‘Why would anyone write a historical study of it?' asks Gavriel Rosenfeld about the Fourth Reich at the start of this rather confusing, but at times entertaining, book. His answer is that the phrase has been used as a metaphor since the earliest days of the Third Reich to mean a wide variety of things. It has permeated politics and culture, and seems to be a term susceptible to any meaning a writer or speaker wishes to impose upon it.
Some of us — and I plead guilty to this — have used the term simply to describe the present German state in its reunified, Europe-dominating form. While of course such usage is a bit of a tease, it also seems to be a matter of fact. As Professor Rosenfeld reminds us, ‘Reich' in German means ‘realm' or, as we would probably say today, ‘polity'. And so since the two fractured pieces of Germandom were put back together in 1990, what we have the other side of Holland is the Fourth Reich. To have a Reich you don't have to have genocide, concentration camps or monocled, Iron Cross-wearing Obersts uttering ‘for you, Tommy, ze var iss over'. It doesn't matter that there is a lack of continuity between Frau Merkel's unproclaimed Reich and the Third; whenever a Reich ends, it takes a period of re-grouping before another can come along. There was a much shorter gap between 1945 and 1990 than between 1806 and 1871, the distance between the First and Second Reichs; and there were 15 years between the Second and the Third.
Rosenfeld never quite nails why the word Reich is so poisonous and causes such a frisson: but perhaps he feels the toxicity of the term is so self-evident that he hardly needs to. The problem lies not just in its association with the Nazis but with the fact that a Reich goes hand in hand with empire-building, and often beyond the German-speaking peoples; first Charlemagne taking over Mitteleuropa, then more than 1,000 years later Wilhelm I uniting Germany and, with it, a couple of portions of France; and of course Hitler and his territorial demands. Those days have gone.
Or have they? Rosenfeld quotes a book by a German émigré journalist, T.H. Tetens, written in 1953, who smelt a ‘plan to create a unified Europe, dominated by Germany' that ‘dated back to the Nazi era', built on the realization that if, post-1945, all European countries gave up their sovereignty, Germany would ‘automatically gain equality, and the stigma would be removed from the Fatherland'. We have a unified Europe now, dominated by Germany, based on a joint surrender of sovereignty, but we all know who calls the tune and pays the bills. Well done to Tetens for spotting it so early. There has been no need to send in cavalry or Panzers to make this latest conquest; diplomacy, and the ease with which so many European countries have accepted a loss of democratic power, have done it for them.
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