German Joys

America -- A Nation of Mongrels?

I've been a bit busy lately, but I thought I would post something quick about an interview published in Die Zeit with Erardo Rautenberg, Attorney General for the German state of Brandenburg (sorry, no link).  During the interview, part of a recent package of articles about far-right forces in Germany, Rautenberg quotes a handout prepared by the NPD to school party operatives on how to respond to questions about the party's opposition to mixed marriages in Germany:

"The logical country of destination for such mongrels (Mischlinge) would be the USA, where there has never been a true folk community or national culture, but rather a thoroughly racialized (durchrasste[!]) nation built only by the will of the state and of individuals, a society of rootless, autonomous individuals, where the ethno-culturally castrated individual grows like a weed, without identity and homeland."

Rautenberg says passages like this clearly show the influence of Nazi racial ideology, and therefore justify banning the NPD.  To see whether he was right about this, I turned to my well-thumbed copy of Mein Kampf (translated by Ralph Mannheim in 1943), and found this, on page 286:

"North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with aborigines on a large scale.  By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture.  The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood."

I'll have more to say about this later, when I get a bit more free time.  Since I don't have time to put it all in context, let me issue a disclaimer to make sure I don't get put on any government watch lists: This is all horribly stupid, delusional nonsense!

Paul Hockenos Weighs In Again

American journalist Paul Hockenos weighs in on the "wrenching, introspective" public debate in Germany on the legacy of '68, as it's called here. I'll resist the urge to quote the entire piece, but here's the heart of his argument:

Those who went the way of the revolutionary left were far smaller in number. Some formed their own sectarian Marxist-Leninist parties (the K-Gruppen), while even fewer (among them Joschka Fischer) took the path of anarcho-syndicalism. Just a handful - a tiny minority of a tiny minority - threw in their lot with armed struggle, the most prominent of those urban guerrillas being the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction / RAF).

It is little wonder that commentators like [Goetz] Aly, Gerd Koenen, Stefan Aust, and Wolfgang Kraushaar come to negative and cynical conclusions about the student revolt when they focus so exclusively on the 68ers' most radical bi-products [sic] like the K-Gruppen and the RAF. (It is also not surprising that all these figures had themselves been active members in the most sectarian of the leftist groups.) True, these small groupings had their roots in the student movement and the new left - but, in contrast to the reformists, they were the ones that failed to learn from the movement's dogmatism of attitude and crudity of judgments: evident in its ultra-leftism, its illusions about the working class, its skewed analysis of the Federal Republic as a proto-fascist state, its macho male ethic, and its insensitivity (to put it no higher) to Jewish issues.

...

The current debate in Germany is further disabled by the fact that it completely misses the post-1968 grassroots campaigns that had the greatest impact on the republic: the Bürgerinitiativen that during the 1970s linked up to become the powerful "new social movements": the women's, the environmental, the anti-nuclear energy, and the peace movement. These mass movements, the biggest Germany had ever seen, mobilised millions of ordinary Germans: young and old, urban and rural, men and women - in stark contrast to the middle-class, university-based '68ers and the radical splinter groups of the '70s.

The citizen's initiatives and the new social movements introduced the republic to grassroots activism, anti-authoritarianism as practical experience, participatory democracy, and the complexity of gender relations....

It is astounding how little present this chapter of the Federal Republic is today in Germany's public discourse and memory. While there was extraordinary - and, for me, inexplicable - media hype around the thirtieth anniversary of the "German autumn" (the peak of RAF terror) in 2007, there was barely a word said about 1977 as the year that tens of thousands came together at Kalkar along the Lower Rhein and other nuclear sites to protest against atomic power.

Why are the new social movements so marginalised in Germany's discourses today?

An excellent question, that!  Here's my answer, in three parts:

• Baader, Meinhof, & co. are brands, just like Che Guevara.  They're buy-triggers, and it's the bottom line that counts.
• Editors of German broadsheets form an exclusive, insular clique dominated by middle-class former '68ers.  They all went to university, and most at least flirted with thinking about supporting the RAF.  The mass movements, as Hockenos points out, were broad-based organizations featuring lots of people (the non-university educated, the rural) whose opinions and experiences are, to judge by what I read, unknown and completely irrelevant to editors of upscale German newspapers.
• The RAF story features exciting stuff: Safe houses! French intellectuals!  Shootouts!  Hostage-taking!  Hard to find high points like that in the patient, grass-roots organizing of large-scale protest and direct-democracy movements.

This is not to excuse the German media, of course. It's a gross disservice to public discourse and to Germany's image for the media landscape to be so dominated by the dull, whiny has-beens of the RAF.

A Spare Head with A Kinder Facial Expression

Don't you wish you had one?  The new Ukrainian Adolf Hitler doll does, according to the Daily Mail [h/t Paul R.]:

An action-man style doll of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler has gone on sale in the Ukraine, with saleswomen comparing the doll to Barbie.

Supermarkets in the capital Kiev are stocking the 40 centimetre high figure of the fuhrer, complete with jackboots, leather trench-coat and swastika armband.

The £100 figure has a spare head "with a kind expression on it," glasses and several changes of clothes.

