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2 - A third path?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Stephen Brockmann
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
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Summary

The events of October and November, 1989 forced a fundamental rethinking of postwar German cultural history and initiated major philosophical, political, sociological, and literary debates which are still continuing. What happened in Europe in the fall of 1989 was not just political and was certainly not confined to the eastern half of what used to be the divided continent; it was the total breakdown of a linguistic and ideological system at once bipolar and regressive which had governed European affairs since the end of World War Two. If many of Germany's writers and intellectuals reacted to German reunification as if they had completely lost all sense of proportion and bearing, it is because to a large extent they had. For over forty years, they had been living in an infinite bipolar regression, in a language and ideology machine which seemed to function in perpetual motion. The machine may have been inhuman and cruel, but it was one's own. It was what one knew. There is little doubt that Germany and the world will be feeling the shock waves from this collapse for some time to come.

At the center of “the German Question” as it emerged once again in the fall of 1989 were two fundamental problems: the problem of German nationhood on the one hand, and the problem of socialism on the other. Within the German context these two questions were interconnected because of Germany's troubled twentieth-century history.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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  • A third path?
  • Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Literature and German Reunification
  • Online publication: 24 August 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519468.003
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  • A third path?
  • Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Literature and German Reunification
  • Online publication: 24 August 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519468.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • A third path?
  • Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Literature and German Reunification
  • Online publication: 24 August 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519468.003
Available formats
×