Sturms Flug: Thriller (German Edition)

Meaning of "Asservatenkammer" in the German dictionary

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The instant it left his foot, Schumacher crashed into him with full force, knocking him out immediately. It has become one of the most notorious moments in World Cup history, not least because Schumacher appeared entirely unmoved. While the French players were deeply worried about their seemingly lifeless teammate and Dutch referee Charles Corver signalled for a stretcher, a disinterested Schumacher stood near the post, waiting to take the goal kick.

The foul has become part of our collective football memory because we have seen it so often. In real time, things looked no less serious but a lot less sinister. The German television commentator spoke of a "bad incident, this clash" and added that "Schumacher had to risk everything.

These things can happen in a game when both sides go flat out. Germany advance, but questions remain - Laurens: France growing stronger - Macintosh: German finishing hits new low. I think neither the reporter nor the writer was trying to downplay a serious misconduct. Football was a much rougher game in the s, and there had been numerous bad moments at this World Cup -- Italy's Claudio Gentile fouling Diego Maradona 23 times, for example. It was only after you saw the replays a few times that you truly realised how ruthlessly Schumacher had knocked down Battiston.

In the issue of Kicker that called the foul "an unfortunate collision," another account of the match said, "Schumacher brutally jumped at Battiston. For most journalists covering the game, there would be little time to do this, though, as there was a lot of football still to come. In the final minute of regulation, Manuel Amoros hit the bar with a thundering strike from distance and the game went to extra time.

In the 92nd minute, France won a free kick near the edge of the box. The German defence inexplicably left Marius Tresor unmarked near the penalty spot, and he scored with a fine volley. Six minutes later, Giresse made it The game should have been over, save for two details. One was that at this point the Germans had turned coming back from two goals down into an art form -- think of the and World Cups or the European championship. The other detail was that national coach Jupp Derwall had an ace up his sleeve.

He had benched one of his best offensive players, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, for this game because the Bayern forward was not fully fit. Now, with 97 minutes gone, he sent him onto the pitch. The French, meanwhile, had already used up the two outfield substitutions they were allowed under the old rules. Six minutes after coming on, Rummenigge instigated an attack in midfield.

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He passed the ball to Uli Stielike and ran into the box. Stielike set up Littbarski on the left wing, and his cross was acrobatically pushed across the line by Rummenigge, who scored with his back to the target. An even finer goal tied the game on minutes. Again Littbarski crossed from the left. Horst Hrubesch rose at the far post and headed the ball back to Klaus Fischer, who equalised with a stunning bicycle kick.

And so the Night of Seville saw the first-ever World Cup game that had to be decided by a penalty shootout. It's worth noting that the Germans hadn't yet acquired a reputation for being masters at this particular art.

In fact, they had lost the one shootout they'd been involved in so far the European championship final , and when Stielike missed Germany's third penalty, it seemed as if this one would end in defeat too. But 84 minutes after his dreadful and unpunished foul on Battiston, Schumacher turned the game. He saved from Six and then wiggled his finger at the still distraught Stielike, who hadn't been watching the penalty, as if to say "don't worry. Hrubesch scored with the final shot of an already long night to book a place in the final for West Germany.

The night wasn't over, though. As the mentally drained German players were sitting in their dressing room, too tired to properly celebrate, Derwall told them to hurry up. They had to get to the airport to take a 1: The players dragged themselves off the benches and into the showers then changed into street clothes and drove to the airport -- where they were told their flight would be 30 minutes late. Through this contradiction, the authors at once create and betray this singular subjectivity.

But why then this gesture of revolt against the traditional values and norms, this pose of threat against society, this seemingly paradoxical game? The staging of passion threatens the old authorities with what is brought on stage, but in the very moment of theatricality lie the seeds of betrayal, for the gesture of revolt springs, as the mainstream proponents of Enlightenment claimed, from the hidden and unpredictable nature of passion see Luserke. Kittler overshoots the mark, however, because the middleclass society which became the object of the psychoanalytic gaze at the end of the nineteenth century was only a developing social formation around which was not yet stable.

Eiskalter Sturm. Thriller

In those days, sons were not compelled to talk and write, but in fact wanted to in order to compel the powers that be to make a deal with them. The danger and Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion 39 the remedy lie close together in their works: The elitist individual of Sturm und Drang was not to become the source of a conspiracy against existing society. On the contrary, the simultaneous literary production of the passionately transgressive individual together with the remedy of allowing this subjectivity to speak and write, guarantees the authors a place in society.

Most of the other Sturm und Drang authors managed to hide this problem of an internal emotional link to traditional norms and values through their theatralisation of the Kraftgenie. Lenz never solved, either in literature or in practice, the tension between the figure of the Sturm und Drang intellectual who ends in despair and suicide, as depicted in Zerbin oder Die neuere Philosophie , and the utopian harmonising of autonomy and social integration in the Oberlin-like figure of the country parson only one year later in Der Landprediger.

