The Myth of Deutschland Über Alles

Given the record of German nationalism -- actually aggressive chauvinism -- in the first part of the 20th century, you might have thought that the Germans would have obsessed about reunification ever since 1949, when West Germany and East Germany were established as separate states. That is, that they would behave like the French after the Germans grabbed Alsace and Lorraine in 1871: N'en parler jamais, y penser toujours -- never talk about getting it back, but think about it always. But nationalism isn't what it used to be -- at least not in Western Europe.

---

Today's Berlin Wall

Five barriers that continue to divide nations and disrupt lives today.

By Joshua Keating

By the time the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989, both Germanys had pretty much accommodated to permanent partition. In West Germany, the chattering class no longer talked about "Deutschland über alles," but about "détente über alles." Advocating reunification was seen as a kind of reactionary no-no, as Cold War mentality smacking of "rollback." The more popular idea was to support rapprochement, not reunification -- in other words, to create a setting that made life in two separate states tolerable, and so reunification unnecessary, while lessening West Germany's excruciating military dependence on its western allies. If the two Germanys found a way to get along, the thinking went, they might be able to dispense with the hundreds of thousands of foreign troops on their soil and, of course, their nuclear weapons.

That was the long-term vision. There was hardly anyone in West Germany's chattering class (encompassing a large part of the political establishment) who did not assume the permanence of both the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet empire. This state of affairs was the inversion of the old dictum about Alsace and Lorraine: "Talk about reunification always, but don't actually think about it." This is why the West Germans were so surprised when the wall came down -- and their brethren spilled across in droves.

Unforgettable is the poster the East Germans held up in those heady days: "If the deutsche mark doesn't come to us, we will come to the deutsche mark."

But to keep the East Germans out, we -- the West Germans -- went in. With our deutsche marks and with annual subsidies totaling about 4 percent of German GDP ever since, we aimed to improve economic conditions enough to entice the former East Germans to stay home. If such assistance to our less fortunate brethren was a form of nationalism, it was defensive -- in the way all rich Western countries prefer to keep out large numbers of poor immigrants.

On the other side of the wall, I am not even sure the "Easties" wanted reunification as such. They just wanted basic human rights: the right to travel, to move around freely, and to get rid of, as it were, wall-to-wall surveillance by the Stasi state.

12NEXT