A few comments:

• First, one-hundred bleedin' pounds?  Isn't this probably 5 times the monthly salary in the Ukraine?
• This reminds me of an passage in Hans Massaquoi's Destined to Witness, an account of his childhood growing up half-black in Nazi Germany.  Turns out one that the main hobby of young boys growing up in the Third Reich was meeting after school to trade dolls of the Nazi Party leadership (literally, "I'll trade you two Goebbels for a Himmler").  The kid who collected the entire set got all the respect.  Massaquoi relates that he was just as passionate a doll-trader as all of his buddies.
• Let me register my irritation at the lazy gits at the Daily Mail, who don't even tell you the name the company that makes the doll.  I thought they taught you to answer the questions "who, what, where, when and why" in Journalism 101.  Why would they omit this basic information?  Are they afraid that thousands of Daily Mail readers will suddenly...oh, wait, I get it.

QED

Taken during an Olympics protest in the U.S., pic found here:

Die Fraunhofer-Vergangenheitsbewältigungsmaschine

One of the things that had me scratching my head when I read Stasiland was the news that the agency tasked with re-assembling millions of documents shredded by the East German secret police had hired a bunch of people to sit there and try to do this by hand.  Because piecing together shredded documents is pretty hard, the result was a projected finish date for this project of somewhere around the year 2619. 

I wondered when it might dawn on the German government that perhaps the task of sorting thousands of tiny bits of paper according to complex criteria could be done more efficiently by one of those bright, shiny objects sitting around on office workers' desks.  You know, those magic, blinking boxes that somehow perform complex calculations automatically!

Dawn has finally broken, according to this fascinating piece in Wired.  The geniuses of the Fraunhofer institute, who brought us the unfathomable blessing of the .mp3, are on the case -- with big sacks of government money:

The data for the 400-bag pilot project is stored on 22 terabytes worth of hard drives, but the system is designed to scale. If work on all 16,000 bags is approved, there may be hundreds of scanners and processors running in parallel by 2010. (Right now they're analyzing actual documents, but still mostly vetting and refining the system.) Then, once assembly is complete, archivists and historians will probably spend a decade sorting and organizing. "People who took the time to rip things up that small had a reason," Nickolay says. "This isn't about revenge but about understanding our history." And not just Germany's — Nickolay has been approached by foreign officials from Poland and Chile with an interest in reconstructing the files damaged or destroyed by their own repressive regimes.

This kind of understanding isn't cheap. The German parliament has given Fraunhofer almost $9 million to scan the first 400 bags. If the system works, expanding up the operation to finish the job will cost an estimated $30 million. Most of the initial cost is research and development, so the full reconstruction would mainly involve more scanners and personnel to feed the paper in.

Wouldn't it be cool if this ambitious project spins off a bunch of interesting new applications and inventions? It would be like the space program!  But with a uniquely German twist: the mammoth technological challenge involves looking backwards, to thoroughly document all the horrible things Germans did to each other and to other people.*

* For the record, let it be said Germans have largely stopped doing horrible things to each other and to other people.  Good for them!

I'm So Bored with the R.A.F.*

Thanks to friend SK, I was altered to this essay by Paul Hockenos (an American?) on the 30th anniversary of the German Autumn.  It's pretty rare to find well-informed English-language discussions of the RAF, but here it is. Shorter Paul Hockenos: the RAF story discredits large portions of the German body politic, and is probably best forgotten.  First up, the state and the 1970s left:

The state’s overreaction and heavy-handed response brought out its worst. Rather than reach out to its radical critics, it criminalized them and treated the entire left as terrorist collaborators, which fueled suspicion, even among non-leftists, that the state had indeed murdered the RAF prisoners.

As for West German leftists, in retrospect their failure to distance themselves from the ultra-left RAF is embarrassing, as is their paranoia about a proto-fascist Federal Republic. The greater left waited far too long to criticize the underground, whose activities produced no progressive social change, but justified the state’s creation of an extensive high-tech security apparatus to spy upon, infiltrate, and harass left-of-center activists.

Next up, conservatives:

Although the 1967–1970 student revolt and its successors in the new social movements failed to alter the political and economic foundations of the Federal Republic, they permanently transformed attitudes toward gender relations, morality, sexual orientation, citizenship, work, and religion. Germany today is indebted to these movements for helping facilitate its liberal metamorphosis and making it a more open, worldly, and democratic place. Yet this debt is often overlooked. Conservatives, hoping to take back lost ground, gladly see the debt diminished in the country’s collective consciousness.

Bush Wades into Historical Debate; Drowns

What's the most dispiriting thing about this story:

(1)  The fact that President Bush was apparently ignorant of the historical debate about whether the Allies should have bombed the rail lines leading to Auschwitz?

(2)  That he apparently didn't bother to read up on it or even have someone explain the gist of it to him before his second visit to the world's most famous Holocaust memorial -- necessitating a hurried confabulation with aides during the visit itself concerning what he should say?

or

(3)  That, according to the English-to-Hebrew-to-English report of Bush's off-the-cuff remarks during a tour of the memorial, Bush said the Allies should have bombed 'Auschwitz' itself, instead of bombing the train lines leading to it?

On a positive note:

Was the Stasi Involved in RAF Murders?

The Wall Street Journal has raised a few eyebrows with this piece, in which they suggest that the Stasi had a role in the Herrhausen and Rohwedder assassinations, which are usually attributed to the RAF:

According to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the murders of Mr. Herrhausen and others attributed to the Red Army Faction bear striking resemblance to methods and tactics pioneered by a special unit of the Stasi. The unit reported to Stasi boss Erich Mielke and actively sought in the waning years of the communist regime to imitate the Red Army Faction to mask their own attacks against prominent people in Western Germany and destabilize the country.

"The investigation has intensified in recent months," said Frank Wallenta, a spokesman for the Federal Prosecutor. "And we are investigating everything, including leads to the Stasi."

