For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, a Chancellor has been voted out of office in a national election. Can we conclude that German democracy has gained in self-confidence?
Yes, I think we can. Hitherto political parties manoeuvred to change coalition partners during a legislature. This was the way both Ludwig Erhard and Helmut Schmidt were forced out. Now citizens have taken it upon themselves to reject a Chancellor. In a democracy voters must believe that their decisions can at certain turning-points influence a self-enclosed and bureaucratized political world. In West Germany it required several generations for this democratic attitude really to take hold. I have the impression that this change is now effectively sealed.footnote1
You always felt Helmut Kohl guaranteed the Western credentials of the Federal Republic. Will you miss him?
Every necessary criticism of Kohl has already been made. His historical merit was to embed German unification in a wider enterprise of European unity. People of my age also recognize Kohl as one of their own generation. I am thinking here of his almost bodily disavowal of the kind of political aesthetic that elitist spirits called for, especially after 1989. Kohl had clearly not forgotten the monstrous mises-enscèneof Nazi rallies or the Chaplinesque antics of our fascist mountebanks.
Certainly we often groaned at the shapeless provincialism of Kohl’s words and gestures. But I came to appreciate the deflation of sonorous vacuities and banalization of public ceremonies that went with it. There was an element of contrariness in Kohl’s style which, if it doesn’t sound too presumptuous, my generation wanted. Maybe we succeeded in mustering some of it against the turgid inwardness, misprinted grandeur, and compulsion to the sublime of the airs and graces of the German spirit.
Kohl achieved something else against his own intentions. The failure of his original talk of a ‘spiritual-moral change’ acted as something of a litmus test. Once Kohl in office found that he could no longer do what he wanted at Verdun or Bitburg, or elsewhere, it was clear that the country had become a liberal society. One of the mental fixtures of the early Federal Republic was the suspicion, voiced by thinkers like Carl Schmitt, of ‘internal enemies’ on the left—a deep dread of subversion discharged once again in the pogrom-like atmosphere of autumn 1977. Kohl no longer drew sustenance from this kind of emotional attitude.
There is going to be a red-green government in Germany now. Is this just a political shift, or does it signal a change of cultural outlook?