This book is an ambitious and rich contribution to the interdisciplinary field of emotion studies, and an original intervention in postwar West German historiography. First published in German as Republik der Angst. Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Rowohlt, 2019), Frank Biess's book clearly hit a nerve with its German readership, provoking discussions in the press and on talk shows, reaching first place on the non-fiction bestseller list, and receiving a nomination for the non-fiction prize at the Leipzig Book Fair. The German subtitle frames the book as an “alternative history” in contrast to hegemonic narratives of West German history seen as a teleological journey towards German normalcy by way of Western democracy. Complementing existing historical narratives, German Angst exposes the complex fragility of West Germany's democratization, which, at times, was anything but self-evident.
The popular postwar diagnoses of the German collective as “pathological” are refuted in careful empirical reconstructions of the changing objects, protagonists, and experiences of fear as a category that morphs according to its historical and political contexts. By way of paradigmatic case studies germane to broader processes of democratization in the former Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and by regarding emotions as “historical forces of their own” (20), rather than irrational or apolitical reactions incidental to history, Biess demonstrates the “negative contingency” (Arndt Bauerkämper) constitutive of history (3–4). Drawing on methodologies from the history of emotions, the book offers an analysis of expressions of and reactions to discourses of fear circulating in the FRG circa 1940s-1980s. William Reddy's term “emotional regime,” which captures the normative aspect and expressive styles of emotional cultures, and Barbara Rosenwein's concept of “emotional community” are key to Biess's analysis of the normative and intersubjective heft of emotions as “a causal force in their own right” (20). Importantly, the book foregrounds the temporal dimension of fear, which acts as an emotive hinge between the past and the future, exposing the contingency of the present, as with tensions between memories of recent catastrophe and apocalyptic projections into the future in the former FRG. The book's focus on fear's varied manifestations and the historical intentions driving fear's mobilization or suppression suggests that “fear” and “democracy” should not be understood as axiomatic opposites.
The book can be divided into three parts along chronological and thematic lines: the first four chapters consider postwar, moral, Cold War, and modern Angst. Drawing here and throughout the book on a variety of evidentiary sources, including diaries, opinion surveys, contemporary debates, and intelligence reports, Biess illustrates the symbolic power of fear. For example, in the immediate postwar years Germans’ fears of retribution by their victims and Allied victors drew on persistent racist stereotypes. Belied by the lack of historical records of such violence, these disproportionate fears allowed Germans to perceive themselves as potential victims in imagined apocalyptic futures, simultaneously recognizing and immediately disavowing Germany's genocidal past. Chapter 3 complicates our understanding of the unpredictable role fear played in the politics of the Cold War in the FRG. The Adenauer government's intention to steer popular emotion by exacerbating anti-Communism (“Better Dead than Red”) and minimizing popular anxieties about the state's rearmament was undermined by their infelicitously titled and poorly received national civil defense campaign (“Everybody Has a Chance”), which amplified, rather than quelled, popular fears of nuclear war and ineffectual national governance. Chapter 2, “Moral Angst,” surprises with the less-discussed fear of moral contamination of West Germany's young men by French Foreign Legion recruiters. Based on barely suppressed homosexual panic, these fears were provoked by lurid scenes of seduction circulated in the media around 1950, and exacerbated existing nationalist fears of tainted masculinity.
The remaining chapters chart a shift in “emotional regimes” from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Chapter 5, “Democratic Angst,” segues into the escalating fears of the viability of West German democracy. The “democratic fear” of authoritarianism's reemergence from within West Germany lent the New Left a “privileged epistemological position” vis-à-vis perceived dissonances between democratic constitutional structures and lived democratic habitus (191). At the same time, conservatives’ fear of democracy's potential erosion of traditional state power led to retaliatory cautionary measures, such as the emergency laws, initiating what the author calls a “dialectic of fear” between progressives and conservatives (199). The ascendancy of the student movement, psychotherapy, new counter-cultural movements (communes, sexual “liberation,” Kinderläden) and a cultivation of the “new subjectivitiy” of the 1970s, which promoted character traits of authenticity and sensitivity, shifted the postwar “emotional regime” of sobriety in political discourse to one that valorized political cultures of open emotional expressivity when addressing proliferating political and existential anxieties. From the 1960s up to unification, events as diverse as the media coverage of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963–1965) or the unpredictably strong emotional responses of West German viewers to the German screening of the U.S. television series Holocaust (1979) shaped the commemorative landscape, demonstrating how the Nazi past was an object of “emotional management” that productively “stimulated democratic fears rather than containing them,” requiring ongoing vigilance (175, 182). In Chapter 8, “Apocalyptic Angst,” the author draws on his own experience with palpable fears of extinction posed by nuclear power and environmental destruction in the peace movement of the 1980s. This movement presented fear as a healthy response to the threat of extinction, galvanizing many West Germans into protest, and ultimately ushering in new political agents, such as the Green Party.
The final two chapters (“German Angst” and the conclusion) open up new vistas, suggesting contemporary fears and potential threats to democracy in unified Germany and the broader global context. We are also reminded of the book's limitations touched on in Biess's introduction—most prominently, his sole focus on fears of the “majority society” (20). How might discourses of fear in unified Germany appear from intersectional vantages that include the ongoing racial othering of minorities in German society (particularly Muslims and refugees), or the socio-political impact of feminist and queer movements (in AIDS activism around 1980, for example)? Who is the subject of an “emotional regime,” and how does change between different regimes take place? How should we account for fear's complex intertwinement with other emotions?
At times of turbulent politics and proliferating uncertainty, such as with the present global resurgence of right-wing populism and white supremacy, as well as the renewed awareness of human fragility in the face of COVID-19 and the climate crisis, fear arguably gains the upper hand. The prescience of Biess’s book's lucid and thought-provoking exploration of the unpredictable relationship between fear and democracy through the example of the contingencies of West German history should draw close attention from a broad readership.