If those leads turn out to be true, it would mean not only rewriting some of the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War, but would likely accelerate a broader soul-searching now under way in Germany about the communist past.

In building a reunified country, many Germans have ignored discussion of the brutal realities of its former communist half. When the former East Germany is discussed, it's often with nostalgia or empathy for brothers hostage to Soviet influence.

I'm sure the last paragraph will raise a hackle or two, but overall, it's an interesting piece. A sampling of the German reaction can be found here (G).  The article raises as many questions as it answers, though, including the following:

1.  Did an official give the Wall Street Journal reporter access to still-confidential Stasi files?

2.  If so, why did they pick a WSJ reporter?

a.  Because he asked?*

b.  Because the investigators wanted to reach an international audience? 

c.  Because the officials thought they could rely on the staunchly anti-Communist WSJ to handle the story in a way they would find appropriate? (Note that the WSJ's right-wing editorial page is generally thought to have little influence on its reporting, which is often critical.  Note also, however, that the paper was recently bought by Rupert Murdoch).

3.   What exactly is the German prosecutors' theory?

a.  Stasi agents themselves, not RAF members committed these crimes? (DNA evidence puts Wolfgang Grams at the scene of several RAF actions in the late 1980s and early 1990s);

b.  The RAF members who committed the crimes were actually Stasi agents; or

c.  The Stasi provided more intensive weapons and training assistance to the RAF members than was previously thought?

I'd be interested in your thoughts. [h/t Bro.]

* Why has an foreign journalist seemingly been the first to publicize this angle?

"Every German is a Potential Source of Trouble"

And now, a little detour into German history, courtesy of some kind readers.  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is now displaying a photo album taken near the Auschwitz death camp by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker.  You can page through the album, which was given by an anonymous donor, here, to see Nazis at play and rest. In this picture, officers and Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) dance down a bridge in Solahutte, an SS retreat outside of Auschwitz [h/t Ed Philp]:

After the war, Höcker (in the center) became a bank clerk in Lubbecke. The International Herald Tribune's Europe correspondent wrote about the photos for the New York Times here,  and a gigantic thread of 230+ comments about his piece can be found on the International Herald Tribune's website.  Nothing too blindingly original, but proof of how intensely this subject still grips people.

And now, to a 1946 propaganda film intended for U.S. soldiers stationed in post-war Germany. According to online sources, the movie was directed by Frank Capra ("It's a Wonderful Life") and written by Theodore Geisel, none other than Dr. Seuss. Enjoy!

Why all the warnings against being taken in by the German landscape, the music, and the pretty girls? A couple of reasons. First, Americans of German descent are the U.S.'s largest ethnic group, so surely some of the troops felt certain ancestral stirrings of the blood, so to speak. 

Second, many U.S. troops found ordinary Germans sympathetic. Not so the French: U.S. troops stationed in post-war France complained about the arrogance, laziness and poor hygiene of the French. One propaganda booklet given to U.S. soldiers said the French stank because all their soap had been stolen by the Germans. The Germans, on the other hand, struck many American soldiers the way they strike me: well-mannered, hard-working, and well-groomed. Once all the nasty, nutty naziness was gone, many American soldiers wondered exactly why we had gone to war against such nice people. This film reminds them. [h/t James R.]

Spineless Conformity -- Now With a Generous Pension.

Thousands of people were spied upon, imprisoned, and otherwise harassed by the East German dictatorship.

Yet, as Evelyn Finger (G) recently reported in Die Zeit, their demands for compensation in the unified Germany earn grudging and miserly responses.  Dissidents who were locked up in East Germany's notorious prisons (such as Bautzen I and II or Hohenschoenhausen) got only 50% of the compensation payments that the innocently imprisoned in West Germany got.*  The dissidents had to jump through bureaucratic hurdles to get even these meager payments, and sometimes faced West German officials who told them, face to face, things like, "well, people didn't exactly get sent to prison for nothing in East Germany."  In many cases, people whose lives were transformed or broken by long terms of imprisonment under brutal conditions saw their claims for compensation reduced or denied outright.

Meanwhile, the loyal apparatchiks who ran the East German state are doing well. As Anna Funder reported in her book Stasiland, many of the loathsome secret service agents were able to transform their connections and security expertise into lucrative post-unification jobs. Loyal servants of the East German state earned pension rights, of course, and have filed countless lawsuits in German courts to make sure they receive every penny they're entitled to under the complex laws designed to integrate the former East into Unified Germany.  In everyday life, they strive to keep their former official position a secret.  However, when it comes to official state-employee pension claims (which are objects of quasi-religious veneration in Germany), they will hire damn good attorneys and fight all the way to the Federal Constitutional Court.  Margot Honecker, the "People's Education Minister" under the dictatorship of her husband, Erich Honecker, recently won a 45,000 Euro back payment after prevailing on a pension claim.

Finger's explanation for the West's relative indifference to those who defied the system is damning:

Since East German prisoners were sentenced according to valid laws -- the injustice that was then considered justice -- they had certainly broken some law.  That is the logic of the West German official bureacracy.  The legal order that was in effect then (even if it was a dictatorship) cannot be described as a perversion of the legal order.  Otherwise, it might occur to someone to question the current legal order.

