From the Bonn to the Berlin Republic: Germany at the Twentieth Anniversary of Unification (review)

In his portraits of Europe written in 1983, the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini titled his chapter on Germany "The Mutable Germans" and wrote, "Germany is a trompe l'oeil Protean country. As everyone knows, only when one tied down Proteus, the prophetic old man of the sea, could one make him reveal the shape of things to come. But he couldn't be pinned down easily; he continued to change" (The Europeans, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983, pp. 69-70). The German Prometheus continues to take new shapes and character at a dizzying pace and continues in Barzini's view to determine the future of Europe. The great historian Fritz Stern has titled his own memoir of Germany Five Germanies I Have Known. Just as we got to know the cozy Bonn Republic and the unbearably boring and repressive German Democratic Republic, Germany morphed into the new unified Berlin Republic.

On the twentieth anniversary of this unification the Georgetown University BMW Center for German and European Studies convened a workshop to assess this new Germany. This publication, ably edited and shaped by two of the center's faculty, Jeffery Anderson and Eric Langenbacher, is the result.

As the editors note, the purpose of the volume is "to present a comprehensive portrait of German politics and society two decades after unification" (p. 4). They assembled an impressive array of specialists to look at the history, culture, society, politics, public policy, and political economy of the Berlin Republic. The range is wide and ambitious, including historical memory, immigration and integration, gender politics, film and culture, the party system, education, and the overall political economy. With the exception of Beverly Crawford's and Abraham Newmans's chapters on Germany's post-wall foreign policy, it does not extensively look at Germany's role in Europe and the wider world.

Overall the verdict on the Berlin Republic is a positive one. Unified Germany continues to be a well-functioning democracy, although it is now more complex and perhaps less governable because of the emergence of a five-party system, the continuing east-west divisions, and the new complexities of an overly expanded federal system with the addition of five new states (Länder). Two of the premier U.S. historians of contemporary Germany, Konrad Jarausch and CharlesMaier, offer thoughtful historical reflections on the changed German republic and set the context for the more detailed political, social, economic, and cultural analyses that follow. Jarausch looks at why the old Federal Republic succeeded after the failure of Weimar, homing in on the importance of the complete defeat of 1945, which eliminated the "stab in the back legend" used by Adolf Hitler and others to discredit Weimar, the creation of an elaborate welfare state, and the embrace of the West. He also notes some of the deficiencies of the current Berlin Republic, including the continuing problem of inner unification and the lack of integration of foreign minorities. He concludes with some interesting lessons for democratic nation-building based on the German experience and concludes that the old separate way (Sonderweg) has come to an end. Maier likewise concludes that German society has mellowed over the past two decades and that Germany is in much better shape today than the United States, being less divided and less vulnerable to political gridlock and extremism.

The survey of the various policy areas tends to confirm that Modell Deutschland is back. The divisions that characterized unified Germany in the early 1990s have been ameliorated though perhaps not eliminated in such areas as higher education and gender politics. Even in the area of economic policy, although unemployment remains higher in the east and out-migration continues, there have been dramatic improvements in productivity, infrastructure, and housing. The partial liberalization of the labor market undertaken during Gerhard Schröder's chancellorship has resulted in the transformation of the welfare state and the...