Thus the opposition between an internalized culture and as only theoretically and rationally deduced counter-movement, cuts through the individual psyche. Victims like Lenz clearly demonstrate the price of counter-cultural activity under the post- sentimental condition. Some of those who drew a moral, social or political conclusion from the logic of passion and voted for real social change represent 40 Gustav Frank the active counter-culture of the late Enlightenment, of the French Revolution, and of the first republican experiments on German territory at Mainz.

At the same time, the older customs of pre-literate social groups, which changed only slowly, were also beginning to take on the quality of a resistant counter-culture in response to accelerating rationalisation. But the rapidly changing mainstream culture of the industrialising first half of the nineteenth century would leave behind the alternative counter-cultures which had been inspired by earlier traditions of local riots that sprang up spontaneously in response to unjustifiably high prices for basic necessities up to the late eighteenth century.

Sturm und Drang seems, therefore, to be the first main festation of very different counter-cultures. Finally, what makes Sturm und Drang interesting as a way of reflecting on later countercultures, is its combination of passionate transgression with strategic rationality, of semiotic competence with chaos, of destructiveness of the elite with psychopathic destruction of the self. The Myth of Motherhood: Von der Werther-Krise zur Lucinde-Liebe. Das Andere der Vernunft. Studien zu ihrer dichterischen Erscheinung. Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im Lovers, Parricides, and Highwaymen: Hg Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur.

The Archaeology of Knowledge. London, Tavistock Publications, Empfindsamkeiten Passau, Rothe, Weischedel Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, Geschlechterdifferenz und Affekt in der Sprachpoetik des Studien zu Psychogenese und Literatur im Studien zu einer Geschichte der literarischen Empfindung, Hg. Die Dialektik der Empfindung. Hg Der ganze Mensch.

Anthropologie und Literatur im Jahrhundert Stuttgart, Metzler, , — Fiktion und Wirklichkeit Heidelberg, Winter, , — Jahrhunderts Stuttgart, Metzler, Der Strukturwandel in der Lyrik Goethes: This paper focuses on the part played by the ethnic group still called Gypsies and Zigeuner — the Romany nation — in the tradition of German counterculture, and finds several of the above modalities exemplified in the history of their literary representation. The first part of the paper examines the cultural anthropology and literary image of the Romanies in the epoch around as emblematic of the role of art and of the Gypsies in early modern German culture.

The thesis is that the representation of the Romanies around consistently followed the agenda of an aesthetic counter1 We define modernity with Silvio Vietta as a cultural macroepoch lasting from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, and characterised by the inner continuity of a small number of basic features across several, superficially distinct stylistic microepochs. The basic features are exhibited in elemental form in Early Romantic culture: Only in the twentieth century was this ultimately colonialist stance overcome.

Romanies in modern and postmodern German literature are still the locus of counter-cultural utopian emancipatory energies. However, the twentieth-century utopia rests for the first time on a hybrid or dialogical notion of authentically intercultural communication: As already indicated, we see the key term counter-culture as implying the notion of utopia. There is a vast amount of internal variation in the literary utopian genre per se.

Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 45 Romantics however modify this representative strategy in two typically modernist ways. Thus Hardenberg presents the theocratic Middle Ages in the context of post-Revolutionary chaos as a lost and future ideal of political constitution. Second, however, these utopian designs are ironically reflected and relativised in the texts themselves, revealed modernistically as merely provisional, experimental and provocative in function something non-specialists perennially overlook when they try to define Romantic politics see Malsch and Kurzke.

Thus despite the attempt to overcome distance, and to embed the utopia in everyday reality, the Romantics in fact also preserve one fundamental characteristic of the utopian tradition in literature, namely the insight that the realisability of a utopia is not in itself an indicator of its value, which lies elsewhere only Karl Mannheim would disagree.

Mannheim argues that only an historically realised utopia qualifies as authentic, the rest qualifying merely as ideologies. Norm, says Pikulik 13—14 , means two negative things for the Romantics: To take Hardenberg again, there are explicit signs of this only towards the end of his career.

In Heinrich von Ofterdingen we find the first proper Romantic encounter with utopian Oriental alterity, when the figure of the imperialist Crusader is contrasted with his Muslim prisoner, the Saracen poetess Zulima — with decidedly negative consequences for Germano-Christian selfesteem. For the Gypsies figure here as the ultimate ideal of human perfection, as ultimate cultural mediators, in short, as the ultimate Bohemian counter-culture of early nineteenth-century philistine Biedermeier.

At one level the tale concerns how this inauthentic artist meets his aesthetic Nemesis. The treatment of the border theme is where the interculturality comes in. It is important to note that the company in the tavern is a representative selection of pretty much all the member nations of the Habsburg empire and its neighbours: Austrians, Tiroleans, Savoyards, Italians, Croats, Germans, plus a representative of the former enemy, the Frenchman Devillier not to mention Turks and others in the inset tales. But the greatest contrast is with two others, in fact the chief characters of the tale.

They achieve this by a variety of means, usually aesthetic in nature and involving the creation of order or the discrimination of truth from falsehood. For example Michaly, whom the narrator likens to a second Orpheus Brentano, , quells an outbreak of multicultural chaos in the tavern by playing his violin at a strategic moment and imposing Orphic order. She also makes peace between the aesthetic entrepreneurs, and even rediscovers her own lost beloved, the sceptical Frenchman Devillier.

