ABSTRACT
One supporting motif of the anti-Bismarck argument is the concept of a supposedly golden era during the decades long loose federation of many small German states, the structural condition, so to speak, for a cultural nation of the Germans. Politically more convincing is the argument that the Germans have lost for all time the right to unity, because the loss of unity was the result of a war which they forced upon the world not just with criminal intentions but with criminal results. The misery of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) milieu, which has struck anyone willing to look at it without blinders, was derived to a large extent from the tradition of the small German police state, and the authoritarian character which was born there. The privileging of the technical-economic argument and the failure to see the deeper spiritual dimensions of national identity are themselves part of the West German loss of identity.
