From national identity to national interest

the rise (and fall) of Germany's new right

Jan-Werner Müller

pp. 185-205

in: German ideologies since 1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

Much has been written about the so-called New Right in Germany in recent years. Its rise in the early 1990s caused alarm both within the country and abroad, particularly in the United States, where, arguably, alarmism catered well to a local audience.¹ Some observers have gone so far as to see it as a 'structural feature" of the transition to a unified Germany, while others have drawn a suggestive parallel with post-Bismarckian cultural despair and the rise of nationalism after unification in 1871.²