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  • The Meaning of The Nazi Past in The Post-Postwar:Recent Fiction by Günter Grass, Christa Wolf and Martin Walser
  • Stuart Taberner

Today, Germany may finally be emerging into its “post-post-war,” some twenty-plus years after the term was first coined in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War (see Kirchner and Sperling).

First, a period of nearly seventy years has passed since the end of the Second World War. The last wartime generation is dying out, and soon there will be no living witnesses to the twelve years of National Socialism that so definitively shaped the politics and culture of the two post-war Germanies, and of the so-called Berlin Republic that emerged post-unification. All future understanding of that period will be historically mediated, a product of what Jan Assmann has called a society’s “cultural memory.” Moreover, that generation - born from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, described by Dirk Moses as the 45ers and by Jens Hacke as the “long generation” (30) – will, self-evidently, no longer dominate German culture, politics, and society as it has for so many decades.

Second, the profound changes set in motion by unification, and some changes that were already under way before 1990, are now finally coming to be fully realized, in both senses of the word. In the late 1990s, Normalität was still a contested term, wrestled by Gerhard Schröder, newly minted as chancellor in 1998 after sixteen years of conservative dominance under Helmut Kohl (see Taberner and Cooke), from its previous almost exclusive association with right-wing, New Right, or even far-right nationalism (see Berger). In 2013, in contrast, the term scarcely raises an eyebrow, and most commentators would probably agree that the Federal Republic is now at last more or less “normal.” By this they generally mean sovereign, democratic, relatively self-confident, and, above all, Western. It may be a “muted normality,” as The Economist put it in March 2010 (“A Muted Normality”), continuing the Bonn republic’s internalization of self-restraint (see Baumann and Hellmann) and preference for multilateralism – action taken in concert with other nations or institutions – but we should not underestimate how far Germany has come over the last two decades. Germany is still instinctively a civilian power (see Schweers). But “active” interventions from Kosovo to Afghanistan, including, from late 2012, the Bundestag’s decision to [End Page 161] dispatch Tiger attack helicopters to the Mazar-e-Sharif airbase and to deploy Patriot missile batteries to defend Turkey against overspill from the civil war in Syria, speak of a growing routinization of military self-projection in support of diplomatic but also wider strategic aims. To be sure, the deployment of military transporter planes in support of the French intervention in Mali pushes up against the very limits of recent Constitutional Court rulings, but for the first time perhaps there may be a widespread sense that the Grundgesetz now frustrates Germany’s desire to be “a good ally” rather than, as in the past, helpfully shielding it from international entanglements. In 2011, in fact, Germany suspended conscription, and in 2012 the Constitutional Court ruled that German soldiers would be permitted to deploy on their home soil during an emergency (i.e. a terrorist attack). These steps surely imply a professionalization of Germany’s military, a normalization of its role as an expression of sovereign power, and a lessening of anxieties related to the army as a “state within a state” in the Nazi period.

At the same time, Germany’s refusal to back the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its abstention from the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of military force to establish a no-fly zone over Libya in March 2011, demonstrated a degree of assertiveness that few of its allies had expected (see Herf). Of course, German leaders were also responding in both cases to domestic pressures – whether voters’ reflexive pacifism or party-political manoeuvring – but the very fact that public opinion and Innenpolitik now occasionally triumph over the elite’s long-held preference to “fit in” internationally may itself be indicative of...

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