Table Of ContentChildren of a New Fatherland
CHILDREN OF
A NEW FATHERLAND
Germany’s Post-War
Right-Wing Politics
..
Translated by Paul Vincent
Foreword by David Binder
I.B.Tauris Publishers
LONDON • NEW YORK
First published in 2000 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd,
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Copyright © J.H. Brinks, 2000
A shorter version of this book was published as De Rechterflank
van Duitsland by BOOM Publishers, Amsterdam, in 1994.
The right of J.H. Brinks to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Set in Monotype Dante by Ewan Smith, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by WBC Ltd, Bridgend
Contents
Preface vii
Foreword by David Binder ix
Introduction xii
Abbreviations and Acronyms xix
Background
1 German Partition: A Failed Judgement of Solomon and
the Myth of the Class State 3
2 The Two-tier Society: A New Partition? 13
3 Xenophobia and Right-wing Radical Tendencies among
Young People in East Germany 23
4 National-revolutionary Sentiments in the Former GDR? 36
History and Political Culture of the GDR:
Right-wing Authoritarian Views in a Nutshell 43
5 Imposition of the Party Line and the Militarisation of
East Germay 45
6 The Language of the Third Reich and Anti-Semitism in
the GDR 52
7 ‘Our Goethe, Your Mengele’, or Legitimising Anti-fascism 59
8 The Ravensbrücker Ballade and ‘Anti-fascism’ 69
9 The GDR and the Legacy of German Political Lutheranism 72
10 The GDR and the Legacy of Prussian Political Ideals 82
v
The Right Wing of the United Germany 91
11 An Anti- ‘Anti-fascist’ Iconoclastic Fury? 93
12 The Historikerstreit: A Prefiguration of the Swing to
the Right 101
13 The New Right 110
14 The Republikaner 115
15 Anti-Semitism 124
16 The ‘Debate on Asylum-seekers’ and the Influence of the
New Right 129
17 Poland, the New Right, German Conservatives and ‘Ordinary
Germans’ 143
18 Weimar Revisited? 155
Notes 162
Bibliography 187
Index 193
Preface
What prompted me to write this book in the first place was the
desire to know why, almost immediately after German reunification,
there was a veritable boom in attacks on foreigners, often associated
with Nazi symbolism.
After the attacks in Hoyerswerda in East Germany in 1991 and in
Rostock in the autumn of 1992, it was clear that many people felt a
need for background information on these events. How could it be,
one was frequently asked, that such scenes were taking place in a
country that had always prided itself on being ‘anti-fascist’ and was
also regarded as such by many people in the West. But it was
impossible to view these trends separately from the situation in the
old Federal Republic. Here too violence against foreigners, particularly
against asylum-seekers, experienced a revival that was given world-
wide attention after the attacks in Mölln in West Germany in 1992
and Solingen in 1993. However, these attacks were not isolated in-
cidents but the extremist expression of a ‘swing to the right’ among
the population that was reflected in German politics. I have tried to
map out a few of the political and ideological roots of this Rechtsruck.
The relatively large number of notes offers interested readers the
opportunity of researching things for themselves.
Xenophobia and a ‘swing to the right’ have not been exclusive to
Germany since the implosion of party communism. Elsewhere in
Europe too, since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it is possible to identify
an increase in racist violence and right-wing authoritarian sentiments
among the population and in politics.1
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viii Children of a New Fatherland
However, there seems to me to be little point in invoking a ‘Euro-
pean question’ if this is meant to imply that detailed research is
thereby rendered unnecessary. For example, in 1997 the European
Parliament debated respect for human rights in the European Union
in the year 1995. Various abuses were listed, but references to abuses
in individual countries had to be omitted. In the case of Germany,
this meant the omission of any of the violent attacks on centres for
asylum-seekers.2
I have chosen Germany as a case study because in many respects
it is Europe’s engine room. Through German reunification the coun-
try has again become a fully fledged partner. Germany had been
divided into three and occupied, but this unnatural situation has
ended. This, in my view, calls for certain trends in Germany to be
subjected to a thorough critical examination, without this automatic-
ally fuelling outdated anti-German sentiments or resentments.
