by Camilo Erlichman
Camilo Erlichman is a historian of modern and contemporary Europe. He acts as an Assistant Professor at Maastricht University. He is also the co-founder and co-convenor of the Occupation Studies Research Network. Erlichman has just co-edited, with Martin Conway, the volume Social Justice in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge UP, 2024).
The Federal Republic of Germany turns 75 this week. As the post-war model of democracy has largely seized to function, there is a disorientation about the relation between this history and Germany’s current juncture. How urgent problems are approached, however, will depend on the meaning given to those years.
Anniversaries, as the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar once wrote a little unkindly, have the tendency to unbolt ‘the great gates to stupidity’: as public acts, they encourage forms of passionate acclamation, celebration, and condemnation, rather than detached historical analysis. That does not, however, render them any less interesting as opportunities to gauge the ways in which societies lend meaning to their past and present. It is therefore perhaps telling that the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic has been characterised not by fervent jubilation, but by its uneventfulness. The two main historical museums devoted to the post-war era, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and the Haus der deutschen Geschichte in Bonn, have been noticeable for the failure to announce any stimulating exhibitions on the subject. To be sure, the central political institutions of the state, including most notably the Bundestag and the federal government, have organised the obligatory celebratory events and stern speeches, which will culminate in a public, three-day Demokratiefest (‘democracy party’) in the heart of Berlin from 24 to 26 May.
It is difficult to escape the notion, however, that there is a sense of unimaginativeness and, indeed, disorientation about the relation between the last seventy-five years and Germany’s current juncture.
This attests to the fact that the Federal Republic of the twenty-first century lives in an uneasy tension with its post-war past. Above all, the pre-existing certainties of the post-war era, including the predictable nature of German political culture and the hegemony of a centrist political ethos seem to have dissipated. While much of the current commentariat keeps repeating the worn-out song about the successful democratisation of Germany in the wake of the Third Reich and East German state socialism, this story has become increasingly difficult to maintain. The Alternative für Deutschland has continued its gradual ascendancy and is now polling close to twenty per cent of the vote, having overtaken both the SPD and Greens. The process of post-war democratization would therefore appear to have been far more fragile than the unbound optimism about the triumph of ‘liberal democracy’ after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic once suggested.
Above all, it is the post-war model of democracy that has largely seized to function.
That model had been structured around a promise of material security and a gradual improvement of living standards. This was, at the same time, a largely non-participatory system of rule, marked by its strong top-down and technocratic bent: a politics for the people, but not one by the people. With its gradual denouement since the 1970s, in the seventy-fifth year of the existence of the Federal Republic this form of doing politics has ceased to command the ‘permissive consensus’ it once enjoyed.
That this should be so owes much to the ways in which many citizens no longer think that the German state is able to work in their interest and deliver on its promise of material progress. Europe’s largest economy today is characterised by a highly diverse and multicultural, but also unequal and divided society. Income inequality has risen significantly since the 1990s and the share of the top income percentiles in the overall distribution of wealth has grown continuously. Most notably, the costs of living have risen sharply, while wages and pensions have struggled to keep up with inflation rates. Living in the larger German cities has become prohibitively expensive, especially for young people, families, the old, and those on lower-skilled jobs. This has created a pronounced level of societal division, which is compounded by the enduring material differences between eastern and western Germany. The strikingly low level of state investment has led to a deplorable condition of basic public infrastructure and services, as the derelict state of the Deutsche Bahn, the failure to digitalise the state apparatus, the lack of kindergarten places, the run-down condition of many schools and the dearth of teachers, as well as the underfunding of the health care system all indicate. These realities have exacerbated the sense that the state can no longer distribute the fruits of the economy in the more equitable manner it did prior to unification.
Overshadowing these discussions is the environmental question, which today dominates German political debate. Rather than providing a past to which one might want to return, the post-war era confronts many with the unsettling reality that the forms of industrial production, the technological progress, the improvement of living conditions, and the concomitant emergence of a consumer society have exacted a significant price that has contributed to the climate crisis of the present. For others, however, such as those who long for a return to the ‘golden years’ of post-war economic boom, it is precisely the industrial model of the early Federal Republic that ought to be reinstated.
These different visions of the past, and the ways in which the response to the climate crisis is felt to be borne unduly by those at the bottom, have served to widen the societal divide.
Finally, the fundamental historical assumptions of the post-war era are increasingly under attack. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, German society had gradually converged around a conception of the place of the Third Reich and the Holocaust as the central vectors of German history. From this self-conception there emerged not only a particular memory politics, but also a set of political principles, structured around a general reluctance of the Federal Republic to flex its muscles on the international stage. That world is long gone: with German unification, participation in the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and above all with the imposition of austerity politics in southern Europe during the Eurocrisis, the Federal Republic has dropped its model of self-restraint.
What is new about the current iteration, however, is how the Third Reich is increasingly being displaced as the historical point of gravity in public discourse. From the extreme Right, there is a predictable attempt to minimise the relevance of National Socialist rule, while on the Left, the emphasis has shifted towards a focus on German colonial crimes in Africa. The German government’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as the various public backlashes against these policies, demonstrate how the Federal Republic is both shaped by the key historical assumptions that emerged during its post-war existence, but also stuck in an intricate process of moving beyond it.
None of these fault lines are entirely unique to Germany.
Just like the rest of Europe, present-day Germany has left behind the twentieth century, and has arrived in a new age marked by a novel set of problems. The ways in which these problems are framed and approached, however, will largely depend on the meaning that is given to the country’s post-war past, and the implications for the present that are derived from it.
If the current anniversary has been marked by a paucity of ideas, that might simply suggest that the Federal Republic finds itself today in an uncertain state of flux within which that very understanding of its post-war past is being contested and recalibrated.
