In ex-Yugoslavia, we are lost not because of our primitive dreams and myths preventing us from speaking the enlightened language of Europe, but because we pay in flesh the price of being the stuff of others' dreams. The fantasy which organized the perception of ex-Yugoslavia is that of 'Balkan' as the Other of the West: the place of savage ethnic conflicts long since overcome by civilized Europe... [...] Far from being the Other of Europe, ex-Yugoslavia was, rather, Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed reverse. How then, can we not recall, apropos of this European gaze on the Balkans, Hegel's dictum that true Evil resides not in the object perceived as bad, but in the innocent gaze which perceives Evil all around? The principal obstacle to peace in ex-Yugoslavia is not archaic ethnic passions but the very innocent gaze of Europe fascinated by the spectacle of these passions... (Slavoj Zizek: The Metastases of Enjoyment. London 1994, p. 212)

Prelude 1: In Search of Lost ‘National Identity’

The debates about national identity conducted in Germany in the 1990s were not sparked off by the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 (cf. Barudio 1994; Brunkhorst 1994; Walther 1994a; Walther 1994b). From the mid-1980s onward, the increasingly political nature of articles in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in West Germany had been noticeable (cf. Claussen 1991). Karl Friedrich Bracher, a historian, in 1986 voiced an urgent warning about the "buzzword identity" and the "artificial tone" audible in many "avowals of identity" (Walther 1994b). Three years earlier, the historian Michael Stürmer had asserted, "History promises pointers to identity, places of anchorage in the cataracts of progress." In the course of the 1980s, the notion of national identity made its way from historical studies into politics, travelled "down from the lecture rostrums and through the feuilletons until it reached the far Right; one right-wing journal, copying the Nouvelle Droite in France, sported a subtitle in which its dedication to the ‘national identity’ was declared." By 1994, Rudolf Walther goes on to tell us, "it was part of nationalist to post-leftist hued business practice to present ‘collective’, specifically ‘national identity’ as normal, matter-of-course and in all events necessary."

The concept of national identity, however, is diametrically opposed to that of political culture: precisely the results of political culture research belied the cultural constants postulated by the exponents of national identity or champions of ‘Research into National Character’ (cf. Almond,Verba 1963; Almond, Verba 1980; Fenner 1991). The notion of identity implies a static factor seemingly no longer appropriate to contemporary societies. In most cases, furthermore, what exactly national identity is understood to mean remains vague. One thing, however, is certain according to Rudolf Walther: "collective identities [...] have nothing to do with enlightenment and self-confidence, but plenty to do with excluding enemies and dreams about communal societies." The superposition of national over personal identity can thus ultimately lead to a conditioning of the individual for external purposes, and in extreme cases the call for national identity can place in question the values of a democratic tradition:

The idea that modern societies should, in the old manner of bands of robbers and regiments, clans and tribes, orders or ranks, acquire or develop ‘ritualistic identities’ presupposes a breach with everything conceivable in terms of universalist principles of law and implemented in terms of democratic traditions. The asserted ‘substantially unrenounceable nature’ of ‘collective’, specifically ‘national identity’ is a repudiation of modern thought and its legal and ethical universalism. (Walther 1994b)

The problematical nature of 'national identity’ in Germany
While in Britain and France the Glorious Revolution and Révolution Française were historical events that laid the foundations for a politically and legally (but not racially) based national identity, Matthias von Hellfeld tells us that in Germany "exclusively economic considerations led to larger confederations and alliances in the second half of the 19th century." (von Hellfeld 1993, 144f.) [1] Bismarck’s foundation of the Deutsches Reich in 1871 fulfilled long-nurtured desires for German unification. Disappointment about a unification viewed as ‘merely formal-political’, however, reinforced the irrationalist component of the German national movement (cf. Mosse 1991), which from 1871 onward defined its role as one of opposition to the existing order without conveying a historical perception or political doctrine. In the years leading up to 1933, German nationalism derived its explosiveness once again from the catastrophic state of the economy, alongside other factors:

Shrewd propaganda from the Right took advantage of this situation and propagated the nation as an ethnic superstructure able to reconcile the opposites and distract from earthly deficiencies. Now, setbacks of any kind could be interpreted as attacks on the nation [...]. Precisely here lies the danger of a nationalism that has not agreed upon binding common historical events. In times of economic prosperity, the notion of ‘the nation’ tends to be of secondary importance. If economic problems arise, however, the notion can be filled with arbitrarily selected content. Depending on the situation, and in contrast to countries whose national consciousness is connected to a certain event and therefore stable, the ‘arbitrary nation’ as a transcendental superstructure will adapt to a threatening reality. (von Hellfeld 1993, 147)

Identity in Germany after 1945
For obvious reasons, the Germans found it difficult to identify with the idea of the nation-state after World War II. The majority therefore switched over to the ‘substitute identifications’ that emerged in postwar (West) Germany: the ‘Holocaust identity’, whose bearers were the intellectuals, and the ‘economic-miracle identity’. [2] Berhard Giesen writes, "The intellectuals were certain: only through reference to the Holocaust could national identity be found [...]" (Giesen 1993, 237). In regard to the the development of the ‘economic-miracle identity’, he notes: "If it was obviously difficult to feel pride in the nation’s history and politics, and if defining the national in cultural terms represented an attempt to come to terms with the past rather than to extol what had been achieved, then the ‘indisputable’ economic successes of the new federal republic were, apart from sport, all that was left to find reconciliation with the presence of the nation and to construct a collective identity for the majority who did not consider themselves part of the cultured middle classes" (Giesen 1993, 240).
        With the flourishing economy foremost in most people’s minds in the new Federal Republic, ‘We’re back on the map!’ – a catch-phrase of the Wirtschaftswunder – initially referred to the country’s astonishing feat of reconstruction. West Germans were proud of their newly acquired wealth, their mobility and Americanized lifestyle. Identity was once more being derived from the country’s economic reality.
        For all the differences between the 'Holocaust' and ‘economic-miracle’ identities, there was a mutual understanding not to relate identity to the nation. This silent agreement increasingly disintegrated in the course of the 1980s. [3] Germans (in the GDR, too) began to remember the cultural heritage over which identity could be defined. Finally, the process of German re-unification in 1989-90 altered "the tension between culture and power, between Holocaust and Wirtschaftswunder identity in [such] a fundamental way," that "in the vortex of the unification process those dividing lines [blurred] that had lent contour and foundation to the contrast between the Holocaust identity and economic-miracle identity. The codings of national identity changed their bearer groups" (Giesen 1993, 250).

Renewed demand for ‘national identity’
The common consensus to keep the ‘national question’ in the background collapsed in West Germany in the 1980s. From that time on, not only right-wing extremists more insistently pointed out the "absence of a national identity". On 9 November 1985 – the anniversary of the failed revolution of 1918 as well as the pogrom of 1938 -- the Rheinische Merkur newspaper announced that the time had come to discard the burden of National Socialism: "Plagued by the history of this century and eternally held responsible by its own intelligentsia, the contemporary German is happy to take sanctuary under the waves of his regional home and the enjoyment of transient material values. We have been conditioned to be fearful in national issues and in the quest for Germany" (quoted in von Hellfeld 1993, 149).
        Since re-unification, the call for national identity has been paired with demands for Germany’s ‘normalization’. After the events of 1989, it seemed to many, "people could surely profess their ‘healthy nationalism’, their ‘chastened patriotism’, and at the same time usher in an end to recollecting National Socialism" (von Hellfeld 1993, 151). However, this ‘normalization’, which some chose to describe as an end to a ‘culture of shame’, required some interference in the accepted reading of history. Von Hellfeld discerns the following connections: "Disposing of that part of national history relating to Hitler and Auschwitz is a prerequisite for the much-quoted need to shrug off self-effacement and walk upright; the latter for its part is necessary to make good the ground lost by a ‘hindered nation’ " (von Hellfeld 1993, 151). The Historikerstreit ("historians’ dispute") was a major step toward discarding the troublesome legacy.
 