This may sound corny, but I will own the sincerity: this article made my blood boil.  It made me want to put on an armband and join a protest march.  Think of it: simpering conformist apparatchicks --sniveling worms, spineless desk-criminals -- live on comfortable pensions because they displayed enough cold, inhuman good sense to blindly obey.  Meanwhile, the misfits, the dissidents, the outsiders, those everyday heroes who took a chance, spoke their mind, obeyed their conscience -- they must cope with the damage left behind by imprisonment, harassment, and exclusion on their own.  This fact, if true, irritates my sense of justice like a malfunctioning belt-sander.

Now, I know my way around the German media to some extent, but I might be missing something here. Can I rely on Evelyn Finger? Does he/she** have some hidden ideological axe to grind that might cause him/her to distort the facts? Is the situation really this bad?  Please let me know in comments, before I start designing armbands and writing indignant letters to politicians.

---

* Wonkish note: One problem with many European criminal-justice systems is the relatively long stretches people spend in jail awaiting trial.  However, they are compensated for this time, assuming they're later provent innocent.

** For the Anglophiles: Evelyn is an English name that can be given to women or (much more rarely) men. It's pronounced "EEV-len" in British English, and "Ev-A-len" in American.

Bavaria will Rise Again!

Now, I tend to like most of the Bavarians I meet, but there's no denying Bavaria is a special place.

Here's an example. In 1949, when the German post-war constitution (called the Grundgesetz or Basic Law) came into force, the Bavarian state parliament voted against it by 101 to 64. The Chairman of the Bavarian Party then wrote an article called "The Freedom Struggle is Beginning" in the newspaper Die Welt, in which he announced: "The act of rape emanating from [the German capital of] Bonn is, for us, not a Basic Law but rather a Rubbish Law [Grundgesetz / Schundgesetz]. This sorry effort begins the socialization, centralization, and Russification of the German states..."

Funder on the Impossibility of Das Leben der Anderen

Anna Funder, author of the excellent Stasiland (which I reviewed here), writes in The Guardian that despite Das Leben der Anderen's appeal as a movie, the assumption it's based on -- that a Stasi spy might take pity on the subjects of his surveillance and shield them from persecution -- just could not have happened:

The ex-Stasi are vociferous in their claims of being "victims of democracy". But the truth is that, by and large, they are doing much better in the new Germany than the people they oppressed. They have the educations and solid work histories they denied their victims. Many of them were snapped up by security firms and private detective agencies eager for their considerable expertise, or they went into business, skilled as they are - to perhaps an unholy degree - in "managing" people. Surprisingly often, they sold property and insurance, occupations unknown in the Soviet bloc. (I think they had a head start here - after all, they were schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their better judgment.)

[Dr. Hubertus] Knabe [director of the Hohenschoenhausen memorial (G)] is no doubt correct about the internal surveillance of the Stasi making it physically impossible for a Stasi man to try to save people. But in my experience, the more frightening thing is that they didn't want to. The institutional coercion made these men into true believers; it shrank their consciences and heightened their tolerance for injustice and cruelty "for the cause".

Von Donnersmarck spent four years researching the film, and knows as well as anyone that there is no case of a Stasi man trying to save victims. He has said: "I didn't want to tell a true story as much as explore how someone might have behaved. The film is more of a basic expression of belief in humanity than an account of what actually happened." The terrible truth is that the Stasi provide no material for a "basic expression of belief in humanity". For expressions of conscience and courage, one would need to look to the resisters.

German Murder Rates, 1300-Present

Here's something I came across in a recent article in the British Journal of Criminology: a graph showing murder rates in Germany from the medieval times to the present:

It's contained in an article on European murder rates by Manuel Eisner in the British Journal of Criminology.

Obviously, the graph shows only ordinary civilian murder rates. Wars and mass extermination programs are excluded. The developments in Germany mirror those in other European states. The medieval era, in addition to being smelly, was extremely violent and dangerous; in most places, the murder rate was between 20 and 100 per 100,000. Now, in all European societies, it's declined to around 1. Hooray for modernity!

But why has Europe become so much safer? Eisner discusses Norbert Elias' idea of the civilizing process, of course, but there are other approaches. Eisner suggests a multi-factor approach which takes into account the declining importance of concepts of honor, the emergence of an "inward" and "disengaged" conception of human identity that fosters self-reflexion and rational discourse, and moral individualism and the decline of religiously-based "sacred obligations" that need defending by lethal means. It's all very interesting, at least to me.

Why Did Germany Abolish the Death Penalty?

It's common knowledge in Germany that the inclusion of Article 102 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), which abolishes the death penalty, was motivated by disgust at the excessive use of the death penalty in Germany by the National Socialist regime. During the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, over 30,000 death sentences were handed down -- in addition to the mass extermination directed at 'undesirable' populations. Dozens of Germans have recited to me the some version of the standard sound-bite concerning the Parliamentary Council's 1949 decision to call for the abolition of the death penalty in the Basic Law: "As the extent of Nazi atrocities and abuse of the death penalty became clear, everyone was horrified, and the founders of the Federal Republic of Germany decided the State could never again be allowed the power to kill."

