Hans Kundnani Book order

A revelatory account of the EU as a project driven by racialized thinking.

Since the Euro crisis began, Germany has emerged as Europe's dominant power. During the last three years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been compared with Bismarck and even Hitler in the European media. And yet few can deny that Germany today is very different from the stereotype of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. After nearly seventy years of struggling with the Nazi past, Germans think that they more than anyone have learned its lessons. Above all, what the new Germany thinks it stands for is peace. Germany is unique in this combination of economic assertiveness and military abstinence. So what does it mean to have a 'German Europe' in the twenty-first century? In The Paradox of German Power Hans Kundnani explains how Germany got to where it is now and where it might go in future. He explores German national identity and foreign policy through a series of tensions in German thinking and action: between continuity and change, between 'normality' and 'abnormality', between economics and politics, and between Europe and the world.

One thing separated the left-wing students who demonstrated in West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts worldwide. The young Germans, known as the 1968 generation or Achtundsechziger, grew up aware that their parents were responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust. This awareness compelled them to act, believing they needed to save Germany from itself. For them, it was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz. While many in the West German student movement viewed their struggle against capitalism as a form of resistance to Nazism, they also tended to relativize the Holocaust. Others sought to move past the Nazi legacy. Despite the anti-fascist rhetoric, nationalist and anti-Semitic currents emerged within the West German New Left, stemming from the student movement. Thus, the 1968 generation maintained a complex relationship with their Nazi past. The narrative explores these contradictions, tracing the political journey of this generation through the left-wing terrorism of the seventies, the rise of the Social Democrats and Greens in the eighties, and their eventual attainment of political power in the nineties with Germany's first "red-green" government. It also examines this government's foreign policy, particularly its responses to the Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq crises, reflecting the generation's ambivalence towards their historical legacy.