What dream do Germans have for their country?

October 3rd should give me enough cover to clarify the only national question that matters: What dream do Germans actually have for their country? Do they dream of more than winning another World Cup?

The question arises right now because the AfD is where it is. But the cinema got me there. In the wonderful 1982 comedy Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman plays an unsuccessful actor who is so desperate that he disguises himself as a woman to land a gig. Hoffman's best friend, also an actor and also without a job, is played by the equally wonderful Bill Murray.

His character is writing a play that is never really finished, sitting with party guests in the dim light of the shared kitchen and trying to speak profoundly in front of them. One thing is sad, he reflects: When people dream these days, their dreams no longer even take place in their own country.

I can't say why I remembered this sentence the first time I heard it. The character who voices her is an obvious windbag, albeit an endearing one. But the saying resonated with me in a strange way. Yes, where, I thought, do German dreams actually take place?

Germany, difficult fatherland

When I was around 16 and started to think politically, it occurred to me that as a German I had a “difficult fatherland,” in the words of a former Federal President. A former classmate once told me that when he was young he pretended to be Norwegian when traveling abroad, and I understand the impulse.

You can't choose what kind of country you're born into - and you usually have to live with it for a while. If things become unbearable, you can break up with it like you would with a toxic partner. As with a partner, this can cost a lot. But this bond cannot be completely broken.

My classmate, I and others who were born in the West in the mid-sixties were not only the largest age cohorts in the history of the republic. We were also among the first to be fully confronted with the German crimes of National Socialism and the World War and were now supposed to “come to terms with” this past.

For many, it was the formative part of their political socialization: the realization that we Germans had set a kind of record of barbarism that would last for a long time. The Nazis' bloodlust meant that the supply of stories about German mischief would not run out. The “Millennial Reich,” indeed.

After Auschwitz, Adorno famously found, writing poetry became impossible. Such views were only hesitant to gain acceptance in the young Federal Republic. At least small escapes made it possible for the West Germans to travel, which was about to become a kind of national hobby. A stay on a beach should take us outside of ourselves: over the Alps and all the way to Rimini. Even if it was only for three or four weeks a year.

The imperative of the Federal Republic: Never again

But the shadow of the German nightmare places remained powerful: “He only never talks about Stalingrad,” said a 1981 song (adjusted for dialect) in a song by the Cologne band BAP about a fabulating homeless man named Jupp. "Where is it, Stalingrad? What country is it in? He never packs Stalingrad, somehow." If one can speak of “the” Germans at all and there was something like a collective idea of ​​what one’s own country should look like back then, it was primarily as a counter-proposal to what it had been like. In an imperative: Never again!

Under this auspices, we West Germans have built a vibrant democracy over decades, even if the early bets were against us, and some of the later ones as well. We have developed a sustainable culture of remembrance of the years 1933 to 1945, even if many remained silent in the years immediately afterwards: out of shame, out of defense, as complicit.

What, pray tell, is a “nation”?

The American political scientist Benedict Anderson described nations as “imagined communities”: imagined political communities whose members, for the most part, never meet each other, who do not share a self-evident common history – and yet see themselves as part of a collective. I have sometimes suffered from my own membership in the “German” collective. Or let's say: I struggled with it. For example, so that people from other countries can make it easier for themselves with their relationship with their country. I am interested to hear how Germans are praised for supposedly “rethinking patriotism” by “taking back the flag” (Jürgen Klopp). Then I think: Ah yes, that's how it works. The fatherland is no longer so difficult.

An American would find it quite unnecessary to ask himself what he and his compatriots collectively dream about. He can fall back on the proverbial “American Dream”: as a minimal consensus with a very significant reach. And he has a vision of the USA as a beacon of freedom for the world. “Blue states” and “red states” can operate differently mentally and politically in detail. And yet, in this country, I personally appreciate the hesitation and hesitation that we often fall into. To be or not to be? How should it be? We Germans ponder and seriously debate whether we want to defend our free model of life.

Mark, pension, home ownership and NATO

Freedom: Is this perhaps something Germans dream of? The Allensbach pollsters, who regularly scan the value profile of Germans, come to a different conclusion: that freedom is highly valued in Germany, but often takes a back seat to justice. But there are also others in the mix of social leitmotifs. In 2009, historian Eckart Conze called his 1,000-page history of the Federal Republic from 1949 to the present “The Search for Security”; Marks, pensions, home ownership and NATO make an appearance here.

Freedom is a central value of the now all-German constitution and at the same time an often contested reality. But freedom has not been a positive national dream or an emotional brand core in this country for a long time.

That only changed late, for a historic moment - with the fall of the Wall. This brings us almost to East Germany and the AfD; But as an attentive reader you already suspected that.

Looking back, the historian Conze did not read the revolution, the collapse of the GDR and unity as a special case of the German longing for stability, but as a massive loss of certainties that only renewed the longing. The GDR had been an authoritarian state, but it had given its citizens a promise of security within its heavily guarded borders: basic social services, state-organized life courses and predictable circumstances - bought through repression.

At first, however, the story seemed to end well. The future seemed open, and that was a good thing.

