The German election campaign is cranking up to as close to a throbbing wave of intensity as you are likely to find in modern Germany. Very soon, Chancellor Gerhard Schr�der is going to take on the CDU’s Angela Merkel in a televised debate. Merkel has always had to do it tough in the CDU, as I’ve remarked on before, because she isn’t really the kind of person who fits the traditional shape of the post-war German conservative movement. Last time around, she was party leader but was ditched as Spitzenkandidat (a German term which compromises between a quasi-US presidential candidacy and the reality of a Westminster-style constitution) in favour of the hard-right Bavarian, Edmund Stoiber. This time, though, the polls are running heavily in her favour, after she spent the intervening period selectively eliminating the men (and they were) who did her in the first time around.

This is where it gets interesting. Last week, she was moved to give a speech in which she said a very remarkable thing. Apparently, Germany needs to retrieve the spirit of the Gr�nderzeit. This word is usually translated into English as the Founders’ Generation, which doesn’t sound terribly interesting or controversial. The point is, though, which generation, and what did they found? When you speak of the Gr�nderzeit in Germany, or Austria, you mean the 1870s and the foundation of united Germany. For some reason the Austrians use it too, perhaps stretching the definition to include the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise or Ausgleich. It’s not an especially controversial word, but then, that is in part because it’s most often used to describe architecture.

Outside Germany, though, you might be forgiven for thinking this pretty eyebrow-raising. In the Anglosphere, it is fairly conventional wisdom to hold that the Wilhelmine empire was a fatal aberration in Germany’s historic development, the point at which the Germans swung off the Whiggish tracks into the future onto that infamous Sonderweg that in the end led to world war, Weimar, Hitler, more war, Auschwitz, and partition. And that foundation, after all, took place by means of conquering northern France. The proclamation of the empire took place at Versailles.

(So far, so clich�d.)

The Left would never in a million years have said such a thing. Gr�nderzeit? The time of Bismarck’s Antisocialist Laws? The foundation of the three-class voting system? Surely the injustices that began the SPD’s historic struggle. Why she did, though, is part of a very important point about identity, history and German politics.
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