German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past by A. Dirk Moses (review)

In this meticulously researched, well-written account, A. Dirk Moses challenges the widespread belief that the Federal Republic of Germany "developed a healthy democratic culture centered around [sic] memory of the Holocaust" and, indeed, "has become a model of how post-totalitarian and postgenocidal societies 'come to terms with the past'" (p. 1). Underscoring the many shocks that have racked the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) since 1990—the assaults on asylum seekers and foreigners, the persistent gulf between Ossis and Wessis, the fierce controversy over the Holocaust memorial in the country's capital, the revelations of the Nazi pasts of key FRG eminences, the swell of literature of Allied war crimes and of German victimization during and after World War II, and the calls to "normalize" and extol the German identity—Moses has set out to reexamine the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Cold War West Germany and the nature of its transformation since 1949.

According to Moses, for 60 years the "1945 generation" has been the key interpreter of West Germany's "legitimacy dilemma" (p. 51): its links with the Third Reich and the Holocaust. After coming of age in Nazi Germany and experiencing the full brunt of defeat at the end of World War II, a distinctive cohort of primarily male historians, social scientists, writers, and journalists immediately split into two camps: the "German Germans" who, despite the Nazi aberration, held largely positive views of the German past and its institutions and promoted an "integrative" republicanism; and the "non-German-Germans" who stressed the need to cleanse German politics and society of totalitarian remnants and promoted a "redemptive" republicanism. For Moses, this fundamental dichotomy—far more than the economic modernization of the 1950s or the cultural modernization that emerged from 1968—formed the essential political and intellectual structure in which the past and present were assimilated by the West German population and also permeated the early years of the Federal Republic.

After presenting his intellectual framework in chapters 1-3, Moses selects two representative figures: in chapter 4, the German-German Wilhelm Hennis (b. 1923), a World War II sailor, front soldier, prisoner of war, and prominent postwar right-liberal political scientist who sought to distance the FRG from the Third Reich by linking fascism with the travails of modernizing societies; and in chapter 5 the non-German-German Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), a former Hitler Youth member, wartime field nurse, and prolific postwar social philosopher who from the start cast doubt on the FRG establishment for its virulent anti-Communism, failure to purge former Nazis, and uncritical reverence for the "'fiery Moloch of technology" (p. 121). In chapter 6, Moses describes one of the chief battlegrounds in the 1960s, university reform, in which Habermas was pitted against the political philosopher and education minister Hermann Lübbe in a debate over cleansing higher education of historical myths, with the former urging more rigorous critical thinking and the latter calling for the removal of all politics from the campus. Moving into the national realm, in chapter 7 Moses deftly links the intellectuals' swelling historical debates with the FRG's rocky transition from Christian Democratic Union to Social Democratic Party leadership, In chapter 8 he examines the challenges of student radicalism in the late 1960s and the terrorism of the 1970s, and in chapters 9-11 he discusses the nationalist revival under Helmut Kohl, the raucous Historikerstreit, the new challenges of multiculturalism, and the post-1990 debates over the future of the nation-state. The climax came in 1998 with Martin Walser's controversial speech demanding the end of Germany's eternal stigma and the immediate rejoinders by the non-German side that stirred the waters nationally and internationally.

But is the German stigma eternal? In his concluding chapter, Moses suggests that the long dispute over German national memory—based either on solidarity with the Third Reich's victims or with the perpetrators—has begun to "dissolve with the generational change...