Prelude 2: Historical Revisionism in the Historikerstreit (1986)

The "historians’ dispute" had its starting point in a conference held on the Römerberg in Frankfurt in June 1986. A speech written by the historian Ernst Nolte sparked off the controversy, although it was not delivered at the conference but printed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with the title "The Past That Will Not Pass Away". Nolte asked whether Auschwitz was really "singular" (unique, that is) in world history, with no model or successor. He then proceeded to look for – supposedly – "comparable" deeds by other nations, and developed his thesis of the "causal nexus" existing between the Soviet labour-camp network and Auschwitz. Nolte’s text relativized the crimes of the National Socialists with a thesis he draped in question marks: the Stalinist gulag was, he suggested, "more primordial" than Auschwitz, and the Bolsheviks’ "class murder" took place before the "racial murder" of the Nazis. According to Nolte, Hitler possibly perpetrated his own "Asiatic deed" only because he viewed himself as the potential victim of an earlier "Asiatic deed". At the same time, Nolte re-assessed the reasons for the outbreak of World War II, asserting that Germany’s plans to conquer Eastern Europe ('Volk ohne Raum') and subsequently enslave the Slav population ('Untermenschen') had not been the crucial factor. Stalin, in Nolte’s view, had viewed the highly armed Germany and warmongering Hitler as a welcome opportunity to realize his own plans for expansion, and had virtually longed for hostile German action so that he could, at last, "lash out".
        Nolte’s theses at least halved the culpability for World War II, which had cost 55 million people their lives and had inflicted grievous physical or mental harm on a further 50 million victims, including those made homeless or displaced. Nolte likewise placed in a "causal relation" to each other the main figures Stalin und Hitler. The originator of the "extermination of the enemy of the working class" had not just been a personified menace to Europe, but also Hitler’s role model. The Holocaust, according to Nolte, was "only" an imitation of the method of rule by which Stalin had stayed in power over the years.
        Departing from the "causal nexus" outlined above, Nolte and other historians arrived at the following thesis: without Bolshevism there would have been no National Socialism, without Stalin there would have been no Hitler, without the Gulag Archipelago there would have been no Auschwitz (cf. Historikerstreit 1987; Oesterle and Schiele 1989). The goal of this line of argumentation was easily seen through. "If one shifted responsibility for the European catastrophe to the actual originator, namely Stalin," wrote von Hellfeld, "one reduced the culpability of the Germans. If one also succeeded in showing Stalin to be Hitler’s mentor, then even Hitler’s accountability could be relativized or excused. The ‘Fuehrer’, who until had been portrayed as an anti-person, was supposed to appear in different light, and along with him the approval both he and his policies enjoyed in Germany for many years" (von Hellfeld 1993, 130).

Although the conservative historians who participated in this "attempted exoneration" were, according to von Hellfeld, "by no means on the far Right, the effect of their theories was nevertheless – or perhaps for that very reason – fatal. Their reasoning breached inhibitions valid up to that point, and fuelled an extenuating, even vindicating, view of history" (ibid). According to Wolfgang Kraushaar, the Historikerstreit "indubitably [...] caused the greatest intellectual irritation in the second half of the 1980s, [for] it touched the spiritual roots of the old Federal Republic [...]" (Kraushaar 1993).
        Yet not even one argument presented by the revisionists was new, none of their figures of thought original. As Claus Leggewie wrote in 1987, "Ernst Nolte too was a student of Armin Mohler, who for some 20 years has been criticizing the notion of ‘coming to terms with the past’. Mohler’s books of 1965 (Was die Deutschen fürchten) and 1968 (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) contain all the themes and ideas that went on to create a rumpus in 1986, although few remembered this source" (Leggewie 1987, 205). Thus, the significance of the historian’s dispute lies in the fact that it introduced into a public debate figures of thought and theses until then primarily the preserve of rightist intellectuals and right-wing extremists. By the end of the 1980s, the theme of national identity was already "the bizarre foam riding on the rhetoric of politicians in Bonn" (Leggewie 1987, 209). Even "Helmut Kohl and Franz Josef Strauss are [...] in their capacity as members of the government demanding that which has long been propagated by Armin Mohler and [...] Helmut Diwald, namely that the Germans should ‘step out of Hitler’s shadow’ and ‘close’ with the past [...]" (ibid.).
        The historians’ dispute of June 1986 was thus in line with a conservative zeitgeist that, by re-assessing Germany history, wanted to redress an alleged loss of a stabilizing historical consciousness and furnish patriotic sentiments of identity.
 

