The confident nation

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The self-confident nation is a German-language anthology published in 1994, edited by the publicists Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht .

Origin of the band

The essay "Swelling Bocksgesang" by the author and playwright Botho Strauss and the subsequent debates were used by the editors Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht as an opportunity to talk to 26 other authors about the Germans' understanding of the nation and the nation state after reunification in 1990 to deal with.

The essay by Botho Strauss was first published in 1993 in Der Pfahl. Yearbook from the no man's land between art and science and published in the mirror . Sentences such as "that a people wants to assert their moral law against others and is ready to make blood sacrifices for it, we no longer understand that and in our liberal-libertarian self-centeredness we consider it wrong and reprehensible" had provoked massive criticism. The then chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis , was one of the critics, who later relativized his criticism. The original version, which was published in 1993 in Der Pfahl , was printed in the anthology .

The essays were presented in four sections with the subtitles Identity , Conflict , Interest and Resistance . In the second edition the section on unity (with the essays by Steffen Heitmann and Wolfgang Templin ) was added, in the third edition Epilogue with two further essays by Schwilk and Peter Gauweiler .

Several articles had previously been published in the features section. That was Safranski's essay “Destruction and Lust. On the Return of Evil ”on December 24, 1992 under the title“ The Return of Evil. A Christmas Consideration ”appeared in the FAZ. Tilman Krauses “Inwardness and distance from the world. About the German longing for metaphysics ”was the original version of the essay“ German (Ab-) reasons. Western roots alone do not do justice to our culture ”, which was to be published on June 1, 1994 in the weekly post . The same applies to Heitmann's essay “Revolution and Wende. On the difficult construction of a united Germany ”, which had already been published on September 2, 1994 under the title“ The Revolution Degenerates Towards Wende ”in the FAZ. The additions to the third edition had also been published in the FAZ beforehand.

In addition, the essay by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg was based on a lecture he gave in April 1993 at the event “Being German? An exhibition against xenophobia and violence ”held in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

reception

After the first publication, the co-author Eduard Beaucamp distanced himself from the entire publication and saw in it a “German-busting overexertion and choral reinforcement of zealotry”, which was “in parts unbearable”. Against the background of his ideological distancing, Beaucamp accepted the editor's offer to remove his essay from the second edition of the book.

The journalist Martin Doerry described the volume as a “bizarre hodgepodge of individual messages.” Botho Strauss made “the beginning”, then “the rank and file, sometimes in a devout interpretation of the poet, sometimes in wild right-wing extremist polemics.” So Ernst Nolte considered why Hitler ordered the annihilation rather than the expulsion of the European Jews. Rainer Zitelmann got excited about the "coping process" and asked "whether National Socialism was 'right' at all". Hitler "never called himself right". Zitelmann wanted to create space for a new, supposedly “democratic right”. Reinhart Maurer followed the classic strategy of trivialization and complained about the “ritual repetition of the word 'unique' in connection with the Nazi crimes”. History knows many genocides. "Inhumanity is human". Perhaps the greatest provocation, Doerry described, was that Strauss had "come out as 'right wing'" "in the left mainstream of the cultural industry". Stephan Sattler expressed himself similarly in Focus , who speaks of the change of front of the former 68er Botho Strauss in his book review .

These negative reactions to the publication are discussed in detail in the prefaces to the second and third (1995) editions of The Self-Confident Nation . Among other things, a letter from Botho Strauss is cited, which he had addressed to Schwilk and Schacht and which was published in the FAZ on October 27, 1994: “But you have to distance yourself from a book whose publisher, subject and authors are known nothing but cowardly and about as loud as the denial of a politician who 'accidentally' expressed an opinion that deviated from the camp ”.

The literary scholar Gabriele Kämper described the volume The Self-Confident Nation as a “manifesto of a new right of the 90s”. The federal republican consensus regarding National Socialism had been terminated. In it, well-known conservatives met for the first time with intellectuals who belonged more to the mainstream of the German feuilleton. According to Kämper, they drew from the same sediment by using well-known conservative thought patterns in which the inequality of people and nations is propagated. Based on the volume, she analyzed the rhetorical strategies of the New Intellectual Right after 1989, which revolve around a strong national identity, and their effects on mainstream journalism. One of their main strategies is the establishment of enemy images within society (the 1968, feminists, multicultural society, postulates of equality and justice) with the help of language images that conjure up ideal gender orders and images of masculinity, which have never existed, as utopia. According to Kämper, one of the four basic ideological positions in the book was to relativize and normalize German responsibility for the Holocaust .

Authors

In addition to Schacht, Schwilk and Strauss, the authors of the anthology are:

The contributions by Heitmann and Templin were only included in the second edition, but the contribution by Eduard Beaucamp, as explained above, was deleted from the second edition.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Swelling goatsong . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1993, pp. 202-207 ( Online - Feb. 8, 1993 ).
  2. ↑ a b Martin Doerry: Intellectual teachers of hatred . in: Der Spiegel. 42/1994 (about Botho Strauss as the spokesman for a “conservative manifesto”).
  3. ↑ a b c Stephan Sattler: The "new" rights The anthology "The self-conscious nation" shakes the German cultural landscape. In: Focus 45/1994.
  4. ^ Technical University of Dresden : Swelling goat singing. ( Memento of August 5, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) 1993.
  5. ↑ Pioneers like Nolte. Ignatz Bubis explains his intellectual scolding , Spiegel of April 18, 1994.
  6. ↑ a b The 3rd edition in 1995 was supplemented by an epilogue which, in addition to an essay by Heimo Schwilk ("Systematic Verlogenheit", first published in the FAZ on January 13, 1995), Gauweiler's essay "Silence with the wolves?" (Here online ( Memento of January 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ); PDF; 2.0 MB), which was first published in the FAZ on January 14, 1995.
  7. ↑ On the first publications cf. Heimo Schwilk (Ed.): The self-confident nation. 3rd and extended edition. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Main 1995, p. 478.
  8. ↑ a b cf. Heimo Schwilk (ed.): The self-conscious nation . 3rd and extended edition. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Main 1995, SV
  9. ↑ Quoted from Heimo Schwilk (Ed.): The self-conscious nation . 3rd and extended edition. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Main 1995, p. VI.
  10. ↑ Gabriele Kämper: The male nation. Political rhetoric of the new intellectual right , (Studies on literary and cultural history. Large series, Bd. 36) Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2005, ISBN 978-3-412-13805-9 , p. 11 (also Univ. Diss ., 2003)
  11. ↑ a b Gabriele Kämper: From the self-confident nation to national self-confidence. ( Memento of March 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 3.8 MB). In: WerkstattGeschichte . 37, Klartext Verlag, Essen 2004, ISBN 3-89861-411-5 , pp. 64–79.
  12. ^ Table of contents on H-Soz-u-Kult , December 6, 2004
  13. ↑ Thomas Kleinspehn: Longing for masculinity. Gabriele Kämper on intellectual rights , Deutschlandradio June 13, 2005