASF while at university.14 After he completed his Ph.D., Ludwigshafen’s chemical trade association employed him for ten years, during which the employer allowed Kohl to focus primarily on his role in his party and politics.15 To succeed in politics, Kohl socialized with former Nazis: Fritz Ries, who had gained millions thanks to the ‘aryanization’ of Jewish property and forced labour from the concentration camps, sponsored Kohl’s political rise and introduced him to a squad of further dubious sponsors, as Bernt Engelmann revealed.16 Later, as CDU chairman, Kohl also received thousands from the family of Friedrich Flick, a friend of Heinrich Himmler. Having profited greatly during the Holocaust from methods similar to Ries’s, Flick was sentenced to prison for seven years and then released early to rebuild his industrial empire.17 In Kohl’s view of history, however, hardly any Germans were real Nazis – not even his friend Hanns Martin Schleyer, who had been the leader of the Reichsstudentenwerk at Heidelberg and SS officer.18 In 1948, in an appeal of his previous sentence, Schleyer lied about his actual SS rank and was consequently exonerated as a ‘fellow-traveller’.19 After graduating from the Oberrealschule in July 1950, Kohl enrolled first at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. There he attended lectures in international law given by Walter Hallstein, whom he saw as ‘an architect of Western integration’.20 His other lecturers included the economist Franz Böhm, who had previously been involved in the reparations agreement between Israel and West Germany, and the Social Democrat Carlo Schmid, whose lectures Kohl described as so boring that he could only think of the beautiful girls outside the lecture theatre.21 In 1951, after two semesters, he transferred to Heidelberg, where he subsequently received a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship.22 Heidelberg was closer to Ludwigshafen, the centre of his early political life.23 Kohl claimed to be one of the few persons at Heidelberg who already had profound sympathy for Adenauer’s foreign policies, West Germany’s rearmament and his rejection of Stalin’s offer to support the unification of a neutral Germany in 1952.24

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Kohl remained loyal to his alma mater throughout his life.25 He described Heidelberg’s university as ‘one of the greatest sites in the German cultural landscape’. He believed ‘there were few places in Europe, where one could perceive the intellectual force and dynamic of the occident more strongly’ than in Heidelberg.26 Kohl remembered that many older students among his cohort at Heidelberg had had wartime experiences different from his own. However, ‘what connected us as a great community was the curiosity for an academic curriculum which had freed itself from the ruinous enmeshment of the German scholarship during the Third Reich’. Kohl also assured readers that the scholars he met had unfailingly ‘conformed to the lebendigen Geist’ (to the eternal spirit).27 The Nazis had replaced that original university motto in 1936 with Dem deutschen Geist (to the German spirit).28 Prior to the Third Reich, the intellectual history of the University of Heidelberg mirrored what Hans Kohn would have described critically as ‘the German mind’, and what Peter Watson sought to rehabilitate as ‘the German Genius’.29 The institution has not shied from flaunting the positive sides of its tradition:30 Friedrich Creuzer immersed himself in Greek mythology there. Clemens Brentano and Achim von Armin founded the early Heidelberger Romantik. Joseph von Görres joined them, and Joseph von Eichendorff also studied at Heidelberg. Johann Heinrich Voß – the greatest opponent of antiEnlightenment romanticism among them – lived there from 1805 to 1826. Hegel spent two years at Heidelberg before he replaced Fichte in Berlin in 1818. The early national-liberal historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus was appointed to a professorship in 1835. Bismarck’s adviser, Heinrich von Treitschke, taught here before he replaced Leopold von Ranke in the new German capital, Berlin. Another of Kohl’s favourite authors, Carl Zuckmayer, studied here after the First World War.31 Max Weber was a member of Heidelberg’s student fraternity Alemannia. His younger brother, Alfred, who also worked here, left his office voluntarily in opposition to the Nazis’ takeover in 1933. Gustav Radbruch was the first professor in Nazi Germany to be dismissed. Like Alfred Weber, he was among the relatively few scholars who resumed their positions at Heidelberg after the war. In January 1933, Martin Heidegger had advised Baden’s Minister of Culture to implement the Führerprinzip at the universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg. These were the first German universities to lose their independence. From then on, the Nazis and their sympathisers ran the institutions and the fascist student movement grew. In April, Germans ‘of Jewish race’ were dismissed from public service positions.32 Steven P. Remy argued in The Heidelberg Myth that ‘[t]he dominant response of professors who had not been fired was enthusiasm for the new regime and a willingness to adapt to it’.33 Most of them were glad to see the end of the Weimar Republic and were committed to a ‘national revolution’. Unsurprisingly, the intellectual climate changed dramatically when research and teaching became subject to the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft. Economy, history,



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language and literature, law, theology, medicine, psychiatry, the sciences, geography, theology, philosophy and art – all had to be in line with the Nazi ideology’s anti-Semitism and German expansionism. A chair in folklore was created, and regional studies were promoted. Willy Andreas and Paul Schmitthenner, who joined the Nazi party in 1934, dominated the History Seminar.34 Günther Franz, an expert in the Peasant Wars and the Thirty Years’ War, arrived in 1935 to join the Heidelberg historians for three semesters. Franz, a member of the Nazi party, was first in the SA (Sturmabteilung) later the SS (Schutzstaffel) and finally the SD (Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS). In 1937, Franz participated in the Historikertag at Erfurt in his SS uniform.35 He initiated the creation of the Institute for Frankish-Palatine History and Regional Studies, as part of the interdisciplinary field of Westforschung (research on Western Europe).36 Heidelberg, as the centre of the Old Palatinate, was regarded as the perfect place for this purpose. Eventually the ambition to expand Germany’s western borders overshadowed the interest in local history, geography, language and folklore. Kohl’s later Ph.D. supervisor, Walther Peter Fuchs, was also then involved in Westforschung.37 This background influenced Kohl’s later decision to complete his doctorate with him.38 According to Remy, only 4 per cent of the German academics fired after the Nazi takeover returned to their jobs.39 He recalled Gerhard Ritter’s apologetic claim in 1945 that German professors had had nothing to do with the Nazis.40 Further, the British and American authorities exonerated the vast majority of Heidelberg professors who had kept their positions during the Nazi era.41 The year 1945 did not signify ‘a “zero hour” in German academic culture’, Remy noted, but ‘marked the beginning of a series of partial and modified restorations’.42 After the Third Reich’s collapse, universities, like churches, were presented as unburdened by Nazi guilt. Immediate effort was made to locate those who were not considered Nazis.43 A group of academics then met at Karl Jaspers’ home to plan the reconstruction of the university, which reopened in January 1946. Remy observed that most members of Jaspers’ group were born in the 1870s and 1880s. This Wilhelminian generation tended to remain suspicious of the new liberal values imported from the West after the Second World War and wish for a neutral, unified nation.44 Many Heidelberg professors at the time tried to justify their Nazi membership and the content of their lectures and publications, drawing a distinction between active and passive party members.45 Jaspers himself spoke of ‘fellow-travellers’ and developed different categories of guilt.46 Interestingly, Alexander Mitscherlich also belonged to the early core of Jasper’s group. He confronted himself with the details of Nazi crimes during the 1946 Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, where he documented the cases.47 After another twenty years, in a work he published with his wife, Margarete, they argued that after the downfall of the Nazi state,West Germans had suffered a form of collective mental illness, suppressing their memories to avoid depression and feelings of guilt, and an imagining themselves also to be Hitler’s victims.48

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Kohl first aimed at a legal career but quickly realized the law was not his main academic interest.49 He opted for a major in history and minor subjects in public law and political science, which ruled out sitting the state examination to become a lawyer. Instead of finishing his degree, he went directly into his doctorate. In his memoirs, Kohl portrayed himself as a student with very broad interests, taught by an intelligentsia of diverse backgrounds, all committed to the Federal Republican project. Kohl remembered the teaching of the sociologist, economist and former émigré Alexander Rüstow, whose (neo)liberal theories influenced the idea of the social market economy, and who most impressed him early on in his studies. He later also listened to the economist Erich Preiser, whom he saw as a mastermind of West Germany’s economic system. He read studies by the conservative psychologist Willy Hellpach and visited the seminars of the medical scientist Viktor von Weizsäcker. Kohl found Hans von Eckardt to have ‘great entertainment value’, and he informed himself learned about Soviet politics at the sparsely attended seminars of Waldemar Gurians. He also liked the classes of the Francophile Swiss historian Rudolf von Albertini, who invited students to his home for pasta.50 The former Nazi Erich Maschke taught him modern history. He learned political science from Theodor Eschenburg, a national conservative,51 and Arnold Bergstraesser, who had gone into exile because of his Jewish descent.52 Alfred Weber, who had left his position at Heidelberg in protest against the Nazi government, was another of Kohl’s lecturers. Kohl’s higher education took place in an atmosphere of reconstruction and rejuvenation. In the curriculum vitae appended to his dissertation, Kohl listed the six teachers he perceived as most influential during his studies. Four were historians: Fuchs, mentioned above, as well as Fritz Ernst, Johannes Kühn and Werner Conze. In addition, Kohl mentioned the political scientist Dolf Sternberger, and the lawyer Walter Jellinek.53 Jellinek (1885–1955) was an expert on administrative and international law. He held a chair in public law at Heidelberg from 1929 until his dismissal because of his Jewish background.54 Sternberger (1907–89), a liberal journalist married to a Jewish woman, had been barred from his occupation in 1943 but in 1947 was appointed cofounder of the new discipline of political science at Heidelberg. Until 1948, he edited Die Wandlung, a journal aimed at the intellectual and moral renewal of German society.55 As discussed in chapter 1, Sternberger later coined the concept of Verfassungspatriotismus (constitutional patriotism), which could be interpreted as an attempt to reflect on the Federal Republic’s reality as a state forced to move beyond the national category.56 This term later became very influential after Jürgen Habermas adopted it.57 In 1957, Kohl was accepted into a seminar led by Sternberger, who employed him as a research assistant at the Alfred Weber Institute. Kohl teased Sternberger’s group by calling them a ‘red bunch of assistants’.58 Sternberger’s assistant Bernhard Vogel, who was also part of this group, later became a



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high-ranking Christian Democrat.59 Sternberger himself represented a new form of conservatism, as he later wrote in reaction to the changes launched by 1968: ‘constitutional conservatism, rights-conservatism, freedom-conservatism, even state-conservatism’ were in his view acceptable; only nation-conservatism should be excluded from the political culture of Federal Republic.60 As already mentioned in chapter 1, Sternberger, unlike Habermas, had never turned away from the prospect of (re)unification.61 Kohl contributed to Sternberger’s research on candidates for subsequent Bundestag elections.62 Kohl’s focus, however, was limited to liberal and conservative politicians in Rhineland-Palatinate. Erwin Faul, who worked with Kohl on the project, explained: ‘within the conflict between the scientific quest for illumination and the reason of his party, Kohl would have thoroughly decided in favour of the latter’.63 Like his Ph.D., this work in political science was quasi-autobiographical in character. Kohl did not write directly about himself, but he described the surroundings of his Heimat, where the young politician personally knew many of the subjects of his thesis. Sternberger introduced his students’ work as an homage to representative democracy: ‘the great masses are powerless to propose, but powerful to decide. However, because in their great numbers they are unable to decide quickly, the authority to propose needs to elude the masses.That is why they need parties’.64 Kohl expressed commitment to this ideal in his dissertation on the (re)formation of political parties, a topic he had chosen ‘because in a representative democracy, the fortune of a whole people depends greatly on the quality and character of individual parties’.65 Whereas the political scientist Sternberger and law lecturer Jellinek can be regarded as unburdened, all historians at Heidelberg had engaged with the Nazis to varying degrees. None of them were self-critical about their role before 1945, as Eike Wolgast noted.66 Historian Fritz Ernst (1905–63), a member of the SA and of the NS-Dozentenbund, replaced Günther Franz in 1937.67 Ernst would become the co-director of the Frankish-Palatine Institute established for Westforschung. An extremely right-wing conservative, he could be seen as accepting Nazi rule without being a ‘thoroughbred’ Nazi himself.68 After the war, Ernst became prorector at Heidelberg. He remained conservative and remarkably nationalist, though at the same time Anglophile.69 In 1960, he admitted that Heidelberg University had enjoyed special protection by the Nazis and benefited from the city’s lesser damage compared to other cities its size. Ernst rejected Heidelberg’s reputation as ‘the most radical university in the sense of the Nazi party’. This image was ‘by no account in accordance with its interior’,70 according to Ernst, a historian who sought to relativize the collaboration and improve his workplace’s stigmatized image as a Nazi stronghold. Conze (1910–86) came to Heidelberg in 1957. Having displayed extremely strong affinities with Nazism until 1945, he became one of the most controversial historians in the Federal Republic. An anti-Semite from the field of Volksgeschichte, which emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, he played an important

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role in Ostforschung (research on Germans in Central and Eastern Europe) and Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung (geopolitical research on German ethnicity) during the Third Reich. Conze proposed reorganizing Polish agrarian society, including by purging Jews from towns and cities, and was also an enthusiastic soldier in the Second World War. After the war, Conze thought it unnecessary to come to terms with the Nazi past. The academics of the Third Reich reshaped their ideologized approaches to suit the requirements of the new politics, and Conze became a cofounder of the Working Group for Modern Social History.71 Kühn (1887–1973) left Saxony for Heidelberg in 1949.72 The diaries of Viktor Klemperer, who often met privately with Kühn and his Jewish wife in Dresden, provide revealing insights into his former friend’s political stance. In personal conversations early in the Nazi rule, Kühn was already expressing anti-Semitic and anti-communist positions, believing in a typically German character that should be reflected in the political system, in which he saw great opportunities for the German Volk under Hitler’s dictatorship.73 Klemperer was disappointed, not only by Kühn’s pro-government attitude but much more because he had known him as a rational historian with a sense of justice.74 In 1936, Klemperer was so appalled by a propagandistic article Kühn had written about Frederick the Great that his friendship turned into hostility.75 Klemperer perceived Kühn’s writings as a betrayal of historical science against his friend’s better knowledge. In 1940, Kühn disclosed his commitment to the Nazi ideology in writing ‘about the meaning of the present war’.76 In 1947 he published a critique of the Rankean understanding of history: history would not show ‘how it essentially was’, but celebrate ‘the marriage between the sources and the creation of the mind’.77 Notwithstanding this arguably justified revision of the traditional understanding of history in Germany, opportunists like Kühn had a genuine interest in obscuring historical developments. German academics carefully tried to avoid distorting the image of normality as much as did industrialists and politicians. Kohl felt closely connected to his Doktorvater Fuchs,78 whom Laurenz Müller saw as a ‘committed Nazi’,79 although this might be overstated. However, Fuchs, like Franz, took his Ph.D. at Marburg under the supervision of the Nazi Wilhelm Mommsen. He then followed Franz, who wanted Fuchs to move to Heidelberg for political reasons. Müller revealed considerable anti-Semitism in their correspondence.80 He also mentioned that the NS-Dozentenbund at Marburg had encouraged Fuchs to work with Franz at Heidelberg.81 Fuchs conducted research on the Reformation, Leopold von Ranke, and Frederick I, Grand Duke of Baden.82 In his memoirs, Kohl emphasized Fuchs’ expertise on Ranke: ‘from my point of view, Leopold von Ranke, the leading historian of the nineteenth century . . . is certainly not outdated’.83 For his supervisor’s ninetieth birthday, Kohl wrote – contradicting his usual presentation of national history as something predestined – that ‘history is not the consequence of inescapable fate or supposedly historical laws, but the result of the thinking and



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actions of individuals’.84 In this article, Kohl also emphasized that Fuchs’ work transcended national history to account for ‘the consciousness of a common European heritage’. ‘[F]or us Germans’, Kohl argued, ‘Europe is a – if not the – question of destiny (Schicksalsfrage)’. Unified within the West, Germany had finally found ‘its place, where it belongs according to its history – on the side of freedom, on the side of those states that want to design the world of the twenty-first century in the spirit of human dignity and constitutional democracy’. However, the Westforschung of the Third Reich earlier undertaken by Fuchs had aimed at a different unification of Europe than envisaged by the Treaty of Maastricht, which Kohl, in turn, presented as consistent with the aims of the Hambach Festival.85 Fuchs had to get special permission for Kohl to enter his postgraduate degree programme because the young politician had failed to take enough courses.86 His dissertation, which he entitled ‘The Political Development of the Palatinate and the Revival of Parties after 1945’, was thus carefully monitored: ‘a discredit to the doctoral student, Kohl, would have been a discredit for the overhasty Fuchs’, as Jürgen Busche observed.87 Kohl collected party documents, got access to private archives and interviewed local politicians. Finck’s collection was especially crucial to this work, but members of other parties also supported him.88 Eckard Henscheid regarded this thesis as ‘a stultifying work of collection’; however, it had the great advantage of allowing Kohl to network with other politicians during the research.89 Fuchs later recalled, of the dissertation of his famous student, that ‘the guiding ideologies of several leadership groups are carved out, that . . . maintained surprisingly many ideas from the Weimar time, pre-war Germany and the Bismarck Reich’.90 Kohl’s thesis was indeed an early attempt to normalize German history, trying to prove that Germany’s liberal political culture was not as new as it seemed: These men and women had largely rejected National Socialism; after the breakdown of the Hitler Regime they took over the heavy responsibility for the reconstruction of their Heimat, coming from the prisons and concentration camps, or from the outer or inner emigration. So the Landräte, chief mayors, and mayors in the Palatinate after 1945, were, almost without exception, Weimar members of the Social Democratic Party, Centre or Bavarian Peoples’ Party, the Communist Party, the German Peoples’ Party or the German Democratic Party.91

Kohl gave Social Democrats and Christian Democrats the most attention. For him, the SPD then was another fine example of the positive continuities in German history. He emphasized the tradition of this movement, which had persisted under the Nazi regime, and stressed its patriotic attitude in rejecting collective guilt accusations, refusing to see the new state as the successor of the Third Reich and demanding removal of the four zones of occupation.92 Kohl’s own party received even more attention. He stressed the Christian legacy, highlighted the permanence of political Catholicism and told the story of Finck’s vicarage. As already mentioned in chapter 2, he also claimed there had been a

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Christian ‘defence front’ in the Third Reich.93 Among the goals of the CDU were restoring the good reputation and trustworthiness of the German people, the demand for German unity, no systemic de-nazification, and opposition to any form of separatism.94 Although Kohl firmly emphasized continuities, he also tried to draw readers’ attention to the immediate postwar atmosphere after the ‘breakdown’, in which the predominant feeling was of having ‘escaped by the skin of one’s teeth’ and having the unique chance to begin afresh.95 Kohl’s generation had a common answer to the Nazi past: ‘the Federal Republic as a project of consolidation and reform’ of Germany’s political culture, as Dirk Moses explained (see also chapter 2).96 A sense of discontinuity was thus inherent to this age group. Kohl’s way of historicizing German history was thus a type of ‘integrative republicanism’ on this generational spectrum, which ‘based the new state on positive cultural and intellectual continuities, whether that of the German cultural nation or liberalism’.97 Moses argued that many history students had shown interest in the causes of the events from 1933 to 1945, and in ensuring that it could not be repeated. Moses also found that the ’45ers’ dissertations criticized the intellectual traditions in Germany.98 However, Kohl did not pursue any interest he may have had in historical explanations for the catastrophe and rarely expressed any criticism of Germany’s political tradition. His Ph.D. was an early expression of his self-image of the embodiment of the ‘all-clear’. He used this case study of his Heimat to shore up the Federal Republican foundation myth and present his profession in a patriotic light. Kohl’s case exemplifies the part of his generation that was not thoroughly sceptical of German history and followed the model of their teachers, who lectured in a relatively uncontested environment of historical enquiry. By the time of the Fischer Controversy in the early 1960s, Kohl had already submitted his thesis. Fischer then claimed the aggressive, imperialist tendencies in German society had triggered the First World War.99 This major contestation of German historiography conflicted with Kohl’s belief in the positive continuities in Germany’s political culture. Because Fuchs was not permitted to conduct Kohl’s entire examination in history, his friend Fritz Ernst helped out. Sternberger examined Kohl in politics, and the former Nazi Ernst Forsthoff evaluated his grasp of law.The examiners agreed that Kohl passed cum laude, the third best possible result.100 Later however, as Federal Chancellor, he would top his political class for sixteen years, without renouncing the Heidelberg spirit of the 1950s, which had reconciled the ‘German’ and ‘eternal spirit’.