Halftime & Interlude: a Cultural Turn to the Right? (1993ff.)

Early in 1993, a controversial Spiegel essay in which the playwright Botho Strauss’ revealed himself as a "rightist in judgement" raised the question of whether Germany might not have its own ‘New Right’ in the manner of the French Nouvelle Droite. Although Micha Brumlik answered this question in the negative, he ascertained that if one stopped looking for organized right-wing extremism, a "surprisingly differentiated landscape of thought [opens up] that ranges from the conservative to the right-wing, and has long taken its place in the politics of the centre". At large in this landscape was a "conglomerate of irrationalist critics of enlightenment, nationalists who are only seemingly sober, lofty historical revisionists, and mellowed ex-leftists" (Brumlik 1993).
        The debate triggered by Strauss’ essay "Anschwellender Bocksgesang" ("The Swelling Song of a Billy Goat") was fanned by two further essays published by Suhrkamp in 1993: Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg and Peter Sloterdijk’s Versuch über die Hyperpolitik. [4] A similar debate had broken out three years earlier on the appearance of a book by Hans Jürgen Syberberg. The vehement discussions in the Zeit and Spiegel were triggered by several ‘right-wing tendencies’ allegedly voiced in Syberberg’s essays.

"The Swelling Song of the Billy Goat": Botho Strauß, the "rightist with all his being"
In his "Swelling Song", Strauss expressed his feeling that contemporary society and its system is ‘anaemic’, "democraticism" being basically "economism", and the latter for its part nothing more than a "cybernetic model, an academic discourse". In the following assertion, he suggested that liberal or democratic societies brought about a general decline in moral standards: "That a people wishes to assert its moral laws against another and is prepared to sacrifice blood in doing so, that is something we no longer understand and, in our liberal-libertarian self-delusion, view as false and damnable."
        Having discerned a "society in decline", and within it the "suffocating, saturated convention of intellectual Protestantism", the writer lamented the loss and destruction of ‘genuine’ values, and placed the blame on the political (‘libertarian’) system: "The hypocrisy of public morality that at all times tolerated (when not joining in) the derision of Eros, the derision of the soldier, the derision of church, tradition and authority -- this hypocrisy should not be astonished to discover its words no longer have any significance in times of distress." The culprits, wrote Strauss, were the intellectuals who "are friendly to foreigners not for the sake of the foreign but because they greet, due to their wrath against what is ours, anything that destroys what is ours". Describing himself as a ‘rightist’, he simultaneously delivered his own definition of the term: "To be on the Right, not by shoddy conviction or with base intentions, but with all one’s being, that is to experience the superior strength of a recollection that grips the human more than the citizen, that isolates him and shakes him to the core in the midst of these modern, enlightened circumstances in which he leads his normal life."
        By alluding to the antithesis between ‘society’ ("citizen") and ‘community’ ("mensch"), Strauss resurrected the stock theme by which Ferdinand Tönnies had attacked the democratic order of his own times. The writer saw the heroic turning-away from the citizen in favour of the entire human being as "an act of rebellion against the totalitarian rule of the present that desires to rob and drive out from any individual any presence of the unenlightened past, of historical coming-into-being, of mythical ages. [...] Rightist [fantasy] is always [...] a fantasy of loss [...]. As such a fantasy of the poet [...]." Strauss declared this rebellious act to be heroic, for "the rightist in judgement [is] an outsider". He saw himself surrounded by "cunning and contrite custodians of the conscience", who had placed bans on certain ways of thinking, and went on to explain why these "custodians of the conscience" were leftists: "in our society, the Left continues to be the site of the cultural majority". Demanding a renewed "protopolitical initiation", he casually remarked that the origin of racism and xenophobia was actually ‘positive’, these being " ‘fallen’ cult passions that originally possessed a non-religious, order-endowing sense". [5] His elitism came to the fore when he came to speak of what he abhorred most: "The isolated is what must be reinforced. The general is [...] feeble [...]. If one would only stop talking about ‘culture’, and finally make a categorical distinction between that which keeps happy the masses and that which belongs to the cut-off stragglers (who do not even build a community), both being for ever separated by the simple notion of the sewer, the TV channel ...".

