German Angst

This chapter analyzes contemporary fears in the post-unification Berlin Republic since 1990. It first historicizes the slogan of a “German angst” that is often used to diagnose a German collective pathology. Instead, the chapter argues that the concept emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as part of a conservative critique of the West German environmental and peace movements. The chapter then analyzes the emergence of deterritorialized fears that were no longer primarily bound to a national context. These deterritorialized fears manifested themselves above all in the discussion of unified Germany’s place in the world, especially with respect to the question of German participation in military interventions. Similar fears emerged with respect to the increasing presence of the world in Germany—that is, with respect to immigrants and refugees. The chapter then seeks to locate the current mobilization of such fears by right-wing populist parties in the longer history of fear in postwar Germany. Right-wing populism is part of, and draws on, an expressive emotional culture, but it turns these fears against an ethnic or religious “other,” and at times also against the democratic state itself. The chapter concludes with a reflection on what a democratic politics of emotion might look like.

Apocalyptic Angst

This chapter analyzes the culmination of the history of fear in postwar West Germany during the 1980s. A culture of emotional expressiveness now merged with two new external threats: environmental disaster and a nuclear war. Apocalyptic fears served as the emotional driving forces of two new social movements: the environmental and the peace movements. The environmental movement did not emerge only as a result of new environmental threats but also derived from a changed emotional culture that increased individuals’ susceptibility to environmental threats. The chapter analyzes the emerging perception of a global ecological crisis, the anti-nuclear movement, and the debate over the dying forest in the 1980s. It then explains the emergence of the largest protest movement in the history of West Germany—the peace movement of the 1980s—as a result of a new culture of emotional expressiveness. Peace activists enacted this new emotional culture by publicly displaying and performing fear. The emergence of a popular Holocaust memory also enabled apocalyptic fears of, as it was called, a “nuclear Holocaust.”

Revolutionary Angst

This chapter analyzes the impact of the West German student movement on the history of fear and on emotional culture more generally. The “68ers” propagated an expressive emotional culture that partly displaced the older repressive emotional culture. The student movement celebrated the public display of emotions and enabled a new significance of emotions within political activism and for individual subjectivities. The chapter brings into focus the specific role that fear and anxiety played in shaping the political outlooks and subjectivities of student activities. While historians have often emphasized the optimism that drove the student movement, activists’ fears and disappointments resulted, in part, from their far-reaching, even utopian, ambitions. Fears also resulted from student activists’ confrontation with police and popular violence. Students’ politicization of sexuality turned personal relationships into a source of anxiety because many activists found it difficult to reconcile their political views with their private lives. Finally, the chapter analyzes conservative fears of revolution, as they were expressed by the conservative Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft that sought to contain the influence of left-wing forces within the universities. The dialectic of fear that had already shaped the interplay between democratic fears and fears of democracy in the earlier period intensified further. Revolutionary fears and fears of revolution structured the political debate in the West German 1960s and beyond.

Modern Angst

This chapter shifts the focus from fears and anxieties that primarily resulted from the Federal Republic’s external situation to internal fears. The modernization and stabilization of West German society generated their own fears. This chapter focuses on fears of automation during the late 1950s and 1960s. Contrary to conventional wisdom, West Germans did not display an unabashed optimism about technology but were keenly aware of the ambivalent consequences of technological progress. In particular, they remembered the negative consequences of the rationalization movement of the 1920s and their impact on the political stability of the Weimar Republic. The chapter analyzes first the debate about technology among West German intellectuals such as Friedrich Pollock, Helmut Schelsky, and Arnold Gehlen. It then focuses on the broader cultural debate on automation that brought into view anxieties about structural unemployment, deskilling of workers, and psychological impact of automation. As a case study, the chapter then analyzes the confrontation of the largest West German industrial union, IG Metall, with automation. Labor unions did not respond to automation with optimism but were keenly aware of its potentially detrimental effects. A more skeptical attitude toward automation and technological progress more generally thus predated the economic crisis of the 1970s.

Moral Angst

This chapter analyzes a little-known episode of moral panic during the 1950s: the alleged abduction of young German men into the French Foreign Legion. Fears and fantasies of the Foreign Legion reflected a widespread sense of popular humiliation and limited sovereignty vis-à-vis the Western allies during that decade. Fears of the abduction of young Germans into the Legion reflected deep-seated concerns regarding the safety and integrity of male youth, which formed the core constituency of postwar reconstruction. The alleged “recruiter” as “folk devil” represented the absolute opposite of normative male citizenship. Cultural representations cast the recruiter as effeminate, foreign, and potentially homosexual, as well as displaying some of the stereotypical antisemitic features of the Jewish “other.” By the late 1950s, the growing recognition that young men entered the Legion out of their own volition shifted public attention from fear of recruiters to concerns about the fragility of male youth in postwar society. West German anxieties regarding the Legion began to focus on the inner resilience and resistance of young German men rather than the external threat of seduction by French-paid recruiters. This shift from externally to internally generated fears and anxieties anticipated a general shift in the history of fear and anxiety in West Germany from the late 1950s onward.