No Fear of History: Kohl’s Integrative Republican Historism Imparting a particular interpretation of German history was part of Kohl’s political method. To signal normality, he did not depict a total break with national history but tried to champion the inexorable fate of a positively charged



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national history that he constructed teleologically from the Federal Republican viewpoint of the Cold War. Instead of trying to break with national traditions, he presented national history as something inescapable, incontestable and at the same time subject to his liberal nationalist ideology. It was the history of all Germans, whether they wanted it or not, and Kohl felt it his duty to lecture the ignorant ones, who threatened the determined existence of the nation. He saw national history, like the liberal state, as something Germans had the right to be proud of and the responsibility to recognize.Yet in his view, a healthy national identity required a better image of the past. One method of relativizing the Nazi episode was to highlight supposedly positive threads running throughout German history. He thus continued his early attempts as a student to justify German history against the negative Sonderweg image. Ultimately, he wanted to go down in German history books as a national hero: the Chancellor of Unification, a monumental element in Germany’s grand historical series. In May 1966, Kohl – then chairman of the CDU Rhineland-Palatinate – wrote an editorial under the question Angst vor der Geschichte? (Fear of History?) for his hometown’s local newspaper.101 Kohl objected to collective shame, which he saw as hindering Germans from finding ‘a new and lasting national self-image’. He therefore urged Germans to ‘search for our place in history’. The rhetoric in this article resembled his demand for a national revival later in his chancellorship: the ‘youth in Germany have a right to rethink the notions of nation and fatherland and to grant them a place in the life of the Volk, or to newly determine this place’. His central focus, though, was the ‘continuity of German history’. Kohl had to recognize that one could ‘not avoid dealing with the time from 1933 to 1945. It is impossible, yes it would be dishonest, to delete this time from our experience of history’. However, he could not deny the need for ‘what one today embraces with the terrible catchword Vergangenheitsbewältigung’. Kohl suggested dealing seriously with not only ‘the causes and effects of the Third Reich’, which he was in fact reluctant to address more thoroughly, but also ‘the democratic tendencies visible before 1933 that became the primary political reality in Germany after 1945’. Ultimately, he was striving for a more relative view of the Nazi past as an accidental episode within the positive history of a normal nation: We remain Germans in our history as a whole . . . This past includes images of horror and guilt, like Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Treblinka. But it also includes the men and women of the 20th of July, the students of the ‘White Rose’ in Munich, images such as the Wartburg in Eisenach or the Cathedrals in our country, in Trier, in Worms, in Mainz or Speyer. These are figures and images we do not have to be ashamed of, which were consistent, especially in times of political confusion. We would be bad democrats, if we did not wish to be good patriots and to consider the whole of German history.102

The ’68ers also evoked historical continuities in German society, though unlike Kohl they tended towards negative connotations. For them there was no

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zero hour; they had seen their parents’ generation maintain the fascist structures. In 1968, Kohl decried their agitation in another local editorial: ‘we have to deal with a generation that . . . criticizes their fathers, because they have no sympathy for the fateful involvement during the time of the Third Reich’.103 He thus called on youth show some ‘stronger interest in the personal, familial, and professional situation of their fathers’ and ask whether they had been motivated not by opportunism but by ‘concern about the security of their family, about the education of their children, who have become so critical’. According to Kohl, one should not forget that some were ‘seduced’ into following the Nazis, even if they had done so with genuine conviction. And, he argued, now ‘millions of citizens . . . are sincerely committed to our democracy, even if they were members of the NSDAP’. He naturally exonerated himself by adding that notions of collective guilt should be firmly rejected by ‘those who could not get enmeshed due to reasons of age’.104 In Kohl’s final analysis the entire German nation signalled the all-clear, which he himself epitomized. As explained in chapter 3, Kohl’s increasing evocation of national history was a component of his reaction to the postnational, leftist, generational abasement of his liberal nationalist standards. Five days after Kohl’s election as federal chairman of the CDU in 1973, he gave a speech in Berlin to celebrate the Day of German Unity in commemoration of the 1953 uprising in the GDR: ‘do we Germans not have any reasons to be proud of these women and men?’105 Exploiting the Cold War atmosphere, Kohl defended the FRG’s appropriation of these people as national heroes. He criticized West Germans who viewed them merely as rebelling against working conditions in the GDR and used the national day to justify the then utopian idea of unification under Federal Republican formulas. He historicized the 1953 uprising as but one episode in a series of glorious events in Germany’s infinite stream of national history. The German nation was undying, and would be utterly freedom-loving: ‘on 17 June 1953 – only nine years after the [attempt to assassinate Hitler on] 20 July 1944 – Germans stood up once more against thraldom and bondage, risked their lives to win freedom, and fought for a humane life’. Going further back in time, Kohl connected 1953 to the national movement of the first half of the nineteenth century: ‘this spontaneous will for freedom was connected with the demand for the state unity of Germany’. Any aversion to this historical truth would threaten the ‘the moral quality of our country’. Nobody should turn away from the nation’s past or question the essential moments in national history: ‘we must not allow for this . . .We have to learn from this development that a Volk cannot live without history, that a Volk that questions itself loses its identity and cannot find it when it denies its own history’.106 By the early 1970s, a certain pattern and routine were clearly developed in Kohl’s nationalist rhetoric, revealing authoritarian tendencies in the sense that ‘one cannot remove oneself from this common history. Who does that . . . removes himself from the solidarity of our Volk’.107



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Speaking to an assembly of Danzig expellees, Kohl asserted that ‘we will only be able to give an answer to [the German] question . . . when we finally again find a clear relationship with our own history’.108 No socialist could find this answer, because ‘German history is not a series of class struggles. It is a chain of great achievements, but also terrible aberrations’. No German could escape national history: ‘it is the history of all Germans, the history of the German nation. It unites us, even if we are today divided’.109 However, Federal Republican history was a fresh blossom of German history, overshadowing the wilted outgrowth in the East. Marking the 25th anniversary of the Basic Law, Kohl acknowledged that ‘twenty-five years in the life and history of a Volk is only a brief period’.110 Yet, he remarked proudly, ‘the Federal Republic of Germany has existed almost twice as long as the Weimar Republic and more than twice as long as the so-called “Millennial Reich”’. At this point it again was evident that Kohl always assumed historical continuity made for a positive contrast with the notion of a negative Sonderweg trajectory. To foster the image of German normality, Kohl insisted that the national history of German democracy was older than the FRG itself. He saw ‘history’ in general as something predominantly national as well as positive, and negative exceptions only confirmed this rule: ‘1918/19, 1933 and 1945 . . . stand for deep slumps within the historical continuity of our Volk’. But ‘this is not the whole history of our fatherland’, he contended, as ‘this country has not only seen a barbarian national-socialist revolution; it has also seen, here in the Paulskirche, 125 years ago, an attempt at a political revolution that aimed at personal freedom and the unity of Germany’. To perfect the link between 1848/49 and 1949, he argued: ‘We know today that the text of the Frankfurt constitution of 1849 accompanied some fathers of the Basic Law within all meetings of the parliamentarian council. This attests to a piece of the democratic and republican tradition in our country which in its substance consists of the achievements of a political culture in Germany that developed over centuries’.111 To be sure, the ’45er did not deny certain ruptures in German history and had internalized 1945 as a moment of national rebirth. Moreover, postwar sensibilities limited Kohl’s public memory selection. As head of a representative government, he could never completely exclude ‘the terrible and dark chapters’ in German history;112 instead, ‘the common experience of haughtiness and guilt, of misery and suffering binds all Germans together and keeps awake the awareness of their unity’.113 To give people a greater sense of heroism and glorification, however, Kohl thought it more important to highlight the positive historical examples like ‘Graf Stauffenberg and his friends, as well as all those Germans who risked their lives resisting tyranny on 20 July 1944 and thereafter’. Naturally, only the FRG – not the GDR – could legitimately claim to be carrying this resistance forward, as ‘they did not want to replace the brown dictatorship with another’.114 Kohl pursued this apologetic historism further in the introduction to a book by the Forschungsgemeinschaft 20. Juli

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e.V., which appeared for the 40th anniversary of the 20 July plot.The essay presented the resistance as a mass movement across genders, classes and regions. The Nazi revolution had failed, in Kohl’s opinion, because ‘Hitler failed to drag the German nation into the abyss of his immorality and cynicism’. The German nation’s resistance had ‘saved German history from its perversion by the dictator’. He maintained that nobody in the world should forget that most Nazi followers in Germany acted within exceptional circumstances.115 And irrespective of the considerable support for Nazism, ‘the resistance against Hitler belongs to the entire German Volk’. History was not subjective: ‘one must neither withdraw from the accountability which history enjoins on the present; nor deny the gratitude for or conceal the gratification from exemplary action and good tradition’. Stauffenberg’s attempt proved that Germany was not a rogue nation; he had heralded normalitiy. This date ‘presented the actual Germany, its patriotic tradition and its values, which from 1933 to 1945 were misused by the National Socialists in an unimaginable way’.116 It stood for ‘the rehabilitation of the German name in the world and, therefore, for the precondition for a return and reintegration of the German Volk into the community of nations’.117 For Kohl, Stauffenberg personified German normality within an unusual period of disorder. Kohl’s chancellorship marked the beginning of the normalization of German national identity, which has been further pursued ever since.118 Kohl was a key actor in Hitler’s shadow theatre of German memory politics in the 1980s. He represented F.J. Strauß’s conservative demand that Germans be able to walk upright, ‘step out of Hitler’s shadow . . . and finally become a normal nation again’.119 This message stood opposite the notion of normality advocated by centre-left protagonists of the Historikerstreit like Heinrich A. Winkler, who suggested that Germans should finally get used to their historical position ‘in Hitler’s shadow.120 Kohl raised the hope that the postwar period of shame would finally give way to a new era of national pride, without forgetting the Federal Republic’s superiority to anything that had happened before or was still happening in the East. ‘We live within the stream of the history of our country. We cannot cancel what was yesterday and the day before, it lives with us – as a burden, but also as greatness, and at the same time as an opportunity for our Volk’, he philosophized at the Bankentag in 1985.121 Kohl’s historical narrative attributed a certain universality, naturalness, determination and inalienability to the Federal Republican state and his party’s ideology, as legitimate outcomes of German history. However, the generational challenge to his idea of German history gave him no peace. As Chancellor, he worried about the lack of historical empathy among his younger West German contemporaries, who had ‘lost this continuity in history’. They failed to understand the essence of the republic, which had emerged in opposition to Nazism and communism ‘because the older generation had allowed that the experiences of the history of our Volk got lost,



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yes got stolen. Today we pay the piper’. Kohl thus proclaimed that the 1980s must be a phase of reintroducing historical awareness to the German mind.122 West German society should, he said, remember the great achievement of the difficult but golden age of (re)construction after the downfall of Hitler’s regime. Kohl saw himself as a messenger of this zeitgeist and praised ‘this great generation of founders of the Federal Republic of Germany . . . the fathers and mothers of the republic’. He remembered how it fascinated him, even before his consequent dissertation project, ‘that these men from the first hour believed in the future . . . although they came from the nothingness, from the Stunde Null, although they had their back to the wall’.123 In Kohl’s version of history, however, the zero hour represented not a total break, but a total renewal of Germany’s political culture. He exhorted his audience: ‘let us source some energy from those, who then served as examples . . . [M]aybe something operated during those days, that we overlook too easily in our daily grind, and that we now risk losing’. However, Kohl forgot his historical tact in the punchline of his speech, when he mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s resort to prayer during his imprisonment in the Flossenbürg concentration camp: ‘this man, facing the gallows, was able to feel continuity in himself, to carry it and to communicate it, felt faith in God, and . . . in the future. What was possible in the Concentration Camp Flossenbürg, should also be possible today at the Bankentag’.124 Unlike those who saw a lack of historical consciousness in Kohl’s rhetorical escapades, Michael Stürmer insisted his boss was historically aware and had anticipated a national revival even before to his chancellorship.125 Kohl had employed the conservative historian as an adviser since 1980.126 Stürmer’s appointment reflected Kohl’s commitment to stimulating a more positive national identity by relativizing negative aspects of history. In Stürmer’s view, the nation was the primary reference of modern identity, and historical writing should take the nation-state as its foremost reference.127 As Kohl had tried to do for decades in politics, his adviser sought to promote, in academia and the media, a normalization of German nationalism, encouraging reconciliation with the past and emphasizing that Germany’s national history predated the Third Reich.128 Stürmer, moreover, saw history as ‘a political science’129 that every regime used to legitimize itself and acknowledged that historians were able to deconstruct and reproduce political myths.130 Like Kohl, Stürmer feared the appropriation of German history, in particular Prussian history, by the GDR and cited East Berlin’s Geschichtspolitik as an example to West German officials.131 Moreover, Stürmer’s method of relativizing the past was principally based on his assumption of Germany’s geopolitical position between East and West (Mittellage), which had inescapably exposed the nation to its historical trajectory.132 He therefore shared Kohl’s obsession with assuring that ‘no German Sonderweg can emerge out of our country in the middle of Europe’.133 Eventually, Kohl must have greatly pleased Stürmer, who was certain that the

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future power-holders in a ‘land without history’ were the ones who ‘fill the memory, coin concepts and determine the content of history’. Whoever had power would ‘give history to the land’ and help people out of their ‘loss of orientation’ and ‘search for identity’.134 Kohl saw himself as fulfilling his duty in exactly this role. Kohl presented himself as the incarnation of German normality: a lateborn son of innocent Catholic parents in the Palatinate, he could radiate national pride without being associated with alleged Sonderweg traditions.This image, however, caused concern when it was communicated as national selfabsolution. Kohl’s first feat of éclat as Chancellor occurred on a trip to Israel in early 1984, when he conflated his personal myth with the symbolization of a blameless German nation as a whole. His infamous proclamation of Gnade der späten Geburt (grace of late birth) at the Knesset clearly revealed his desire to personify the ‘all-clear’.135 As demonstrated in the previous chapters, Kohl always strove to historicize his own origins – the Palatinate, his parents, the Church and his party – as opposed to the Nazis. He staged his own life as an ideal reflection of Germany’s recent history. This time, by portraying his generation as Nazi-era victims who were too young to be guilty in an attempt to represent the ‘new Germany’ and a ‘normalization’ of the relationship between the FRG and Israel, he gave the impression that he felt justifiably free of any guilt. Indeed, his own biography was meant as an example of the invalidity of notions of collective guilt: ‘I speak as someone who could not be guilty in the Nazi-time, because he enjoyed the Gnade der späten Geburt and the good fortune to come from a particular family background’.136 This idea was not new: as early as 1970, he had introduced himself as ‘someone who was born too late to sin’.137 Frank Hermann’s early hagiography for Kohl’s first candidature for the chancellorship in 1976 further stressed his generational belonging, assuring readers that it was not suppression but conscious remembrance that had turned his cohort into a ‘Sceptical Generation’.138 Hermann confirmed Kohl’s self-image as someone fortunate to be born late enough ‘to not be directly involved in the Hitlerian war machinery, but also old enough, to grasp the context of the devilish automatics’.139 But coming from Germany’s main representative in the world, such a statement was liable to much greater domestic and international outcry than it had been before Kohl attained this degree of representation. It is nonetheless surprising that the ethnic nationalist aspect of Kohl’s controversial speech at the Knesset attracted comparatively little attention. He had stated, perhaps somewhat cryptically: ‘[O]ne cannot secede. One carries the blood of the family and genes. Everything also flows into the later generation. Therefore, it is clear that one confronts history here’.140 Kohl’s government spokesman, Peter Boenisch, however, warned the Israelis not to ‘instrumentalize Auschwitz for purposes of everyday politics’.141 It is worth noting that Kohl was also criticized at this time for travelling with the controversial Austrian author Kurt Ziesel (b. 1911). Ziesel had