My German colleagues, both journalists and historians, have been
extraordinarily helpful to me in my research. I should like to take
this opportunity of expressing my thanks to Roger Eatwell (Bath),
Kurt Goldstein (Berlin), Professor Walter Grab (Tel Aviv), Gerke
Hoekstra, the late Dr Lieuwe Hornstra (Freie Universität), Professor
Georg Iggers (Buffalo), Monika Kadur and other staff of Amnesty
International in Berlin, Josh Klemkow, Simon Wiesenthal, Ralf Wolz,
Professor Wolfgang Wippermann (Freie Universität, Berlin), the
former Akademie der Wissenschaften (East Berlin) and to the Presse-
und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung.
I am particularly grateful to my teachers and friends, Sheila Browne
(Oxford) and Professor Paul Valkenburgh (Vries). Without their co-
operation, which was often accompanied by lively discussion, this
book would not have been written. The findings are of course entirely
the responsibility of the author.
This book was completed during the author’s tenure of the
Charlemagne Institute Fellowship.
Birkbeck College
Foreword
Germany has been ruled with brief interruptions by the political
right wing for nearly all of the twentieth century: as monarchists, as
Nazis and, after the Second World War, as Christian conservatives.
Indeed, the very creation of the German national state in the late
nineteenth century was performed by the right wing. (The German
left, powerful as it sometimes became, was born in internationalism
and became national only under the aegis of foreign occupation
powers after the second great war.)
That lengthy history of the right wing has given it a primary role
in the ever-developing German sense of national identity in all its
aspects – from symbols like flags, salutes, anthems and uniforms to
deciding fundamental matters such as who is authorised to be a
German citizen and what territory must be considered inviolably
‘German’. It lies at the heart of such tortured moments but also
euphoric moments of the post-war era as the great national debate
at the beginning of the 1970s over Ostpolitik. Again, the ever un-
resolved identity issue was reflected in the Historikerstreit nearly a
decade later, in which historians fiercely debated the nature and
degree of German guilt for the crimes of the Hitler regime.
One must acknowledge, however, that the political right was not
all bad for Germany – that its representatives did much to build and
consolidate a nation that once seemed almost hopelessly divided
against itself, to preserve virtues such as diligence, public service and
rectitude, and to erect a social system that blazed trails in looking
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x Children of a New Fatherland
after the underprivileged, to serve as a balance against anarchy and
revolutionary chaos.
Furthermore, as Richard Lowenthal, the journalist and political
thinker who was close to the Social Democratic Party for much of
his career, once observed, what made the German Federal Republic
work was ‘that the German right finally accepted democracy’. Indeed,
the evolution of the Federal Republic is unthinkable without the
massive contributions of the right, however grave its shortcomings
or faults. The problem was that the mainstream of the German right
continually flirted with and sometimes fostered the extreme right,
whether the outright anti-Semites of the Kaiser era, the Nazis in the
inter-war period or, during the last decade, the various brands of
neo-Nazis. In the case of Hitler, his rise to power could hardly have
taken place without the massive assistance of Germany’s bankers,
industrialists and, ultimately, its conservative politicians.
That pattern was not repeated in the Federal Republic during the
Cold War. Indeed, the extreme right was largely repressed by Federal
authorities in West Germany and of course by the Communist Party
in East Germany.
Only recently, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification of
the two Germanys, has the extreme right re-emerged in more or less
full flower – often with the ugliest sorts of manifestations such as
brutal killings of foreigners and Hitlerite political revivals. The cynical
formula of the mainstream conservatives – the Christian Democratic
Union and its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union – was
rechts überholen, overtaking on the right, which is fraught with danger
in politics and in highway driving.
As the extreme right-wing groupings marched, rallied and pro-
moted their xenophobic programmes, the Union parties, to the
revulsion of many Germans, simply digested their ravings and re-
gurgitated them in ‘acceptable’ formulas under their mainstream
banners. Even the Social Democratic Party proved a bit susceptible
to the siren songs of the rightists.
For its part, East Germany under the Communists perversely
