Hannah Arendt and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich produced influential accounts of the postwar West-German population's silence or inarticuleteness. The Mitscherlichs claimed that this silence was symptomatic of a blocked process of mourning; Arendt saw it as a legacy of brutal totalitarian rule. However, both viewed the rapid economic recovery as evidence of the German inability to engage in discursively mediated therapeutic and political processes. Frantic busyness was a form of silence. This paper presents a critical reassessment of these approaches. By drawing on Albert Hirschman's theory of exit and voice, it argues that economic activity possesses a communicative dimension. The alleged retreat from politics is not a symptom of muteness but rather indicates people's preference for an alternative mode of communication. Arendt and the Mitscherlich may be right in assuming a correlation between the postwar economic recovery and ostensible political apathy, but lack the conceptual means to clarify the relationship.
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Jakob Norberg
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2011
- Article Type:
- Research Article
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- 1–20 (19 total)
Introduction
Innocence and the Politics of Memory
Jonathan Bach and Benjamin Nienass
take on the problematic some decades later, see Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York, 1975). 11 Just in the last few years, see, for example, Angelika Bammer, Born
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2021
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–14 (14 total)
Samuel Salzborn
Allgemeine Zeitung online , 14 September 2017. 37 Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich, 1980), 53–54. 38 Quoted in Hans-W. Saure and Anton Maegerle, “Skandal um
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2018
- Article Type:
- Discussion
- Pages:
- 74–93 (20 total)