An article entitled "The Swelling Echo of the Billy Goat’s Song" in the periodical Fachdienst Germanistik showed that 22 reactions to Strauss’ Spiegel essay of February 1993 had already appeared in print by the following April. The Frankfurter Allgemeine contented itself with a devastating critique of the style of Strauss’ essay, and delivered the verdict "insufficient for outsider status". In the eyes of Peter Glotz (Social Democratic Party), Strauss was "a dangerous hothead" (Wochenpost), while Elke Schmitter, the editor-chief of the taz, rephrased Karl Valentin’s pronouncement on art to remind the writer that, "Democracy is fine. But a lot of work" (Hage 1993, 141). Writing in Die Zeit, Ulrich Greiner asked, alarmed, "Where do the rightists with the right judgement stand?" (Greiner 1994)

HJ Syberberg – the "good fortune of Germany"
In his book Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege ("Of the Misfortune and Good Fortune of Art in Germany after the Last War"), which was published in 1990, the film director and producer Syberberg, a writer less Sybilline and ambiguous than Strauss, placed the blame for "Germany’s postwar misfortune" on a conspiracy of left-wingers and Jews:

What also stalked art in Germany after the last war was the curse of guilt that was used as a tool of intimidation by the Left, since the Left viewed itself as innocent and because Hitler had persecuted the Jews. Now, up to the point of boredom and of lies that paralyzed all cultural life, an unholy alliance of Jewish and left-wing aesthetics opposed the guilty, with the result that guilt was able to become a business that killed the imagination, inhibiting as opposed to inspiring in its capacity as a criterion of producing for the masses and of the mass audience. In a Europe of the West, the apparently fortunate liberation from dictatorship needed the Left from the side of the Jews and the Jews from the side of the Left. [...] Whoever went along with the Jews and with the Left climbed the career ladder, and did not necessarily encounter love or understanding or even affection. How were the Jews able to endure this, unless power was all they wanted. (Syberberg 1990, 14)

Syberberg’s book was published by Matthes & Seitz, a publishing house that had built up a solid reputation with works by the new French philosophers, but had also gained notoriety with several far-right publications. One early example was the anthology Zur Kritik der palavernden Aufklärung ("In Criticism of the Chattering Enlightenment"), edited by Gerd Bergfleth and published in 1984, which set "healthy patriotism" against the "homeless Jews" and "enlightenment mafia". In an ‘enough of that snivelling from leftists and liberals’ tone, the book talked about the "German-Jewish intellegentsia that came back and received one last chance to re-model Germany according to its own cosmopolitan standards – a process so wholly successful that for two decades no mention was made of an independent German spirit" (Bergfleth 1984). Syberberg’s book was the latest in a series of right-wing publications from the house of Matthes & Seitz (cf. Diederichsen 1993, 123). [6]

