Francois Mauriac on race, war, politics, and religion: the great war through the 1960s (original) (raw)
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The study of social movements in West Germany: between activism and social science
EconStor Open Access Articles, 1991
The existence and activities of social movements, on the one hand, and so cial-scientific study of them, on the other, are usually linked closely to gether. The flourishing of social movements is likely to promote, although with some delay, a corresponding boom in research on social movements. West Germany did not follow such a pattern, though, for a long period of its existence. In the postwar period at least, the general public had mixed feel ings about discussing social movements. This term was by no means neutral as it had been heavily exploited by the Nazi-regime. For many people, social movements were discredited per se as a means for influencing the political process. For a number of reasons, certainly going beyond mere terminology, the Nazi-movement did not induce sociological social movement analysis. Until today, this movement has rather been an object of study of political scientists and historians. The labor movement also did not become a central object for sociology. The conflict between labor and capital had already been moderated and me diated during the Weimar republic. This processes continued in the period after the Second World War. Mainly due to the effects of the Nazi regime, but also as a result of profound socioeconomic changes, the labor move ment could not re-establish its once vital counter-cultural networks. It very soon crystallized into the institutionalized forms of unions and parties, and 1 An earlier and shorter version o f this essay was presented at the Annual Conference o f the French Society o f Sociology, September 29-30, 1989, in Paris and published-in German-under the title »Die Analyse der neuen sozialen Bewegungen in der Bun desrepublik-eine Zwischenbilanz« in Forschungsjoumal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, Sonderheft 1 9 8 9 .1 am grateful to Roland Roth for comments on earlier versions o f this article.
THE NEVER-ENDING STREAM: CULTURAL MOBILIZATION OVER THE RHINE
[…] rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum. Horatius, Epist. I.2, 42-43 European nationalism was born on the Rhine, that great faultline dividing and linking the twin cathedrals of French-dominated Strasbourg and Prussian-dominated Cologne, between 1792 and 1840. 1792 was the year of the Chant de guerre pour l 'Armée du Rhin (the Marseillaise), 1840 that of the Wacht am Rhein – both anthems which resounded down the decades with their call on the people-in-arms to protect the homeland against foreign invaders. Between 1792 and 1840, a crystallizing point was 1813, when Ernst Moritz Arndt defined, in prose and verse, both the territory and the frontier of Germany against French claims. The discourse of nationalism, its rhetoric and its propagandistic hold on public opinion and on state policy culminated in 1914, when hundreds of German and French academics threw their cultural and scholarly prestige into the propaganda war that vindicated each side in the unfolding World War. This discursive tradition spans the Battles of Valmy, Leipzig, Sedan and Verdun, and links them in a thematic and an intertextual continuity. Thematically, the texts in this tradition focus on the Rhine and the Rhineland, from Alsace to the Low Countries, as the core of a great European confrontation, which is not merely a geopolitical, but also a moral-anthropological one. The clashes over the Rhine are felt to involve, not states and their interests, but nations and their characters and moral identities. Intertextually, the arguments echo and reverberate from Arndt and the period of the Congress of Vienna (1813-15) to the writings of the Rhine Crisis of 1840, thence to the altercations surrounding the 1870-71 war, to come to the boil once more in 1914. (Secondary moments of intensification surround the Belgian Rebellion of 1830 and the Luxembourg Crisis of 1866-67.) This intertextual continuity deserves to be emphasized: the outbursts of writing activity punctuating the century from 1813 to 1914 are not each, separately, the individual reflection of the crisis of that particular moment (which is how these materials have usually been studied until now); on the contrary, they hang together as a discursive tradition in its own right and in the root sense of that term. Each author picks up issues and arguments from his predecessors in this pen-and-ink war, in which the moments of political crisis are merely pulsations. Indeed, the lingering cultural effect of each discursive stance (poem, song or pamphlet) exercises its influence, not only on subsequent authors, but also on public opinion in later political conflicts. Germans in 1840 recall the rhetoric of 1813; the rhetoric of 1870 recycles that of 1840 and of 1813; 1914, for all parties concerned, is a rerun of 1870. This textual echo-chamber gives continuity and adds intensity to the political conflicts which it helped shape and colour over the century. Seen in this light, the tradition of intellectuals and versifiers writing on behalf of their nation's interests constitutes an important historical factor in the development of nationalism. It establishes, over a century, an interface between the world of learning and the world of conflict and political propaganda. The case demonstrates, I think, that cultural mobilization is an enabling condition for the rise of political nationalism rather than a mere side-effect. Studying it as such can teach us much about the influence of nationalist thought on nationalist politics, and also about the rhetoric (meaning: the relationship between the inner convictions and the persuasive strategies) of nationalist discourse.
2012
Until his death in 2000 at age 96, Alexandre Marc, French pioneer and long-time dean of the European federalist movement, when lecturing to students of the European institutes he founded, used to hold up to them as a model of activism his pre-war collaboration with Harro Schulze-Boysen, German leader of the controversial Red Orchestra Resistance network, who was executed by the Nazis in 1942. This paper will highlight the European dimension of Schulze-Boysen's otherwise East-leaning (ostorientiert) political action, and compare it with the overtly federalist vision of his French associates from his early days like Marc. For if both men understood themselves as professional revolutionaries whose visions defied all party lines, and were each among the earliest active members of the Resistance to Hitler in their respective countries of France and Germany, their geopolitical and ideological horizons differed sharply in some crucial respects.