Friedrich August von Hayek, Is There a German Nation?

Hayek’s 1945 review of Edmond Vermeil’s Germany’s Three Reichs, reprinted with editorial notes in 2013, turns an assessment of German history into an argument about national identity and postwar political reconstruction. Its central question is how Germany’s admirable cultural and humanist traditions could coexist with, and contribute to the historical setting of, Nazi aggression. Hayek rejects both the attribution of an identical criminal character to all Germans and the comforting belief that atrocities must have been exaggerated or confined to an insignificant minority. Neither response can explain the coexistence of cultural achievement and political catastrophe.

Any true picture of that people must begin by the realisation that extreme opposites form part of it.

This methodological claim governs his praise of Vermeil. A convincing account must preserve contradictions rather than manufacture consistency by suppressing inconvenient evidence. Hayek commends the French historian’s learning, range, sympathy, and willingness to acknowledge what is great in German life. Such sympathy does not soften the indictment of Nazism: it makes the historical explanation more disturbing, because the catastrophe emerged from a society containing genuine achievements and humane possibilities.

The review first considers Vermeil’s historical survey, then identifies its explanatory culmination, and finally develops Hayek’s own implications for Germany’s future. Vermeil’s compressed treatment encompasses the medieval towns, Bismarckian economic development, intellectual history, and religious change. Hayek particularly notices the substitution of newly wealthy groups without established traditions for a missing bourgeoisie, and the redirection of disappointed religious energies toward science, culture, and the imperial nation. These are strands in an explanation of German political development, not a single deterministic sequence. The survey’s abundance can make it difficult to read, but Hayek treats that difficulty as potentially faithful to its subject.

Yet unsatisfactory as this may seem at first, it may yet be the truest picture that can be given where perhaps there is no true whole.

The apparent incompleteness of Vermeil’s historical mosaic thus anticipates the review’s central conceptual move: the unity called “Germany” may itself be problematic. Hayek distinguishes the diversity of German life from Germany’s conduct as an organised national power. Vermeil’s recognition of a surviving humanist Germany, and of a majority that dislikes war yet accepts and wages it, does not cancel his account of aggression. Rather, these observations sharpen the question of how heterogeneous individuals and traditions become participants in an intolerable political organisation.

Hayek regards Vermeil’s concluding “Psychological Sketch and Future Perspectives” as especially valuable, noting its treatment of regional differences and its comparison between Germany and Russia. He also singles out the replacement of the familiar opposition between civilisation and culture with an opposition between civilisation and policy. The conceptual shift places political orientation, rather than cultural accomplishment alone, at the centre of the problem. His strongest interpretive emphasis falls on Vermeil’s contention that Germany has never achieved, and may never achieve, the condition of a true national state.

Hayek develops that contention through a contrast between inherited and constructed national identity. In his account, an Englishman, Frenchman, or American seeking to express national belonging can imitate recognisable characteristics of fellow citizens. The German instead confronts a discrepancy between strong regional identities and an uncertain common model.

Not so the German: He invents a theory of what the German ought to be like and tries to live up (or down) to it—however different this may make him from his fellows.

Bavarian, Prussian, and Swabian identities supply concrete patterns of belonging that a general German identity lacks. The spread of formerly Prussian characteristics over the preceding seventy years does not, for Hayek, establish that they became universally admired. Their influence reflects a striving for shared national character. He connects that striving to the willingness of some Germans who rejected Hitler’s programme nevertheless to perceive something beneficial in the Nazi movement. The dangerous mechanism is the attraction of unity itself, which can make the content of the unifying ideal secondary.

It is this lack of common features which explains why there is scarcely a virtue which some German has not claimed as a national characteristic, and hardly a vice which they could not be made to embrace if it seemed to give them at last something in common.

The review therefore shifts from asking what fixed traits define Germans to asking what their desire for a common definition can induce them to accept. Hayek fears that Hitler may actually have created a unified German nation, but he does not regard that achievement as irreversible. His proposal seeks to weaken the political demand for centralised unity without turning reunification into a forbidden object of longing. An imposed permanent partition, he argues, would probably renew the very craving it was intended to frustrate.

The alternative is a conditional route toward decentralisation and European integration. A central German government would remain under Allied control for a prolonged period, while extensive regional autonomy would become the path to independence. Individual regions could enter the Western community as they established stable representative institutions. Without a formal prohibition on reunion, they might eventually accept a loose federal connection. Hayek closes by making this possibility dependent on Western Europe’s own political framework. The review’s lasting relevance lies in that linkage: national identity is neither simply a cultural inheritance nor an immutable collective character; its political consequences depend partly on the institutions and wider community through which belonging can be realised.