The events of October and November, 1989 forced a fundamental rethinking of postwar German cultural history and initiated major philosophical, political, sociological, and literary debates which are still continuing. What happened in Europe in the fall of 1989 was not just political and was certainly not confined to the eastern half of what used to be the divided continent; it was the total breakdown of a linguistic and ideological system at once bipolar and regressive which had governed European affairs since the end of World War Two. If many of Germany's writers and intellectuals reacted to German reunification as if they had completely lost all sense of proportion and bearing, it is because to a large extent they had. For over forty years, they had been living in an infinite bipolar regression, in a language and ideology machine which seemed to function in perpetual motion. The machine may have been inhuman and cruel, but it was one's own. It was what one knew. There is little doubt that Germany and the world will be feeling the shock waves from this collapse for some time to come.

At the center of “the German Question” as it emerged once again in the fall of 1989 were two fundamental problems: the problem of German nationhood on the one hand, and the problem of socialism on the other. Within the German context these two questions were interconnected because of Germany's troubled twentieth-century history.