In June of 2005, however, American journalist Charles Lane, who covers the U.S. Supreme Court for the Washington Post, set off a minor earthquake by writing a piece called "The Paradoxes of a Death Penalty Stance." The piece began: "In the debate between Europe and the United States over the death penalty, no country is more vocal than Germany. German media regularly decry executions in Texas." Then, drawing on a Richard J. Evans' monumental book Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1978, noted that the original motion to include what later became Article 102 in the Basic Law was tabled by Hans-Christoph Seebohm, a delegate from a right-wing party whose main intention was not to abolish the death penalty for ordinary killers, but to try to hinder the execution of Nazi war criminals by the Allied powers still controlling Germany at that time: "...Seebohm[] surprised everyone by proposing to get rid of the death penalty. Seebohm, who ran various industrial enterprises under the Nazis, led the tiny, far-right German Party -- which also advocated using 'German Reich' instead of 'Federal Republic.'" Lane continues:

Both Social Democrats and Christian Democrats initially rejected the Seebohm initiative but gradually began to see its advantages. To the Social Democrats, it offered right-wing political cover for an idea they [supported but] dared not pursue on their own. And for more than half of the Christian Democrat delegates, Evans reports, the political advantages of trying to shield Nazi war criminals trumped their belief in the death penalty for ordinary murder cases. Social Democratic arguments about turning the page on Nazism, belatedly made, were not decisive. Rather, writes Evans, "only the hope of being able to save Nazi criminals from the gallows . . . persuaded conservative deputies from the German Party and the Christian Democrats to cast their votes in favor of abolition in sufficient numbers to secure its anchorage in the Basic Law. Had it merely been the question of common homicide that was at issue, the vote would never have been passed."

The piece also appeared in German, and drew rather defensive responses from some German readers (G) of the Tagesspiegel newspaper. One of them started her letter: "There's no doubt that Charles Lane, as an American faithful to the system, is arguing for the death penalty. The fact that the Germans are against it is an annoyance to him,"  No proof is provided for either of these assertions, and I have been unable to find anything in the public record on whether Charles Lane personally supports the death penalty. (Most Washington journalists are left-of-center in American terms, and therefore likely to privately opposed the death penalty. Generally, they keep their views on controversial public issues to themselves as long as they are working journalists). Another reader asks whether Lane was trying to "disclaim the moral integrity of the German government, of Germans in general, and of me," and points out that the mere fact that someone opposed the death penalty for less than admirable reasons doesn't make it the wrong position to take. Nothing in Lane's piece, for that matter, suggests otherwise.

Reason Magazine on the 'Red Elvis'

His name was Dean Reed. He was an American who became a Communist, settled in East Germany, and became a minor rock 'n roll star. They called him the 'Red Elvis', but I prefer the moniker 'Socialist Cowboy', since he acted in East German cowboy movies (cowboys rapacious capitalists, Indians peace-loving naive socialists). This is the genre known as 'Westerns From the East'.

Reggie Nadelson has now written a book about Reed called 'Comrade Rockstar,' and Michael Moynihan reviews it in Reason (a libertarian magazine). As you might imagine, Moynihan is not very fond of Reed:

After a short and largely unsuccessful stint with Capitol Records, Reed abandoned California for South America, where, inexplicably, his singles were outselling those of Elvis Presley. Possessed by his newfound ideology, he underwent a transformation among the bitterly impoverished natives: He shed his "false consciousness" and subsumed the artist's prerogatives beneath those of the Party. After a few years, Reed was expelled from Argentina for agitating against the government and moved to Italy, where he landed a string of minor film roles, including the lead in Karate Fists and Beans, billed as the world's first western/kung fu cross­over film.

Nadelson's account offers few details of what motivated Dean's political journey. Like many radicals of his generation, he claimed to have been inspired by that common inventory of 1960s grievances: Third World poverty, the Vietnam War, CIA machinations in Latin America. So when, in 1966, Reed was approached by a friendly Russian apparatchik offering a truly socialist variant of fame, he boarded a plane for the Soviet Union as an Officially Approved Rock Star-the genuine American article, playing ersatz rock 'n' roll.

Moynihan distrusts Ostalgie and therefore has his suspicions about why Reed was considered an appropriate subject for a book. The review's worth reading, however. [Hat-tip: SK, a Liberty-Loving Slovene].

Gustav Seibt on German Iraq Hawks

Gustav Seibt (G) wrote yesterday in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung about people who get very little attention outside of Europe: West Europeans who supported the invastion of Iraq in 2003. In The Disaster of the Hawks (G), Seibt names names, and draws some spot-on conclusions:

The majority of the war's supporters -- with Herfried Muenkler as a prominent exception -- never occupied themselves with Iraq, international law, or the opportunities or risks of a war in the Middle Eastern context at all. The vast majority of the arguments for the war were based on European experiences of the last two or three generations. Thus, people wrote about second-order subjects such as pacifism and anti-Americanism, about appeasement and anti-Semitism, instead of talking about the real topic itself.

They primarily occupied themselves with broad historical analogies: the desirable overthrow of Saddam was compared unthinkingly to the struggle against Hitler, the democratization of Iraq with the democratization of West Germany or Japan after the Second World War. They compared the chance of a democratizing effect on the entire Middle East to the end of the Eastern Bloc and the quick establishment of civilian democracies there afterward. They had plenty to say about many things, with one exception -- the inner situation of present-day Iraq.

***

...The rubble of the Iraq War needs to be cleared away before we can continue an even halfway-credible debate. Nobody should be glad that writers such as Wolf Biermann, Gyoergy Konrad, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Karl-Otto Hondrich, "liberal hawks" like Paul Berman and Michael Ignatieff, and even reasonable observers such as Ralph [sic] Dahrendorf and Herfried Muenkel erred in so many points. One should also credit some authors, such as Konrad and Gumbrecht, for the fact that they have generously conceded their errors in the meantime.

Enzensberger on German Democracy

Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes lucid, witty prose, which can't be said of some other contemporary German writers (who may or may not nevertheless be worth reading).

