Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future by Stephen Green (review)

Stephen Green, Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, has had an illustrious and varied career. He served as chief executive officer and group chairman of the world’s third-largest bank, HSBC. From January 2011 until December 2013, he was minister of state for trade and investment in the first Cameron government. He is chair of the Natural History Museum in London. When it comes to the writing of German history, however, he is, in his own words, an “amateur without any claim to be an academic specialist” (321). While Green may lack training as a historian, he is exceptionally well read, as his account of some two thousand years of German history demonstrates. Drawing on historical scholarship and his knowledge of literature and music, he tries to explain fascism as well as contemporary Germany’s reluctance to assume the role of Europe’s political leader.

Green is at pains to caution against interpreting the past through the prism of the twentieth century—and particularly, the years from 1933 to 1945. However, his history is Whiggish in that he is clearly interested in the past as a necessary precursor of the present. That becomes most apparent in his account of postwar Germany. Telescoping the past through the present, his narrative proceeds from Adolf Hitler via Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel. In Green’s reading, the East German experience—including the specific hopes and anxieties of East Germans—becomes a minor detour. Unsurprisingly therefore, when writing about the end of the German Democratic Republic, he only recalls the slogan “Wir sind ein Volk” as if the East German civil rights movement’s earlier “Wir sind das Volk” had no relevance for the events of 1989.

Green’s history is immensely readable. It is elegantly written and has a narrative that keeps the reader’s interest alive. Yet his book is unlikely to hold much interest for scholars of German cultural studies. The culture in which he is interested is high-brow German Kultur: from J.S. Bach to Karlheinz Stockhausen, from Arthur Schopenhauer to Jürgen Habermas, and from H.J.C. Grimmelshausen to Günter Grass. He wants to provide a “deeper history of the German lands” (xi), a history of ideas and mentalities that found their emblematic expressions in music, literature, and painting. It is this deeper history that, in his view, is sorely needed in order to understand contemporary Germany.

The author’s strong opinions and his particular brand of history will not be to everyone’s liking. This reviewer, for one, was troubled by the fact that Green’s views of Germany’s past are colored by his unadulterated admiration for the country, its people and, most importantly, its Kultur. Perhaps only a contemporary British writer could get away with statements such as “There is no culture on the planet greater than that of Germany” (xi) or “the contribution of Germany to human cultural enrichment … is unsurpassed by any of the great Eurasian cultures” (85).

For all his knowledge about German Kultur, Green shows no sustained interest in what “new” cultural historians have had to say about twentieth-century Germany. He frequently refers to German “consciousness,” “social psychology,” “self-awareness,” “psyche,” and “folk memory” as if these were unproblematic categories, and as if they could be deduced from the operas of Richard Wagner, the plays of Heinrich von Kleist, and the art works of Anselm Kiefer. He concludes a section in which he discusses the writings of Heinrich Böll and the music of Hans Werner Henze, among others, by saying: “this is the story of a society which was increasingly coming face to face with its past” (267). His is largely the story of an intellectual and artistic elite; in order to understand “society,” we need social and cultural history at least as much as an analysis of contemporary classical music and Nobel Prize winning literature...