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Understanding Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicholas Boyle
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The feelings of trepidation and resentment aroused in Britain by the imminent unification of East and West Germany, and too accurately voiced in July by Mr Nicholas Ridley, derived as much from the disturbance of illusions about ourselves as from any rational insight into the affairs of our most powerful and important neighbour. ‘Don’t mention the War’ was a good joke because it precisely identified a British obsession: since 1945 a mythologized version of the Second World War (‘the War’) has stood in as the image of a national identity which neither the twilight of Empire nor our ever shabbier political institutions, let alone our industries or our culture, could provide. Mr Ridley’s outburst expressed the fear that soon we should not be able to tell the joke any more. We may even, in the Europe of tomorrow, be forced to face the truth about those forgotten, untried, unpunished, uninvestigated war- crimes: not just a few wicked old collaborators who escaped to Britain rather than Latin America, but the collusion of an entire supposedly civilised ruling-class in the deliberate and systematic burning, machinegunning, dismembering, and burying alive of hundreds of thousands of women and children in what until a few months ago were regularly and not incorrectly referred to in GDR official publications as ‘the Anglo- American terror-raids’ on German cities. ‘Murder is murder’ are words that we must hope will return to haunt the British popular conscience.

Yet, at the same time as the Ridley affair, the revelations about the Chequers seminar on Germany showed that even at the highest level at which in modern Britain the political and intellectual worlds can interact (and quite evidently not all of the seminar was conducted at that level) the subject of Germany is peculiarly beset by illusions.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 71 , Issue 843 , November 1990 , pp. 480 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Fichte, J.G., ‘Alte und neue Welt’, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Fichte, I.H., (reprinted Berlin, 1971), vol. 7, p. 609Google Scholar.

2 Stern, J.P., 'Introduction to the samizdat Czech edition', Hitler: the Führer and the People (London, 1990), p. xxGoogle Scholar.

3 ‘A Social Revolution?’, Stern, Hitler, pp. 149–155.

4 It has been a tragic misfortune, but it has not been only that. In the same essay—What is Enlightenment?–in which Kant proclaims the absolute distinction in the Prussian state between freedom of thought and obedience in political action he goes on to argue that under such a constitution thought will make further and more daring advances than where a greater degree of political freedom (e.g. in England?) trammels thinkers with a prudential concern for the consequences of their ideas. We may, with hindsight, be as inclined to think him right as be relieved that the Prussian state is no longer with us.

5 Francis Fukuyama's article, ‘The End of History’ (The National Interest, Summer, 1989, pp. 3–18), contains too many undefined terms for its argument to be perfectly clear. But it certainly needs modification in two crucial respects: (1) What Fukuyama calls the triumph of the idea of liberalism is actually something rather different, namely, the establishment of a world‐wide economic order, a global market, and the financial and communications systems to run it. (2) the ‘end of history’ has no doubt arrived–given Hegel's definition of (world‐) history as the process in which one ruling national spirit, embodied in a particular state, is displaced by another; ‘history’ in that sense, however, has ended only because the definition is no longer adequate. World‐history, however, as a genuinely international process, in which a world‐wide economic order leads to a world‐wide political and cultural order (itself a process completely describable in Hegelian terms) has only just begun (in 1945, perhaps?).