"Spiritual Mobilization"?
Botho Strauss, the "rightist in judgement", declared his entitlement to enjoy the ‘privilege of the poet’. Art, he opined, takes place in a sphere adhering to criteria not necessarily matching those of politics. There exists in art, as Rüdiger Safranski correctly wrote in Die Zeit, a "lack of conscience, a forlornness that comes into play, a yearning to disappear into one’s own images. A metaphysical obsession, a grudge against the world. Therein lies the ecstatic impetus of art. Naturally, the ecstatic refuses to be bound by any kind of morality, and certainly not by political morality. Art is extreme; it is lessened by seeking consent" (Safranski 1995, 39). [7]
        By publishing his "Bocksgesang" as a ‘political essay’ in Der Spiegel, however, Botho Strauss had deliberately ventured into the political arena. Yet politics, unlike art, is the "business of forming a consensus" (Safranski 1995, 39):

It is one thing to place oneself at the mercy of the labyrinth, and this one can do only as an individual and in isolation. It is something else to venture onto the marketplace. He who speaks at the market must strive to be as clear and as distinct as possible, and is unwise to call those by whom he failed to make himself understood ‘idiots, barbarians or political denouncers’ [...]. He would do better to remember where he is speaking, and to whom. (Greiner 1994)

First, there is a basic pessimism critical of progress that – differing from the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ writers or from Walter Benjamin – no longer includes any idea of reconciliation, and can thus summon up nothing more than heroic realism. Secondly, one can find a sometimes bitterly, sometimes painfully proclaimed dismissal of moral universalism and of human rights, in conjunction with an accepted limitation to what is one’s own, in this case the German nation. And thirdly, there is a derision of parliamentary democracy, historico-philosophical in mood and combined with a direct invocation of atavistic life forms. (Brumlik 1993)

Afterlude: "Deutsche Leitkultur" (2000)

Your Christ Jewish, your car Japanese, your pizza Italian, your democracy Greek, your coffee Brazilian, your holiday Turkish, your numerals Arabic, your alphabet Latin. And your neighbour – just a foreigner? (<http://www.leitkultur.de>, 2000)

Julius H. Schoeps, director of the Moses-Mendelssohn Center of European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam, said a debate about immigration and Leitkultur would be "fatal" at a time in Germany when incendiaries were being thrown at synagogues, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, and foreigners assaulted or even murdered on the streets. "Putting immigration at the centre of an election campaign would sanction these attacks" (Schoeps 2000).
        In the opinion of the journalist and writer Rafael Seligman, Merz used the term Leitkultur with the object of "deliberately disseminating a subtext" (Seligman 2000). The "thinly disguised message reads: we Germans refuse to allow foreigners to destroy our German culture and prescribe a new one. The ‘man on the street’, whose vote Friedrich Merz is counting upon, gets the message" (ibid.). Nor was it a new method, he continued: in the early 1990s "many CDU/CSU politicians had inveighed against the ‘multicultural society’. [...] The campaign fast obtained results. It touched resentments in the population. The ‘foreigner issue’ became the Germans’ main problem" (ibid.). [9] The constitutional right to political asylum was de facto abolished in 1993. The election was won by the CDU/CSU. Another successful offensive by the conservatives, this time a petition against plans to introduce dual nationality, was launched in the state of Hessen in 1999. Taking place at the height of the regional election campaign, the main objective was to rouse the fears and resentments of the German population. The strategy worked.
        And now, according to Seligman, the CDU/CSU was joining the other democratic parties in shedding "bitter tears about xenophobic assaults and crimes in east and west Germany", and in bewailing the increasing numbers of young people who voted for extreme right-wing parties. The democratic parties began to consider a ban on the German National Party (NPD). What, Seligman asked, was the good of such laments, if they came from the politicians "themselves creating the resentments that generate a right-wing mood?" (Seligman 2000).

As implied at the beginning of this essay, the ‘Balkan’ is not the Other of the West. It is more the case that the ‘atavism’ discerned by the West on the far-off ‘Balkans’ is only what the West itself structures, its own phantasm, its own innermost suppressed and vulgar reverse side. A wildly phantasmic mechanism, functioning here and there alike, an enjoyment that is virtually universal, a vulgate that is well-nigh universally valid.

