Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity

by Jan-Werner Müller

How did German intellectuals react to unification and how have they conceived the country's national identity and its new international position? This important book not only examines changing notions of nationhood and their complicated relationship to the Nazi past but also charts the wider history of the development of German political thought since World War II—while critically reflecting on some of the continuing blind spots among German writers and thinkers.

Jan-Werner Müller explains why many intellectuals reacted so defensively to unification and why unification plunged the Left in particular into a major crisis that is yet to be overcome. He analyzes the responses of Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, and others of the so-called skeptical generation, who broke with the tradition of the illiberal interwar intellectuals and reinvented themselves as a "democratic elite" who sought to transform political culture after the war#151;and tried to do so again after 1989. He discusses the German idea of "constitutional patriotism" as well as the antinationalism of the "generation of 1968," and provides the first full-scale analysis of Germany's "New Right." Written clearly and elegantly, the book assesses the acrimonious debates about the future of the nation-state and public memory in Germany and offers more general reflections on the role intellectuals can play in post-totalitarian societies.brpbAbout the Author:/bBR
Jan-Werner Müller is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and has recently held a senior visiting fellowship at the Remarque Institute at New York University.

Genres: Politics, History, Germany

320 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University, where he also directs the Project in the History of Political Thought. His previous books include What is Populism? (2016) and Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (2011). He writes for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.

Reviews

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Müller's Another Country is a penetrating and comprehensive analysis of German intellectual concepts and disputations regarding national identity, specifically pertaining to Reunification, and generally regarding the nation's relationship to its Nazi past. Chapters focus on several key figures participating in this public debate, including Jürgen Habermas, Gunther Grass, Martin Walser, and Karl Heinz Bohrer. A dense, challenging, and virtuosic exploration of contemporary German intellectual history, I found this book incredibly thought-provoking and bursting with ideas. Highly recommended to academics interested in the subject.