ABSTRACT
Karl Heinz Bohrer may well suspect that the self-understanding of constitutional patriotism is guided by a moralism which robs artworks of their un-canniness, and which brings us to the point of repressing entire categories of the psychic and cultural tradition which used to form part of German identity, because these categories supposedly helped prepare the consciousness that ultimately made the Holocaust possible. The Eastern treaties and the initial successes of detente at the very least destabilized the anti-Communism so typical of Germany. The Model Germany, brought into play for a while by the Social Democrats, contained traces of such pride, but it never had any significance beyond the realm of campaign strategy. The alternative to the version of economic nationalism is the strengthening of those components of our self-understanding with which, in the 1980s, the citizens of the Federal Republic have also come closer to the normal kind of western national identity.