Conclusion

The conclusion explains what was distinctly “German” about German Angst after 1945. It summarizes the argument of the book and reflects on the general historical factors that explain the rise and fall of specific fears in postwar Germany. Recurring episodes of fear resulted from changing international and global contexts. Intense media attention exacerbated certain fears, whereas shifting scientific understandings of emotions enabled other fears. Political elites engaged in a deliberate politics of fear, but fears and emotions more generally often evaded attempts at control or manipulation. The conclusion then also discusses the significance of the history of fear for our contemporary political moment.

Proliferating Angst

This chapter examines proliferating fears in the wake of the student movement and during the 1970s. This period saw the establishment of an expressive emotional culture within West German culture at large. The proliferation of fears was therefore not simply a reaction to the onset of the economic crisis in 1973 but rather resulted from broader sociocultural changes. The open and public expression of emotions increasingly appeared as an indication of a healthy and authentic personality, partly as a result of the considerable expansion of psychotherapy and the emergence of a “therapeutic society.” Fear also no longer appeared as a predominantly negative emotion but rather as a reflection of a “new subjectivity.” The new expressive emotional culture was practiced and enacted especially within a left-alternative milieu. But it eventually shaped mainstream society as well. The chapter also analyzes the emotionalization of public life with respect to the public reaction to the TV series Holocaust in 1979. This allowed large segments of German society for the first time to express publicly their empathy with the victims of Nazism. Finally, the chapter focuses on the escalation of political fears in response to the left-wing terrorism of the Red Army Faction. The dialectics of political fears reached its apex in the late 1970s.

Cold War Angst

This chapter analyzes Cold War fears. The emotional politics of the West German Cold War consisted of a carefully calibrated balance between mobilizing fears of Communism and containing fears of a nuclear war. The chapter demonstrates the function of anti-Communism as a primary fear object in postwar West Germany, which also displayed numerous continuities to the Nazi mobilization of fears of Bolshevism. The chapter then analyzes a failed official attempt to contain fears of a nuclear war through civil defense. It analyzes the production, distribution, and popular reception of the first West German civil defense brochure, “Everybody Has a Chance,” in December 1961. The chapter uses this case study to demonstrate the (mal)functioning of an emotional regime that sought to contain fears and emotions in general in favour of a cool, rational, and male anti-emotionality. The chapter then also provides a multifaceted explanation as to why Cold War fears of nuclear war eventually subsided by the mid 1960s. Changing domestic and international political contexts played an important role, as did a more comprehensive commemorative culture that brought into view Germans as perpetrators rather than primarily as victims.

Postwar Angst

This chapter examines German fears of retribution in the early postwar period, roughly from 1945 to 1948. It focuses on three main groups on which Germans trained this fear: Jewish Holocaust survivors, former slave laborers from Eastern Europe who had become displaced persons after 1945, and American occupation officials. By analyzing German fears of retribution, the chapter highlights massive uncertainty and fear as formative popular experiences of the early postwar period. Fear and insecurity emanated as much from Germans’ imagination of the consequences of their defeat as from the threat or reality of actual acts of retribution. By analyzing both dimensions—actual experiences of retribution as well as popular fantasies of revenge—this chapter highlights the extent to which a specific postwar fear shaped German subjectivities and anticipations of the future. Fears of retribution were based on Germans’ widespread knowledge of National Socialist crimes. Germans’ increasingly frequent self-perception as “victims” derived from their expectations that what they had done to the victims of Nazism would now be inflicted on them. Fears of retribution therefore also displaced emotions such as guilt and shame, and hence enabled postwar Germans to avoid a more comprehensive confrontation with the Nazi past.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the central arguments, conceptual framework, and main themes of the book. The book challenges a dominant narrative of West German linear progress. Instead, it tells the history of the Federal Republic as a history of recurring episodes of fear. Contrary to a long tradition of associating fear with authoritarian regimes, the book highlights its importance in a democratizing society. The book criticizes previous attempts at diagnosing German angst as a German collective pathology. It instead explains the origins of fear with shifting memories of a catastrophic past that postwar West Germans projected into the future. The introduction also highlights some recent findings of interdisciplinary research on emotions, which are particularly useful for writing a history of emotions. These include the emphasis on the cognitive dimension of emotions as well as the rejection of a clear dichotomy between “reason” and “emotions.” The introduction outlines the three major interpretive thrusts of the book. First, a shift from a repressive to an expressive emotional regime; second, a shift from external to internal fears; and, finally, a shift from the containment of fear “from above” to the mobilization of fear “from below.”