They create intercultural harmony between the bewildering mix of nations and cultures that is the Habsburg state and there is plenty of evidence that Brentano seriously intended this as a political utopia. They rescue love from oblivion and re-unite divided partners. In short, Michaly and Mitidika transcend any kind of boundary — political, cultural, aesthetic, sexual — in order wherever they act to restore wholeness and harmony, and Brentano does not shrink from promoting messianic associations around their person.

And, to focus more narrowly, the two Gypsies, representatives of Oriental otherness in war-torn and philistine Europe, are the ultimate symbol of late Romantic selfunderstanding, vehicles of one of the last versions of the Romantic poetic utopia, symbol of healing for all the ills of Biedermeier Germany or Austria. But it is precisely the Romantic selection of the Gypsy — among all possible Oriental ethnic groups — which is most remarkable about this tale.

For of course the Romantic Gypsy utopia entirely fails to correspond to the reality of Gypsy life around Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 49 degree than even the Jewish nation Jews were at least tolerated absolutely the most despised ethnic group. Naturally this had to do with their vagrant status and irredeemably low public esteem. In every German state save Austria they were obliged by law on pain of death as vogelfrei to cross the border of wherever they happened to be.

With no national territory, they were therefore obliged to make their home everywhere and nowhere, de facto outside of society, in fields and forests — in nature, and to make their scarce living by disreputable trades or theft. The negativity and marginalisation of the Gypsies rather like that of woman in patriarchal discourse paradoxically only increased their suitability as a poetic symbol of sheer Otherness, and precisely this is what Brentano exploits. Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt 50 lithe physicality as a Naturvolk which Brentano gleefully translates into his particular brand of aestheticised eroticism and their historical trajectory the myth of the return to Egypt, which Brentano translates into Romantic Heilsgeschichte.

But the key point is this: But this criticism is hardly the point. For none of this prevented the Gypsies around from serving as the perfect symbol of everything a Romantic utopian looked for. This is also the case for much of the nineteenth century in Germany, through texts which cannot be explored here,8 at least up to Thomas Mann, whose Gypsies symbolise everything Gustav Aschenbach is not.

The Romantic paradigm of the Gypsy, then, which effectively silences the Gypsy voice even as it preaches emancipation and transcendence, exerts a dominating influence over the literary representation of the Gypsy in the nineteenth century. It thus inaugurated and controlled the discourse on the Gypsy for this period. We shall now consider to what extent this received discourse of the Gypsy retained its power in the twentieth. Counter-Cultures and the Twentieth Century In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the presentation of the Romany universe in normal German culture tended to be restricted to the Orientalist mode.

It was an oppositional life-style, a bohemian liberated and liberating space, an escapist aesthetic utopia, which was available to cultivated Germans either in literature or in life. In the 8 For example: After Adorno signalled the perils of attempting to produce poetry after Auschwitz, and it is equally hard to see how after the extermination of half a million European Romanies the cultural history of the German-speaking world could continue unabashed to present the world of the Gypsies as a utopia. It was not until the s that Romany voices were raised and the dystopian spaces around the Gypsy experience acknowledged.

Ethnicity and the Search for Utopia in the Early Twentieth Century Among the Expressionist writers and artists at the start of the twentieth century there was an enthusiasm for other cultures, for other peoples, whether they lived in Europe or beyond. Otto Mueller — — who reputedly had Gypsy blood and spent several extended periods with Eastern European Gypsies — created images of their proud independent culture. In an exhibition in Bonn in some images of Gypsies bore witness to the ethnicity and individuality of the Romanies, rather than showing them as outsiders. Yet this artistic utopian landscape peopled by bronzed bodies, by angular and often distorted facial features, and scruffy clothing, defiantly staring out at the viewer, this glorification of what appeared more like a primitive tribe, was pronounced unacceptable, likely to inspire only disgust.

Although these works portrayed the reconciliation of man and nature, and opposed urbanised civilisation, they were considered decadent, not in line with Nazi classicist ideals of beauty. The images of Gypsies flowing from the brushes and charcoal of Mueller and Pankok were thus among the many banned by Hitler as degenerate in the infamous Exhibition of Entartete Kunst in Munich in Their works were proscribed, removed from public view, consigned to the storerooms of the galleries. After this cultural cleansing, Pankok comments in on how only one of the many Gypsies he had painted had actually survived the Holocaust.

The others fell, victims of ethnic cleansing. In his speech on Post Acknowledgement of Dystopia After the Romanies were no longer officially persecuted. But does this mean that they ceased to be part of a counter-cultural group? The fact that some forty years after the end of the war many Gypsies had still not received compensation from the German and Austrian governments was proof enough of the continuity of anti-Gypsyism.

In cultural terms Romanies still do not form part of the dominant discourse and are marginalised. At a time when the heyday of socially critical literature in Germany was over, the Austrian writer Erich Hackl began to emerge as the champion of the underdog, the exposer of the iniquities suffered by various minority groups, be they in Europe or South America.

