Europeanizing Germany's Twentieth Century

Looking at Germany's twentieth century from a post-1989 perspective alerts us to a new sense of space and proportion. With the Iron Curtain torn down and buried for good, Germany—East and West alike—is no longer perceived as a border country pinpointing the political split of Europe. Instead, it reemerges as the geographical center of a continent that impatiently seeks to restore and reinvent itself as a political, economic, social and cultural entity.

Germany's central position is not, to be sure, purely geographical. The size of its population plus its economic strength qualify it as a major player in the theater of European integration well underway since the 1950s and spurred on after 1990. Not surprisingly, this raises suspicions, even fears. Some contemporaries envisage Germany as a power that is either overtly or subversively striving for hegemony in Europe. History can easily be invoked to "prove" this assumption—has Germany not constantly attempted to "Germanize" Europe and mold it according to its own needs and desires? When war twice failed to attain this goal, it resorted to more peaceful means, disguised as supranational politics in a West European setting.¹ The enlargement of the European Union and the accession of East European member states fuel further anxieties—would Germany again seek a "special" and "peculiar" path between East and West as it had done so often and persistently before 1945? Would it leave behind the traits of westernization and resort to notions of Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) discussed since the late nineteenth century?²

This is not the place either to support or repudiate political fears and suspicions as to Germany's future role in Europe. Instead, I choose a historian's perspective, examining the nation's European past in quest of mutual encounters, "Europeanizing" moments, transnational influences. My starting point is the allegedly new sense of European connectedness that prevails among Germany's political, economic and cultural elites. In recent years, "Europe" has shaped their practices and images in a way that is both structurally visible and mentally felt. In foreign and domestic policy, European references and allegiances abound; in terms of cultural mindsets, European identifications are omnipresent. Even historiography, the most national of all academic fields, cloaks itself in a European habit. Publishers have started ambitious series focusing on Europe instead of nation-states, university chairs of German history are being converted into those of European history.³ The concept of "shared," "connected," "entangled" histories stressing transnational interaction, cross-references, mutual impact has gained increasing prominence in intellectual discourse.⁴ This concern clearly reflects overall tendencies of denationalization as they can easily be observed in everyday life. Some people suggest that those tendencies have been most prevalent in (West) Germany where national identities seem to be less well developed than European ones. This is attributed to the defeat of World War II and the subsequent period of Western integration. Before that, so the narrative goes, national attitudes governed German politics and culture, much to the detriment of non-Germans and, ultimately, German citizens, too. A "bad," nationalistic past which culminated in two world wars was thus superseded by "good" events in the second half of the twentieth century when Germany became tamed and included in multilateral political structures.⁵

The standard narrative is not wholly convincing, though. First, the opposition of national versus European tends to overlook how deeply connected and intertwined those orientations actually are. Thinking European does not necessarily imply neglecting national interests, and vice versa. Both identifications could and did coexist side by side throughout the twentieth century, albeit in different mixtures and forms. Even in times of intense nationalistic fervor, Germanness was never oblivious of its European background or foreground. Second, the clear-cut caesura between pre- and post-1945 tends to belittle institutional and mental continuities that easily bridge the political rupture. In this light, the European Community appears to be radically and unforeseeably original and innovative—which is barely half true.^6...