Here's an excerpt from an speech he gave in New York in 1979, called "A Valiant Attempt to Explain the Secrets of German Democracy to a New York Audience." The whole thing deserves to be translated, and I'll try to get around to that someday. But for now, you'll have to content yourself with the following: 

When you get out of your airplane in Hamburg or Munich, you will notice that German society, 35 years after the end of Nazi rule, makes quite a civilized impression. Generally, you won’t have to worry about anyone screaming at you. In the tax offices and savings banks, you will see long-haired, casually-dressed young people, just as you would in New York and other places. Nobody is standing ramrod-straight. A certain politeness is now all the rage. Army officers don’t look as if they could be named Erich von Stroheim. In government offices, you will be greeted with easygoing, petty-bourgeois manners, as long as you’re not a Turk or a Communist – and sometimes even then. German democracy, you might possibly say, is a success; and your opinion will be reinforced when you read our constitution. It is, namely, an absolutely first-class constitution, and it’s by no means a dead letter. Quite the contrary: the task of protecting, obeying, and realizing it is being contested downright ferociously by all sides. The newspapers and the politicians go on about this subject endlessly; 'constitution' is one of the most common German words.  Perhaps you know that our language has a tendency to word-combinations; and thus the most diverse word-combinations crop up in talk about the constitution: protection of the constitution (Verfassungsschutz), loyalty to the constitution (Verfassungstreue), constitutional complaints (Verfassungsklagen), enemies of the constitution (Verfassungsfeinden), conformity to the constitution (Verfassungsmäßigkeit), and unconstitutionality (Verfassungswidrigkeit).

All this eagerness may surprise you. You may ask yourself “since when have Germans taken democracy to heart so enthusiastically?” Now, aside from isolated, brave, but quickly-defeated attempts to bring about democracy in the nineteenth century, our country hasn’t had much success with this form of government. The Weimar republic existed for only fourteen years, and it’s pretty well-known how precarious its short life was. Our current Basic Law came about while Germany was under allied occupation; malicious tongues even claim that democracy was imposed on the Germans as a punishment for the lost war. However, this outside pressure can’t explain why democracy has taken root in the last decades, and why it’s become a familiar habit to West Germans. Alongside the previous attempts just mentioned, one should also mention the strong role played by Germany’s federalist traditions. But most importantly, democracy was encouraged by the political and economic conditions of the period of post-war reconstruction: The Federal Republic of Germany needed to foster widespread, decentralized initiatives, integrate with western Europe, find a place in the world market, disperse suspicions of fascism, encourage mobility, and allow a free flow of information. The old model of the authoritarian state had to retreat under the pressure of external and internal circumstances.  Anyone who gives a child a toy and then tries to take it back after a while will have to brace himself for stiff resistance.  Certain German politicians are facing exactly this resistance right now, in fact, it’s even more awkward; since that considerable portion of the population which has convinced itself of the advantages of democracy over many years doesn’t regard it as a toy in any way, and also won’t satisfy itself with merely defending its rights. In the sixties, Germany saw something like a democratic offensve, it even went so far that a West German Chancellor got a bit carried away and endorsed the governing slogan “Dare More Democracy.”

[Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Unentwegter Versuch, einem New Yorker Publikum die Geheimnisse der deutschen Demokratie zu erklaeren, Kursbuch No. 56 (1979), pp. 1-2]

German Joys Uncut: Michael Buback on RAF Terrorism

The debate about the possible early release of RAF terrorists Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christan Klar intensifies. One recent contribution is an essay in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung written by Michael Buback. He is the son of Siegfried Buback, former Attorney General of Germany, who was murdered by RAF terrorists in 1977. The piece is called (in my translation) Debate about Strange, Distant Murderers (G). My translation, presented complete and unedited, appears below.

Debate About Strange, Distant Murderers

Why it is almost unimportant for a survivor whether an RAF terrorist remains in custody or is freed. An essay by Michael Buback, the son of Attorney General Siegfried Buback, murdered in 1977.

It is entirely proper that relatives of the victims do not participate in decisions on clemency for murderers. My essay could actually be limited to this one sentence. If, however, I write further, I do so because I have been repeatedly implored to give a detailed statement of my position and because I belong to the ever-diminishing group of people who still have strong memories of the events of 30 years ago.

To be sure, one hardly needs an especially good memory here. The event is chiseled into my memory, as it surely is with most people who have lost relatives to crime.

One particularity of the killing of my father is that those who murdered him and two members of his retinue, Georg Wurster and Wolfgang Göbel, did not know their victims personally.  They defined the Attorney General as evil by virtue of his function in a state that they rejected and hated. In thier blind fanaticism, fathomless arrogance, and extreme cruelty, they chose him for death according to their perverted standards, along with members of his security detail just as innocent as he.

The Assassination was Aimed at the State

The assassination was primarily aimed at the Federal Republic of Germany, whose leading criminal-justice officials were marked to be “blown away” by the terrorists. Perhaps the terrorists’ hate for this Attorney General was increased by the fact that he recognized the enormous dangers of terrorism early (which one would, of course, expect from an official with so much experience in the investigation of crimes against the state) and gave clear warning of the possible dangers.

Later events show how correct his warnings were. We now see the ubiquitous threat of terrorism almost daily in news programs. We are confronted with the consequences of terrorist violence every time we board a plane. Leading politicians in free, democratic countries are forced to live subject to intensive security measures.

