(5) Typically German, and therefore only partly comprehensible to other national movements, is the romanticizing of the East, combined with the theory of the German “middle-mandate” [Mitte-Auftrag].* “Schwer der Gang, härter die Winde” [Tough the road, harsher the winds] versified Syberberg – “and anyone who went East knew what awaited him.” The tie to the West is downplayed, equidistance is propagated: “And if we don’t want them, not the Americans and not the Russians?” The future of Germany: “To be the one in the middle.” Picking up on old geopolitical concepts, the great European power Germany is oriented toward the East and the Southeast. [ . . . ]
(6) That leaves the oldest and yet at the same time the most utopian discourse, which still faces the toughest opposition among us, even from hard-core normalizers: the critique of total peace, or to turn it around: removing the taboo from war. “War in the old sense,” writes Syberberg, “was also a cultural phenomenon. It corresponded to the natural being of settled humans.” There are virtues that shine especially brightly in war. [ . . . ]
3.
What this means is that talk of “identity” is dangerous. After reunification, the Germans are in the midst of the process of reconstructing a national identity, but in the sense of a backwards-looking revision (which leaves out Hitler). Where that’s likely to end is obvious: with the defiant ethnocentrism of the maxim “Germany first.” With a return to the socially conservative domestic morality of a misconstructed national state. With normalization in the sense of a robust reduction of complexity, in short, with Tonio Kröger’s longing for blond Inge, for the “pleasures of the common.” At the end of the twentieth century, a return to its beginning, a laconic gyroscopic movement of history over fifty million dead – bluntly put, that would be either nauseating or terrifying.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the word “identity” has to be poisoned. That is insinuated by Diedrich Diederichsen’s statement: “He who demands, creates, or venerates identity without fundamental necessity is a Fascist.” To be sure, this idea conveys the correct insight that the struggle for survival among “nations” under assault, be they peoples, races, youth cultures, or sexual and religious minorities, is more legitimate than the separation of dominant cultures so that they might fully develop and assert their peculiarities. The outraged reply of an irate normalizer – “You want to grant the gay community the same thing you want to deny the Germans” – is something one could still deal with. But it’s unavoidable that groups (that is, “nations,” “communities,” “movements”) develop subjectivities, social constructions, forms of coherence. The problem is not the “nation” and its “patriotism,” but the sharpening of patriotism into a weapon.
That’s why it would not be German-national if the Germans – like the French – agreed on a canon, a core curriculum, provided that Heine, Börne, Glassbrenner, and Tucholsky were as much a part of it as the Weimar Classics. That’s why it would not be cultural chauvinism if the German and French film industries were given places to show their products, provided this protectionism did not carry with it the elitist arrogance against Pop, mass culture, and American art. That’s why the careful nurturing of the Rhaeto-Romanic language for a few thousand Swiss citizens is not a nationalistic whim, but the preservation of diversity.
*In an article in Die Zeit, author Peter Glotz described Germany’s “middle-mandate” as “the idea that Germany has a mission in the East.” See Peter Glotz, “Wir Deutschen sollten uns klarmachen; die Nachbarn misstrauen uns weiterhin,” Die Zeit, June 24, 1994 – eds.
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