Breadcrumb

Interwoven with the story of the life of the young Gypsy girl Sidonie Adlersburg, who is adopted by an Austrian family, and later deported to a concentration camp, is the reflective discourse around later governmental and public responses to these events. The key issue is Gadzo non-Romany complicity in the crimes. Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 55 issue of the play, but the bomb explodes before the play begins. For Jelinek it is the cultural representation of the deaths, and the media indifference and insensitivity, the oscillation between images of misery and banality, the failure to see beyond the surface, which intrigues.

The play is not only about the deaths but their memorialisation, the place which they take in history. Yet in both works they emerge as an important part of the literary counter-culture, and illustrate the cultural diversity of the contemporary German-speaking world. How do the minority group themselves react, respond, generate a new genuine counter-culture? Written down some fifty years after the end of the war, these autobiographies highlight the counter-culture, the culture of the Romanies, which was targeted for extermination 12 Cultural history does not only relate to works of literature.

Cultural memorials to the past can also be seen as an attempt to acknowledge dystopia. Since the s a substantial number of monuments and plaques have been erected in cities, towns and other sites which mark the events of the Nazi regime in which Gypsies were deprived of their liberty, tortured and murdered. In the debate over the memorial to the Sinti and Roma in Berlin the old concerns about whether the dystopian images should be brought into the foreground are raised again. Driven by the wish to record the traumas which they had experienced, and perhaps themselves exorcise some of the pain, the Romanies use writing as a form of therapy.

Whilst recording the depths of depravation and inhumanity of the Nazi period, they attempt with remarkable lack of bitterness to create a culture of tolerance and understanding, to recapture those idyllic days in which they led a life free of threats of violence and abuse. The heterogeneity of the autobiographies is striking.

Here the Romany counter-culture forms part of a further subculture — a regional counter-culture. Oliver, born in Swabia to Spanish parents, who mixes the Alemannic with the Andalusian. When Alfred Lessing writes of having to play in front of Nazi officials in Buchenwald he is describing the paradoxical attitude to countercultures — the Nazi at once proscribed Romanies and yet were perfectly willing to enjoy their musical talents be it wittingly, or as in the case of Alfred Lessing who played for the SS in Buchenwald concentration camp, unwittingly, since they did not know that he was in fact a Romany.

Oliver also interweaves writing and singing and has made a number of CDs in which he reads or sings his work. Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 57 In the writing of all these Romanies and in the art of Karl and Ceija Stojka, both now internationally acclaimed as artists who depict the horrors of the Holocaust, the dystopian world of the concentration camp is described in all its inhumanity and excesses of barbarism.

Although relatively few of their works relate unambiguously to the experience of Romanies — some refer to those of Jews and other persecuted groups — the aim is to create an aesthetic space in which the relatively utopian contours of a nomadic lifestyle prior to the introduction of strict laws preventing movement from one town to another are juxtaposed with the horrors which succeeded it. Conclusion In the cultural history of the German-speaking world the art and writing about and by the Romanies illustrate the weakness of talking of a major and a minor culture.

Although the works of both Mueller and Pankok were condemned as degenerate, they diverge from the officially accepted art culture in different ways. The Romany may appear as a form of noble savage, a primitive in an utopian landscape, as in the works of Mueller, but for Pankok social inequality is signalled in his inner emigration to a cultural space beyond the Nazi propaganda machinery.

After it is impossible to represent the Romanies without the Holocaust casting its shadow. The idea of utopian images of Gypsies seems a contradiction in terms. The continuity of anti-Gypsyism is perpetuated by the journalists, but Jelinek interrogates the melodramatically dystopian media images of the Oberwart bombing and sets against them her own counter-interpretation. Rather than being seen as forming a minority alternative group within society, the work of the Romanies is no longer to be comprehended exclusively in terms of a counter-culture, in opposition to something which is not, but as a valid culture in its 58 Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt own right.

This recognition of dystopia and the reaching to reclaim utopia should not be dismissed summarily as a counter-culture, but should be appreciated as an integral part of the multicultural world of Germany and Austria today. Works Cited Agnew, V. Materialien zu einem Buch und seiner Geschichte Zurich, Diogenes, Schaub Hg , Clemens Brentano. Ein Zigeunerleben Freiburg, Basle, Herder, Selected Essays London, Fontana 3— Abschied von Sidonie Zurich, Diogenes, Schulz, 6 vols Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, — , I, pp.

Mein Leben im Versteck: Poetische Rede des Novalis. Schulte-Bumke, First edition, The Story of Karl Stojka: Hg , Otto Pankok: Kunst im Widerstand Bonn, Bundeskanzleramt, Das Brennglas Frankfurt aM, Eichborn, Western Conceptions of the Orient Harmondsworth, Penguin, Stojka, Ceija, Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer Rom-Zigeunerin Vienna, Picus, Stojka, Karl, Auf der ganzen Welt zu Hause: Stojka, Mongo, Papierene Kinder: Politics and Propaganda London, Routledge, The Burschenschaften and the German Counter-Cultural Tradition Throughout their history the Burschenschaften have been associated with strong nationalist tendencies.

Their public image has always gone hand in glove with the political intentions and positioning of German nationalism, which from the later nineteenth century onwards locates them in the right-wing regions of the political spectrum. From at the latest, modern German nationalism, reduced from its original complexity to the simple priority of establishing national unity, was a conservative force that aimed at consolidating an externally powerful and internally obedient nation which could challenge its neighbours for international supremacy.