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joined the Nazi movement in 1931 and worked as a journalist for the Völkischer Beobachter and a propagandistic poet.142 After the war he remained active in right-wing politics as chairman of the national-conservative DeutschlandStiftung and cofounder of the extreme right Gesellschaft für freie Publizistik. Ziesel rejected the Israeli media’s accusation that he had gained entry to the country on the basis of circumvention and deception. He claimed he had merely travelled as a journalist for Deutschland-Magazin and therefore did not need a visa because of his Austrian citizenship (Germans born before 1928 needed a visa). Moreover, he had initially booked a normal flight but was subsequently invited to fly with Kohl.143 Kohl, responding to similar criticism from SPD members, accused them of hypocrisy, for they had whitewashed Nazis in their own ranks. Kohl defended Ziesel’s book, Daniel in der Löwengrube (1959), as a contribution to Jewish-Christian reconciliation. He also referred to Ziesel’s chairmanship of the Deutschland-Stiftung and the fact that Ziesel had awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize to Kohl’s friend Axel Springer for his special achievement in German-Jewish relations.144 To maintain the ‘all-clear’ image of the Germans, Kohl recounted Federal Republican history as a parable of a prodigal son: former Nazis had been rehabilitated as good, liberal citizens. Horst Ehmke (SPD) compared Kohl’s mission with the oriental journeys of Kaiser Wilhelm II.145 Heinz Galinski, then chairman of the Jewish Community in Berlin, was disappointed: ‘I would have wished for more tact and more diffidence’. Galinski felt that even representatives of generations without direct responsibility for Nazi crimes should be conscious of their special responsibility in maintaining the memory of the German atrocities. Galinski, moreover, denounced Germany’s sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which was at war with Israel.146 Ben Nathan, the president of the Israeli-German Association, explained that many had expected a very different attitude toward the Holocaust: Kohl had spoken of crimes perpetrated ‘in the name of the Germans’ instead of admitting they were committed by Germans, not by anonyms. The exoneration should have been left to the Israelis themselves. Nathan mentioned his personal encounters with older German army officers who had acted impeccably. By emphasizing the fact of his own age, Kohl had devalued their position during the Nazi era. Nathan was also critical of Kohl’s support of Palestinian self-determination as envisaged in the EC’s 1980 Resolution of Venice, which he had previously attacked as opposition leader. For all those reasons, Kohl lost substantial credibility in Israel, where his attempt to personify normality turned out to be counterproductive.147 Kohl would spend the rest of his political life justifying his message: How I was defamed for the phrase “Grace of late Birth”! They twisted my words. This sentence had then raised cheers in the Knesset. What does it say? With a few words: the one, like me, who was at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship three and by the end of the War fifteen years old, was still too young to get enmeshed in guilt, but already old enough to experience and observe the dread of the

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dictatorship and the misery of the war. My own memory of such events goes back until the years 1938/39. The conversations of my parents about the Kristallnacht I have in vague memory – I then felt that there was something terrible happening.148

To maintain his guiltless image in his memoirs, Kohl also recalled the pogroms of 9 November 1938, maintaining that ‘at the age of eight I could not grasp what really happened’.149 Hans Bardens pointed to the age difference between himself and Kohl, who ‘is only three years younger than I am; but this “little difference” meant that he could not view the world from the perspective of a young soldier or POW (maybe that’s where the ominous sentence of the “grace of late birth” comes from)’.150 Kohl was indeed born later, also later than his fallen brother.Yet this fact’s translation into the image of the innocent German was part of his desire to rehabilitate Germans from the stigma of being a rogue nation. He used it, moreover, to demonstrate his superiority to younger generations that had not experienced the Nazi apostasy and thus had to be instructed in appreciation for the Federal Republican system. Equating his self-image with his ideal image of the German nation, Kohl fought to make himself a symbolic element in Germany’s glorious stream of history. Patricia Clough witnessed this obsession while researching the life of Kohl’s wife, when he effectively blocked relevant data.151 Perhaps it was due to Kohl’s lack of ‘the subjective characteristics of historical greatness’, as the conservative publisher and Kohl biographer Alexander Gauland once argued.152 Kohl’s representation of the nation seems to be secured in the history books, but his image has come under threat from ongoing revelations about the tragic private life of his family, and the disclosure of his personal views on world politics and former colleagues.153 It will be interesting to see how Kohl’s life is historicized in the future, after his lifetime. Towards the end of his chancellorship, Kohl was also cautious about classified archival material on his Deutschlandpolitik. Gunter Hofmann criticized the way the files were opened to ‘a carefully chosen circle of academics and thereafter mysteriously closed again’.154 Back in 1996, Kohl had published his first substantial autobiographical work on the (re)unification process under the title Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit (I Wanted German Unity).155 He subsequently wrote his Tagebuch (‘diary’) about the period from 1998 to 2000, hoping to improve his public image in the wake of the CDU’s contributions scandal.156 The year before, the CDU’s acceptance of illegal donations in 1983 under Kohl’s chairmanship had come to light. Kohl first denied any involvement but then admitted that on behalf of his party, he had accepted millions of deutschmarks from donors whose names he refused to provide.157 Thereafter, Kohl sought to foster his legacy in German history with three volumes of his memoirs.158 Realizing that his autobiography was too detailed for many potential readers, Kohl offered an abridged version in 2009 covering only the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall to (re)unification.159 Hoping that students of history and politics would one day use his memoirs, Kohl wished to



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preempt his critics’ unfavourable (de)construction of his monumental image in German history.160 With the memory boom surrounding the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and (re)unification, as well as his eightieth birthday, Kohl reentered the public stage after a stroke and enjoyed a high profile in the German media. In October 2009, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation organized a celebration reuniting Kohl with George H.W. Bush and Gorbachev,161 at which Kohl stated, ‘There is nothing I am prouder of than German unification’.162 At that time, with more than 40 per cent approval in the new and the old German Länder, Kohl was ranked first, before even Adenauer, as the most influential German.163 His former opponent, Helmut Schmidt (SPD), who ranked third, admitted that he had ceased to regard Kohl as a provincial politician after the autumn of 1989. According to Schmidt, Kohl had turned into a statesman who deserved his place in history: without him, the chance for (re)unification might have been gambled away.164 ‘Better than Bismarck’, the foreign policy expert Karl Kaiser proclaimed.165

Exonerating Germans from the Past: A Prelude to Normality? Alongside establishing positive continuities, another controversial method of relativizing ‘slumps’ in German history was Kohl’s continuous attempt to historicize Germans themselves as victims of Nazism, and to relativize their Nazism to the allegedly equally evil communist antagonists. His method consisted in refuting the singularity of the Nazi atrocities while also legitimizing the Federal Republic in opposition to the GDR. This portrayal upheld Germans’ belonging to the West and elevated the world view of Kohl’s own party to an ideological equilibrium, where it stood for the nation’s historical completion, flanked by illiberal threats from both right and left. Kohl believed a more positive image of German history was needed for Germany once more to be a proud nation – an image that would include Germany’s firm position against the communism of the East. Meanwhile, Kohl also had to maintain and promote the memory of the Holocaust to sustain the ‘all-clear’ signal. In 1979, when asked during a public TV discussion in The Hague about the Berufsverbot in the FRG, which banned left-wing public servants, including teachers and professors, from their profession, he defended the law by elaborating a politically slanted version of history that blamed communists and Nazis equally for the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933. When listeners recalled that the CDU’s predecessor, the Catholic Centre party, and other conservative forces had also contributed to the collapse, Kohl sidestepped the issue by claiming his party had arisen from the anti-fascist resistance movement. He also argued that former Nazis had been needed to rebuild West Germany as a bulwark against the Communist regime in the GDR, which he loosely

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equated to the Third Reich.166 Kohl repeated this falsification of history in his first policy statement at the Bundestag, contending that ‘the first German democracy was destroyed by extremes from left and right. The second German democracy has been built out of the centre of our Volk, and it will . . . find its power for renewal out of this centre’.167 Kohl thus portrayed the German mainstream of the Weimar period as the victims of Nazis and communists, and the contemporary mainstream as equally democratic. Past Nazism became an analogy for past and contemporary communism. This was another method of overhauling history so as to represent the German nation as essentially normal, though still subject to anomalous constraints. The international aspect of the motivation to rewrite national history cannot be disconnected from domestic motivations: ‘out of historical experience and common understanding of values . . . we have established the alliance of the free West permanently’.168 Beyond his permanent fear of damaging the Westbindung, Kohl suffered from a national inferiority complex that further compelled him to stage himself internationally as a paragon of German normality. Thus he was disappointed when his government failed to convince the Western Allies to invite him to the fortieth D-Day ceremonies in Normandy in June 1984.To compensate, Mitterrand agreed to meet Kohl at the battlefields of Verdun, where Kohl’s father was wounded in the First World War and the French President himself had fought in the Second World War.169 Mitterrand explained on TV that this was an attempt ‘to repair historical memory’, as ‘Europe cannot be made without a good Franco-German accord’.170 The resulting image of Kohl and Mitterrand joining hands in an emotional gesture of reconciliation counts as a high point in Kohl’s chancellorship, a monumental snapshot of normality.Through joint remembrance, Kohl and Mitterand honoured the soldiers killed on both sides, irrespective of their roles as victims or offenders. A joint declaration they issued at Verdun stated that both countries had learned their lesson from history: Europe would be their common cultural home, and they had become friends.171 Kohl subsequently planned another ‘Verdun’ with U.S. President Ronald Reagan at the Kolmeshöhe military cemetery near Bitburg.172 The U.S. government supported Kohl’s quest for normality, which both Reagan and Kohl saw as involving Germany’s unconditional Westernization.173 This time, however, Kohl’s vision suffered a setback when it transpired that forty-nine SS soldiers were buried at this garden of remembrance. Reagan’s ‘visit was intended symbolically to wipe away the last moral residues of probation under which the Federal Republic still laboured’, Charles Maier lamented.174 Geoff Eley, moreover, argued that the alliance between Reagan and Kohl must be seen in the light of the Cold War: ‘Germany should be allowed to honour its fallen soldiers, the argument runs, because they fought for the cause of freedom on the eastern front’.175 The controversial event was intended to benefit both sides: Germans would be able to regard themselves and their forebears as victims of the Second



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World War, and Reagan would be repaid with West Germany’s participation in the Strategic Defence Initiative, which had the added advantage of undermining British and French nuclear power. These two factors combined created the impression abroad that the West German government intended to reemerge a self-confident power.176 Kohl found a date in early May 1985 to be most suitable for Reagan’s visit. This was just before the world economic summit in Bonn and also coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the capitulation. When planning began, the two sides discussed sites of former concentration camps that might be suited to a visit during the trip. Reagan, however, expressed concerns that such a visit would only reactivate memories of the unpleasant parts of German history and impose feelings of guilt instead of focusing on the Federal Republican success story of the last forty years.177 The agenda was reviewed again in April 1985, when protests by veterans, Jewish organizations, the Democratic opposition, Republican senators and the U.S. media increased in response to the fact that SS soldiers were buried at Bitburg. Consequently, the trip was extended for a visit to the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.178 Regardless of the public anger about the SS graves, Reagan defended his decision not to exclude the visit to Bitburg. On 18 April, the U.S. President stated at a press conference: ‘those young men are victims of Nazism also . . . They were victims, just as surely as the victims of the concentration camps’.179 Two days later, in reaction to the pressure put on Reagan, Kohl’s nationalconservative floor leader, Alfred Dregger (CDU), sent a letter to U.S. Senator Metzenbaum, telling him that cancelling the Bitburg ceremony would be an ‘insult to my brother and his fallen comrades’ who had fought on the eastern front.180 Subsequently, 257 members of the U.S. House of Representatives appealed to Kohl to release their president from this visit. The German chancellor remained unimpressed. But even though the Greens’ motion at the Bundestag to cancel Bitburg was voted down (328 to 24),181 Kohl’s reputation was further impaired when the international media continued to stir up memories of Germany’s Nazi past, criticizing him for ‘banalizing the Holocaust’.182 This increased the Western public’s awareness of Kohl’s strategy of showcasing the FRG as a normal state that had overcome the past.183 Meantime, the men buried at Bitburg were discovered to be members of the SS Panzer Division responsible for an atrocious massacre of civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944.184 In contrast to the Bundestag, a vast majority in the U.S. House of Representatives then objected to the Bitburg itinerary (390 to 26).185 As Reagan continued to insist on his plan, political crisis became inescapable. He and his wife, Nancy, arrived in Bonn on 5 May 1985. Their first stop was Adenauer’s grave in Rhöndorf; second was the Bergen-Belsen memorial.186 Next they visited the military cemetery, where Kohl thanked Reagan for joining him to pay ‘homage to all victims of war and tyranny, to the dead and persecuted of all nations’ and for turning Bitburg into a ‘symbol of reconciliation and

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of German-American friendship’.187 At the U.S. airbase near Bitburg, Reagan confirmed this friendship, stating that the Third Reich had ‘one man’s totalitarian dictatorship’ and sustaining Kohl’s portrayal of Germans as victims: ‘we can mourn the German war dead today as human beings, crushed by a vicious ideology’.188 Reagan referred to the ‘totalitarian darkness’ that still covered the East and praised West Germany’s contribution ‘to preserving peace and guarding the security of the free world’. One should therefore ‘walk out of that shadow’ of the past.189 The final location on Kohl’s and Reagan’s day trip was Hambach Castle, one of the Chancellor’s favourite historical sites. Kohl was ashamed of the two hundred peace activists who mooned him and his American guests on the way.190 It was not the naked bottoms but Kohl’s and Reagan’s own behaviour that caused the greater controversy of 1985. Reagan had affirmed the end of the Sonderweg at a time when the emotions surrounding the German past obviously still hindered the nation’s ability to seem normal to the world and itself. In his famous speech at the Bundestag on 8 May 1985, West German President Richard von Weizsäcker (CDU) tried to compensate for Kohl’s lack of ‘historical tact’. Weizsäcker emphasized the meaning of 8 May as the day of Germans’ liberation from the Nazis, defined Hitler as the paramount evil, praised the German resistance and concealed the fact that the conservative elite had wanted Hitler’s rise to power.191 Weizsäcker’s speech was well received internationally, though it did not fundamentally differ from Kohl’s message at Bergen-Belsen two and a half weeks before. On 21 April 1985, Kohl had already instrumentalized the commemoration of the Bergen-Belsen’s liberation, attempting to appease the wave of criticism that crashed against his revisionist tendencies before his visit to the camp with Reagan. Speaking at Bergen-Belsen, Kohl acknowledged that ‘the era of murder, yes of genocide, is the darkest and most painful chapter of German history’.192 This implicitly suggested there were many other, more splendid chapters in German history. But despite this positive emphasis, Kohl also confessed to infinite feelings of shame, thus deviating from the requirement to bring the debates about German guilt to a final close (Schlußstrich). Shortly thereafter, Ernst Nolte envisioned such an end in an article about ‘the past that won’t go away’.193 Nolte sought to relativize Nazism in comparison to the preexisting communist threat.194 Kohl used a similar technique to relativize the past, despite demanding in Bergen-Belsen that the ‘whole dimension of this historical experience and burden’ be kept alive.195 However, Kohl’s argument that ‘totalitarianism, as it had asserted itself after 30 January 1933, is not an unrepeatable lapse, not an accident in history’ conflicted with previous attempts to represent German history as something altogether positive. Kohl concluded this speech by quoting the Rabbi Bal Shem Tov: ‘in remembrance lies the secret of redemption’.196 The prospect of redemption was in fact the deeper rationale in Kohl’s accounts of the



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past, though this always entwined with his liberal nationalism. Finally, Kohl thanked the Americans for ‘liberating Europe and ultimately the Germans too, from Hitler’s tyranny’.197 His representation of German normality, however – which had always rambled between taboo-breaking blunders and the methodological extension of the boundaries set by political correctness in the FRG – never really stabilized. In April 1986, Kohl contributed to the persistence of the negative memory of the Bitburg controversy by supporting his ‘old personal friend’ Kurt Waldheim in the Austrian federal election. Explaining that the controversial candidate came ‘from a generation that experienced and suffered the ups and downs of the common German-Austrian history’, Kohl rejected criticism of his friend in West Germany and Austria as an ‘arrogance of the younger generations that is difficult for me to bear’.198 The World Jewish Congress’s accusation that Waldheim had been a confidant and accomplice of Nazi criminals in the Balkans left Kohl unmoved. Kohl called Waldheim ‘a great patriot,’ valued his ‘achievements for the civilized world’ and encouraged Austrians to vote for him. The left of the Austrian political spectrum cautioned Kohl that ‘the initiator of the Bitburg disaster should spare Austria his political advice’. 199 Kohl was also extensively criticized in Israel and once more suspected of having no historical consciousness.200 While vacationing in Austria the following year, Kohl and Waldheim met privately for dinner at Waldheim’s home. This made Kohl the first Western European leader to meet Waldheim since his election as Austrian President. While some wondered why Kohl still met with Waldheim, others saw their meetings as further evidence of Kohl’s mission to put an end to the memory of the Nazi past.201 Regardless, Kohl kept up his friendship with Waldheim and welcomed him once more in Munich in 1992, sparking vehement criticism in Israel.202 In terms of foreign policy, the kind of relativization of the past that Kohl had pursued in The Hague again caused significant repercussions in October 1986, when he compared Gorbachev with the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels in an interview with the U.S. magazine Newsweek. First, Kohl almost offended the U.S. government by comparing the Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev with the 1938 conference in Munich, but then seemed to appease critics immediately by expressing his personal gratitude for the packages received through the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) in 1946. Kohl acknowledged that, apart from the Pope, only the Americans had ‘said that not all Germans are collectively guilty’.203 Nonetheless, Kohl deeply insulted the Soviet government in the Newsweek interview by frankly gossiping about his future friend Gorbachev: ‘I’m not a fool. I don’t consider him to be a liberal. He is a modern communist leader who understands public relations. Goebbels, one of those responsible for the crimes of the Hitler era, was an expert in public relations, too.’ Moscow, expecting an apology, froze important diplomatic relations.204 Genscher and Kohl’s