They must often work in areas screened-off from the public, behind security fences and protective walls. Sometimes, in fact, the buildings from outside are so fortress-like that they resemble buildings intended for prisoners. The fact that there are ever more terrorists whose fanaticism drives them to take their own lives in addition to those of strangers makes the planning and execution of measures against terrorist brutality especially difficult.

The Party is Always Right!

Some people have accused this website of being little more than Communist propaganda. Damn straight, comrade!

Here's some more: perhaps the most famous propaganda song of the former German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. It's called, appropriately enough, the Song of the Party (The Socialist Unity Party, that is). You can listen to it here. (.mp3 file; 2.7m).*

The song was written in 1950 by Louis Fuernberg, a the son of a Jewish merchant family from Moravia, a part of Czechoslovakia which then had a substantial German-speaking population). Fuernberg joined the Communist party when he was 17, and formed an agit-prop group called "Echo from the Left." When World War II broke out, Fuernberg emigrated to Palestine. His family remained in Czechoslovakia and were all murdered after the Nazi invasion. After the war, Fuernberg made his way through Czechoslovakia to East Germany, where he became a well-known playwright and novelist. He died in 1957

Below the fold, I've provided the German lyrics, with a literal English translation. I have not even attempted to make the translation rhyme or match the meter of the original German. That's really too bad, but of course it's Communist propaganda, folks, not Goethe.

You may find the song laughable or chilling, but it illustrates a typical propaganda technique. The "party is always right," goes the refrain. Not because everything it does is right, mind you, but because, as a whole, its purpose is to "fight[] for the right" and bring "freedom and peace" to the "poorest of the earth." Any stern measures the Party might have to take against decadent bourgeois individualists (remember, the Party never "flatter[s]" us) are justified by the overarching positive goals the Party pursues.

The lines about the Party giving us "sun and wind," however, are just plain bizarre.

Freedom for Mohnhaupt and Klar?

Yesterday on my local radio station there was a call-in show on the future of two convicted terrorists of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). The RAF existed for almost thirty years, but its heyday was in the late 1970s, and especially in 1977, when the group staged a series of kidnappings an assassinations that caused a serious crisis atmosphere in Germany. This period was known as the "German Autumn."

Now two of the most infamous RAF prisoners, Brigitte Mohnhaupt (looking icily suave in the 'man'-hunt photo at left) and Christian Klar, might soon be released (G) after serving twenty-four years behind bars. Mohnhaupt, one of the leaders of the German Autumn attacks, is serving a sentence of five terms of life imprisonment plus fifteen years. She'll have a hearing before the Fifth Criminal Senate of the Stuttgart Regional Court on January 22 to determine whether she should be released early on parole. Klar, convicted of nine counts of murder and 11 counts of attempted murder, submitted his application for executive clemency years ago, when Johannes Rau was the President of Germany. Rau's successor, Horst Koehler, has signaled he might be near a decision.

Back in the day, these two were ideologically disciplined, stone-cold 'urban guerrillas', capable of planning and carrying out  sophisticated operations against heavily-guarded state and industry targets. Executing their targets, if necessary, was no problem to them, although not all of the murders charged to their account were execution-style.

Revisionist Deniers and their Critics

[Note to readers: this post is going to contain some 'scare quotes'. Normally, I don't like scare quotes, but I thought it wise to use them here, for reasons that will become obvious]

Over the holiday break, I watched Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's eight-hour documentary about the Holocaust. It was fascinating and intermittently almost overwhelming but, I must admit, a bit too long. A more detailed review will have to wait for another day.

Doing a bit of research on the movie, I came across the group blog Holocaust Controversies (HC), a site whose mission is to monitor and refute the arguments of Holocaust deniers and revisionists. HC thinks it's important not to just denounce Holocaust deniers, but rather refute their specific arguments by criticizing their errors (inaccurate citations, sloppy/dishonest use of sources, non sequiturs, etc.). They're continuing in the tradition of John C. Zimmermann, who recently wrote a book analyzing Holocaust deniers' arguments. You can read a long, fascinating excerpt from the book, 'Body Disposal at Auschwitz: The End of Holocaust Denial', here.*

These debates are not for the faint-hearted. You'll find detailed discusssions, for instance, of mass-grave construction. People have been thinking about this for a long time, since wars produce lots of human and animal corpses which need to be got rid of quickly. (The Belgians, apparently, made a major advance in this area in 1814!). That's not all, though, you'll also read about the number of "muffles" on the ovens delivered to Auschwitz, oven repair protocols, coke deliveries, cremation procedures, and much more. Historical documents also come into play: there's analysis of aerial photos, document authenticity tests, disputes about the meaning of the word Sonderbehandlung.

As long as I hold the sword hilt in my hand...

This quotation, from Fritz Stern's The Politics of Cultural Despair, is just too good not to pass along:

Certainly Frederick William IV felt this way [i.e. that teachers were “dangerously subversive” and “should be held culpable for the revolution of 1848”]: Addressing Prussian teachers in 1850, he said: “All the misery which has come to Prussia during the past years is to be credited to you and only to you. You deserve the blame for the godless pseudoeducation of the common people by which you have been propagating as the only true wisdom and by means of which you have destroyed faith ahd loyalty in the minds of my subjects and turned their hearts away from me. . . .  These [teachers’] seminaries, every one, must be removed from the large cities to the small villages, in order that they may be kept away from the unholy influence which is poisoning our times. . . . I am not afraid of the populace, but my bureaucractic government . . . is being undermined and poisoned by these unholy doctrines of a modern, frivolous, secular wisdom. But as long as I hold the sword hilt in my hands, I shall know how to deal with such a nuisance.”

