The Siren Song of 'Normalcy'
Donfried, Karen
The American Interest, November/December, v5, #2, online edition
"'Normal' tends not to be an adjective that individuals or nations cherish for themselves. Who wants to be merely normal, average or typical when one can be exceptional or superior? Germans do, and it is not hard to understand why. As a united polity only since 1870, Germany's bloody odyssey from the Franco-Prussian War to World War I, revolution, depression, Hitler, World War II, the Holocaust, and a country divided into two diametrically opposed political systems defines its historic "normalcy." At least for Germans born after World War II, normal meant being deviant, subject to a kind of metaphysical disfigurement, symbolized in concrete by the hideous wall sprawled across Berlin. Thus to be genuinely normal meant Germany must divorce itself from its own history, an abnormal enterprise-and so a problem of another sort. To what extent has Germany achieved this divorce and solved this problem?"
Karen Donfried is Executive Vice President of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Go to the article at:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=697
F7c/05-09, posted November 20, 2009
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