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A Word From the Chair
by Bill Patch, Professor of History
Greetings from your new department chair!
I hope that your academic year is off to a good start. The business
of history is booming this term, with near record enrollments
in our courses, and I hope that we can promote some stimulating
discussion of history outside the classroom as well. It’s
not too soon to mark the date of February 8 in your calendars,
because that’s when we will have a truly distinguished guest,
Professor William Roger Louis of the University of Texas at Austin,
come to lecture us on changing approaches to the history of the
British Empire. We also hope to attract other guest speakers
during the year and will definitely organize a series of informal
presentations by Grinnell historians to discuss their ongoing
research.
It gives me great pleasure to announce
that the first Kathryn Mohrman Fellowship, in the amount of $1,500,
has been awarded to Dan Rothschild ’02 to support travel
to London over fall break. This fellowship was established through
the generosity of Kathryn Jagow Mohrman ’67 to support long-distance
travel for advanced student research on a project earning academic
credit in the Department of History or Political Science.
Dan is working on a capstone project under
the supervision of Don Smith on the subject of "British
Political Attitudes Towards Homosexuality, 1951-1970." He
has already conducted research at the Library of Congress over
the summer and will travel to London soon for ten days of intensive
work in the Public Records Office and the Archives of the Albany
Trust and the Homosexual Law Reform Society at the London School
of Economics.
There is enough money in the fund to support
two or three student trips per year, and another fellowship competition
will be held early in the spring semester, so keep this opportunity
in mind if you are planning to write a Senior Thesis (History
411) or undertake Advanced Independent Study (History 397) next
term.
I spent my sabbatical year doing archival
research on the social background and mentality of Christian
trade unionists (i.e., members of unions for patriotic, churchgoing
workers who rejected the political radicalism and anticlericalism
of the socialist labor movement) in the industrial state of Northrhine-
Westphalia from the 1890s through the 1950s.
For the first six months my wife and I
lived in the town of Meerbusch, just across the Rhine from Düsseldorf,
and then we moved for five months to the small town of Hachenburg
in the Westerwald (the size of Grinnell but with a dozen good
restaurants, a castle on the hill, and a thousand-year-old church).
Hachenburg is just thirty miles away from both Koblenz, with
its German National Archive, and the archives of the political
parties in Bonn.
I read through two dozen records of the
proceedings of early congresses of the Christian unions, police
surveillance notes on union meetings from the days before the
First World War (when the Prussian police considered even Christian
trade unions potentially subversive organizations), and the extensive
personal papers of the long-time head of the Christian miners’
union. But my most valuable discoveries came from the 1950s,
when almost all veterans of the Christian trade unions chose
to participate in a unified trade union organization with socialist
workers, today’s German Labor Federation, while asserting
a distinctive political identity within the Christian Democratic
Union (CDU).
Many Germans now forget that the CDU began
as a left-wing, populist party at the end of the Second World
War, which demanded the nationalization of large-scale industry
and banks. It sometimes even used the hammer and sickle as the
party emblem, to symbolize the belief that Germany must be rebuilt
by an alliance of workers and peasants. Back then veterans of
the Christian trade unions played a very influential role in
founding the CDU, and they could easily combine party activism
with trade union membership.
During the Cold War, however, the CDU under
Konrad Adenauer quickly developed into a staunch defender of
free enterprise and champion of national rearmament to support
NATO, and the Adenauer government adopted policies that antagonized
the Social Democratic majority within the German Labor Federation.
By 1953 the government was engaged in a
kind of internal cold war with the trade unions, and Christian
workers experienced mounting pressure to decide whether their
primary loyalty was to their party or their trade union. They
divided right down the middle over that issue, and I have discovered
letters from hundreds of Christian Democratic workers and documentation
from local workers’ organizations that will allow detailed
analysis of what sorts of workers considered class solidarity
most important and what sorts placed primary emphasis on loyalty
to party.
