In the past century, Germany, for better and for worse, offered itselfas a natural laboratory for political science. Indeed, Germany’sexcesses of political violence and its dramatic regime changes largelymotivated the development of postwar American political science,much of it the work of German émigrés and German-Jewishrefugees, of course. The continuing vicissitudes of the German experiencehave, however, posed a particular challenge to the concept ofpolitical culture as elaborated in the 1950s and 1960s,1 at least inpart to explain lingering authoritarianism in formally democraticWest Germany. Generally associated with political continuity or onlyincremental change,2 the concept of political culture has been illequippedto deal with historical ruptures such as Germany’s “breakwith civilization” of 1933-1945 and the East German popular revolutionof 1989. As well, even less dramatic but still important and relativelyrapid cultural changes such as the rise of a liberal democraticVerfassungspatriotismus sometime around the late 1970s in West Germany3and the emergence of a postmodern, consumer capitalist culturein eastern Germany since 19944 do not conform to mainstreampolitical culture theory’s expectations of gradual, only generationalchange. To be sure, continuity, if not inertia, characterizes much ofpolitics, even in Germany. Still, to be of theoretical value, the conceptof political culture must be able not only to admit but toaccount for change.