American, young – and enthusiastic about “West Germany”

As it happened, I spent the 1989-90 academic year as an exchange student at a great little college in Connecticut. This summer, no one could have predicted that the division of Germany would suddenly end. At some point during those months, I struck up a conversation in the Campus Center with a black student who noticed where I was from. You picked up your mail in the basement of the building, and further up at “Itza Pizza” you got a snack between missions in the library.

The fellow student raved to me at length about my own homeland, about efficiency, hard work and material security - but he hadn't been there himself. I remember thinking: Germany – a dream of a country? How unusual.

The economic miracle as an ideal export good

When I told other students that I came from “West Germany,” some of them used an old joke: “Is that our part or theirs?” Is this our half or the other half? Of course that meant the Soviets.

The Germany enthusiast, on the other hand, was primarily concerned with the spectacular economic success - which had also become an essential pillar of identity for the residents of the Federal Republic. For the enthusiast, without knowing the term, the German economic miracle reflected his own expectations of social advancement that the elite, expensive college was supposed to enable him to achieve. Made in Germany: a better life.

I learned about the fall of the Wall when I was strolling down Main Street in Middletown, Connecticut, on November 10th and saw the headline "FREEDOM! Berlin Wall comes tumblin' down" on the front page of the New York tabloid Daily News. This gave rise to a dream that had world-historical implications and that at that moment belonged solely to the Germans: the dream of freedom, not just for the West. The Germans were, as they say, holiday, export, football and memory world champions. Now we could prove that other things were important to us too.

For the bartender, freedom was hardly worth mentioning

I remember it like it was yesterday: That day I found the nearest bar on Middletown's Main Street. It was around lunchtime, not a good time for a drink either way. But I had to talk to someone, the newspaper still in my hand. Immediately. And there was hardly anyone on the street.

In the days that followed, the images from Berlin would flicker across the screen of the small black-and-white television that stood on a fruit crate in the corner of my student room. The bartender must have been quite surprised that someone showed up at her bar and wanted to know what she thought about what had just happened almost 4,000 miles away. Maybe she was just wondering if she could serve alcohol to the boy in front of her. She thought it was “great” that the Wall had fallen, or something similar. That means, she said, that the people there would now be freed, right?

Fear as a guest in the “German House”

My room was in a shared house called the “German House”, which was intended for students who had German parents, were studying German or were somehow interested in Germany. A roommate whose mother was German immediately got a ticket and flew to Berlin. He didn't want to miss this.

I, on the other hand, having arrived only a few months earlier, decided not to witness the historic moment. I heard the warnings from leading German thinkers all too well: a possibly reunified, larger Germany in the middle of Europe would necessarily be dangerous for its neighbors. There was talk of a “Fourth Reich”. “A Fourth Reich?” was the name of the lecture by a German professor organized by the “German House”; I made the poster for it.

The figure of thought had a long tradition: especially in left-liberal milieus, the Federal Republic was considered a democracy on probation until the 1980s; Against the background of German history, it appeared to be unreliable. I had mostly viewed such talk as a politically motivated defamation of the new German founding.

But German self-doubts were not without effect abroad. That's why I offered the student newspaper "Argus", whose offices were in a building very close to the "German House", an article that emphatically promoted trust in the "new Germany": People could now count on us.

When the dream becomes a trauma

People like to talk about the “irony of history” and it sounds light and cute. But where irony becomes world, it is usually bitter. Sad. Often ugly. Within just three decades, the former “madness!” dream for the eastern part of Germany has turned into trauma – and into political majorities for a party like the AfD that is so driven by resentment.

For me, this is a fiasco that I take personally, even though I live in the West. When there was a debate in the 1980s about whether American medium-range missiles should be stationed on German soil in order to assert themselves in the Cold War, I was in favor of it; I was considered a “hawk.” Hundreds of thousands of people who were against it gathered in Bonn's Hofgarten; One of the slogans was: “Better red than dead.” My argument, on the other hand, was: Would you really want to live like the people in the GDR who aren't even allowed to go to Heilbronn?

Germany now has experience with two dictatorships: the genocidal National Socialism and the supposedly comparatively “commodest” SED and Stasi rule, as Günter Grass said about the GDR from a safe distance. Personally, I had firmly counted on the fact that this historical influence would immunize the Germans against the temptations of nationalist or authoritarian thinking for the foreseeable future. What a mistake.

Many East Germans experienced a devaluation of their biographies

Especially these days there is heated debate about why things turned out differently. Whether we are primarily dealing with a phenomenon from the East; which circumstances explain the success of the AfD in the West. Disappointment, fear of status – these are apparently all-German phenomena. The “establishment of equal living conditions in the federal territory” is a goal in the Basic Law. To put it bluntly, one could say: With the advance of the AfD in both the West and the East, internal unity is complete. But in an unfortunate way.

If you think about it further, you will find other moments of historical irony, each sadder than the last. After the war, the people in the East paid a high price for the National Socialist madness of all Germans by having to serve as a large-scale attempt at real socialism. Those in the West, meanwhile, had a world of opportunity open to them thanks to the grace of birthplace.

The fact that so many former GDR citizens are now being won over to the AfD's ideas can probably be explained with reference to perceived or actual humiliation and disappointment at the hands of “the West”. Another victim of the bitterness was apparently respect for the West German party system, which was built with great effort.