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foreign policy staff were shocked at the damage caused, whereas the opposition felt ever luckier to benefit from Kohl’s scandals. Kohl drew another correct but somewhat bizarre parallel in history when he assured the Newsweek reporters that more people had voted for him than for Hitler.205 After the interview, the Kohl government claimed that Kohl’s statements had not been officially approved and were misrepresented and taken out of context. Newsweek rejected this accusation.206 This ‘slip’ yet again revealed that Kohl’s historism concerned more than the promotion of a ‘healthy’ national identity per se. This fourth pillar of Kohl’s nationalism was also highly ideologized. It aimed, unsuccessfully in this instance, at legitimizing a particular notion of German history, his own power base and his image of normality flanked by Nazism and communism. Only in July 1989 did Kohl explicitly admit on French television that his comparison of Goebbels and Gorbachev had been a ‘mistake’.207 In response to the Newsweek interview, the journalist (and later Kohl biographer) Jürgen Leinemann expressed concern about the disparity between Kohl’s repeated claim to have learned the lessons of the past, and his tolerant attitude towards Nazis, which unsettled people in Germany and abroad. Kohl grasped history, which he ‘appropriated like a close lady-friend’, as something that was ‘less the result of human action’ than a ‘mythic figure of fate’; humanity was ‘inescapably at her mercy’.208 Moreover, Leinemann observed, Kohl’s ideology and historical understanding derived from his parents’ Weimar-period ideology, as reflected in his Ph.D. dissertation. Few new factors had influenced Kohl’s understanding of history as ‘German, occidental, Christian, liberal – the historically legitimated “good” per se’, Leinemann noted succinctly, and continued: ‘anything that disturbs this idyll will be either denied and suppressed or blamed on “the evil,” to which precisely – next to the Nazis – the Communists always also belong’. Leinemann found this static world view alarming: ‘in Kohl’s image of history, of course, only Adolf Hitler and his major followers rank as demonic criminals and embodiments of the evil’ but not the rest of the Germans: ‘the real evil was in Moscow’. 209 Thus, besides establishing positive continuities in national history, Kohl pursued various methods of ‘victimization’ to exonerate the Germans from the Nazi burden. Despite all the criticism, Kohl caused a similar row in 1987. Even though the Moscow government had already frozen important contacts with Bonn because of Kohl’s Gorbachev-Goebbels gaffe, Kohl decided to further pursue his historical relativism. During an election campaign in Dortmund, he accused the GDR of keeping ‘more than 2000 German compatriots as political prisoners in prisons and concentration camps’.210 As there were indeed a large number of political prisoners in the GDR, journalists speculated about whether this inappropriate terminological comparison was another slip, or was actually intended by the educated historian.211 Alluding to Kohl’s relationship with the Flick family, the Green politician Otto Schily (later SPD) retorted that ‘it is no



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coincidence that such statements come from those political exponents who have been sponsored by the murderous helpmates of Hitler’.212 The opposition was certain that Kohl sought to lure voters from the extreme right. The FDP also criticized Kohl. Trade union leader Ilse Brusis asked which Kohl should surrender: his Ph.D. in history, or his office as chancellor. CDU General Secretary Heiner Geißler, however, defended Kohl’s choice of words: communism and Nazism were both misanthropic regimes, and their treatment of prisoners justified the term concentration camp. Secretary of State Ottfried Henning remarked that the Soviets had used the buildings at the Buchenwald concentration camp as a prison again in August 1945. The GDR government rejected Kohl’s accusation, as well as his reference to GDR citizens as his compatriots, but took no further diplomatic measures.213 Meanwhile the CDU defended Kohl, stating that the SPD had also used the term concentration camp in the 1960s to describe GDR prisons, and in the 1970s for detention centres in Chile and Greece. 214 Kohl addressed the negative responses at a rally in Kiel a few days later. Referring to human rights violations in the Eastern Bloc, he assured the West German electorate that his ‘party would never accept that one speaks of ‘normality’ in the middle of Germany, where there is none. We are miles away from normality as long as people who try to move from one part of Germany to the other get shot’.215 Kohl’s crude comparison thus was not a blunder but a conscious attack on the GDR. It sprang from his liberal, nationalist quest for normality, which sought to distinguish the Federal Republican keynote of the ‘all-clear’ signal from any un-German variation on the national concord. After (re)unification, Kohl visited Buchenwald in June 1991. By then it had become two sites of commemoration: one for the victims of Nazism and one for the victims of Soviet Special Camp Number 2, which operated from 1945 to 1950. At this ideal place for Kohl’s memory regime, he dedicated six wooden crosses to the victims of the ‘communist terror dictatorship’, at the same time commemorating the victims of the Nazi concentration camp.216 With the dissolution of the GDR, Germany’s totalitarian past doubled. Supplementing the culture of coming to terms with the Nazi past was the new coming to terms with the Stasi past, which became the foundation myth of the Berlin Republic.217 On 17 June 1996, Kohl cofounded the Bürgerbüro Berlin e.V., established to account for the dictatorial GDR past.218 Prominent historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Heinrich A. Winkler, who had studied the conservative quest for Germany’s exoneration from the Nazi burden in the 1980s, have recently worried about a decline in public memory of the GDR’s illegitimacy.219 Sabine Moller’s study of Kohl’s Geschichtspolitik demonstrated that his efforts in the 1980s to blur (entkonkretisieren) the victim-offender assessment of the Nazi era did not simply lose effect upon Germany’s (re)unification. The remaking of the Neue Wache in 1993, which was principally an outcome of plans made back in the 1980s under the Kohl government, symbolized the

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continuation of Kohl’s mission to include the widest possible range of German groups in the community of victims.220 While the GDR had dedicated the building ‘to the victims of fascism and militarism’, the post-(re)unification monument invites the entire German nation into the community of victims, symbolizing the swing from collective guilt to collective absolution, and attempting to come to terms with the past to de-substantiating historical understanding of the Nazi era. However, the controversy over Daniel J. Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, published in 1996, was the most powerful sign that total normalization of German nationalism remained elusive, for the time being.221 Goldhagen’s views contrasted starkly with Kohl’s endeavours to retrospectively polish Germany’s tarnished image and limit the circle of German perpetrators during the Nazi era. Interestingly, Rupert Seuthe pointed out that during the reopening of the Neue Wache, Kohl had promised Ignatz Bubis, chairman of the Zentralrat der Juden, that he would support the erection of a ‘countermonument’ in Berlin exclusively for the Jews murdered in the Holocaust (and excluding, e.g., Sinti and Roma).222 The idea of such a monument, initially promoted by Eberhard Jäckel and Lea Rosh, predated the remaking of the German nation-state and reflected Kohl’s admission that infinite national remembrance of the Holocaust was necessary to achieve ‘redemption’, as he had indicated on 21 April 1985 in Bergen-Belsen.223 Kohl, unlike Berlin’s mayor Eberhard Diepgen (CDU), was concerned about the realization of this monument.224 After several waves of controversy over the concept, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was completed only after Kohl lost the chancellorship in the 1998 elections. Stephen Brockmann, who asked whether Kohl’s ‘vision of normalization’ had been realized, wrote in 2006: ‘Since Auschwitz is now generally recognized in the western world, and by Germany itself, as the greatest national crime in human history, it is exceedingly difficult to build a conventional national identity that is based on it’.225 Kohl’s quest for normality was thus a utopian undertaking. Still, both his endeavour to relativize the Nazi past and the intervals of its instrumentalization for political purposes were part of the Kohlian melody of the ‘all-clear’.

Concluding Remarks on Kohl’s Historism Historism was a dominant ingredient in Kohl’s personal nationalism. As Chancellor, he provided political leadership for a conservative movement that strove to ‘step out of Hitler’s shadow’, prevail over the stigma of guilt and put an end to the postwar era. In Kohl’s Rankean image of the past and present, political order grew organically and ultimately had to comply with God’s will. National history served to legitimize the existence of the state, as well as his ideology and power. He presented the nation as a historically inescapable category of social



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and individual existence. In his rhetoric, national history constituted the past of all Germans, regardless of their location in time and space. With Germany divided into two states, Kohl felt that this common history was forced into unnatural channels. He included the Third Reich in national history, if only as an aberration of an otherwise positive continuity, but he excluded the GDR: only the FRG could legitimately represent the national history of the Germans. To encapsulate the Entwarnung in a new image of German normality, Kohl sought to relativize the Nazi past. This way of historicizing German history is traceable to the key argument of his 1958 Ph.D. thesis, which emphasized positive continuities in Germany’s political culture beyond the Betriebsunfall of the Third Reich. The ’45er attended university in an atmosphere that floated between sanitization of the Nazi past, practical reconstruction and renewal of the political culture in the Federal Republic. Former Nazis had important functions in the not-so-new West German society, including in academia; meanwhile, the Cold War affected Germans like a magic potion to stave off ideological anomie after the fall of the Third Reich. Kohl’s thesis advanced both the Federal Republican foundation myth and his personal myth. He presented himself as a politician grounded in Germany’s liberal tradition, which outweighed – and was clearly distinct from – the Nazi episode. His Ph.D. gave him confidence to take the political stage as an expert in history who understood the fate of the Germans. To counter the image of German peculiarity, he strove to construct and represent a German Normalweg of older, democratic traditions that had grown from the Hambach Festival and the Paulskirche Parliament to blossom in the Federal Republican constitution. Kohl placed special importance on the zero hour because it legitimized his representation, but he objected to the assumption that 1945 constituted a complete break in Germany’s national history, preferring to cite the Third Reich’s discontinuity as justification of the historical continuity of liberal traditions in Germany. Ultimately, in Kohl’s interpretation of German history, there were hardly any ‘real’ Nazis except for Hitler and Goebbels. In his narrative, the Germans had always been a good people overall, the millions of Hitler’s followers had been merely ‘seduced’, and those who had subsequently contributed to the morally superior Federal Republican success story were automatically rehabilitated. The FRG was the primary verification of Germany’s affirmative historical course towards the West. Compatriots, especially the youngsters, should not hesitate to be proud of their history, become familiar with their grand past and thus realize themselves as a nation. Kohl’s own autobiographical representation complied with this idea of Germany. He thought of himself as the verkörperte Entwarnung, a guiltless German who had witnessed the failures of the Nazi Reich and the transition to Federal Republican superiority. He seized on the opportunity to make 1989/90 into a momentous link in the chain of allegedly positive episodes of Germany’s continuous national history, which found further fulfilment in the (re)unification

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under Federal Republican formulas. After the natural order of things had been achieved, Kohl defended his place in German history as the Father of Unity. Kohl formed his idea of German history in the postwar context of the Cold War, which led him to further relativize Nazism to its totalitarian counterpart, communism. But this method created obstacles on the road to normality and brought the historical tact of the educated historian into question. Kohl’s frequent testing of the elasticity of socially acceptable boundaries in the FRG caused several major scandals, most prominently when he presented all Germans as the victims of Nazism instead of co-offenders. Yet despite his attempts to exonerate Germans from the burden of the past, he did not deny the need to remember the horrors realized ‘in the name of the Germans’. Without this memory, his normalization nationalism could not have existed.

Notes 1.  For the concept of ‘historical culture’ (Geschichtskultur) as defined by Jörn Rüsen, see J. Rüsen. 1994. ‘Was ist Geschichtskultur? Überlegungen zu einer neuen Art, über Geschichte nachzudenken’, in K. Fußmann (ed.), Historische Faszination: Geschichtskultur heute, Cologne: Böhlau, 3–26. 2.  H. Kohl. 1958. ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’, Ph.D. dissertation, Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg (unpublished). 3.  For the concept of Geschichtspolitik see also H. Schmid. 2009. Geschichtspolitik und kollektives Gedächtnis: Formen der Erinnerung 41 / Erinnerungskulturen in Theorie und Praxis, Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 53–76. 4.  Kohl’s nationalism included both historism and historicism. See Berger, ‘Historians and Nation-Building in Germany after Reunification’, 187, 188. For a critical review of the German tradition of historism (which in the review is translated into English as ‘historicism’) see Iggers, The German Conception of History:The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. 5. Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik. 6. Schwarzmüller, Albert Finck und die Nationalhymne, 88. 7. Judt, Postwar, 56–57; K. Adenauer. 1946. (Speech delivered at the University of Cologne, 24 March 1946), Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation. Retrieved 12 October 2014 from http://www. kas.de/upload/ACDP/CDU/Reden/1946–03–24-Rede-Uni-Koeln.pdf. 8. Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 64–81. 9. Herf, Divided Memory, 208. 10. Bender, Episode oder Epoche? 33–34. 11. Jarausch, Die Umkehr, 85. 12. T.W. Adorno. 1986. ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, in G.H. Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 119–20. This was based on a former text by Adorno: T.W. Adorno. 1977. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10(2), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 555–72. 13. Bender, Episode oder Epoche? 33–36. 14.  H. Kohl. 2004. Erinnerungen 1930–82, vol. 1, Munich: Droemer, 80. 15. Dreher, Helmut Kohl, 48–49. 16. H.J. Noack. 1975. ‘Die stummen Zeugen lagen in einer Kapelle in Auschwitz: Der Einfluß des Unternehmers Fritz Ries um seine Vergangenheit’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 21 May; B. Engelmann. 2002 [1974]. Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz, Göttingen: Steidl; Engelmann, Schwarzbuch Helmut Kohl – eiserner Kanzler des großen Geldes.



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17.  Mannheimer Morgen. 1947. ‘Sieben Jahre Gefangenschaft für Flick’, 24 December; Der Spiegel. 1987. ‘Nachmittags erschien Frau Weber’, 26 October. 18.  For a biography of Hanns Martin Schleyer, see L. Hachmeister. 2004. Schleyer: Eine Deutsche Geschichte, Munich: C.H. Beck; see also Engelmann, Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz, chapter 4. 19. V. Zastrow. 2004. ‘Aus dem Tod heraus erklärt sich nichts,’ (Review of Hachmeister’s biography on Schleyer), FAZ, 12 June. Retrieved 12 October 2014 from http://www.faz.net/ artikel/C30000/lutz-hachmeister-aus-dem-tod-heraus-erklaert-sich-nichts-30047531.html. Kohl wrote in his memoirs that a few days before Schleyer was kidnapped by the Red Army Faction in September 1977, they had dined together in Bonn; see Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 363, 460. 20. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 79. 21. Ibid. 22.  Kimpinsky, ‘Helmut Kohl glaubt an das “Abenteuer des Lebens”’. 23. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 80–81. 24.  Ibid., 85. 25.  H. Vogt. 2009. Die Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg im Aufbruch: Am glänzenden Fluss des Weltwissens, Heidelberg: Winter, 87, 72, 213; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 106. 26. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 82. 27.  Ibid., 83. 28.  S.P. Remy. 2002. The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 50. Under the motto Dem lebendigen Geist, a fundraising campaign to restore the Humanities in Heidelberg’s old town took place in early 2009 under Kohl’s patronage; see Vogt, Die Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg im Aufbruch, 64. See also N. Sombart. 2000. Rendezvous mit dem Weltgeist: Heidelberger Reminiszenzen, 1945–1951, Frankfurt: Fischer; and S. Forner. 2012. ‘The Promise of Publicness: Intellectual Elites and Participatory Politics in Postwar Heidelberg’, Modern Intellectual History 9(3), 641–60. 29.  P. Watson. 2010. The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper; Kohn, The Mind of Germany. 30.  See Vogt, Die Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg im Aufbruch. 31.  In his memoirs, Kohl quotes from Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General, see Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 30–31. Kohl explained how much he admired Zuckmayer, and that they met in 1970.There is a photo of them together on page 31. See also Die Zeit, ‘Was lesen Sie’. 32. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 13,16. 33.  Ibid., 22. 34.  Ibid., 23, 24 ff, 38. 35. A.M. Eckert. 2004. Kampf um die Akten: die Westalliierten und die Rückgabe von deutschem Archivgut nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 365. 36. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 39; for Westforschung, see, e.g., B. Dietz et al. (eds). 2003. Griff nach dem Westen: Die “Westforschung“ der völkisch-nationalen Wissenschaften zum nordwesteuropäischen Raum (1919–1960), vol. 2, Münster: Waxmann; T. Müller. 2009. Imaginierter Westen: Das Konzept des “deutschen Westraums” im völkischen Diskurs zwischen Politischer Romantik und Nationalsozialismus, Bielefeld: Transcript. 37. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 68. 38. H. Kohl. 1995. ‘Der lange Atem der Geschichte: Zum neunzigsten Geburtstag des Historikers Walther Peter Fuchs’, FAZ, 13 March. 39. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 141. See also J. Heß et al. (eds). 1996. Heidelberg 1945, in Verbindung mit Detlef Junker und Eike Wolgast, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner; UNiMUT: Zeitschrift an der uni Heidelberg. 2010. ‘Themenheft: Nationalsozialismus in Heidelberg’, 206(5). Retrieved 12 October 2014 fromunimut.fsk.uni-heidelberg.de/unimut/pdfarch/um206.pdf; for a more general account on historians and Nazi Germany, see also R. Hohls and K. Jarausch (eds). 2000. Versäumte Fragen: deutsche Historiker im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus, Stuttgart: DVA; M. Weinrich. 1999 [1946]. Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, Yale: Yale University Press.

