ABSTRACT
The term 'nation' if at all unambiguous, cannot be defined by the empirical common qualities of those who compose it. The category of the nation those are the symbolic and reflexive constants of a collective historical and cultural ability to remember. The teutonic furor, which the consumerism of the West with Lacoste and Benetton and the cultural admixture of Pizza, Paella, and Mallorca have been able to neutralize, will reappear with a vengeance in Karl Heinz Bohrer's desired nation. Bohrer sees here in the unfortunate tradition of a colonized consciousness, the reservations of a chaste inwardness against civilization. His evaluation: national identity is something else than the feeling of comfort experienced in provincial situations. The category of the nation those are the symbolic and reflexive constants of a collective historical and cultural ability to remember. Bohrer's German nation is nothing else than the entrance requirements of those traditions which can now be realigned from pragmatic power politics to national territory.
