Return Of The Repressed In Germany

He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. Even if we know it is the way of history, it is nonetheless jarring to witness time and again the return of the repressed in the cultural and political life of nations. It is never over, even after the fat lady sings.

The fat lady sang twice in Germany, first after Nazism was roundly defeated in World War II and second, after the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet bloc collapsed and “history ended.” Only decades later are we seeing an eruption of all that was left unsettled with the steady rise of neo-Nazi parties, mainly in former East Germany, and the demise of the mainstream political coalitions that were the pillars of post-war liberal democracy. Some three decades ago, New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ) published an issue focused on the reignited embers of nationalism in Germany. It reads like a chronicle of the future foretelling the tremors shaking Europe’s most powerful country today.

Contributors to that issue ranged from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the celebrated May ‘68 rabble-rouser and then-Green Party’s deputy mayor of Frankfurt, to the controversial playwright Hans Jürgen Syberberg, who broke post-war taboos with his movie, “Hitler: A Film From Germany.” Other contributors included Germany’s president at the time, Richard von Weizsäcker and then-foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, whose essay was titled “Nationalism Has No Home in Germany.” Even then, the issues that stirred the most virulent passions were around the influx of immigrants, lenient asylum policies and the “yearning for a lost sense of belonging.” At the time, isolated gangs were firebombing immigrant homes. Today, those sentiments have been channeled into political parties that garner as high as 44% of the vote in regional elections. The introduction I wrote to that long-ago NPQ edition read: “Now that the long post-war parole is over, will Germany prove to be reformed or a repeat offender?

Unable to face itself, Germany for decades assumed an identity for the benefit of others in order to absolve its crimes. It has become an alias nation hiding its soiled soul under the bushel of NATO and the European community, which, above all else, institutionalizes the liberal ideal of a rational order over a national one.” Citing the filmmaker Syberberg on why the “democratic repression” associated with rational liberalism cannot forever bury the soul, it continued: “If the cool head allows the passions of the soil no expression, then those underground passions will surface in the ugliest form time and again. A culture made to live by an alias will inevitably revert to the identity that was repressed instead of evolve a new identity based on the open experience of a new reality.” Syberberg argued that “after the war, intellectuals stood on the tradition of the Enlightenment and a hegemonic rationalism that focused on the head at the expense of the heart.

Culture is built upon the way the light falls on the trees, the way the heavens look at night from the familiarity of a particular place where people live and feel a sense of belonging to a unique way of life, to our garden plots, folk tales and Teutonic fantasies. We feel safe excelling at mathematics, physics, business. Our people, dominated by facts and figures, are satisfied to dance around the golden calf of materialism and the strong Deutschmark.

We are very efficient and methodical. But where is the heart?” “Heimat,” or homeland, he went on, “was one of the aesthetic subjects that was forbidden territory after the war.” When the Cold War ended and the wall came down, 15 million people became orphans from an East Germany that no longer existed. This is part of the natural function of being human.” To the filmmaker, the extremism of gangs bombing the homes of immigrants was “frightening, like wild animals.” But he thought it was not enough to condemn it; he also needed to understand “what it is in the air nourishing it.” For him, it was a “reaction not fully formed” springing from the wound of historical dislocation and the prohibition, both explicit and implicit, against cherishing one’s own identity when strangers were welcomed.