Lessons from the Century of Extremes

Heinrich August Winkler,
Historian, until 2007 professor of modern history at the Humboldt University Berlin

Lessons from the Century of Extremes

Aug

What does Germany's international responsibility mean?

Germany's alignment with the West is irrevocable. Seesaw politics between East and West are no options. Germany's opening to the political culture of the West is the most important lesson drawn from the century of extremes. This process will not be complete until the inalienability of human rights is respected worldwide. Germany as a young Western democracy has herewith a duty to fulfil in particular in respect to the West.

The initially highly controversial alignment with the West, including the Federal Republic's contribution to the Western European integration process, the work of a centre-right coalition under Konrad Adenauer, ceased to be the subject of domestic political controversy after the Social Democrats' historical course correction in 1959-60.

The title of Eric Hobsbawm’s book about the twentieth century memorably dubbed it the "age of extremes" (Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, London 1994). No country has had more reason than Germany to reflect on this period, for the first half of the last century bore a German imprint.

This is the case not only because of the German Empire's substantial role in triggering the First World War, the "great seminal catastrophe" of the twentieth century (George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck's European Order: Franco-Russian Relations 1875-1890, Princeton 1979, p.3). It is also because the Russian Bolsheviks' seizure of power in November 1917 – an epochal event that is indispensable to the background of two other seizures of power by totalitarian movements: that of the Italian fascists in 1922, and that of the German Nazis in 1933 – would not have occurred without German assistance.

The fact that the First World War was followed a quarter of a century later by the Second was by no means inevitable. But here too, later catastrophes cannot be explained without the great seminal catastrophe of 1914.

Culturally, Germany was a Western country. It had been part of the major European emancipation processes that began in the Middle Ages – indeed setting events into motion in the case of the Reformation – and it had taken part in the European Enlightenment. Right up until the twentieth century, however, Germany's ruling elites had rejected essential political consequences of the Enlightenment in the formation of ideas of inalienable human rights, popular sovereignty and representative democracy.

The First World War was waged by German war ideologists as a battle of the "ideas of 1914" against the ideas of 1789. Liberté, égalité, fraternité found its opposite number in the declared belief in a strong state, the (ethnically or racially restricted) "national community", and "German socialism". The political right regarded the Weimar Republic, the first German democracy, as a product of defeat, as the victors’ form of government and therefore "un-German".

The apogee of German resentment against the West and its normative project, against the ideas of the 1776 American Revolution and the 1789 French Revolution, was National Socialist rule – the "German catastrophe" of which historian Friedrich Meinecke spoke in 1946 (Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe. Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, Wiesbaden 1947).

Only after Germany's second – this time total – defeat in the twentieth century did Western democracy prevail in Germany – or, to put in more precisely, in the western part of Germany. The establishment of democracy in West Germany was a collaborative effort by the Western Allies, led by the United States, and the chastened Weimar republicans, the fathers and mothers of the Basic Law that was created in Bonn.

The latter had survived the Third Reich and learned lessons from the failure of the democracy established in 1918/19, which they applied to building up a robust and properly functioning parliamentary democracy. The initially highly controversial alignment with the West, including the Federal Republic's contribution to the Western European integration process, the work of a centre-right coalition under Konrad Adenauer, ceased to be the subject of domestic political controversy after the Social Democrats' historical course correction in 1959-60.

A quarter of a century later, during the 1986 Historikerstreit (historians' quarrel) about the historical uniqueness of the Nazis' genocidal murder of the Jews, Jürgen Habermas wrote that the "unreserved opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West" was the great intellectual achievement of post-war West Germany, of which his generation in particular could be proud (Matthew G. Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge 2010, p. 2).

Habermas's verdict marked the birth of a posthumous "Adenauer Left" – an informal coalition which the Greens joined as well in the decade after German reunification (Heinrich August Winkler, "Anschluß an den Westen". Adenauer und der deutsche Sonderweg, in: id., Auf ewig in Hitlers Schatten? Über die Deutschen und ihre Geschichte, Munich 2007, pp. 119 – 128 (127f.)).