In the past century, Germany, for better and for worse, offered itself
as a natural laboratory for political science. Indeed, Germany’s
excesses of political violence and its dramatic regime changes largely
motivated the development of postwar American political science,
much of it the work of German émigrés and German-Jewish
refugees, of course. The continuing vicissitudes of the German experience
have, however, posed a particular challenge to the concept of
political culture as elaborated in the 1950s and 1960s,1 at least in
part to explain lingering authoritarianism in formally democratic
West Germany. Generally associated with political continuity or only
incremental change,2 the concept of political culture has been illequipped
to deal with historical ruptures such as Germany’s “break
with civilization” of 1933-1945 and the East German popular revolution
of 1989. As well, even less dramatic but still important and relatively
rapid cultural changes such as the rise of a liberal democratic
Verfassungspatriotismus sometime around the late 1970s in West Germany3
and the emergence of a postmodern, consumer capitalist culture
in eastern Germany since 19944 do not conform to mainstream
political culture theory’s expectations of gradual, only generational
change. To be sure, continuity, if not inertia, characterizes much of
politics, even in Germany. Still, to be of theoretical value, the concept
of political culture must be able not only to admit but to
account for change.