The leadership of today’s CDU and
the widow of Hans Katzer, who led the CDU’s workers’
committees in the late 1950s and 60s, were both very kind about
allowing me free use of papers to which access is restricted,
and I came home with a great deal of material to study. The documentation
is so rich, in fact, that I will need several more months in
the archives to complete the research.
Last year was also a very interesting year
in German politics. When we arrived in Germany, the governing
Social Democratic Party (SPD) was tearing itself to pieces. The
pragmatist chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder (a great admirer of
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair), was engaged in a bitter feud with
the party chairman and national finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine,
who believes that Germany must resist the trend toward globalization
and fight to defend the distinctive accomplishments of the German
welfare state.
Early last fall Lafontaine suddenly resigned
from all his party and government offices in one of the most
childish fits of pique in German history, so that he could go
into seclusion to pour his heart out into memoirs ("My Heart
Beats on the Left") full of spiteful criticism of his own
party’s chancellor.
The chancellor’s poll ratings plummeted,
and everything pointed toward a series of humiliating defeats
in state and local elections that might well be so severe as
to leave the national government unable to complete its elected
term. Then the world suddenly learned that the CDU under Germany’s
former chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was guilty of the worst violations
of campaign finance laws in German history.
A thoroughly disreputable international
arms dealer, who now lives in Canada and is fighting extradition
by German prosecutors, revealed that he had handed over briefcases
full of cash to CDU leaders in an effort to influence arms deals
in the Middle East; a former party treasurer was forced to admit
that he had divided one million marks (about $500,000) from a
Swiss bank account with two cronies in order to compensate them
for their "special services" to the CDU upon their
retirement; and Kohl himself was compelled to admit that he had
accepted two million marks in anonymous, large-scale campaign
contributions that were never reported to the authorities.
Kohl explained that he could not reveal
the names of the donors because he had given them his "word
of honor" to protect their anonymity. Back in January the
scandal climaxed with the revelation that the Hessian state organization
of the CDU possessed ten million marks (!) in secret bank accounts
in Switzerland and Lichtenstein whose origin is completely mysterious.
The former treasurer of the state party
initially declared that the money came from bequests from wealthy
German Jewish emigrants who admired the CDU’s role in combating
anti-Semitism, but he soon confessed that he just made that story
up and now swears that he has no idea where the cash originated.
German campaign finance laws provide for
harsh penalties against parties in such cases but not against
individual party leaders, so the CDU may be fined as much as
fifty million marks for these violations, but it does not now
appear that Kohl or any of his colleagues are heading to prison.
But many party leaders have been compelled to resign their party
offices, and the whole political atmosphere in Germany changed
dramatically with a revival of the political fortunes of the
SPD and Germany’s small liberal party, the Free Democrats.
The Social Democrats have won every state
election since the scandal broke, and Gerhard Schroeder scored
his greatest political victory at the end of July with the passage
of a major tax reform bill that lowers tax rates on large corporations
in particular and eliminates any tax penalty for corporate mergers.
Thus his policy of making the German tax code more closely resemble
that of the United States, so that Germany will become a more
attractive zone of operations for multi-national corporations
in the global economy, has taken a major step forward.
The only clear benefit from the misfortunes
of the CDU has been the creation of an unprecedented opportunity
for a woman to lead a major German political party. Angela Merkel,
the new chair of the CDU, is relatively young, comes from the
formerly Communist eastern provinces, and is resolutely unglamorous
and unfashionable; she seems determined to place substantive
debate over policy matters about questions of style, and to revive
internal democracy within the CDU by giving a greater voice to
rank-and-file party members. If she succeeds in becoming Germany’s
next chancellor, her election would mark a truly dramatic break
with traditional German assumptions about political leadership.
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If any of you need signatures or advice
from the department chair, my office hours (in Carnegie 403)
are Tuesday from 2:15 to 4:45, Wednesday from 10 to 12, and Thursday
from 2:15 to 3:30. You can usually catch me in the office on
Fridays as well, or send me an e-mail at patch@grinnell.edu. |
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