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40. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 2; cf. G. Ritter. 1945. ‘Der deutsche Professor im Dritten Reich’, Die Gegenwart 1(1), 23. 41. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 217; Heß et al., ‘Heidelberg 1945, in Verbindung mit Detlef Junker und Eike Wolgast’, 101. 42. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 116; cf. B. Weisbrod (ed.). 2002. Akademische Vergangenheitspolitik, Göttingen: Wallstein, 11–35. 43. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 118; cf. B.Weisbrod. 2004. ‘Das Moratorium der Mandarine: Zur Selbstentnazifizierung der Wissenschaften in der Nachkriegszeit’, in H. Lehmann and O.G. Oexle (eds), Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften: Leitbegriffe, Deutungsmuster, Paradigmenkämpfe, Erfahrungen und Transformationen im Exil, vol. 2, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 246; for an English version see B. Weisbrod. 2003. ‘The Moratorium of the Mandarins and the Self-Denazification of German Academe: A View from Göttingen’, Contemporary European History 12, 47–69. 44. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 119–20. 45.  Ibid., 146. 46.  See K. Jaspers. 1946. Die Schuldfrage, Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider. 47.  See Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past; A. Mitscherlich and F. Mielke. 1947. Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung: Der Nürnberger Ärzteprozeß und seine Quellen, Eine Dokumentation, Heidelberg: Schneider; see also T. Freimüller. 2007. Alexander Mitscherlich: Gesellschaftsdiagnosen und Psychoanalyse nach Hitler, Göttingen: Wallstein. 48.  M. and A. Mitscherlich. 1967. The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, New York: Grove Press, . 49.  See Kohl’s curriculum vitae attached to his Ph.D. thesis: Kohl,‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’. 50. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 83–84. 51.  A. Rohstock. 2012. ‘Kein Vollzeitrepublikaner – die Findung des Demokraten Theodor Eschenburg (1904–1999)’, B. Hein; M. Kittel & H. Möller (eds.), Gesichter der Demokratie. Portraits zur deutschen Zeitgeschichte (Festschrift für Udo Wengst). Munich: Oldenbourg, 187–204 52.  In a 2010 debate about the Foreign Office’s role during the Third Reich, the historian Norbert Frei accused Eschenburg of denying the Foreign Office’s involvement in the Holocaust; Ullrich and Erenz, ‘Das Ende der Weizsäcker-Legende’. 53.  H. Kohl, ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’. 54.  Juristische Rundschau. 1955. ‘Walter Jellinek zum Gedächtnis’, 10 January, 373; H. Klein. 1974. ‘Jellinek, Walter’, Neue Deutsche Biographie 10, 394, 394–95. Retrieved 12 October 2014 from http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/artikelNDB_pnd118711997.html. 55.  For the history of this journal see M. Waldmüller. 1988. Die Wandlung: Eine Monatsschrift, Herausgegeben von Dolf Sternberger unter Mitwirkung von Karl Jaspers, Werner Krauss und Alfred Weber, Marbach a.N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft. 56.  D. Sternberger. 1970.‘Unvergleichlich lebensvoll, aber stets gefährdet. Ist unsereVerfassung nicht demokratisch genug?’ FAZ, 27 January; D. Sternberger. 1979.‘Verfassungspatriotismus’, FAZ, 23 May; D. Sternberger. 1982. ‘Verfassungspatriotismus’, FAZ, 31 August. For a collection of articles see Sternberger, Verfassungspatriotismus. (Sternberger wrote several articles at different times, all titled ‘Verfassungspatriotismus’.) 57. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 105–30. Habermas argued during the Historikerstreit that ‘the only patriotism that would not alienate Germany from the West is the Verfassungspatriotismus’; see J. Habermas. 1986. ‘Eine Art Schadensabwicklung’, Die Zeit, 11 July, reprinted in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 75.The documentation of the Historikerstreit is also available in English: Augstein, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? I used the German collection for this study. For Habermas’s notion of Verfassungspatriotismus see also J. Habermas. 1992. Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp. 58.  R. Breitling, ‘Im Seminar’, in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 67. 59. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 101.



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60.  D. Sternberger. 1970. ‘Darf man heute konservativ sein?’ FAZ, 7 October. 61. Berger, The Search for Normality, 83. 62. K. Kaufmann et al. 1961. ‘Die Auswahl der Bundestags-Kandidaten 1957 in zwei Bundesländern’, in D. Sternberger (ed.), Politische Forschungen, vol. 2, Cologne: Kipenheuer and Witsch. 63.  E. Faul, ‘Heidelberger Jahre’, in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 68–73, 70. 64.  D. Sternberger. 1961. Begriff des Politischen, Frankfurt: Insel, 49. 65.  Kohl, ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’, 161. 66.  E. Wolgast, ‘Geschichtswissenschaft in Heidelberg 1933–1945’, in Lehmann and Oexle, Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 1, 168. 67.  For a very concise outline of Franz’s ideology see W. Behringer. 2000. ‘Bauern Franz und Rasse-Günther: Die politische Geschichte des Agrarhistorikers Günther Franz (1902–1992)’, in W. Schulze and O.G. Oexle (eds), Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 114–41. 68. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 69–70. 69.  Wolgast in Lehmann and Oexle, Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 1, 165. 70.  F. Ernst. 1960. ‘Die Wiedereröffnung der Universität Heidelberg, 1954–1946: Aus Anlass des 70. Geburtstags von Karl Heinrich Bauer am 26 September 1960’, Heidelberger Jahrbücher 4, 1. 71. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 228–30; I. Haar. 2005. ‘German Ostforschung and anti-Semitism’, in I. Haar and M. Fahlbusch, German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing: 1919–1945, Oxford: Berghahn, 1–27; see also I. Haar. 2000. Historiker im Nationalsozialismus: Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der ‘Volkstumskampf’ im Osten, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; J.E. Dunkhase. 2010. Werner Conze: Ein deutscher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; T. Etzemüller. 2001. Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte: Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, Munich: Oldenbourg; G. Aly, ‘Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze oder die Vorstufen der physischen Vernichtung’, in Schulze and Oexle, Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus, 172–74, 177–78. 72. Professorenkatalog der Universität Leipzig. ‘Prof. Dr. phil. Johannes Gotthelf Wilhelm Kühn’. Retrieved 12 October 2014 from http://www.unileipzig.de/unigeschichte/ professorenkatalog/leipzig/Kuehn_257/markiere:K%C3%BChn. 73. V. Klemperer. 2007. Die Tagebücher 1933–1945: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, ed. Walter Nowojski in collaboration with C. Löser, Berlin: Directmedia (Digitale Bibliothek), 133, 177, 338–39, 369, 450–51. 74.  Ibid., 277, 1702. 75.  Ibid., 751–52, 1671, 1657–658. 76.  J. Kühn. 1940. ‘Über den Sinn des gegenwärtigen Krieges’, Schriften zur Geopolitik, vol. 19, Heidelberg:Vowinckel. 77.  J. Kühn. 1947. Die Wahrheit der Geschichte und die Gestalt der Wahren Geschichte, Oberursel: Kompass, 68. 78. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 106. 79. L. Müller. 2004. Diktatur und Revolution: Reformation und Bauernkrieg in der Geschichtsschreibung des “Dritten Reiches” und der DDR, Stuttgart: Lucius and Lucius, 127–31, 288–320; also see Hacke and Steinbach-Reimann, ‘Neubeginn und Entwicklung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft in den 1950/60er Jahren’. Retrieved 12 October 2014 from http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/beitrag/intervie/stuermer.htm. 80. Müller, Diktatur und Revolution, 302–3. 81. Ibid., 318. Fuchs considered the Reformation to have influenced the German Peasant War more than previously thought. His and Günther Franz’s study was published in 1942; see W.P. Fuchs and G. Franz (eds). 1942. Akten zur Geschichte des Bauernkrieges in Mitteldeutschland, Jena: Scientia. 82.  See L. von Ranke. 1949. Das Briefwerk, (ed.) W.P. Fuchs, Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe; L. Müller. 2000. ‘Das Lebenswerk von Walther Peter Fuchs. Zu seinem Tode am 4. November 1998’, in Kommission für geschichtliche Landeskunde Baden-Württemberg (ed.), Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, vol. 148, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 385–91.

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83. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 100. 84.  Kohl, ‘Der lange Atem der Geschichte’. 85. Ibid. 86.  P. Fuchs, ‘Cum Laude’, in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 73ff. 87.  J. Busche. 1998. Helmut Kohl: Anatomie Eines Erfolges, Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 33. 88. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 98–99. 89. Henscheid, Helmut Kohl, 126. 90.  Fuchs in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 77. 91.  Kohl, ‘Die politische Entwicklung und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945’, 56. 92.  Ibid., 120ff., 132ff. 93. Ibid., 77–78. 94.  Ibid., 63ff., 77ff., 88ff. 95.  Ibid., 80. 96. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 64. 97.  Ibid., 71. 98.  Ibid., 57, 66. 99.  F. Fischer. 1959. ‘Deutsche Kriegsziele: Revolutionierung und Separatfrieden im Osten 1914–1918’, Historische Zeitschrift 188(2), 249; Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht; K.H. Jarausch. 2003. ‘Der nationale Tabubruch:Wissenschaft, Öffentlichkeit und Politik in der Fischer-Kontroverse’, in M. Sabrow et al. (eds), Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Große Kontroversen seit 1945, Munich: Beck. 100. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1; Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, ch. 3 (with contributions by Rupert Breitling, Erwin Faul and Walther Peter Fuchs). Forsthoff was the author of E. Forsthoff. 1933. Der Totale Staat, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. 101.  H. Kohl. 1966. ‘Angst vor der Geschichte?’ Die Rheinpfalz, 7 May. 102. Ibid. 103.  H. Kohl. 1968. ‘Wie soll es nun weitergehen?’ Die Rheinpfalz, 22 June. 104. Ibid. 105.  Kohl, ‘Der 17. Juni 1953. 20 Jahre Danach’ (Speech delivered at CDU/CSU Event, Berlin-Charlottenburg Sporthalle, Berlin, 17 June). For the role of 17 June in German memory politics, see especially E. Wolfrum. 1999. Geschichtspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Der Weg zur bundesrepublikanischen Erinnerung 1948–1990, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. H. Kohl. 1974. (Speech delivered at Tag der Danziger, in the Rhein-Mosel-Halle, Koblenz, 5 May), KAS/Kohl/Reden, unedited manuscript. 109. Ibid. 110. H. Kohl. 1993. ‘Das Grundgesetz – Verfassung der Freiheit’ (Speech delivered at Frankfurter Paulskirche, Frankfurt, 23 May 1974), in Hintze and Langguth, Helmut Kohl, 68. 111. Ibid. 112.  H. Kohl. 1984. (Speech delivered to the Bundestag, Bonn, 15 March) in Reden 1982– 1984, 348. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Introduction’, in T. Heuss et al. (eds), Gedanken zum 20. Juli 1944, Mainz: Forschungsgemeinschaft 20. Juli e.V., v. Hase and Koehler, 11, 17. 116.  Ibid., 12–13. 117.  Ibid., 16. 118. S. Kattago. 2011. Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity, London: Praeger, 43–44. 119.  F.J. Strauß. 1987. ‘Mehr aufrechten Gang’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 14 January; see also his previous speeches: F.J. Strauß. 1985. Verantwortung vor der Geschichte: Beiträge zur deutschen und internationalen Politik 1978–1985, Munich: Schulz.



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120. H.A. Winkler. ‘Auf ewig in Hitlers Schatten: Zum Streit des Geschichtsbild der Deutschen’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 14 November 1986, reprinted in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 256–63; also see Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow; Augstein, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? 121. Kohl, ‘Kontinuitiät und Fortschritt’ (Speech delivered at the Deutscher Bankentag), 314. 122. Ibid. 123.  Ibid., 317. 124. Ibid. 125.  Stürmer in Filmer and Schwan, Helmut Kohl, 279–85, 281. 126.  Bayrischer Rundfunk. 1999. ‘Alpha-Forum. Prof. Dr. Michael Stürmer, Historiker im Gespräch mit Dr. Michael Schramm,’ 18 March. 127.  M. Stürmer. 1981. ‘Nationalstaat und Klassengesellschaft im Zeitalter des Bürgers – Ein Versuch’, Merkur, 35, 477. 128.  M. Stürmer.‘Geschichte in einem Geschichtslosen Land’, FAZ, 25 April 1986, reprinted in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 36–38; M. Stürmer. ‘Was Geschichte wiegt’, FAZ, 26 November 1986, reprinted in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 293–96. 129. Hacke and Steinbach-Reimann, ‘Neubeginn und Entwicklung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft in den 1950/60er Jahren’ (Interview with M. Stürmer, Berlin, 25 March). 130. Ibid. 131. M. Stürmer. 1981. ‘Preußens Erbe an die deutsche Geschichte’, FAZ, 14 October; Berger, The Search for Normality, 87, 94. 132. Stürmer, Die Grenzen der Macht. 133. H. Kohl. 1984. ‘Zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland’ (Report to the Bundestag, 15 March 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 358. 134.  Stürmer in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 36–38. 135.  The notion of Gnade der späten Geburt was developed by Günter Gaus and initially had a different meaning; see Der Spiegel. 1986. ‘Verschwiegene Enteignung: Wer erfand die Wendung von der “Gnade der späten Geburt?’ 15 September; H. Kohl. 1984. Besuch in der Knesset, media release. Bonn: BPA Bulletin 13, 25 January, 112. Kohl had used the concept of “grace of late birth” long before causing this controversy; see K. Harpprecht. 1970. ‘Klaus Harpprecht im Gespräch mit Dr. Helmut Kohl, Ministerpräsident von Rheinland-Pfalz’ (Interview with Helmut Kohl, ZDF Dialog), media release. Bonn: BPA, 23 April. 136. Kohl, Besuch in der Knesset, 112. 137.  See Harpprecht,‘Klaus Harprecht im Gespräch mit Dr. Helmut Kohl, Ministerpräsident von Rheinland-Pfalz’. 138. Hermann, Helmut Kohl:Vom Kurfürst zum Kanzler, 47–51. 139.  Ibid., 47. 140. Kohl, Besuch in der Knesset, 112. 141.  Der Spiegel. 1984. ‘Kohl hat in Israel Glaubwürdigkeit verloren’, 13 February. 142.  J. Hillesheim and E. Michael (eds). 1993. Lexikon nationalsozialistischer Dichter: Biographien, Analysen, Bibliographien, Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 465–74. 143.  Ziesels Deutschlandstiftung zeichnete Israel-Freund Springer aus, media release. 1984. Hamburg: DPA, 9 February. 144.  Kohl wirft SPD wegen Kritik an Ziesel-Mitreise Heuchelei vor, media release. 1984. Hamburg: DPA, 9 February. 145.  Frankfurter Rundschau. 1984. ‘“Wie Kaiser Wilhelm II.” Debatte über Kohls IsraelBesuch und den Publizisten Ziesel’, 10 February. 146.  Galinski enttäuscht über Kohls Israel-Reise, media release. 1984. Hamburg: DPA, 20 January. 147.  Der Spiegel, ‘Kohl hat in Israel Glaubwürdigkeit verloren’, 7, 13. 148.  FAZ, ‘Ich stelle mich in eine Ecke, wo man gar nicht bemerkt wird’ (Interview with Kohl); see also Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 22, 43–45. 149. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1, 22.

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150.  Bardens, ‘Collage’. 151. Clough, Hannelore Kohl, 217. 152. Gauland, Helmut Kohl, 14. 153.  Urschel, ‘Das private Martyrium’; H. Schwan and T. Jens. 2014. Vermächtnis: Die KohlProtokolle, Munich: Heyne. 154.  G. Hofmann. 1998. ‘Ein Kanzler schreibt Geschichte’, Die Zeit, 4 June. One result was Karl-Rudolf Korte’s contribution to the four volumes on The History of German Unity: Korte, Deutschlandpolitik in Helmut Kohls Kanzlerschaft. 155. Kohl, Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit, ed. K. Diekmann and R.G. Reuth. 156. Kohl, Mein Tagebuch: 1998–2000; Kohl, Errinerungen, vol. 1; Kohl, Errinerungen, vol . 2; Kohl, Errinerungen, vol. 3. 157.  Deutscher Bundestag.‘Beschlussempfehlung und Bericht des 1. Untersuchungsausschusses nach Artikel 44 des Grundgesetzes’ (Report of the Parliamentary Investigation Committee), 13 June 2002 (Drucksache 14/9300) . 158. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 1; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2; Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 3. 159. Kohl, Vom Mauerfall zur Wiedervereinigung. 160.  C. Esch. 2011. ‘Dieses Bild erfeut mich’, Berliner Zeitung, 2 November. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/helmut-kohl-stellt-in-berlin-denzweiten-band-seiner--erinnerungen--vor-dieses-bild-erfreut-mich,10810590,10333256.html. 161.  Bild. 2009. ‘Der Tag der Emotionen und der Erinnerungen’, 1 November. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.bild.de/politik/2009/george-bush/kohl-bush-gorbatschowvaeter-der-einheit-10292156.bild.html. 162.  Der Spiegel. 2009. ‘Gipfeltreffen der Einheitsväter’, 31 October. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,658505,00.html. 163. D. Pieper. 2009. ’60 Jahre Bundesrepublik: Die Köpfe Der Nation’, Der Spiegel (Einestages), 1 April. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://einestages.spiegel.de/static/topicalbumbackground/3903/die_koepfe_der_nation.html. 164. G. di Lorenzo. 2010. ‘Verstehen Sie das, Herr Schmidt?’ (Interview with Helmut Schmidt), Die Zeit, 31 March. Retrieved 13 October 2010 from http://www.zeit.de/2010/13/ Schmidt-Kohl-di-Lorenzo. 165.  Stern Edition. 2010. ‘Helmut Kohl: Der Kanzler der Einheit wird 80. Ein Leben für die Politik’, No. 1. 166.  Bürger Fragen – Politiker Antworten (Kohl interviewed in The Hague by R. Appel), media release. 1974. Bonn: BPA, ZDF, 22 February. 167.  H. Kohl. 1984. Koalition der Mitte: Für eine Politik der Erneuerung (Policy Statement to the Bundestag, 13 October 1982), in Reden 1982–1984, 9–49, 47. 168. Kohl, Zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland‘ (15 March 1984), in Reden 1982–1984, 345. 169.  The Times. 1984. ‘Bonn Denies Seeking D-Day Invitation’, 22 May; D. Geddes. 1984. ‘Verdun Ceremonies to Soothe Bonn’s Feelings’, The Times, 22 November. 170. S. Meisler. 1984. ‘Mitterand, Kohl Join in Commemoration of Battle of Verdun’, International Herald Tribune, 24 November. 171.  Ein Zeichen des Friedens im Geist der Brüderlichkeit: Gemeinsame Erklärung des Bundeskanzlers und des französischen Staatspräsidenten in Verdun, media release. 1985. Bonn: BPA Bulletin 108, 25 September. 172. Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective; see also R.J. Jensen. 2007. Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 173.  U.S. Ambassador Richard Burt spoke about this matter at a German-American historical conference in Nuremberg on 23 May 1986 titled ‘Jenseits der Stunde Null: Die Schaffung einer staatsbürgerlichen Kultur im Nachkriegsdeutschland’, cited in H. Mommsen, ‘Suche nach der “verlorenen Geschichte”? Bemerkungen zum historischen Selbstverständnis der Bundesrepublik, Merkur’, in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 156–73, 167. 174. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 10.



