History and German Identity

No nation has been more consumed with, if not also by, the problem of history than has Germany. On the one hand, the historical saga of the German nation-state confronts contemporary Germans with a particularly grim experience of the modern world. Conceived strictly as a theoretical matter, however, the problem of history spoke German before it spoke any other language. In the nineteenth century, German scholars tutored European civilization in how “to think historically.” In philosophy, philology, literary criticism, sociology, and theology, for example, German thinkers introduced new categories, frameworks, and modes of approach that recast the study of humanity and society in ways that gave special prominence to the question of history. And with its pioneering inquiries into the unfolding secrets of history, nineteenth-century German thought and scholarship held out to the world the prospect of a fully modern vantage point. Not only other Europeans, but Americans too trekked dutifully to the centers of German learning to sample the waters of high modernity. Speaking as much for his generation as for himself, Henry Adams rightly observed, “All serious scholars were obliged to become German, for German thought was revolutionizing criticism.”

Early in the twentieth century, however, the dawning promise of the German modernity seemed to turn suddenly into that dark night of which Nietzsche's “madman” warns when he appears in the town square searching frenziedly for a sun that no longer shines. It is German expressionism, in turn, with its lurid colors, cinematic shadows, and leering focus, that perhaps best documents the disenchantment that the Great War imprinted upon European consciousness. The turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1919–33) would see a war-ravaged Germany become the avant-garde home of almost every form of anti-modernism. With the catastrophe of Hitler, which underscored among other things the monumental failure of the German nation-state founded in 1871 to achieve a viable modern politics for itself, an entirely new historical sensibility was born — history as inexpressible and collective moral burden. In particular, West Germans who came of age after the war found the question of citizenship in the Federal Republic (FRG) inextricably entangled in the problem of negotiating the Nazi past.