The left-wing end of the political spectrum had meanwhile been claimed by the new movements of communism and socialism. However, prior to the appearance of these ideas to restructure a fully industrialised society, modern nationalism was the most left-wing element on the political scene because of its links with ideas promoted by the French Revolution, such as constitutional representative government.

The levelling tendencies of nationalism, creating equal citizens of one nation, set it in direct opposition to absolutist dynastic systems. It is in this politically progressive and socially revolutionary context of nationalism that the Burschenschaften originate. On the one hand, 62 Maike Oergel this investigation is a contribution to establishing the origins of modern German nationalism as politically progressive, as a radical opposition aiming at far-reaching social, political, and national reform. In other words, the essay asks whether there is a German tradition of opposition that is intrinsically flawed.

This approach redefines the perennial debate about the political nature of the early Burschenschaften and, in a more general sense, of German nationalism, which still revolves around the assumption that the German political tradition is profoundly antidemocratic and set against the values of Western rationalism and liberalism,2 by asking how and why solidly democratising tendencies promoting civil rights and social justice occur in close proximity to non-democratic activities which tend towards totalitarian dogmatism.

Although as a unique individual act it can only have signal function, the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Burschenschaftler Carl Sand represents these very different tendencies and persuasions: On the other hand, it cannot be overlooked that the readiness to execute such a deed results from a totalitarian dogmatism which decrees that it is legitimate and necessary to eliminate those who hold opposing 1 2 Due to the particular political and social circumstances in the German territories nationalism was an unusually new, politically effective and destabilising force: The grandeur of France, for example, had already sparkled in the fountains at Versailles, before it was claimed by the revolutionary Republic.

The recent study of the Burschenschaften by Dietrich Heither et al. A similar view of the political tendencies of the Burschenschaften was put forward by Walter Grab see Grab, Ein Volk, — Researching German Jacobinism, Grab of course is keen to point out democratic tendencies in other German contexts. It is evident that such violent opposition has proved counter-productive. Militant and radical fringes, committing acts of illegal violence to destabilise a system they find oppressive and exploitative, have repeatedly brought entire opposition movements into disrepute, thus paralysing all progressive powers.

The question arises to what extent there may be a direct line from Carl Ludwig Sand, whose actions precipitated the persecution not only of the Burschenschaften, but also of the entire liberal opposition, to the activities of the RAF and its descendant groups, who caused considerable problems to the self-understanding and efficacy of the Neue Linke. A close analysis of the political and national ideas that informed the early Burschenschaft movement will shed light on the nature of any German peculiarity regarding political tradition and especially political radicalism, and also suggest a number of parallels to radical opposition movements in West Germany in the late s and early s.

Let me begin with a brief look at the political and intellectual background to the nationalism of the Befreiungskriege. Between and the basis for the modern German identity was laid. Political and cultural self- definitions of a modern German nation were in competition, until they eventually combined around the crisis-point of , when after the Prussian military collapse Napoleon controlled much of central Europe. The Sturm und Drang-movement demanded reform in both the cultural and social fields, but had a mainly cultural impact. The events of gave fresh impetus to political ideas of representative and constitutional government — the enthusiasm of the German intelligensia for the early phases of the French Revolution is quite legendary — but the German situation laid the double obstacle of feudal absolutism combined with territorial division in the path of such ideas.

These circumstances necessarily reinforced a link between political reform or revolution and national unity. But political enthusiasm declined in the wake of the Jacobin Terror and the unprogressive handling of the occupation of conquered German territories by the French. It was replaced with the notion of the Kulturnation, which claimed that culture needed to precede politics and suggested that German culture, unsullied by political involvement and unfettered by an ossified classicism, could prepare the culmination of human culture for the benefit of humanity. Although Napoleon brought no small degree of constitutionalism to the states of the Rheinbund, he came to be seen by nationalists as a foreign oppressor whose sole aim was territorial conquest.

A new political-ideological German nationalism mobilised resistance. So for once the princes and the intellectuals stood on the same side to mobilise the people. This is a unique constellation in the revolutionary phase — And it is responsible for the peculiar mix of revolution- and tradition-based approaches to reform, which has been taken as evidence of the immature backwardness of German political thought.

It was clear that, if Napoleon could be defeated, the situation would be conducive to lasting political, social and national reform. Feudal absolutism had been weakened by the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, and a nationally inspired resistance would pave the way towards national unity on a constitutional basis, in conjunction with the constitutional converts among the princes. The Prussian government in particular saw no reason to dampen the zeal of the nationalists and worked hand in hand with progressive nationalist intellectuals, hoping the situation would lead to a united Germany under Prussian hegemony.

Many of these young volunteers became the next generation of politically active students see Steiger, 42—3. The previously defined cultural superiority is now harnessed to invest the need to fight French occupation with a world-historical dimension. Again, culture, in the shape of education, must precede political action, but political action is now paramount.

In Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Karl Friedrich Friesen put together an Ordnung und Einrichtung des deutschen Burschenwesens, a proposal to organise and mobilise students nationally into a political and military opposition in line with their own political and ideological aims of bourgeois emancipation and national unity. The Ordnung propagated an active life in the service of Vaterland and the people, based on middle-class efficiency and the Protestant work ethic.

They intended to politicise the students in order to facilitate their becoming socially responsible and politically active citizens. Jena, situated in the territory of liberal Grand Duke Carl August of Sachsen-Weimar, became one of the hotbeds of liberation, i. It was no surprise that the Urburschenschaft was founded here. But it was also a class exceedingly dependent on the good will of the aristocratic rulers and their bureaucracies, because in the end they would seek jobs not in the independent areas of trade and commerce, but in those feudal 66 Maike Oergel administrations to secure their material existence.

The great majority of Jena students were preparing for some sort of office in the gift of the state.

Synonyms and antonyms of Asservatenkammer in the German dictionary of synonyms

Since the s Jena University had attracted many young up-and-coming academics, among them Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, Schelling, and Schlegel, all of whom launched their academic careers here. Oken and Fries both lost their posts after and endured lengthy professional bans.

In a ceremonial act the Landsmannschaften dissolved themselves and united as one, symbolising the overcoming of the territorial division of the nation. Notwithstanding this, the new charter endeavours to emphasise democratic structures: The Landsmannschaften also used some democratic structures, but were run along more oligarchic lines, priding themselves on their hierarchical set-up.

They had a large underclass of trainees who had no rights. Interestingly much in the Jena Burschenschaft charter is taken verbatim from the constitution of the Vandalia Landsmannschaft. This has been explained as due to time pressure and to the need to achieve a widely acceptable consensus between old and new practices. It is also clear that members of the Vandalia were the driving force behind the national reformation of student organisations.

The Jena foundation ceremony in June occurred at an historically interesting point in time, less than two weeks after the foundation of the Deutscher Bund at the Congress of Vienna and three days before the battle of Waterloo. Both events mark the political crossroads that had been reached: Waterloo establishes the window of opportunity for change, Vienna symbolises the powerful resistance to it. Although Article 13 of the Bundesakte, signed in Vienna, which promised constitutional rule, might have given the Burschenschaftler some hope, the Deutscher Bund was dedicated to safeguard the 68 Maike Oergel absolutist forms of dynastic and monarchic government, and hardly any constitutions came to be agreed.

One unsurprising exception was Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, which received a liberal constitution in June , even guaranteeing the freedom of the press. However, due to increasing pressure from Austria and Prussia, this freedom was curtailed in and withdrawn in The politically progressive ideas were closely linked with a desire for national unity. The obvious lack of the latter and the widespread view that French models had become increasingly inviable resulted in a search for a distinctive German national tradition of reform.

The reformers were looking for a German tradition that supported change, were looking in fact for a precedent for a German revolution. The new historicist outlook, so prevalent among German intellectuals at the time, suggested that social, political and cultural innovations, in order to succeed, needed to be in keeping with tradition and history. The supporters of representative constitutions were a decided minority, and the notion of the separation of powers was rejected. Traditional solutions based on representations of the estates were just about acceptable. The ideologues of this student movement, such as Arndt and Jahn, were Protestant, too.

Hegel echoed this evaluation fairly precisely in his lectures on the philosophy of history. The link between the Christian and the Germanic, which had established itself as a standard topos in the German self-definition from the Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists? The liberation of the individual consciousness was merely the moral basis for the political and national liberation to come, a notion that fits in well with the German idea that culture needs to precede politics.

So the politically responsible and active Burschenschaftler felt called upon to complete the Reformation. This search for a tradition led to an over- emphasis on what was considered original Germanness, which included Francophobia and anti-semitism. Revolutionary ideas were so closely linked with this Teutomania, that the one indicated the other. Steiger observes that conservative authorities viewed these clothes as a German variant of the French Sansculottes Steiger, The link between Jacobinism, nationalism and Teutomania, and their shared revolutionary nature, was taken to be an established fact for several decades, as the assessment of the conservative historian K.

Menzel of shows. He too establishes parallels between Jacobinism and revolutionary nationalism: The Jena Burschenschaft set about planning the two-day event of the Wartburgfest, a sort of national student congress. Jahn and Luden were closely involved in the preparations, Fries and Oken attended. It inaugurated the next phase in the development of the Burschenschaften. It seems that this frustration led to the inofficial act for which the Wartburgfest is really in famous, and which signals the beginning radicalisation of some parts of the Burschenschaft movement: All the books burnt were recent publications.

It has been pointed out that attendance by universities from the south of Germany was sparse, because of their more predominantly Catholic student intake and the abiding suspicion of southern students that the German unity advocated in Burschenschaft circles was really a unity under Prussian hegemony. He was a moderate, who despite his commitment to German national unity, held the ideals of the French Revolution and of French legalism in high regard. Its burning has been interpreted as an indication of the political immaturity of the students, who, blinded by their Teutomania, could not see the constitutional foundations embedded in these laws.

