German Politics and Society

This special focus issue, guest edited by Jutta Helm, features articles

on German cities and urban politics. We are delighted to furnish

Helm and her colleagues with a forum to publish their research on a

crucial area of modern German politics and society. Additionally, we

invited Russell Dalton, a member of our editorial board and among

the most distinguished experts on German elections, to offer his

keen insights on Germany’s landmark parliamentary election in September

1998. We hope you enjoy the issue.

Free elections are celebrations of the democratic process, and the

Germans celebrated in an unprecedented way on September 27,

1998. After sixteen years of Christian Democratic rule, the public

used its democratic power to change the government. Indeed, for the

first time in the history of the Federal Republic, voters rejected a sitting

chancellor and chose a new government through the ballot box.

For more than a century, Germany has had a well-balanced system

of cities showcasing considerable variety in their social and physical

make-up. It has lacked spectacular global cities like New York,

Tokyo, or London. Instead, western cities include industrial cities

like those in the Rhine-Ruhr Valley and cities shaped by universities

and research (Göttingen or Freiburg), media and publishing (Hamburg),

culture and high-technology sectors (Munich), banking and

finance (Frankfurt/Main), wholesale trade and insurance (Cologne

and Düsseldorf), as well as government and administration (Berlin,

Bonn, and most state capitals). Dramatic social or economic crises

that generate debates about urban decline have not happened.

Thanks in part to effective urban governments, no German city has

come close to the near-collapse of American rustbelt cities during

the early 1980s, or the fiscal meltdown of New York City in the

1970s. Crime has been consistently lower and less violent, and the

American racial divide has no equivalent in German cities. East German

cities, while more unevenly developed, have been no less stable.

East Berlin was the dominant center, linked to the industrial

cities in the North (Rostock) and South (Leipzig, Halle, Dresden) by

a rather creaky infrastructure.

The presence of sizable foreign-born populations (which include citizens

and non-citizens) in advanced industrial societies is the result of

national policies on immigration, refugees, and labor migration. The

consequences of these policies, however, are most visible at the local

level, where newcomers work, settle, and raise their families. While

not all immigrants live in cities, they have been particularly concentrated

in urban environments. Thus, it is hardly surprising that many

of the socioeconomic, cultural, and political issues and problems

associated with immigration and the process of immigrant settlement

are played out and magnified in cities.

Cities have long been the destination of those on the move. Migration

and especially immigration always raise issues of inclusion and

exclusion, of rights and obligations, and of the meaning of membership

and citizenship. The particular form and content of these

debates vary, just as host countries, national and local governments,

and immigrant populations vary. Over the past few decades, patterns

of immigration have begun to shift away from classical immigration

countries (the United States, Canada, Australia) toward the democracies

of the European Union. “In this troubled world, Western

Europe has in fact, become a fragile island of prosperity, peace,

democracy, culture, science, welfare and civil rights,” according to

urban sociologist, Manuel Castells. “However, the selfish reflex of

trying to preserve this heaven by erecting walls against the rest of

the world may undermine the very fundamentals of European culture

and democratic civilization, since the exclusion of the other is

not separable from the suppression of civil liberties and a mobilization

against alien cultures.”

In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, millions of Germans emigrated

to the New World. Today, however, immigration to Germany

is an integral aspect of everyday life in the country. The consequences

of immigration are far-reaching, ranging from the wealth of

culinary options offered by Italian, Greek, or Chinese restaurants, to

the social costs of employing thousands of foreign workers in Germany’s

construction sector. In the Ruhr River area, Germany’s

largest industrial melting pot, Turkish names are now as common as

Polish names—the latter representing an immigrant group that settled

in the area some 100 years ago.

Since unification, the political, economic, and institutional structures

in the new federal states have been patterned in accordance with the

West German model. This is due in part to the extension of the

Western legal framework to the eastern Länder. The fact that the

political and economic actors of the once-socialist country are now

subject to the institutional conditions of the West encourages convergence

towards the western model. But questions have been raised as

to whether the cities in the new federal states are also adapting

rapidly to the western model of urban development. Their layout

and architecture resulted, after all, from the investment decisions

made by several generations and cannot be shifted or transformed as

rapidly as legal or institutional frameworks.

In the political and economic history of Germany, Leipzig already

held a special place long before unification. Since the middle ages, it

has hosted one of the most important trade fairs in Europe. When

industrialization turned Germany in the late nineteenth century into

a leading European power, outpacing France and closely rivaling

Britain, Leipzig added to its established and internationally acclaimed

fur and book trade a mighty industrial sector in lignite-based chemicals

and vehicle production. At the turn of the century, Leipzig was

one of the largest and most affluent cities of Germany and indeed

Europe. A rich stock of Gründerzeit houses remains to testify to this

illustrious past.

National and world events shape all cities, but in Berlin they have a

physical presence. For Berliners, the Cold War was tangible, manifested

as a wall and death strip guarded by armed soldiers and attack

dogs. Today that wall is gone and, if national power brokers and the

real estate development community have their way, Berlin will soon

be a “normal” European city and German capital. Not only will the

ghosts of the Nazi past be exorcised, but any tangible inheritance of

the postwar period—in East Berlin the legacies of state socialism, in

West Berlin the strange fruits of a subsidized economy—will disappear.

Few issues have possessed the centrality or sparked as much controversy

in the postwar history of the Federal Republic of Germany

(FRG) as the struggle to come to terms with the nation’s Nazi past.

This struggle, commonly known by the disputed term Vergangenheitsbewältigung,

has cast a long shadow upon nearly all dimensions of

German political, social, economic, and cultural life and has prevented

the nation from attaining a normalized state of existence in

the postwar period. Recent scholarly analyses of German memory

have helped to broaden our understanding of how “successful” the

Germans have been in mastering their Nazi past and have shed light

on the impact of the Nazi legacy on postwar German politics and

culture. Even so, important gaps remain in our understanding of

how the memory of the Third Reich has shaped the postwar life of

the Federal Republic.