In this rich, wide-ranging study, Herfried Münkler, professor of politics at the Humboldt University, addresses the nature of cultural and political myths and their part in German history, and does so from a dual perspective. His discussion, which makes full use of the literature that has grown up around individual myths, moves between past and present, and simplifies neither. Central to his analysis of the workings of myths through history is his understanding that they are elastic narratives, the message of which may change over time. As they influence, they are influenced; they undergo iconic compression into monuments and images, which are resistant to revision, but also ritual staging, which lends itself to change. His recognition of the complexity of his subject results in a stimulating work that crosses the boundaries of time and of disciplines.
From the first the author makes clear his interest in contemporary outcomes of the historical phenomena under examination. In his introduction he suggests that compared to its neighbors, Germany today is largely free of the type of myth that orients society by recalling it to its political origins. The Federal Republic's political consciousness includes “no storm on the Bastille followed by a glorious revolution, as in France, … no war of independence, in which political ideals were established, as in the U.S., … and no identity-creating memory of decline and resurrection, of heroic resistance eventually crowned with success, as in Poland” (p. 9). After reunification Germans could neither celebrate victory nor take pride in heroic sacrifice; the country's historical memory focused mainly on the political-military disasters of two world wars and the crimes of National Socialism. Such factually and morally problematic recollections may still contribute to a sense of national identity, but one with negative indicators. Yet even these may be beneficial. The recognition of a compromised past made it possible “for German politics to move beyond mythic errors and confusions, to function without deceptive narratives, free of the burden of having to repeat history” (p. 9); however, “no straight line runs from myth to reason” (p. 10). Just as the abundance of myths in German history had a price, their absence now may have a price as well: “[Today's] deficit in political myths in Germany … means a lack of narratives that can create confidence and courage, and accompany and secure political reforms” (p. 12).
After briefly considering earlier writers on myths, from Marx and Lévi-Strauss to Cassirer, Barthes, Mannheim, and Blumenberg, Münkler turns to the origin and development of myths in German history, the ideas and attitudes they reflect, and the impact they had or may have had on events. He identifies five major groups. The first consists of three myths, one from the Renaissance and two from the Middle Ages, that traverse centuries of German history, and in one form or another were—and perhaps still are—known to every schoolchild: Faust, the modern, questioning man, who in the nineteenth century becomes the cultural hero of the Bildungsbürgertum; Barbarossa, the emperor asleep in a mountain until his ravens wake him to the misery of land and people, and he returns to repair and reform; and the early thirteenth-century Song of the Nibelungen, the history of which shows with particular clarity how myths may defy logic, shift direction, and change their message.
The Nibelungen epic, derived from legends and poems, some related to Scandinavian sagas, others containing references to the age of migration, was addressed to a courtly audience. The narrative, couched in terms of its listeners' ethical values, relates the adventures, marriage, and murder of Siegfried. To avenge him, his widow lures the murderers and their followers into a conflict with the Huns, in which the Nibelungen, from king to lowest spear carrier, are killed. Rediscovered in the eighteenth century, the work gradually achieved broad significance. At a time of German political fragmentation its drama and beauty asserted an age-old cultural unity. Siegfried, his vanity and trickery notwithstanding, came to personify German rectitude in a world of envy and treachery. By the twentieth century the Nibelungen's unquestioned obedience to their leaders in a hopeless conflict had turned the poem of an ancient German catastrophe into a mirror of modern national virtue. First nationalists then the radical right took ownership of the myth and recreated it into an ideological message that surmounted class differences, until in such statements as Göring's speech of January 30, 1943, the medieval myth came to justify Stalingrad and the final self-destructive phase of the war.
Other myths use German conflicts with Rome from Arminius to Heinrich IV at Canossa and Luther to define German particularity. Further groups are Prussian myths—among them the ritual staging of the “Day of Potsdam,” in which near Frederick the Great's tomb, Hindenburg, wearing the uniform of a Wilhelmine field marshal, shakes Hitler's hand to seal the traditional elites' support of the National-Socialist Revolution; myths centered on locations—the Wartburg and the Rhine in the nineteenth century, Nuremberg and Dresden, the destruction of which in World War II led to new myths; and postwar political myths—the DDR's foundation myth of communist resistance to fascism, the economic myths of the Bundesrepublik—until after reunification myths are replaced by the glorification of consumer society.
This multitude does not include a comprehensive discussion of the National-Socialist myth of German racial uniqueness and superiority, the survival of which demands absolute obedience to a Führer at home and aggression abroad. The author's treatment of the handshake between Hindenburg and Hitler—a particularly incisive analysis—cannot fully take its place. He may have felt that his frequent references to the Third Reich and its leaders would make an integrated analysis unnecessary. An inclusive examination of the myths National Socialism wove together, and their interaction, would nevertheless have been of great interest. Yet even without it, his book is valuable for its reconstruction and interpretation of an element in the German past that contributes to and may even be among the causes of developments large and small. Too many authors, ranging from Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg to their diverse academic followers, have claimed to find universal answers in German myths. Herfried Münkler, in contrast, has written a book on particular myths in their unique context, their individuality, and their common qualities, that enables us to ask new questions both about specific episodes in German history and about that history in general.
