Vol. 19 · No. 1 · Issue 58 · Spring 2001 · pp. 80-95 (16)

Thomas Berger

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Abstract

Jeffrey Anderson, German Unification and the Union of Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Thomas Banchoff, The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics and Foreign Policy, 1945-1995 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1999)

More than fifty years ago, writing during the aftermath of the horror and destruction of the Third Reich and World War II, the great German historian Friedrich Meinecke described what he called the "demonology of power" (die Dämonie der Macht). He argued that a remorseless worship of national power had taken hold of the collective imagination of German elites during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This Nietzschean "will to power" in Meinecke's view was directly responsible for failure of Weimar democracy as well as for the twin catastrophes of the two world wars. The dread of nationalism and the acute disillusionment with dreams of national grandeur that Meinecke eloquently articulated became one of the defining features of the political culture of the Federal Republic and helped shaped virtually every aspect of German politics and intellectual life for more than a generation.