Nolte, Paul

Affluent society is becoming poorer and the welfare state too expensive. The recommended solution for this dilemma: a thorough reform based on old values and virtues by way of personal responsibility and achievement. The university professor Paul Nolte is becoming the mouthpiece of the German middle class with its fear of social decline.

Twenty years ago, at the time of the "Historikerstreit" (historians' dispute) regarding the incomparable, unique nature of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, the then 23-year-old up-and-coming young historian Paul Nolte suddenly came to realize that history essentially always remains contemporary history, a point of dispute and the seed of discontent in the intellectual and political debate of the day. Together with his academic teacher, social historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas he challenged the Berlin historian and professor Ernst Nolte, who sought to explain Hitlerism with the fear of world-revolutionary communism. "My namesake, unfortunately": in those days the young Nolte liked to put things straight with these words.

Born in 1963, Paul Nolte today holds a chair himself at the Berlin Free University in 'Recent history with the main emphasis on contemporary history' – and in the meantime, just like his namesake Ernst Nolte at that time, has become the focal point in the formation of public opinion. Well-known politicians like to be seen with him and mentioned in the same breath. This is because Professor Nolte is a knowledgeable writer and lecturer about values, or – to be more precise – applied virtues, which can hold society together at its essence. As a critic of reality the scholar Paul Nolte became well-known among millions of television viewers for his professional interest in 'television for the underclass' and was quoted on it on an evening TV show.

In Nolte's book Generation Reform (i.e. Generation Reform) the term 'television for the underclass' is intended to describe a 'new underclass' characterized not by a low level of income, but by its intellectual simplicity and lack of education. At the same time the term 'underclass' in present-day Germany (with its five million job seekers) is unmistakably aligned with the unemployed, and the connection with television is evidently clear. According to representative studies unemployed people in Germany watch five hours of television a day, one and a half hours more than the population on average.

"Thoughtful neglect"

The term 'television for the underclass', which has become a catchword in a short space of time, is a classic example of Nolte's method of argumentation and the effect he has. It comes from the field of sociology and has become known to the general public thanks to the book Generation Reform. The term is anything but empty in meaning; it is, on the contrary, quite realistic, as the viewing figures show. And at the same time it is emotionally charged. Nolte expresses his outrage about the "thoughtful neglect" by a State that palms the welfare recipients off with monthly money transfers, but otherwise lets them vegetate in front of the television. On the other hand Nolte wants to shake those affected out of their apathy. "Yes, everybody should at least try to take their situation into their own hands and help themselves", he says.

"More self-responsibility of the individual"

Whoever takes such an informative and circumspect approach expresses just what the German middle class feels with its pressing fear of what Nolte calls the social "downward spiral". The subheading of Generation Reform tells the whole story – Jenseits der blockierten Republik (i.e. Beyond the Blocked Republic). According to the book the over-regulated welfare state ties up the free interplay of forces that had once created the German economic miracle. Nolte says: "The era of automatic welfare expansion has been over for approximately thirty years and we have to come up with something else. But this has been missed. Instead people have fooled themselves and held forth about the end of the industrial age. The welfare state must rely more on the self-responsibility of the individual". Or, as the thesis of his most recent best-seller puts it: "Welfare and risk belong to each other more than ever – this is the characteristic feature of the risky modern age".

In saying as much, Nolte by no means represents a classical liberal individualism, or – as modern language would have it – the ideal of the dog-eat-dog society. Rather he sends out a warning: "Efforts towards reform without a common identity and background of values can neither be conveyed in words nor translated into action. Without a clear awareness of what we wish to achieve as a nation we continue to be thrown back onto a technocracy of reform". Nolte has no qualms about speaking of "modern patriotism" rather than of a technocratic "model of Germany": "Modern patriotism could at the same time act as a protection against being at the mercy of an exaggerated primacy of the economy in the reforms". In plain English, the national, historically grown social order is our resistance potential against a supposedly inescapable globalisation of the economy and society.

Nolte's opinion is not that of one single individual; rather it represents the mood within his generation, the people who are now in their mid-forties. Economic journalist Gabor Steingart, author of the best-seller Deutschland – Abstieg eines Superstars (i.e. Germany – Fall of a Superstar), for example, also stressed the same opinion in an interview with Nolte: "A third of our society generates the affluence that the other two-thirds consume. It is now a matter of remobilizing this society that has reached a standstill, encouraging it and transforming its people into producers, not only consumers of prosperity". Steingart, too, wants to generate a sense of awakening and overcome the sense of extreme anxiety, not least the sense of extreme anxiety towards globalisation.

Professionally competent and present in the media

Professors not only at German universities love to differentiate between presence in the media and the professional competence of those colleagues of theirs who enjoy public appeal. In the case of Nolte, however, there is no explosive charge. From his first book entitled Staatsbildung und Gesellschaftsreform (i.e. Nation Building and Social Reform) to his postdoctoral thesis (relating to his qualification as a university lecturer), Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft (i.e. Order in German Society), Nolte – following all the rules of academic art – has tackled the attempts made so far concerning the intellectual and practical construction of good co-existence. Prepared by this historical knowledge, he feels authorized and obliged to give up-to-date advice for the present time. Nolte admits, self-critically, that he has inherited "a certain regard for morals" from his father, a Protestant clergyman, and also "a tendency towards missionary work".

Yet it may be looked at in less of a personal way and one needs only call to mind the founding of modern German historical science by Barthold Georg Niebuhr at Berlin University at the beginning of the 19th century. The historian Niebuhr lectured to the city's educated citizens, the public and non-specialized students on legislation in the field of agriculture and expropriations in Roman antiquity with respect to the contemporary French Revolution, the protagonists of which, in Niebuhr's opinion, wrongfully referred to the ancient precedent. History in this sense is contemporary history from the beginning, the historian a front man in political discourse. Time will tell, however, how long Nolte is able to keep up this role.

Major works by Paul Nolte: Riskante Moderne. Die Deutschen und der neue Kapitalismus (i.e. The Risky Modern Age. The Germans and New Capitalism), Munich 2006 (C.H. Beck), 313 pages Generation Reform. Jenseits der blockierten Republik (i.e. Generation Reform. Beyond the Blocked Republic), Munich 2004 (C.H. Beck), 256 pages Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft. Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (i.e. Order in German Society. Self-Draft and Self-Description in the 20th Century), Munich 2000 (C.H. Beck), 520 pages