They also threw into the fire what they regarded as symbols of physical and ideological oppression by superpower militarism and authoritarianism, i. These insubordinate acts of anarchic destruction gave the conservative rulers throughout the Confederation the occasion to act tough. There can be no doubt that many were worried. Although they demonstrated progressive criticism of the princes, their authors at the same time hoped for acceptance by and assistance from the feudal regents Steiger, —7. Typical, and correct, was the following assessment by one of their own: At this point, the split between a moderate majority, whose political opinions and commitment were vague, and a radical politicised wing became apparent.

Internally, the spectrum of the politicised members also stretched from moderate to radical. Alle Deutschen sind einander an Rechten vollkommen gleich. Unlike Riemann, Karl Follen reckoned that this sovereignty of the people was unlikely to be achieved through an alliance with the princes, or even by peaceful means. It would require politicising the masses, which would in turn lead to uprisings and the eventual breakdown of the current system. The Lied conceives of political revolution as a religious crusade that politically completes the spiritual process initiated by the Reformation.

In a grand historical panorama it associates the desired national liberation with an ancient Teutonic drive for independence from the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, its political and social aims were clear: When unrest broke out among the peasants in the Odenwald region in the autumn of , the Schwarzen hoped that this might be the beginning of the revolution. Level one is more moderate and focuses on ancient German traditions.

The Reformation has a crucial status in this countercultural identity. Historicist thinking decreed that only if the revolution were anchored in a German tradition would its realisation be plausible and successful. This connection, however, works on more than one level: The French Revolution and the German Reformation are the constant reference points in the discussion about political change in Germany at this time. The French Revolution, particularly its violent and regicidal phase, was by many national ist reformers considered to be a failure rather than a model.

Riemann wished to make clear that the German Burschenschaftler were no French revolutionaries. And yet the Revolution and Reformation were seen as related. The Reformation was the more promising German version of the French Revolution. Nor did the religious language or the appeal to an ancient German past suggest to the reactionary-conservative authorities that these people were political traditionalists. This equation between spiritual and political freedom was turned into a historical relation — one precedes the other — by constitutionally minded theological thinkers in the early decades of the nineteenth century and became a commonplace in liberal thinking.

It is important to note in this context that this equation is a topos congenial to rationalist interpretations as well as to more Romantic or Pietistic approaches that prioritise a living inner spirit of freedom and justice, as evinced by the post-rationalist generation of Protestant theologians such as Schleiermacher and de Wette. All these interpretations share a focus on the need to complete the Reformation in the name of spiritual and political progress see Lange, — Do such metaphysical and spiritual concerns invalidate any political democratic principles, as has been argued by those who take modern German political traditions to be intrinsically non-Western?

Does the spiritual always render the political irrational? Does this endeavour to base reform or revolution not only on political, but also on spiritual and historical principles necessarily lead to dogmatic self-aggrandisement? The national ist element, trimmed with spiritual and cultural traditions, is dubious in both interpretations. Its presence has led to a devaluation of the democratic and constitutional trends in German thought in Western assessments, in GDR treatments it has been brushed aside as a lamentable error of immaturity.

Yet it was integral at the time. In a pre-industrial economic situation only the revolutionary national Volk can occupy 15 See Heither et al. Their democratic principles and structures were realised — reasonably successfully compared to early twentieth-century attempts — on German soil in the later twentieth century, while their exclusion of foreigners and Jews, common in Burschenschaft thinking, foreshadows German fascism.

Their theory of resistance also foreshadows arguments put forward by late twentieth-century German terrorists. One of the first publications of the RAF in runs: Apart from leading the masses into revolt, Karl Follen considered the single violent act against an unrepresentative and repressive system not only a legitimate, but also a successful weapon. Follen made plans to set up a revolutionary organisation that would have revolutionary cells nationwide. After , Follen could not stay in Germany.

To escape arrest, he first fled to Switzerland , but in made for the greater safety of the United States. He planned to found a democratic German state as part of the American federation. Once there, he returned to an academic career, introducing the teaching of German language and literature at Harvard. However, he was removed from his Harvard post after he became active in the cause of liberating another group of oppressed people, the black slaves.

He became an American citizen in After a failed suicide attempt Sand was arrested and tried, and finally, on 20 May , executed. This month span is a phenomenally long gap to intervene between arrest and verdict, especially in a case where there is such a self-evident perpetrator to a crime, who never denied his deed. The drawn-out nature of the case is an indicator of the impact of the deed on the legal and political landscape of the Confederation.

The assassination caused a stir all over Germany. A few months later 1 July , there was an attempt on the life of the Nassau prime minister Karl Ibell. There were even suggestions that a black list of targets existed Haaser, It was widely believed that Sand belonged to an extensive underground conspiracy aimed at the absolutist system. Sand took great care not to implicate his comrades. He denied acting on behalf of an organisation, probably to protect his friends. He was not believed, but no directly incriminating evidence could be unearthed to connect Follen to the attack probably because Follen had had the foresight Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists?

Part of a group or not, Sand had, in true PietisticProtestant tradition, executed the demands of his conscience. Not surprisingly, he saw his action in the context of completing the Reformation. Uwe Backes has recently pointed out to what extent terrorism relies on the media to amplify the impact of terrorist activities and to what extent media and terrorists are in an almost symbiotic relationship: The resonance of the Kotzebue assassination in the press was phenomenal.

