The forty-fivers: The languages of republicanism and the foundation of West Germany, 1945--1977

This dissertation examines the dilemma of republican consensus-formation in West Germany. It contends that post-totalitarian and post-genocidal republics face a unique legitimacy dilemma. On the one hand, they must distance themselves in all respects from the evil regime that they replaced in order to establish their moral credibility. On the other, they must usually integrate a substantial number of those persons who were implicated in the crimes of that regime if the new republic is to be a stable entity. This tension is born by the two opposing republican languages available in such situations. There is the "redemptive" language of republicanism, Jacobin in nature, seeking to sunder the new state from its predecessors in order to commence a radically new project, a rebirth, a regeneration, a renaissance. Its strategy of consensus-formation is captured best in the word "cleansing." The alternative language is "integrative." It is republican insofar as it distances itself from the regime it succeeds, but it does not pretend to a radical new beginning, divorced from national tradition. It seeks to embody positive continuities, and, above all, it integrates the persons implicated in the past regime and offers them the chance to build a future without necessarily requiring the "correct" spirit of them. A new consensus forms gradually over time. This dissertation contends that neither language of republicanism can account satisfactorily for the actual development of West Germany's republican consensus. In fact, a third discursive language has developed that transcends the blindness of the other two, thereby resolving the legitimacy dilemma. I argue that the bearer of this third language was the generation of German intellectuals born roughly between 1922 and 1932, the "forty-fivers." By debating with one another about which language of republicanism the new Republic, whose first youth they were, the members of this intellectual generation began a discursive post facto foundation of country---a slow process of consensus formation based on a tireless hermeneutical reflection on the national past, National Socialism, and the Holocaust.