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ABSTRACT
In this paper I examine the use of the concept of "normality" in debates about German foreign policy since unification. In the early 1990s, left-wing intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas tended to criticize the idea of "normality" in favor of a form of German exceptionalism based on responsibility for the Nazi past. A foreign policy based on the idea of "normality" was associated above all with the greater use of military force, which the right advocated and the left opposed. Thus, "normality" became a synonym for Bündnisfähigkeit. Yet, from the mid 1990s onwards, some Social Democrats such as Egon Bahr began to use the concept of "normality" to refer instead to a foreign policy based on sovereignty and the pursuit of national interests. Although a consensus has now emerged in Germany around this realist definition of foreign-policy "normality," it is inadequate to capture the complex shift in the foreign policy of the Federal Republic since unification.
KEYWORDS
Germany; foreign policy; normality; collective memory; nationalism; Auschwitz
Introduction
"In the course of a thousand years, the Germans have experienced everything except normality," A.J.P. Taylor famously wrote in 1945 in The Course of German History.1 Much of the history of the Federal Republic can be seen as an attempt to attain that elusive "normality."2 Nevertheless, although the concept of "normality" has been used by both the leftand the right, it has been so in different ways at different times. Since unifica- tion, the concept has been used frequently by advocates of change, who increasingly have spoken of "normality" in the context of the Berlin Republic. The implication of this usage is that the Bonn Republic-in contrast to combinations of the Third Reich, the Weimar Republic, and the German Empire (Kaiserreich)-should be considered "abnormal."
The concept of "normality" is usually opposed to the idea of a Sonderweg (special path)-an equally problematic term.3 It originally referred to the historiographical theory of Germany's aberrant historical trajectory that diverged from that of other nation states in the West, in particular, France and the United Kingdom, but has also been used more generally to refer to German exceptionalism in both negative and positive connotations. The idea of the Sonderweg is in turn linked to Helmuth Plessner's idea of Germany as a...