Karl Dietrich Bracher
Karl Dietrich Bracher (13 March 1922 – 19 September 2016) was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two children.
Karl Dietrich Bracher
Bracher emerged as one of the first proponents of the idea of the Federal Republic as a "post-national democracy" or what become known as "constitutional patriotism", a new definition of what it meant to be German. Bracher argued that in the aftermath of the Third Reich, the traditional German nationalism based on a "blood-and-soil" ideology that defined "Deutschtum" (Germanness) in racial terms was too morally compromised by its association with Nazism, and the values promoted by the old Prussian-Imperial "Obrigkeitsstaat" (authoritarian state) were not suitable for a democratic society, thus requiring something new. Instead, Bracher called for a new German nationalism that defined itself in terms of its commitment to democracy and made upholding the humanist values of the 1949 Basic Law (the constitution) the centerpiece of what it meant to be German. Bracher argued contra the traditional "national patriotism" with loyalty to the nation that with "constitutional patriotism" the primary loyalty of Germans was to be towards the Basic Law and its values, creating a new sense of German national identity based upon a sense of loyalty to the Basic Law that would to apply to all regardless of sex, religion, skin color or ethnicity. Many supporters of "national patriotism" like the historian Hagen Schulze argued Bracher's "constitutional patriotism" was too dry and abstract, maintaining that Germans needed a stronger glue than loyalty to the Basic Law to have a sustainable sense of national identity, thus requiring loyalty to the nation. In the 1970s-80s, Bracher published a series of essays calling for "constitutional patriotism" and a "post-national democracy" that redefined "Deutschtum" in terms of republican belonging to a democratic state and rejected the old definitions of the nation-state. Such was the success of Bracher's efforts that many younger Germans starting in the 1980s embraced his idea of "constitutional patriotism" as a way of affirming one's pride in being German. In 1989-1990, Bracher welcomed the fall of the East German dictatorship and German reunification. Bracher did not feel the East German SED dictatorship was morally equivalent to the Nazi regime, but he argued that the memory of how awful the Communist regime in East Germany should be preserved to prevent any return to Communism.