The all-clear incarnate? : Helmut Kohl's nationalism and the quest for normality

Abstract

Nations exist because individuals believe in their existence; the foundations of such beliefs can be explored through the study of individual lives. This political biography is concerned with the personal nationalism of Helmut Kohl. The so-called Chancellor of Unity was instrumental in Germany's (re)unification process in 1989/90, which was a prime example of a nationalist event. However, Kohl's nationalism went beyond the one nation = one state formula. Nationalism is treated here as a contemporary, mainstream phenomenon with the capacity to generate countless personal notions of nations. Biography helps to understand the particular repertoire of self-images that the nationalist can mobilise selectively to represent his ideal notion of the nation and himself. In Kohl's case, it was not only his membership of a political party (CDU), but also the combination of religious (Roman Catholic), generational (forty-fiver), regional (Palatinate), and educational (PhD in History) affiliations that were formative to his nationalist representation in the context of the Cold War and the memory of Germany's Nazi past. Kohl's personal nationalism can be analysed along four ideological traditions in German nationalism. The four empirical chapters - which discuss Kohl in that order as Catholic Nationalist, Liberal Nationalist, Romantic Nationalist and Nationalist Historian - each connect Kohl's nationalist ideas to particular biographical narratives that shaped Kohl's self-perception and provided his representation of the German nation with an appearance of authenticity. Kohl used his (auto)biography to promote a normalisation of German nationalism during his quest to overcome the Sonderweg stigma. Together these four pillars sustained Kohl's representation as the embodiment of the 'all-clear': a de-radicalised German nationalism, which was intended to eclipse its anti-Western and post-national peculiarities. Show more