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175.  Eley, ‘Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past’, 121, 176. 176.  The Economist. 1985. ‘Re-enter Germany: SDI plus Bitburg Equals New West German Power?’ 10 May. 177. Geoffrey H. Hartman provided a very valuable chronology of developments in the Bitburg controversy; see Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, xiii-xvi, xiii. 178.  Der Spiegel. 1985. ‘Eine eigenartige geistige Gymnastik,’ 22 April; see also Jensen, Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg, 62. 179. Jensen, Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg, 62. 180. See E. Alexander. 1994. The Holocaust and the War of Ideas, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 212. 181. Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, xiv-xv. 182.  H. de Bresson. 1985. ‘Bonn: le chancelier Kohl sur la sellette,’ Le Monde, 27 April. 183. T. Catterall. 1985. ‘Kohl Weeps for ‘Noble’ Reagan on War Graves Gaffe’, The Observer, 28 April. 184.  J.M. Markham. 1985. ‘SS Unit’s History Overlooked in U.S. Plan on German Visit’, New York Times, 28 April. 185. Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, xv. 186.  For Kohl’s memory of Reagan’s visit see Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 348–60. 187. Address by Chancellor Helmut Kohl to German and American Soldiers (Bitburg, 5 May 1985), in Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 256–57. 188.  Remarks of President Reagan (Bitburg Air Base, 5 May 1985), in Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 258–59. 189.  Ibid., 260–61. 190. Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 2, 359. 191.  Der Spiegel. 2005. ‘8. Mai war eine Befreiung’, 8 May. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,354568,00.html; for an English translation see R. von Weizsäcker (Speech delivered at the ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe and of National Socialist tyranny in the Deutsche Bundestag, Berlin, 8 May 1985), in Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 262–73; see also Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung, 247–54. 192.  Kohl in Die Unentrinnbare Gegenwart der Geschichte, 6. 193.  E. Nolte. ‘Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’, FAZ, 6 June 1986, reprinted in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 39–47. 194. See also E. Nolte. 1963. Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, Munich: Piper; E. Nolte, ‘Zwischen Geschichtslegende und Revisionismus? Das Dritte Reich im Blickwinkel das Jahres 1980’ (Speech delivered at the Carl-Friedrich-von-Siemens-Stiftung, 1980), reprinted in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 13–35. 195.  Kohl in Die Unentrinnbare Gegenwart der Geschichte, 10. 196.  Ibid., 14, 18. 197. Address by Chancellor Helmut Kohl to President Reagan during the Visit to the Former Concentration Camp at Bergen-Belsen the 5 May 1985, in Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 252. 198. H. Schleicher. 1986. ‘Kohl macht sich für Waldheim stark. Empörung in Israel und Österreich’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 28 April. 199.  Scharfe Kritik an Kohls Äußerungen im österreichischen Wahlkampf, media release. 1986. Hamburg: DPA, 27 April. 200. Ibid. 201.  S. Schmemann. 1987. ‘Kohl and Waldheim Meet Privately’, New York Times, 15 August. 202.  C. Haberman. 1992. ‘Israelis Say Kohl Has Insulted Jews’, New York Times, 30 March. 203.  Newsweek. 1986. ‘Kohl to Reagan: “Ron, Be Patient”’, 27 October. 204.  Nachrichtenspiegel/Inland II, media release. 1986. Bonn: BPA, 3 November. 205.  Der Spiegel. 1986. ‘Ich bin von mehr Leuten gewählt worden als Hitler’, 10 November. 206.  The Guardian. 1986. ‘Bonn Plays Down “Goebbles” Claim’, 4 November.

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207.  Kohl: Goebbels-Vergleich war ein Irrtum, media release. 1989. Hamburg: DPA, 6 July. 208.  J. Leinemann. 1986. ‘National verstand sich von selbst’, Der Spiegel, 10 November. 209. Ibid. 210. J. Westhoff. 1987. ‘Kohl: Die DDR hält Landsleute in KZ gefangen,’ Westfälische Rundschau, 5 January; J. England. 1987. ‘Kohl Stirs New Row with Concentration Camp Jibe at East,’ The Times, 6 January. 211.  Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung. 1987. ‘Entgleisung’, 6 January. 212.  Schily bringt Kohl in die Nähe zu “Mordgehilfen Hitlers”, media release. 1987. Hamburg: DPA, 5 February. 213.  Frankfurter Rundschau. 1987. ‘SPD und FDP rügen Kohls KZ-Vergleich: “Kanzler verschwätzt die Ostpolitik”’, 6 January ; K.H. Baumann. 1987. ‘Ermutigendes Zeichen’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 7 January. 214.  J. Merschmeier. 1987. CDU, 6 January, KAS/Kohl/SV/3a. 215.  Kohl spricht von “unsinnigem und unseligem Regime” in der DDR, media release. 1987. Hamburg: DPA, 10 January. 216. Kattago, Ambiguous Memory, 126; P. Monteath. 1994.‘Buchenwald Revisited: Rewriting the History of a Concentration Camp’, International History Review 16(2), 267. 217. Habermas, Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik. 218.  For further information, see the homepage of Bürgerbüro e.V.: . 219. F. Gathmann. 2007. ‘Von einem Schlussstrich kann keine Rede sein’ (Interview with Hans-Ulrich Wehler), Der Spiegel, 17 August. Retrieved 13 October 2014 fromhttp:// www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,500046,00.html; F. Gathmann. 2009. ‘Die DDR war vom Anfang bis zum Ende eine Diktatur’ (Interview with Heinrich August Winkler), Der Spiegel, 20 May. Retrieved 13 October 2014 from http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,625785,00.html; cf. H.U. Wehler. 1988. Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum Historikerstreit, Munich: C.H. Beck; H.A. Winkler. ‘Auf ewig in Hitlers Schatten: Zum Streit des Geschichtsbild der Deutschen’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 14 November 1986, in Augstein, Historikerstreit, 256–63. 220. Moller, Die Entkonkretisierung der NS-Herrschaft in der Ära Kohl, 40–71. See also Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung, 196–209; Seuthe, Geistig-moralische Wende? 235ff. 221.  D.J. Goldhagen. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust, New York: Knopf; M. Schneider and D. Dowe. 1998. Die “Goldhagen-Debatte”: ein Historikerstreit in der Mediengesellschaft, Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Retrieved 13 October 2014 fromhttp:// www.fes.de/fulltext/historiker/00144.htm. 222. Seuthe, Geistig-moralische Wende? 269. For an extensive study on the debates surrounding the Holocaust Monument in Berlin, see J.H. Kirsch. 2003. Nationaler Mythos oder historische Trauer? Der Streit um ein zentrales “Holocaust-Mahnmahl” für die Berliner Republik. Cologne: Böhlau. 223. Seuthe, Geistig-moralische Wende?, 265; Moller, Die Entkonkretisierung der NS-Herrschaft in der Ära Kohl, 11; Kohl, ‘Das Geheimnis der Erlösung heißt Erinnerung’, in Die Unentrinnbare Gegenwart der Geschichte. 224. Seuthe, Geistig-moralische Wende? 291, 293. 225. Brockmann in Taberner and Cooke, German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century, 21.

Conclusion A Synthesis of Kohl’s Personal Nationalism

Nationalism, thanks to its ideological flexibility in response to structural changes and its susceptibility to the influence of individual ideas in diverse societies, has manifested itself as a very important determinant in contemporary world views. Despite its internal elasticity, nationalism’s conceptual shell has remained stable at the universal level, again reinforcing the personal stratum: the world is perceived as a conglomerate of nations, and being nationalist means being normal. Each nation offers a distinctive, shared, changing repertoire to which the nationalist can resort. The cultural material offered, however, can be apportioned differently among the mindsets of co-nationals of the same nation.The individual notion of nation can encompass a variety of personal experiences, identities, loyalties and imaginations, including ideological and religious convictions. Thus the study of nationalism should not be limited to its understanding as a global or mass phenomenon but can also extend to a very personal level, where individual ideas and actions reinforce the universality of nationalism. Kohl’s personal nationalism must be understood primarily in the context of Germany’s particular historical culture during the Cold War. Within this framework, Kohl emerged as the embodiment of German normality. In the 1950s, when conservatism was liberalized and the nationalism of the mainstream was presented as de-radicalized, Kohl finalized a personal ideology from which he did not deviate thereafter. In the years when he was climbing the career ladder, the nation-state was missing and the nation’s reputation was at stake. Germany’s cultural distinction from Western civilization was no longer glorified

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but widely perceived as a dangerous burden.Yet the Cold War helped to alleviate Germany’s status as a rogue nation.Whilst the GDR presented itself as a bulwark against fascism, the FRG could draw on its existing anti-Communist tradition. Simultaneously, and increasingly as of the late 1960s, the already existing conception of German ‘abnormality’ was confirmed by the recognition of the singularity of Auschwitz, which permeated the public consciousness, became an international lieu de mémoire and manifested the German stigma. The alleged failure of liberalism in Germany was increasingly understood as a deeper cause of the catastrophic ending of that first nation-state in 1945. Consequently, German nationalists became more and more concerned about the reduction of their people’s past to pessimistic trajectories from Luther to Hitler, Herder to Hitler and Bismarck to Hitler. To establish possible rationales for what went wrong in Germany as compared to other Western nations, such teleological narratives of German thought and social structure sought to rationalize the roots of the incomprehensible crimes committed by Germans during the Nazi era. In the meantime, the Federal Republic’s Western integration remained a convenient means of containing the dysfunction of the allegedly illiberal German mind. The communist threat from the East – including the negative example of the GDR – facilitated the perception of Germany’s authentic belonging to the West, which was the principle underpinning all four pillars of Kohl’s personal nationalism. By subordinating his nationalist endeavour to the Westernization of his nation, Kohl was able to pursue the nationalization of his nation with relatively little dissent. This combination of two desires was key to Kohl’s quest for normality, which he sustained authentically with his (auto)biography. Somewhat ironically, the one person who seemed to epitomize Germany’s new normality was quite exceptional. Kohl’s life story is striking primarily because of his political leadership: he had greater agency than the average nationalist. Reducing Kohl’s representation to his political leadership, however, does not do justice to other important factors in his life that operated within his personal nationalism. Being elite matters, but to overemphasize a person’s hierarchical positions is to overlook the mobilization of additional (auto)biographical repertoires that populate notions of nations. In reality, Kohl’s religious, generational, educational and regional belongings provided a catalogue of selfimages that Kohl himself selectively projected into his version of German normality and perfection. He nurtured an image of himself as analogical to the nature of the German nation. He presented his own life as that of an ideal German: Christian, Western, European, rooted in local traditions, conscious of Germany’s glorious past and free of any Nazi guilt. Having drawn this hagiographic image of himself as the standard German, he represented the departure from the new and the old Sonderweg, which nobody in the world should fear anymore. Kohl did not always succeed in marketing himself as the verkörperte Entwarnung, but nevertheless, both in Germany and internationally, the German

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nation he imagined and sought to represent caused relatively few misgivings. A German nation that was politically excluded from the West could not, in Kohl’s view, realize its cultural destiny. Throughout his career, Kohl, who is increasingly remembered for his European identity, mobilized his Catholic background to endow his representation of German normality with authenticity. His notion of nation was profoundly shaped by his religious socialization, which proved an advantage in his mission to absolve the Germans of their Sonderweg stigma. It symbolized a return to God, not only after the Nazi apostasy but also in opposition to the equally atheist communists of the East. Additionally, it attested to the deviation from the allegedly Prusso-Protestant trajectory towards 1945. Kohl presented his Christian belonging as according with German culture, which was genetically European and Western. German Kultur was not opposed to Western Zivilisation, in Kohl’s world view; instead, the two were intrinsically linked by Christianity. Following the spirit of Konrad Adenauer, he presented the German nation as part of the Christian Abendland. His attitude to foreign policy, the system of state, society and economy thus had a religious underpinning. Kohl saw 1990, like 1945, as a return to Christianity, which like nationhood was an inescapable norm and a positive continuity in Kohl’s version of German history, beyond Nazi and Stasi aberrations. Kohl propagated Christian Democracy as the ideal (anti-)ideology, reflecting the nature of a German nation that had learned the lessons of the past. Without recognizing that he himself had internalized an ideology – one that critiqued the present, stressed its visions for the future and suggested a strategy to retain these visions under its own power – Kohl presented all ‘ideology’ as fundamentally wrong. Secular ‘ideologies’ were distinctively utopian. However, Christian Democracy struck the appropriate balance between conservative, social and liberal values, all of which were rooted in Christian ethics. Because Kohl also believed that the Federal Republican constitution was fundamentally based on Christianity, he saw the CDU as the Basic Law’s most patriotic representive. The CDU’s rejection of any ‘pure’ ideology allowed Kohl’s party to appreciate and represent the essence of the new state and stand as the sole guarantee of ‘freedom’ against the totalitarian tendencies presented as inherent in any ideology. Citizens should therefore acknowledge the Christian Democratic foundation of their state and society, which he had personally experienced during his early years in politics. In contrast to his liberal nationalism, Kohl’s idea of harmony within society was based not just on national imagination but also on Christian ethics. The firm religious foundation of Kohl’s personal nationalism – and of his political ideology more generally – rules out viewing nationalism as post-religious or directly connected to a gradual process of secularization, although the quasireligious function of nationalism must not be neglected. It also points to more subtle interplays between religion and nationalism in nations where religion is

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usually not perceived as a significant characteristic of national distinction. The personal nationalisms of nationals of such nations may nevertheless still differ according to their different religious affiliations. Though the religious foundation of Kohl’s nationalism was crucial, Kohl’s personification of German normality rested more fundamentally on his liberal nationalism. It was the direct connection of liberal and nationalist doctrines in Kohl’s rhetoric that preconditioned this embodiment. Foremost, it implied complete devotion to the Federal Republic as the manifestation of Germany’s liberal political culture and belonging to the West. It also included a focus on individualism, economic freedom, representative democracy, constitutionalism and a stable but limited welfare state, which required a legitimizing identity framework provided by nationalist imagination. Liberal nationalist theory has been in vogue since the crumbling of the Soviet hegemony and the subsequent national revivals in Eastern and Central Europe and beyond. Kohl’s double representation of the break with both Germany’s illiberal past and its postnational Sonderweg made him an agent of this intellectual development. He was aware of the dangers intrinsic to nationalism – which indeed was a terminological faux pas in his oratory – but he still maintained that Western liberal societies needed national foundations to be fully functional. Consistent with his upbringing in a Catholic milieu, Kohl’s generational belonging also underpinned his representation of normality. As a ’45er, Kohl had genuinely assimilated into the liberal political culture of the new state that came to be before his twentieth birthday, though after he had already been active in politics for more than three years. Kohl could thus appear as a guiltless eyewitness of a positive political transition mirrored in his own passage from personal hardship at the Nazi Reich’s end to success in the early years of the Federal Republic. This progression to normality was fundamental to Kohl’s (auto)biographical and historical narratives.The evolution from Hitler’s authoritarianism to Adenauer’s Kanzlerdemokratie was the central rhetorical element of Kohl’s restorative formula after 1968. He subsequently evoked the spirit of the Federal Republic’s foundation years, basing his own leadership on this premise. By attributing West Germany’s success story to the Christian Democrats, he profiled himself and his party as having at once the most loyal commitment to the West and the greatest devotion to the heritage of the Germans.This association was fundamental to his public (self-)image as Adenauer’s political grandson. He then sought to reconcile the categorical principle of Westbindung with the promotion and revival of national identity. Kohl knew that only Germany’s convergence with the West could effectively remediate the image of the Sonderweg. In line with liberal nationalist theory, Kohl considered national traditions a critical means of endorsing solidarity and loyalty among citizens. This mechanism, however, was less functional in Kohl’s nationalism than liberal nationalist theorists tend to suggest because the nation was held to be less a means than

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an end, an a priori fact, an inescapable norm across past, present and future. In Kohl’s rhetoric, willingness to be a nation was the precondition for the existence of the nation as well as an incontestable norm, natural and absolute. Germans were not to question their own nationality or turn against their compatriots in the East. From a post-nationalist perspective, the authoritarian tendencies in Kohl’s nationalism are hard to overlook, but they are hardly extraordinary amongst everyday nationalists. Questioning the naturalness of nationalism remains a taboo for many citizens. Kohl’s liberal nationalism and the constitutional patriotism of his generational contemporary Jürgen Habermas shared some features, including the goal of taming nationalist excesses under a liberal political culture. The two ’45ers suggested fundamentally different solutions for Germany: Habermas emphasized the dominance of Auschwitz and called for a complete rupture in German history, whereas Kohl emphasized the ongoing nature of good German traditions and demanded a national revival. Habermas was opposed to (re)unification, fearing a departure from the postwar achievement of Westernization, whereas Kohl favoured (re)unification within NATO, as his greatest political wish was for the Germans to be like all other Western nations. Interestingly, both still thought in categories of the Kulturnation, and both saw Christian influence in the liberal values system of the West. Crucial, however, was that Kohl wanted to reconcile (all-)German nationalism with Federal Republican patriotism, whereas Habermas synthesized post-nationalism with nostalgia for the old Federal Republic. Habermas was preoccupied with Germany’s old Sonderweg, a concern Kohl shared, but where Habermas saw possibilities in Germany’s new Sonderweg, Kohl perceived it as humiliating. To him, constitutional patriotism implied commitment to the unity and history of the nation, which had found its authentic expression in the Basic Law. Until 1990, Kohl tirelessly reminded the world that the German Volk was missing its territorial completion. In doing so, however, he followed Adenauer’s example, subordinating ‘unity’ to ‘freedom’ – a hierarchy he also applied during the (re)unification process. He saw the nature of this relationship as not exclusive but mutually constitutive. Normality required self-determination, which meant to him unification within the West. The belonging to the West was to him the FRG’s main raison d’état. Insofar as his party represented the ideal German ideology, Kohl idealized the Federal Republic as the superlative German model state and frequently warned of a ‘reverse unification’ led by the GDR. Kohl’s idea of ‘freedom’, however, held some contradictions. On the one hand, he sought to generate fear of a decline of ‘freedom’ in the FRG due to constant intimidation by the dogmatic ideologies that he ascribed to the communist regimes in the East, the ’68 generation and sometimes even the Social Democrats. Kohl presented his party as the only one that could guarantee ‘freedom’. In referring to these constant threats, Kohl styled ‘freedom’ as something requiring active realization and general consensus across the whole

