Jan Herman Brinks. Children of a New Fatherland: Germany's Post-War Right-Wing Politics. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000. xix + 200 pp. $39.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-86064-458-0.

Reviewed by Raffael M. Scheck (Colby College)
Published on H-German (November, 2003)

The Historical Origins of German Right-Wing Radicalism in the 1990s

The Historical Origins of German Right-Wing Radicalism in the 1990s

Jan Herman Brinks' Children of a New Fatherland is a translation and expansion of a shorter Dutch work published in Amsterdam in 1994. The book first analyses social trends that benefited radical right movements and then explores nationalist sentiments in the former GDR. It argues that official GDR politics openly favored German nationalist thinking, as symbolized most clearly in the revival of historical interest in Martin Luther and Prussian history. It further shows how the anti-fascist rhetoric of GDR leaders produced a backlash against anti-fascism that nourished anti-Semitism and violence against foreigners after 1989.

The most persistent argument of the book is that the GDR fostered the right-wing radicalism that came to the surface after the end of the communist regime. Brink refers to historical connections between Nazis and Communists from the days of the Ruhr Crisis (1923), to the "violence principle" enshrined in GDR education and police practice, and to the widespread paramilitary training of GDR youth. In short, he accuses the GDR regime of preserving right-wing norms and institutions under a left-wing banner. After 1989, Brink detects a banalization of the Nazi past in the rapid equation made by the media between Nazi Germany and the GDR as "totalitarian systems."

Brinks devotes less attention to the origins of right-wing radicalism in former West Germany. The last sections of the book describe the features of right-wing radicalism in West Germany and the re-united Germany, with special attention to the Historikerstreit, the rise of the Republikaner, the revival of anti-Semitism, and the debate on asylum-seekers. But unlike the earlier parts, there is no obvious grand thesis linking the author's observations in this section.

Altogether, this book reads well as a summary of the ideas circulating in the European newspapers in the early 1990s, but I find some flaws with the argument and with many details. The focus on nationalist trends in the GDR seems to me exaggerated in light of the very strong differences between national socialism and GDR-style communism. Certainly, de-nazification in the GDR had serious flaws, but it was also far from perfect in West Germany and in the Allied occupation zones. Whereas foundations for right-wing radicalism in the former GDR receive much attention, Brink remains less clear about the roots of this ugly phenomenon in West Germany. The book is not carefully edited and lacks precision with respect to detail, in particular historical facts (the author blames Friedrich II rather than his father, Friedrich Wilhelm I, for turning Prussia into a great military barracks, and he confounds the revolution of November 1918 with the Spartacus uprising in January 1919; see pp. 153 and 156). The title of the English edition is entirely misleading (leaving the reader guessing as to which postwar period is meant--the years after 1945 or after the Cold War?), but this is probably not the author's fault.

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Citation: Raffael M. Scheck. Review of Brinks, Jan Herman, Children of a New Fatherland: Germany's Post-War Right-Wing Politics. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8391

Copyright © 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.