Nation, Race, and Immigration: German Indentities After Unification

Abstract

Over three decades ago, the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, author of an important and much ignored book about German guilt ( Die Schuldfrage , 1946), claimed that the history of German nationalism was finished and done with. National unity, he argued, was forever lost as a result of the guilt of the German state, and the demand for reunification to him was nothing but a denial of what had happened during the Third Reich.1 Jaspers' s critique was directed against a then strident conservative discourse of reunification which was coupled with the bellicose nonrecognition of the GDR and the demand, especially by the organizations of Eastern refugees ( Vertriebenenverbande) , to keep the question of the Eastern borders open. He was the first to articulate an argument against a unified German nation-state that has since been widely adopted in Germany, even though at the time Jaspers himself was rejected by the right and mostly ignored by the left. While the division of Germany in 1949 into two states was the political result of the emerging Cold War superpower confrontation and had nothing much to do with retribution for the crimes of the Third Reich, a rhetoric of punishment and retribution regarding the question of national unity became the basis for a