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society at all times.Therefore freedom was not self-evident. On the other hand, however, Kohl occasionally came across as a prophet who took ‘freedom’ for granted as a natural force that would determine the future of humankind. A certain historicism was thus instantly recognizable in Kohl’s nationalism. Eventually, Kohl cited 1990 as evidence that all ‘ideologies’ would one day be discarded, for in the long run history was predetermined. After the fall of Nazism, he took the fall of communism as a second proof of the hypothesis that the ‘freer’ system of liberal democracy and capitalism would ultimately triumph. From a theoretical perspective, this primacy of the West in Kohl’s mindset becomes especially interesting when considering his romantic nationalism. His notion of Germany comprised elements of the allegedly dangerous, völkisch traditions in German nationalism that have been associated with the nation’s cultural and intellectual Sonderweg. This contrasted, however, with his view that Germany was firmly part of the West. Kohl’s personal nationalism subjected cultural and ethnic articulations of nationhood to the hegemony of his Christian, liberal, Western values, and thus appeared to rehabilitate the peculiar traditions in German nationalism. In that sense, Kohl’s case demonstrates a synthesis of types of nationalism often believed to be opposed to each other. That the nation and the general will to be a nation existed was, to Kohl, beyond discursive contestation; it was a natural reality. In his world view, the nation was not mainly a political or territorial notion but above all a historical, cultural, ethnic and spiritual category that went deeper than the materially visible. Nevertheless, Kohl subordinated the nation’s materialization to Western values, as liberal nationalist theorists demanded. Alongside his Catholic and generational belonging, Kohl’s regional identity lent further authenticity to his image of the de-radicalized,Western nationalist. Kohl emphasized his upbringing on the Rhine to signal an alternative to Germany’s Sonderweg. Presenting himself as a steadfast though gemütlich Palatine was a way of romanticizing German idiosyncrasy without prompting too much mistrust, Kohl had discovered. He emphasized his regional background to stress his Western identity in combination with his rootedness in local folklore. In Kohl’s mental map, the Palatinate was the centre of a multiethnic Holy Roman Reich, the source of the diversity of German culture and the nation’s integral membership in the occident. Kohl embraced the local category of Heimat in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. Being Palatine and from the Rhine sustained his image as both a proud German and a European. Nationalism did not exclude commitment to local and supranational cultures that were interdependent, formative influences on Kohl’s notion of Germany. Regarding this synthesis of cosmopolitanism and provincialism, however, one must bear in mind that Kohl’s nationalism reserved the German Heimat for ethnic Germans. Kohl articulated a particularly ethnocultural, romantic notion of Heimat – one that transcended the claim for state unity – as a key constituent of his

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personal nationalism. It was also part of Kohl’s conservative turn against the repercussions of 1968. Utopian Heimat sentiments were revived in the context of the political climate change of the Tendenzwende in West German society, to which Kohl’s chancellorship responded. He combined anti-communist rhetoric with a neo-romantic search for transcendence and local traditions, which he presented as essential to democratic organization of state and society. Kohl presented the communal unity and emotional self-protection inherent in Heimat as threatened by the secularism and alienation of modern societies. He thus promoted Heimat identity as something existential that must eclipse the challenges of his time but remain subordinate to Germany’s definite departure from the Sonderweg and secure bond with the West. But to be like a Western nation, Kohl felt, Germans needed to take heart and strengthen their emotional attachment to their culture and history. Some particularity was thus required to sustain the shell of normality. Kohl viewed the concept of Heimat as essentially German and properly reserved for ethnic Germans, so Ausländer living in Germany were excluded from his Heimat community. Romantic nationalism becomes denser when it takes the form of compensatory nationalism, particularly when realization of the nation-state seems utopian. Thus Germany’s double statehood and the territorial loss in the East facilitated the romantic revival in German nationalism. Moreover, Kohl’s case demonstrates the resilience of nationalist traditions, in that 1945 did not prompt a total refurbishment of the nationalist repertoire in Germany. As part of the ‘spiritual-moral change’ that Kohl connected to his political mission, he sought to revitalize a romantic imagination of the German Volk. But even as he appropriated the consensus that Germany was primarily a Kulturnation without any existential need of state unity, Kohl remained true to the constitutional objective of unification. Irrespective of his reluctance to renounce the ethnic conception of German nationhood, though, it is important to note that Kohl minimized German conservatives’ revanchist response to the structural restrictions of the postwar era by declaring the German history of the lost eastern lands to be unforgettable without raising serious hopes that he would question the Oder-Neisse line. His vision of the nation-state never comprised more than the territories of the old Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, which was widely regarded as the legitimate position. Anything else would have severely damaged his representation of normality. By conforming with the nationalist provisions of Federal Republican legislation, Kohl avoided the risk of violating this representation. His insistence on the German nation as a deeper norm that his fellow citizens must to come to terms with, if they were to realize their actual being, was supported by the legal substantiation of an increasingly anachronistic notion of Germany. Over the period of his continual warnings against a decline in the national consciousness that opposed the solidifying division of the country, he reconciled facts and beliefs. Kohl reconnected the past of the lost territory in the East, the cultural

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unity of all Germans, the Basic Law and integration with the West with the stream of Germany’s prevailing national history. But although he sought to attract votes from the extreme right and felt compelled to accommodate the German expellees’ organizations, Kohl always insisted on the primacy of the West and his leitmotif of peace. By maintaining a balance – between state and nation, politics and culture, citizenry and Volk, territory and dream, present and past – Kohl enhanced his normality image considerably. Likewise, Kohl’s aggressive Geschichtspolitik became a balancing act during his chancellorship as he strove to normalize German nationalism domestically and abroad. Because the German Question could not be answered by the Germans themselves but only through agreement among the victorious powers, international trust was crucial to German normality. Meanwhile, a more self-accepting national identity was needed on the Federal Republican level to re-popularize the prospect of state unity as compared to the alternative, postnational (ab)normality. Kohl was aware that nations cannot exist without historical imagination. He also knew that notions of nationhood differ according to perceptions of the national past. His response thus concerned more than the fear that the younger generations had naturally begun to imagine a fatherland different from that of their elders, who perceived the Federal Republic only provisional. He also engaged in the cultural battle over the prerogative to interpret history, correctly understanding it as a dispute over the meaning of German nationhood. Kohl’s geschichtspolitisch acts early on in his chancellorship contributed greatly to the explosive atmosphere of the Historikerstreit in 1986. ‘History’ was indeed an incessant theme in Kohl’s political rhetoric. He presented himself as someone who knew the essence of the German past and what had actually happened and the truth about its historical events. He worked to project an image of himself as able to interpret contemporary problems and future challenges from a historian’s perspective. In this self-portrayal, his historical knowledge and generational experience were evidence of his ability to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Kohl’s 1958 Ph.D. thesis in history demonstrates his proclivity for the Federal Republican foundation myth, a crucial element of his ongoing political ideology. His dissertation focused on individuals involved in the post-1945 political reconstruction of his home region who had also been politically active before 1933. The key objective was to highlight positive continuities in German history. Kohl viewed the Stunde Null as the dramatic moment when Germans, liberated from the Nazi yoke, became able to restore their liberal traditions. He paid no attention to the millions of Germans who had supported the Nazis and joined their movement, and also turned a blind eye to their roles after 1945. This disregard was integral to his method. The framework in which Kohl was educated at the University of Heidelberg in the 1950s was representative of the myth of the Stunde Null. German historians practising at German universities who followed the Nazi

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ideology after the Gleichschaltung are known to have mostly remained in their profession after the downfall of the Nazi regime, although more research could further demonstrate this continuity. Kohl’s alma mater was no exception. His thesis proves his early motivation to suggest German normality. It was a way to de-emphasize the significance of the Nazi era and verify the new political system’s authenticity without acknowledging any fundamental rift in German nationalism. In Kohl’s world view, the nation remained the primary category of analysing the past, including Federal Republican history; any digression from this categorization was both dangerous and ahistorical. Kohl recognized the strong connection between historical and national consciousness, which both were potential victims of rival ideological interests. He believed that Germans must realize themselves through acceptance of their past, a past that could, and would, be much more like the histories of other Western nations than the postnational left would admit. As much as Kohl sought to conceal conservatives’ responsibility for Hitler’s rise to power, he downplayed negative continuities from Nazi Germany to West Germany. He was convinced it was time for Germans and the world to become conscious of the ‘all-clear’ signal, which would awaken the last postnational sceptics and steer them back towards normality. Kohl wanted German history to be perceived as much more than an anomalous course towards the Third Reich. He felt that the German mainstream longed for a more positive image of the German past and themselves and that the postwar liberal achievements could compensate for the misdeeds of the Nazi era. Indeed, the Federal Republican system itself reflected positive continuities in German history, from the Hambach Festival, the Frankfurt Parliament and the Weimar Republic via the resistance to Hitler towards the Adenauer era and all the way to his own chancellorship. Kohl’s teleology depicted the Federal Republic’s viability as the result of an enduring historical journey that legitimized its existence and its claim to represent the whole German people. One is hard put to conceptualize the Historikerstreit outside of the political atmosphere largely created by the Kohl government. The conservatives’ ambition – to midwife Germans’ emergence from the shadow of the past by focussing on the positive moments in their past and portraying Germans themselves as victims of an inescapable history – is thus juxtaposed with their insistence on Germany’s territorial normalization. Kohl presented Germans as victims of both Nazism and communism, a mechanism that not only demonized communism but also relativized the singularity of the evils associated with Nazism. Kohl was primarily interested in a memory of the past in which Germans did not stand out against the West. To be sure, forgetting the Nazi past would have violated the ethical conventions underlying both the FRG and Kohl’s personal myth; therefore, Kohl exploited the memory of Nazism as an expedient means of legitimizing his notion of state and nation, and simultaneously tried to sanitize the more substantial elements of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. He confidently

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walked the fine line that conservative historians drew to close the postwar era, meanwhile testing its elasticity and risking several ‘slips’. Kohl sought to be a key agent in nationalizing Germany’s historical culture according to his own ideological preferences. His agency in the normalization of contemporary German nationalism can never be quantified precisely. Nevertheless, this study of Kohl’s personal nationalism demonstrates consistent striving, by one individual, to generate mainstream nationalism in Germany and channel it towards a more positive ownership of past and present. Paradoxically, the research focus on a single individual reveals the more general openness of nationalism as a personal coffer and suggests the potential value of comparison with other biographies from the same or different times and places. The method used for the current study of Kohl could serve as a model for further studies of personal nationalisms, and not only in contemporary Germany. Political biography is useful in that it allows forensic analysis of the public side of a person’s life without interference from a concurrent focus on other facets of life. Hence, although this individual biography’s reach into the protagonist’s life is necessarily circumscribed, the research demonstrates that the biographical method can generate understanding of the dynamics of personal nationalism and national representation. This approach offers the opportunity to get closer to the personal core of nationalism. By emphasizing the personal in context, biography can bridge structural, elitist and idealist approaches to nationalism, without undermining them in any sense. Individual socialization provides the content – and the context – of personal nationalisms. Interpretations of the past, understandings, criticism and manipulation of reality, along with the anticipations, expectations and visions of the future that are fundamental to the imagination and representation of the nation, are writ large against the biographical background of the nationalist. Biography is thus an extremely valuable tool for comprehending nationalism by examining the nationalist’s ideas, whence they come and whither they go. This is not to depict individuals as essentially autonomous thinkers and actors; rather, the diverse structural and ideological circumstances operating in combination at the personal level make the person a unique carrier of self-images, narratives, desires and world views relevant to the making, remaking and existence of nations. In the final analysis, nations exist because individuals believe in their existence, and the foundations of such beliefs can be explored creatively and rewardingly through the lens afforded by individual lives.

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Further Archival Sources ‘Anfrage bezüglich des Beitrittsdatums von Dr. Helmut Kohl zur CDU’ (Request concerning the date of Kohl’s CDU membership). 1997. StALu/PGV 02/45. ‘Broschürensammlung von Dr Helmut Kohl in der CDU-Geschäftsstelle’ (Collection of Kohl’s books and brochures), StALu, PGV 02/473. CDU. 1971. ‘Bundesparteitag Saarbrücken: Diskussionsbeitrag Dr Helmut Kohl MdL’, 4 and 5 October, KAS/Kohl/Reden. Evangelische Kommentare. 1971. ‘Mit dem “C” die Welt verändern’ (Interview with Helmut Kohl), October, KAS/Kohl/Interview. Kohl, H. 1964. ‘Rheinland-Pfalz im neuen Europa’ (Speech delivered at the 12th assembly of the CDU-Rhineland Palatinate, Trier, 28–30 August), KAS/Kohl/Reden.    . 1970. (Report to the 16th annual assembly of the CDU Rhineland-Palatinate, Ludwigshafen a.R., 23 and 24 May), KAS/Kohl/Reden.    . 1972. ‘Plädoyer für Weltoffenheit’, Europa Union 8 (August), KAS/Kohl/Artikel.    . 1973. ‘Der 17. Juni 1953. 20 Jahre Danach’ (Speech delivered at CDU/CSU event, Berlin-Charlottenburg Sporthalle, Berlin, 17 June), KAS/Kohl/2/293.    . 1973. ‘Deutsche Nation – Bundesrepublik Deutschland’ (Speech delivered at Politisches Seminar, Bad Godesberg, 23 January, unedited manuscript), KAS/Kohl/Reden.    . 1974. ‘Solidarität – Grundlage unserer Politik’ (Speech delivered at Georgetown University, Washington, 12 February), KAS/Kohl/Reden/USA.    . 1974. (Speech delivered at Tag der Danziger, in the Rhein-Mosel-Halle, Koblenz, 5 May), KAS/Kohl/Reden, unedited manuscript.    . 1979. (Speech at a local CDU assembly, Lahr, 28 April), unedited manuscript, KAS/Kohl/ Reden.    . 1980. ‘Perspektiven deutscher Außenpolitik für die 80er Jahre’ (Speech delivered to the Wirtschaftstag ’80, Frankfurt, 18–19 July), KAS/Kohl/Reden.    . 1980. (Speech at Wirtschaftstag, Frankfurt, 19 July), KAS/Kohl/Reden.    . 2002. (Recorded speech, delivered at the launch of Theo Schwarzmüller’s book Albert Finck und die Nationalhymne, Stadthalle of Landau), StALu/PGV 02/598. Merschmeier, J. 1987. CDU, 6 January, KAS/Kohl/SV/3a. ‘Pfälzer für den Pfälzer’ (campaign poster). 1976. StALu/PGV 02/680. Report of the public assembly of the councils of the cities Lorient and Ludwigshafen on 15 September 1962. In Fontainebleau, Niederschriften zu den öffentlichen Sitzungen des Stadtrates Ludwigshafen am Rhein, vol. 2, 554. StALu.