Berlin, April 2001

(With thanks to Dejan Krsic (Zagreb) for linking me to the Metastases of Enjoyment.)

Translated by Tom Morrison <thmo@aol.com>.
 

Notes:

1  This must be contradicted, however, in regard to the early German national movement, which originated in resistance to Napoleon and came into being in the pre-1848 period. After the failure of the 1848 revolution, the ideals of this early national movement were simply forgotten.
2  It would be interesting to examine along the same lines the ‘antifascist identity’ in the Soviet-occupied zone (and later GDR), as well as the extent to which this identity was officially prescribed.
3  In regard to cultural policy, developments ran parallel in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the German Democratic Republic. In line with a conference resolution of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), official GDR cultural policy was from 1986 onward more oriented towards Germany’s "bourgeois-humanist heritage". To the fore came a "critical appropriation of bourgeois Classicism", and increased referral to the "Prussian heritage" along with the legacies of Luther and Bismarck (cf. Giesen 1993, 254).
4  Embittered by the finite and relative nature of human possibilities of action, Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg [„Prospects on Civil War"] favours retreat into the national. Peter Sloterdijk’s book explains world history as a pathological deviation from the natural course of primordial (protopolitical) horde cultures. In view of the remoteness from earthly events displayed by the author, he shows an astonishing amount of understanding for the ‘conservative revolutions’ of the inter-war period in Europe, namely for the Austrian home army, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Action Française, and the Bavarian NSDAP.
5  Strauss also cited ecological reasons as justification for the necessary societal, moral and cultural changes. Similar arguments have been delivered by the new right and far right, who use ecological themes and arguments to justify the need for radical changes. By stretching the notion of ‘ecology’ to encompass not only natural resources but also political, ethnic and cultural aims, it is possible – with enough bad will -- to win ‘ecological’ arguments in favour of "repatriation" measures (see von Hellfeld 1993, especially the chapters "Ökologie von rechts" ["Right-wing ecology"] and "Umweltschutz ist Menschenschutz ist Völkerschutz" ["Protection of the environment equals protection of humans equals protection of nationalities"], pp. 51 - 53).
6  Diederichsen makes particular mention of the yearbook Der Pfahl - Jahrbuch aus dem Niemandsland zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft, which Matthes & Seitz has published since 1987.
7  Writing in a similar vein, Ulrich Greiner suggested that Strauss’ fantasy was one that "does not stoop to have dealings with political intentions, but one that, hermit-like and obsessed with the special, muses over the dark sides of mankind. [...] The suspicion of what is glib and intelligible to all, of the ‘collective stream of opinion’, is a notorious motif running through his [Strauss’] thinking [...]:  thinking conducted against the consensus, thinking in a state of emergency. To paraphrase Carl Schmitt’s words: He who is in a position to determine a state of intellectual emergency is in full command." (Greiner 1994)
8  The blurb freely describes the book’s goals, saying it is concerned with "locating the position of the democratic right, with the necessary critique of feminism, with the renaissance of geopolitics [...], with national identity and critique of freedom-endangering liberalism – and, finally, with the failure of the old elite groups which have ousted the concept of a well-fortified democracy. Philosophical essays about the loss of transcendence, the dissolution of traditional values and the need to rediscover repressed literary and religious traditions carry forward these lines of thought [...], with the result that the book can be taken to be a manifesto of Germany’s conservative intelligentsia." (Schwilk/Schacht 1994)
9  Seligman caustically describes the double standard applying here: "There were, of course, exceptions. The ladies and gentlemen continued to appreciate the paintings of Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Chagall, to read Shakespeare and Pushkin, to listen to the music of Bizet, maybe even Louis Armstrong. They wore Italian clothes, drank French wines, and ate in Japanese restaurants. Yet for all their tolerance they preferred not to see too many Turks in Germany and no asylum seekers at all." (Seligman 2000)
 
 

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