His political views were conservative, and his provision of information to the Tsar, which had become public the year before, made him a hate-figure in the eyes of the bourgeois opposition. Large numbers of sympathisers lined the streets to the scaffold, some in mourning garb, most of them silent, a few expressing their admiration for Sand. The Wartburgfest and the Kotzebue assassination did not start a revolution, they instead radicalised the forces of Reaction.

The Karlsbad Decrees, orchestrated by Metternich, were a direct consequence of the assassination. They banned the Burschenschaften as criminal and treasonous, re-enforced strict censorship of the press, introduced strict and unaccountable policing of the universities, and made it possible to prosecute as demagogues the leading figures of the national-democratic movement.

A Central Commission — the first confederation-wide institution of any kind — was set up in Mainz to implement and co-ordinate the investigations and prosecutions, and Metternich mobilised his network of secret agents to keep anything suspect under surveillance. The measures of the Karlsbad Decrees were hardline, their creation partly illegal. The Decrees were discussed and prepared at the Karlsbad conference in August , to which Metternich had only invited the ten most powerful members of the Deutscher Bund, whom he considered most reliable.

This contravened article 3 of the Bundesakte, which guarantees the same rights to all member states. This was noticed as early as To even prepare the preparations, Metternich had held a secret summit with Prussia a few days before Karlsbad, meeting with Friedrich Wilhelm and Hardenberg at Teplitz. They also agreed co-ordinated action at the forthcoming conference.

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To ensure a unanimous vote in favour, which was necessary for additions to the Bundesakte, member states which had not been present in Karlsbad were left in no doubt by the superpowers about how to instruct their representatives. The usual debating period of fourteen days was shortened to four and the reservations that were voiced in Frankfurt were only recorded in a secret protocol.

The official protocol of the meeting only recorded the unanimous vote. On 26 Nov , the Jena Burschenschaft officially disbanded, and the bourgeois opposition was silenced for ten, if not twenty years. There is a generation conflict. They suspect that, despite promises to the contrary, reactionary forces are setting up the same old nasty system again. In the case of the Burschenschaften the period of turmoil originates in French Revolution and its political and military consequences, in the case of the s revolutionaries it is the extended period of instability beginning with the outcome of World War I and leading up to their present.

The historical situation has effected a moment of unusual liberality, a window of freedom that allows ideas of complete political change to flourish. Students and universities, i. But the fact that some radical professors are older than their students does not deny the fact that they too may stand against a system that is supported and condoned by a generation whose values are drawn from an earlier period of monarchical absolutism in this case.

They are convinced they are in the right because their consciences are clear, applying the dogmatic method of self-analysis and self-justification that originates in the Protestant and Pietistic background, which many of the radical activists share; Sand for example shares such a background with Meinhof and Ensslin. Neither movement manages to get mainstream opinion, bourgeois or proletarian, on whose behalf they thought they were fighting, actively on their side. In both cases the activists question, and threaten, the basic self-understanding of the state, which reacts with relatively severe measures.

Leonard Krieger argued in his study The German Idea of Freedom, with specific reference to the political aims of the radical elements of the Burschenschaften, that social rootlessness and critical dissatisfaction produced a critical negativity regarding political systems: The critical motif remained dominant even in the constructive process of working out a positive democratic system.

The persistence of a strongly negative approach denoted the exclusive sponsorship of political radicalism by socially uprooted intellectuals, whose characteristic political expression consisted precisely in universal criticism rather than concrete engagement. The general criticism of society involved […] the specific revulsion against the state as such. Krieger, Such an anti-state attitude of critical negativity applies to the RAF too.

The German political tradition is the lack of a continuous political tradition. This includes the absence of a clearly defined tradition of opposition. Instead there is a plurality of different 28 The difference is that most of the political-constitutional demands made by the student activists around seem to have been validated by the historical process. They have become reality. On the other hand, many of the political ideas of the radical left-wingers of the late s, anti-capitalism and antiimperialism anti-Americanism in particular, seem to have become, after —90, invalidated by the historical process.

But perhaps it is still too early to judge this. It is no coincidence that both the concepts of fascism and communism received clear definition in Germany. Neither is it coincidental that rival enterprises of capitalism and communism could be set up within German borders, and last for 40 years. Equally, there is a democratic-progressive tradition, which runs from the constitutional hopes of the Befreiungskriege via the Frankfurt Parliament of —9, and the well-intentioned and ill-fated Weimar Republic, to its fulfilment either in the Arbeiter und Bauernstaat, as GDR historiography argued, or in the West German Grundgesetz, as the other side would have it.

On the other hand, there is the tradition of the Obrigkeitsstaat, running from Catholic and feudal dependence, through enlightened absolutism and Prussian militarism, to the authoritarian state of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Between and , none of these approaches had been able to establish a lasting presence.

This leaves openness as well as insecurity, which allows radical oppositional fringes not just to exist, but to impact to a far greater extent than in a society that has an established political tradition. In a situation of shifting or uncertain political structures, anarchic disturbances carry much greater weight.

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