| Abstract | Otherness cannot be tolerated by such pathological narcissism since it signifies a boundary and a limit to the power and purity of the national collective. However, as E. P. Thompson has rightly pointed out: "We cannot define who `we' are without also defining `them' -- those who are not `us.' Throughout history, as bonding has gone on and as identities have changed, the Other has been necessary in this process. Rome required barbarians, Christendom required pagans, Protestant and Catholic Europe required each other."(7) Thus, while serving as a foundation of love among "us," the more pathological form of narcissistic collective self-love inevitably leads to rage against "them," that is, against those who fail to be part of "us" because they differ in some significant way -- such as race, language or religion -- from "us," and against all those who refuse to mirror "our" moral and historical distinction and greatness. In fact, as [Heinz Kohut] has pointed out, for those infatuated with their self, mere otherness can be an offense which deserves to be punished.(8)
While [Habermas] regards it as a moral duty to keep alive the memory of the crimes of the Nazi regime, his narrative also imposes a series of splits on contemporary German history. He claims that "the sensibility, toward the unjustly tortured, on whose inheritance we live...produces a reflective distance to our own traditions."(32) According to Habermas, this distance, which has been created by [Auschwitz], has led to a decoupling of the shared cultural identity of Germans from German citizenship. The split between culture and politics posited by Habermas makes room for the constitutional patriotism he advocates, that is, for "a readiness to idenfify with the political order and the principles of the Basic Law."(33) Such a "constitutional patriotism...does not arise until after culture and national politics have become more emphatically differentiated from one another than they were in the nation-states of the old type."(34) Because this novel, universalist form of patriotism is predicated upon the dissociation of culture from politics, Habermas argues, it is "no longer pledged to continuities filled with victories."(35) Rather, it is conceived in abstract categories as a community based on democratic values, in which different groups of people live with each other within the same political framework, acknowledging that since "it is impossible to carry on with continuities in a naive fashion" in the wake of Auschwitz, it has to relate to the past reflexively and with a historical consciousness that is "ambivalent" and "decentered."(36) As Habermas explains, this universalist and constitutional patriotism entails that "one relativizes one's own form of existence in relation to the legitimate claims of other forms of life; that one grants the foreigners and the others, with all their idiosyncracies and features that cannot be understood, the same rights; that one does not become set on the generalization of one's own identity; that one does especially not exclude that which deviates from it."(37)
(45). [Stefan Berger], "Historians and Nation-Building in Germany"; cf. Arnulf Baring, "In Bismarcks Grenzen," FAZ, 9 Nov. 1990; Joachim Fest, "Nicht wie alle Welt: Immer wieder das deutsche Sonderbewusstsein: Aktuelle Anmerkungen zu einer Debatte von gestern," ibid., 13 June 1992, and "Offene Gesellschaft mit offener Flanke," ibid., 21 Oct. 1992; [Christian Meier], "Wir sind ja keine normale Nation: Deutsche Perspektiven: Kein Sonderweg mehr, aber mehr Verantwortung -- kein Allianzwechsel aber einiges balancieren," Die Zeit, 21 Sept. 1990, and "Nichts trennt die Menschen mehr als Vereinigung: Die deutsche Krise: Warum man auf beiden Seiten so misstrauisch ist," Süddeutsche Zeitung, 31 Dec. 1992/1 Jan. 1993; Thomas Nipperdey, "Die Deutschen wollen und dürfen einen Nation sein," FAZ, 13 July 1990, and "Sinn für Vergangenheit," Die Welt, 23 Mar. 1992; Michael Wolfssohn, "Wachsam sein und Flagge zeigen," Die Welt, 14 Nov. 1992.
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