WEST GERMANY AS ISLAND OF THE BLESSED

The unexpected advent of German reunification caused a paradoxical crisis in German self-understanding. This crisis dealt with the question as to where Germany stood in relation to other world powers, particularly the West. Prior to 1945, Germany had a positive concept of a German Sonderweg; it defined itself as offering a middle path between the West (France, Britain, the United States) and the East (primarily Russia). The two German states that emerged out of the wreckage of the Third Reich tended to reverse that exalted definition of German alterity by seeking identity as part of Western Europe on the one hand or the Russian sphere of influence on the other.

During the Historikerstreit, Jürgen Habermas had argued that West Germany's most splendid achievement was its anchoring in the community of democratic Western values. Habermas even went so far as to suggest that, because they had learned from their country's horrible past, West German young people were in the process of developing a “postnational” identity, moving beyond the concept of the nation, with all of its negative connotations of nationalism, xenophobia, and war. Far from basing their collective identity on old-fashioned, discredited ideas such as “Volk” and “Blut,” many young West Germans found their collective identity in the concept of a civil society and in a devotion to Western democratic values and the rule of law which Habermas, borrowing a term from Dolf Sternberger, referred to as “constitutional patriotism.”