In his controversial speech on receipt of the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels in 1998 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, writer and intellectual Martin Walser (1927–) complained bitterly that the institutionalisation and apparent instrumentalisation, that is, the exploitation for political ends, of the Holocaust in the Federal Republic had made it impossible for Germans to see themselves, and to be seen from outside, as “ein normales Volk, eine gewöhnliche Gesellschaft.” Almost ten years after unification — which repaired the most tangible consequence of German enthusiasm for Nazism, that is, the division of the country — the nation still could not truly grow together, he suggested, because it lacked the adhesive of patriotic feeling.

Walser's version of normality rests upon an emotional attachment to a sense of what it means to be German that, ultimately, may have its roots in ethnicity — although, for Walser, as for many of the thinkers associated with the “New Right,” the Jewish contribution to German life is accorded special respect in a display of compensatory inclusiveness and political point-scoring. In fact, the author embodies the positions taken by conservatives (and large parts of the population) throughout the 1990s on immigration, naturalisation of foreigners permanently resident in Germany, and debates in the late 1990s on the existence of a “German” dominant culture, or Leitkultur, and on multiculturalism. A “normal” Germany, accordingly, is to look to the better parts of its past to nourish a harmonious community on the basis of cultural and ethnic homogeneity.