In the summer of 1990, as the currency union between West and East Germany was about to occur, Serge Schmemann, then the chief reporter for The New York Times in Germany, conducted an interview with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. This was a dramatic moment in German history. The East German regime had unexpectedly collapsed the previous year, the economic unification of Germany was about to occur, and political unification was little more than three months away. Asked what he wished for his nation at the moment of its greatest economic, political, and intellectual transformation after the Second World War, Chancellor Kohl proclaimed that his chief goal was: “That things will normalize. That's the most important thing for us, that we become a wholly normal country, not ‘singularized’ in any question […] that we simply don't stick out. That's the important thing.” Kohl's wish contains an explicit definition of “normality” as that which is not “singularized” and therefore does not “stick out.” In what follows, I explore whether Kohl's wish has been achieved in the decade and a half since it was uttered.

Kohl's definition of normality is implicitly comparative, since not being “singularized” means that one's own nation is more or less like other nations and therefore “simply [doesn't] stick out.” For this reason, in asking whether Germany has achieved normality in Kohl's sense, one needs also to ask what constitutes “singularity” or “sticking out” in a nation and what does not, that is, what qualities allow a nation to appear as merely one of a number of other relatively unremarkable, non-singular nations, and what qualities make a nation appear unique or singular.