Get the latest tech news

Antidemocratic, Racist, and Antisemitic Sentiments in Postwar West Germany

The Perils of Privacy and Passivity: Antidemocratic, Racist, and Antisemitic Sentiments in Postwar West Germany

Even though he points out that these fears had objects of varying plausibility and could, especially in the immediate postwar years, be a means to both fend off guilt and engage in a process of self-victimization, Biess insists these were not detrimental to consolidation of West German democracy, but eventually contributed to a strong vigilance and an awareness for its potential instability. As described by Friedrich Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals, ressentiment is an “imaginary revenge” by those “denied the proper response of action.” Footnote 62 As an “ Akt der geistigen Rache,” a decidedly impotent rebellion against the new democratic regime that subverts the threshold of causing an open conflict with a superior enemy, it thrives on inversion of values: the group's apologetic equation of National Socialism and democracy. In his monograph Misstrauen gegenüber der Demokratie( Distrust of Democracy), which remained unpublished but whose main observations were summarized in the report, Heinz Mauss saw tendencies in the group discussion to undermine the idea of “autonomous action,” which he considered decisive for any democracy.” He diagnosed the participants with “passivity” and a “general disillusion toward all politics.” Footnote 87 And Schweppenhäuser's and Rainer Koehne's monograph about language in the group discussions, excerpts of which were included in Pollock's report, saw the participants taking on a “spectator attitude,” “playing dead,… by not being interested in anything but [themselves],” and exhibiting “collective passivity.” Paying more attention than Schelsky to the alienating dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, Mauss, Schweppenhäuser, and Koehne explained these attitudes with the individual's position in an industrial mass society in which people “can no longer experience themselves as subjects, only as disposable objects.” Footnote 88 But they also accounted for the phenomena by reference to the German Nazi past.

Get the Android app