Abstract

1. During a discussion of terrorism last fall, at the peak of the government's manhunt following the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, my godmother in Wuppertal said to me, “I love this government.” I remember this sentence, not only because of its remarkable senselessness, but also because of its aggressive and erotic implications. Is it at all possible to love an abstract and “un-bourgeois” structure like the government? What provokes a person to make such a statement voluntarily? Or are we Germans particularly predestined to love our government because of our long tradition? In 1813, Mikhail Bakunin wrote, "The Germans…are, to the greatest extent possible, a government conscious people, and this awareness of government supercedes all other passions in them, and completely represses in them the instinct for freedom…a real deification of governmental power has developed over the centuries in the hearts of the Germans, a cult which has, by degrees, generated a bureaucratic theory and practice.”