Europa in der Tradition Habsburgs? Die Rezeption Kaiser Karls V. im Umfeld der Abendländischen Bewegung und der Paneuropa Union By Markus Pohl. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020. Pp. 189. Paperback €79.90. ISBN: 978-3428181650.

Abstract

tance of her subject and overstating her possible conclusions. How many readers will agree with the following propositions: that initiatives in product design “normalized East-West relations, which eventually undermined the Cold War status quo and helped to pave the way for unification” (6)? Or that a shared taste for “conservative modernism . . . made the [1989] transition from reform to unity plausible and feasible in German minds” (9, 183)? Or that “the pan-German economic culture developed a vocabulary of transparency, humanity, and morality that shaped German efforts for peace in Europe in the 1980s” (186)? Or that shared notions of “design, taste, and consumption” helped prevent “great social upheavals or political disruptions in the fall of 1990” (189)? Many scholars will find these claims to be over-reaching. Materially oriented scholars will doubt whether Schreiter’s proposed “economic culture” of shared perceptions, norms, values, and tastes could ever bring the two German economies closer together. The real existing gaps between economic structures and performance in the neo-Stalinist East and the social-market West were enormous and obvious; they permeated daily life in the GDR. Those gaps are widely recognized as the root causes for the dead-end trajectory of the East German economy and state. These differences could not be bridged by the cultural constructs Schreiter identifies.