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Index

Abendland (Occident), 9, 64, 68, 72, 74–75, 76, 81, 85, 87, 114, 139, 142, 143, 151, 158, 161, 162, 174, 194, 209, 211 Adenauer, Konrad, 77, 78, 79, 87, 97, 98, 103, 104, 105–15, 116–18, 123, 125, 138, 140, 142–43, 145, 146, 149, 158, 172, 173, 189, 191, 209, 210, 215 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 19, 26, 31, 42, 159 anti-communism. See communism/ anti-communism Applegate, Celia, 42, 139–44, 148 Armstrong, John A., 26 Auschwitz, 4, 5, 35–36, 107, 124–25, 181, 186, 196, 208, 211. See also Holocaust Australia, 21, 23, 43–46, 152 Austria, 21, 49, 66, 119, 140, 154, 156, 158, 186–87, 193 Basic Law (Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany), 64–65, 73, 80, 82–83, 99, 104, 107, 108, 109–10, 114, 117, 122, 126, 150, 153, 154–55, 156, 183, 197, 209, 211, 213, 214 Bauer, Fritz, 4 Bender, Peter, 104, 172–73 Bergen-Belsen, 161, 191–92, 196 Berger, Stefan, 43, 105, 46, 61n235

New Sonderweg, 105 Berlin, 104, 106, 119, 120, 143, 158, 159, 182, 196 Berlin Republic, 5, 46, 125, 195 Berlin Wall, 1, 6, 105, 128n70, 119, 189 Brandenburg Gate, 2, 3, 140 East Berlin (see German Democratic Republic) Berufsverbot, 108, 189. See also communism/ anti-communism Billig, Michael, 20–22 Biography, 22–24, 47, 208, 216 Bismarck, Otto von, 29, 49, 64, 66, 73, 77, 114–15, 123, 124, 140–41, 158, 174, 189 Bitburg, 117, 190–93 Bloch, Ernst, 84, 95n175, 115, 147, 148 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 67, 185 Bonn, 10, 119, 124, 159, 191 Bösch, Frank, 78, 85, 106, 121 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17 Bracher, Karl D., 47, 78, 88n2 Breuilly, John, 49, 50n2 Britain, United Kingdom, 21, 69, 76, 77, 98, 101, 123, 175, 191 Brockmann, Stephen, 15n43, 161, 196 Buchenwald, 181, 195 Bude, Heinz, 4, 14n22, 126n7 Bush, George H.W., 122, 141, 189

246 Index

capitalism, 31, 32, 87, 117, 212 Catholic Church/Catholicism, 9, 63–88, 106, 140–43, 151, 179–80, 189, 209–10 Brüning, Heinrich (Centre Party), 67–68 Cathrein,Victor, 72, 91–92n85 Centre Party, 9, 66–69, 72–74, 75, 87, 141, 142, 179, 189 Christian socialism, Catholic Social Teaching, 30, 72, 73, 77, 83, 86, 87 natural law, 6, 28, 72, 74, 76–77, 80 Pope Benedict XV, 66 Pope Benedict XVI, 65 Pope John Paul II, 30–31, 65 Pope John XXII, 65 Pope Paul IV, 85 Pope Pius XI, 68, 76 Pope Pius XII (Pacelli), 67–68 Vatican, 63, 65, 67–68 CDU (Christian Democratic Union, Christian Democracy), 4, 9, 64, 65, 69, 71, 73, 74–87, 98–99, 103, 106, 107, 108, 112, 114, 116, 118, 121–22, 129n88, 141, 145–46, 152, 180, 188, 195, 209 Adenauer, Konrad (see Adenauer, Konrad) Ahlener Programm, 77 Altmeier, Peter, 79, 139, 146 Dregger, Alfred, 118, 149–50, 191 Dusseldorfer Leitsatze, 77, 99 Junge Union, 71, 120, 146 Kaiser, Jakob, 73, 145 Teltschik, Horst, 120, 122, 152 Weizsacker, Richard von, 192 CSU (Christian Social Union), 78, 83, 150, 152 Strauss, Franz J., 113, 184 Cohen, Anthony, 23–24 Cold War, 48, 86, 87, 104, 105, 108, 110, 119, 145, 151, 156, 160, 171, 172–73, 181, 190, 197, 198 communism/anti-communism, 5, 9, 43, 64, 65, 68, 72, 76, 77, 86, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107, 114, 119, 137, 148, 162, 184, 189–90, 194, 195, 198, 212, 215 conservatism/conservatives, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 18, 35–36, 37, 40, 41, 48, 64, 65, 67, 70–71, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84, 87, 88, 99, 105–6, 115, 118, 140, 147, 148, 149, 152, 159, 176–77, 185, 187, 188, 192, 195, 207, 213, 215 constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus), 10, 17, 34–35, 47, 111, 149, 176, 211 constructivism, 19, 32, 43, 44 Conze, Werner, 176, 177–78

culture, 35, 44, 45, 64, 66, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83–85, 88, 99, 102, 106, 137, 139, 140–43, 148, 149–51, 155–62, 174, 175, 207, 209, 212, 214 historical (Geschichtskultur), 4, 8, 10, 22, 99, 170, 207, 216 political, 6, 10, 35–36, 47, 78, 106, 116, 125, 171, 177, 179–80, 183, 185, 197, 210–11 Deutsch, Karl, 151 Deutschlandlied (Song of Germany, national anthem), 2, 26, 73, 125, 146, 157, 161 Deutschlandpolitik, 48, 114, 118–20, 188. See also Ostpolitik Dresden, 1–2, 178 Duara, Prasenjit, 43 Eichmann, Adolf (Eichmann Trial), 4, 107 Elias, Norbert, 20 Engelmann, Bernt, 173 Enlightenment (Aufklärung), 10, 19, 26, 28–31, 37, 38, 39, 43, 57n169, 114, 158, 160, 174 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 19 Enzensberger, Hans M., 101–2 Eric Hobsbawm, 20, 26, 29, 44 Invention of Tradition (with Terrence Ranger), 44 Ernst, Fritz, 176, 177, 180 Europe, 2, 12, 30, 39, 65, 68, 75, 76, 85–87, 88, 103, 113, 114, 115, 117–20, 123, 139, 142, 143, 157–58, 174, 185, 190, 193, 209 Central and Eastern, 3, 32, 43, 119, 151, 155, 178, 210 Western, 26, 117, 175 European identity (Europeanness, Europeanism, European patriotism), 47–48, 70, 72, 84, 85–87, 111, 113, 116, 118, 123, 137, 138, 139, 142–43, 146, 158, 179 European integration, 9, 10–11, 20, 27, 75, 79, 85–87, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 113, 118, 122, 123, 141, 144–45, 179, 190 ethnicity, 2, 3, 7, 137, 148, 150, 154–55, 156, 162, 212–13 Evans, Richard J., 1 fascism, 26, 38, 67, 71, 101–2, 195, 196, 208 FDP (Free Democratic Party), 98, 107, 114, 115, 121, 182 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 121, 122, 123, 193

Index

Federal Expellees Act of 1953, 155 Federation of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen, BdV), 150, 152, 153 Figes, Orlando, 23 First World War, 3, 19, 38, 65, 66, 67, 68, 106, 142, 180, 190 Fischer, Fritz (Fischer Controversy), 4, 57n168, 89n11, 180 Flick, Friedrich, 173, 194–95 Flossenburg, 185 France, 11, 25, 27, 29, 66, 68, 73, 76, 98, 100, 103, 113, 122–23, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 162, 191, 194 French Revolution, 19, 26, 28, 31, 32, 66, 91–92n85, 109, 112 Frankfurter Paulskirche (Paulskirche Parliament), 109, 140, 160, 183, 197 Frederick the Great, 159, 160, 178, 201n81 Freeden, Michael, 18 Fuchs, Walther P., 175, 176, 178–80 Galinski, Heinz, 187 Gaus, Gunter, 77 Gebhard Schweigler, 156 Gellner, Ernest, 7, 16, 19, 21, 53n77 generation (generational identity, generationalism), 2, 4, 9–10, 13n21, 14n22, 32, 36, 41, 46, 48, 70, 80, 97, 98–100, 103, 107, 108, 111, 116, 126, 126n7, 138, 148–49, 159, 175, 180, 182, 184–85, 186, 188, 193, 210–11 ’45ers, Flakhelfer, Sceptical Generation, 9, 98, 99, 138, 148, 180, 186, 210–11 ’68ers (1968, 1968 movement), 4, 5, 10, 36, 45, 80, 84, 97, 99, 111, 115, 116, 137, 156, 177, 181, 182, 210, 213 Geoffrey Blainey, 45 German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany), 5, 11, 36, 75, 87, 104, 106, 110, 112, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122–23, 124, 139, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 160, 182, 183, 185, 189–90, 194, 195, 196 Giddens, Anthony, 21 Gnade der spaten Geburt (grace of late birth), 186–87, 186n203 Goldhagen, Daniel (Goldhagen affair), 196 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 2, 70, 119, 123–24, 141, 143, 189, 193, 194 Grass, Gunter, 122, 125, 156 Greenfeld, Liah, 37, 52n62 Greens (party), 121, 191 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 113 Grosby, Steven, 26, 27

247

grossdeutsch option (grossdeutsche Losung), 65–66, 140, 141, 143, 158 Habermas, Jurgen, 3, 5–6, 17, 20, 34–36, 100, 111, 122, 125, 126, 127, 138–39, 156, 159, 168n164, 176, 177, 200n57, 211 Hallstein Doctrine (Walter Hallstein), 104, 110, 173 Hambach (castle), 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 160, 179, 192, 197, 215 Hastings, Adrian, 26–27 Havel,Vaclav, 119, 141 Hayes, Carleton, 25–26 Hearn, Jonathan, 44 Hechter, Michael, 31, 49 Heidegger, Martin, 174 Heidelberg (University of Heidelberg), 4, 34, 65, 145, 172–80 Heimat (regional identity, local identity), 2, 11, 17, 37–39, 41–42, 47, 71, 86, 136–55, 157, 158, 162, 177, 179, 180, 212–13 film series (Reitz, Edgar), 149 Helmuth Plessner, 105 Herder, Johann G., 37, 42, 208 Herf, Jeffrey, 73, 75, 106, 172 Heribert Schwan, 6, 69, 71 Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute), 5, 12, 35, 140, 159, 184, 214, 215 historism (historicism), 9, 33, 47, 172, 180, 196. See also Berger, Stefan Holocaust, 3, 48, 137, 158, 172, 173, 187, 191, 196 Holy Roman Empire, 66, 68, 137, 139, 141–42, 144, 156 Honecker, Erich, 114, 119, 159 Horkheimer, Max, 95n175 Human Rights, 31, 84, 120, 140, 195 Hungary, 2, 119, 154 Hutchinson, John, 40–41, 46 Israel, 4, 26–27, 30, 71, 107, 173, 186, 187, 193 James, Paul, 43 Jarausch, Konrad, 3, 105, 119, 124 Jaspers, Karl, 175 Jews/Judaism, 27, 28, 38, 67, 70, 161, 173, 174, 176, 178, 187, 191, 193, 196 Kedourie, Elie, 19, 31 Kiesinger, Kurt, 107, 129n82, 156 Kleindeutsch option (kleindeutsche Losung), 65, 75, 140, 158 Knopp, Guido, 44 Kohl, Cacilie (nee Schnur) (Kohl’s mother), 68–71, 103, 124

248 Index

Kohl Hannelore (nee Renner, Kohl’s first wife), 70, 146 Kohl, Hans (Kohl’s father), 68–71, 125, 190 Kohl, Walter (Kohl’s brother), 69, 101, 125 Kuhn, Johannes, 167–68 Kulturkampf, 29, 64, 66, 68, 70, 75, 99, 141, 142 Kulturnation, 7, 35, 48, 156, 158, 159, 211 Langewiesche, Dieter, 98 Leinemann, Jürgen, 194 Lemberg, Eugen, 37 liberalism, 26, 33–36, 40, 71, 76, 80, 81, 83, 98–100, 105–6, 111, 139, 144, 180, 208 lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora), 48, 68, 160, 208 Ludwigshafen, 8, 68–72, 76, 90n38, 100, 101, 103, 123, 138, 139, 146–47, 173 Bardens, Hans, 70, 188 BASF, 173 Finck brothers (Johannes and Albert), 64, 71, 72–73, 75–76, 86, 145–46, 172, 179 Ramstetter brothers (Erich and Fritz), 65, 79, 146 Luther, Martin, 159–60, 208 Lutheran Church. See Protestantism MacCormick, Neil, 32 Maier, Charles, 190 Mann, Michael, 19 Mann, Thomas, 56n135, 139 Marxism (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels), 31, 67, 78, 84, 86, 147 May, Karl, 100, 147 Meinecke, Friedrich, 37, 89n11. See also Kulturnation; Staatsnation memory politics (Vergangenheitspolitik, Geschichtspolitik, history politics), 5, 12, 15, 45, 48, 159–60, 100, 151, 171, 180–96, 195, 214 migration (Auslander, Aussiedler, guest workers), 154–55 Miller, David, 33–35 Mirosvlav Hroch, 18–19 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 175 Mitterand, Francois, 190 Modrow, Hans, 1–2 Moses, A. Dirk, 98–100, 115–16, 144, 180 Mosse, George, 26, 38–39 multiculturalism, 33, 117 museums, 44–45, 116, 144, 158–59, 141, 159–60

Nairn, Tom, 23, 31–32, 41 Nazism (Third Reich, Adolf Hitler), 4–5, 9, 12, 27, 37–38, 63–68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 98–99, 101–3, 105, 106, 107, 143, 151, 152, 161, 171–75, 177–78, 179, 182, 184–98, 208, 210, 214–15, 219 Goebbels, Joseph, 193–94, 197 Hitler Youth, 101, 102, 103, 125, 148 Neue Wache, 195, 196 Newsweek (magazine), 139, 193–94 9 November 1938 (Kristallnacht), 188 9 November 1989. See Berlin: Berlin Wall 1945 (zero hour, Stunde Null, 8 May), 2–4, 10–11, 18, 37, 46–48, 65, 75–77, 78, 99–104, 105–6, 107, 108, 113, 119, 136, 144, 149, 156, 158–59, 162, 171, 172, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181–82, 183–84, 185, 195, 197, 208, 209, 213, 214–15 1949 (foundation of the GDR, FRG and Rhineland-Palatinate), 3, 4, 29–30, 65, 73, 77, 99, 103–4, 115, 145–46, 178, 183 1968. See generation: ’68ers 1937, Borders of (Exclusive mandate, Alleinvertretungsanspruch), 47, 110 143, 152, 155, 175, 177 Nipperdey, Thomas, 27–28, 38–40, 57–58n172 Nuremberg Trials, 3, 172, 175 Oder-Neisse line, 121, 150, 152 Ostpolitik, 5, 48, 98, 107, 110, 112, 114, 155–56 Palatinate (Pfalz), 11, 12, 64, 68–74, 138–46, 179, 186, 212 Pimlott, Ben, 24 Poland, 27, 29, 65, 69, 119, 120, 150–53 Popper, Karl, 6, 42, 61n235, 116, 119–20 post-nationalism, 5, 20, 36, 38, 46, 47, 48, 105, 107, 111, 137, 158, 211. See also constitutional patriotism Protestantism (Protestant Church, Lutheran Church, Reformation), 4, 26–29, 57n168, 63–67, 70, 73–74, 75, 80, 105, 159, 178, 201n81 Prussia, 9, 29, 37, 49, 65–66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75–76, 102, 105–6, 140, 142–44, 157, 185 Ranke, Leopold von, 43, 61n235, 174, 178, 196 Reagan, Ronald, 119, 190, 191–93 Rechtsstaat, 34, 107, 108, 109, 113. See also Unrechtsstaat

Index

Reemtsma, Jan Phillipp, 77 Remy, Steven P., 174–75 Renan, Ernest, 42, 112, 131n151 Rhine/Rhineland/Rhenish, 11, 29, 68, 75, 101, 118, 137–38, 140, 142–45, 162, 212 Rhineland-Palatinate, 79–80, 139, 142, 144–46, 177, 181 Ries, Fritz, 173 Ritter, Gerhard, 38, 89n11, 175 romanticism, 37–40, 105, 141, 148, 149, 152, 158–59, 174 Saarland (Saar), 49, 121, 143, 145–46 Schelsky, Helmut, 99, 148 Schleyer, Hanns Martin, 173, 199n19 Scholder, Klaus, 67–68 Schumann, Robert, 103 Schwarz, Hans-Peter, 6 Schwarzmuller, Theo, 67, 72, 146 Second World War, 2, 3, 3, 9, 10, 11, 69, 73, 100, 102, 108, 151, 178, 190 self-determination, 2, 18, 19, 20, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 63, 98, 110–14, 120, 123, 187, 211 17 June (uprising 1953, Day of German Unity), 139, 155, 160, 182 Smith, Anthony, 21–22, 26, 27, 40, 53n77 socialism, 71, 72, 75, 76–77, 80, 83, 86, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114, 117, 118, 120, 124, 142, 160, 162, 179 social market economy, 77, 87, 99, 116, 152, 176 Solidarity Movement (Solidarnosc), Poland, 2, 119 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, The Gulag Archipelago, 78 Sonderweg, 37, 38, 40, 57n162, 57n168, 57–58n172, 63, 64, 75, 87, 88n2, 89n11, 97, 136, 138, 139, 142, 148, 150, 158, 162, 181, 183, 185, 192, 208–13 Sorkin, David J., 29 SPD (Social Democratic Party, Social Democracy), 10, 67, 70, 78, 80, 81, 83, 88, 103, 106, 107, 108, 114, 121, 124, 179, 187, 196 Brandt, Willy, 1, 4–5, 107, 108, 110, 128n70, 129n88, 129n92, 129–30n99, 155, 157 Lafontaine, Oskar (today Linke), 121, 158 Schmidt, Helmut, 109, 157, 189 Soviet Union, 5, 70, 86, 106, 110, 119, 122–55, 193–94

249

Speirs, Ronald, 49 Spengler, Oswald, 84, 95n174, 117 Speyer (Cathedral), 68, 138, 141, 145, 181 Staatsnation, 110, 156, 158 Stahlhelm, 68, 69 Stauffenberg, Graf, 183–84 Sternberger, Dolf, 34, 176–77, 180 Sturmer, Michael, 45, 117, 140, 141–42, 185–86 Sturzo, Luigi, 78 Tamir,Yael, 32–33, 34, 35 Tendenzwende (political climate change of the 1970s), 149, 213 Territory, 30, 47, 49, 110, 122, 146, 152, 155, 162, 213, 214 transcendence, 8, 20, 25, 26, 28, 38, 42, 43, 64, 82, 84, 95n175, 110, 148, 213 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 45, 174 unification, 7, 11, 34–35, 47, 48–49, 73, 84, 103–4, 104, 105, 106, 109–10, 114, 145, 159, 173, 175, 177, 179, 197–98, 211 first German unification (1871), 29, 38, 66–67, 75, 104, 140, 158 little unification (Saar), 49, 145 second German unification, (re)unification (1990), 6, 7, 9, 20, 46–48, 66, 70, 98, 115–26, 146, 150, 152, 156, 158, 188–89, 211 Ten-Point-Programme for unification, 65 United States, 3, 20, 85, 101, 117–19, 120, 122, 144, 161, 190, 193, 204n173. See also Bitburg Unrechtsstaat, 74 Verdun, 103, 122, 190 Waldheim, Kurt, 158, 193 Walser, Martin, 5, 14n30 Weber, Max, 22, 28, 51n44, 138, 174 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 28, 47, 52n62, 155, 195 Weimar Republic, 9, 10, 66, 67, 171, 174, 179, 183, 189, 190, 194 Westbindung, 4, 10, 36, 76, 97, 100, 104, 111, 115, 116, 145, 190, 208, 210 Winkler, Heinrich A., 124, 142, 184, 195 Ziesel, Kurt, 186–87 Zuckmayer, Carl, 102, 143, 174, 199n31

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