Abstract
In the summer and autumn of 1992 the Federal Republic of Germany was the site of what commentators called an ‘overdue debate’ fomented by Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker’s critique of the German Parteienstaat, or party-state, that appeared first in Die Zeit and then in expanded form in a volume published by the president’s interviewers. German journalists, publicists and academics produced a wealth of supportive and critical commentary in countless outlets, leading one of the debate’s most (over-) used terms, which was just vague and exotic enough to be used with less care than might be desired, ‘Politikverdrossenheit’ (roughly, vexation with politics), to become Germany’s ‘word of the year’ in 1992. Weizsäcker’s interviewers wrote that the federal president may have provided the immediate push for this debate to unfold in 1992, but ‘its causes lie in genuinely flawed developments of German democracy that were evident long before German unification, that have taken on sharp crisis proportions during the difficult process of integrating two different societies’.1
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Notes and References
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Kvistad, G.O. (1999). Parteienverdrossenheit? Whither the German Party-State in the 1990s. In: Merkl, P.H. (eds) The Federal Republic of Germany at Fifty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27488-8_14
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