[Quoted in J. Tewes, Ein Jahrhundert Preußischer Schulgeschichte, Leipzig 1914, p. 126.]

Heinrich Böll: CIA Operative?

I subscribe to the newsletter sent out by www.german-foreign-policy.com, a spunky website which provides an independent, not to say critical take on German foreign policy. It has an English-language component as well.

Their latest headline is on the German writer Heinrich Böll. A new documentary on ARTE claims he accepted money from, and reported to, the CIA, although it's not clear how extensive his knowledge of this fact was:

The German writer Heinrich Boell had worked for several front organizations of the US secret service. This is alleged in a TV documentation of the French-German television channel ARTE, which was introduced to the press in Berlin. "We all worked for the CIA", admitted the former business administrator of the base of cultural operations in Cologne, that enlisted Boell's services for CIA actions all over Europe. But this background was unknown. It was believed that the Ford Foundation (USA) was doing the financing. Also Boell's colleague, Guenter Grass, who was interviewed in the film, considers improbable that Boell was deliberately engaged in CIA activity. As proven by documents in the film, the CIA paid Boell's travel expenses. It also subsidized appearances in the international cultural scene of various other writers. Boell "was a diamond in the CIA's collection", says the author of the film in a discussion with german-foreign-policy.com.

A reconstruction of the relationship to the CIA, that the future Nobel laureate and eponym of the Green Party's foundation, can be traced back to the beginning of the 50s. At that time, the little known Boell was invited to West Berlin for readings where he became involved with the milieu of the (West) "German front organizations (...) in the Battle of the Cultures". They are said to have been directed by the CIA.

...

It was further reported, that these contacts congealed into Boell's becoming a regular member of a CIA front organization. Their couriers contacted intellectuals in Poland, the Soviet Union and in the GDR and supplied them with material from the west. This is how dissidents were recruited and presented to the international public during Boell's subsequent trips to the eastern bloc countries. Boell is said to have made reports about his trips, that landed on the desk of the CIA's base of cultural operations in Cologne - in the publishing house of the former Kiepenheuer and Witsch, a reputable address for German and international literature.

German Joys Review: In Europa

  In Europa (G) took 6 years to finish, and is over 900 pages long. Its author, Dutch journalist Geert Mak, calls it "a journey through the 20th century." Mak divides the century into time-segments as short as two years (1939-41) and as long as fourteen (1956-1980), and a chapter is devoted to each. The occasion for the book was an assignment from Mak's newspaper, the Dutch NRC Handelsblad. In 1999, as the millennium drew to a close, the paper sent Mak off to travel through Europe and write a weekly column taking the continent's pulse at points large and small. He visits places in Europe that played a role in whatever era he is researching -- Paris for the early years of the century, Stalingrad for the early 40s, Berlin for the late 80s, Spain for the mid-70s, etc.

The book is much more than a stitched-together collection of newspaper columns. Mak relied on several sources of information: his own immediate impressions (he rented a mobile home for some parts of the journey, but went by train, bus, and steamer for others); visits to the same places earlier in his journalistic career; interviews with locals and with people who played a part in the events he describes, and a bibliography comprising 18 pages and four languages (Dutch, German, English and French).

It's hard to do justice to the kaleidoscopic richness of the result. You watch Serbian television propaganda in Novi Sad in 1993; drink with cheerful peasants in a small Hungarian village in 1999 (the "last year that trash was collected by a horse-driven carriage"); hear the first-person accounts of a Polish government minister, Portuguese coup plotter, Dutch prime minister, and a founder of the European Union; visit an East German factory coming to grips with competition for the first time; sail across the Black Sea on a Ukrainian steamer; drink ouzo on a Greek island with men who resisted Italian and German occupation; watch a group of mentally retarded Germans riding a train through booming post-Wall Berlin; hear a Romanian professor describe the downfall of the Ceausescus; visit a pair of Ukrainian peasants who stayed on their farmstead even after Chernobyl melted down next to it; hear an afternoon of Poland's populist, anti-Semitic Catholic right-wing Radio Maryja; listen to bemused Dutchmen describe Hungarian refugees who arrived all over Western Europe following the 1956 uprising; hear the complaints of unemployed Frenchmen living a vagabond existence in campgrounds on the fringes of provincial towns; and share Mak's dismay at the nationalistic blather of Basque separatists.

Geoff Eley On "Ossiness"

Here, historian Geoff Eley evokes some of the complicated feelings of mistrust and resentment spurred in East Germans by the way re-unification of Germany was handled. The prose is sometimes a bit academic, but Eley makes interesting points.

Eley maintains that many Western politicians denied the East Germany government any sort of recognition whatsoever, painting it as nothing more than a chilling Communist dictatorship (which, of course it was). This blanket characterization, though, meant that "the legitimacy of the forms of popular experience fashioned during the life of the GDR became systematically denied." (remember what I said about academic prose).

It is important to grasp what was entailed in such a process of denial. It affected not only the official history of the old East German state and the political tradition incorporated by the SED, the postwar record of GDR Communism, and the specificities of what used to be called actually-existing socialism. Much more fundamentally, that denial also disallowed the mundane accomplishments of ordinary citizens' lives - that is, the arduous process of having tried to build workable lives inside the constricting boundaries of what an established but beleaguered and poorly-resourced state could realistically make available.

Ja, Guenter Grass was a Nazi

Over the weekend, Guenter Grass, 1999 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, admitted that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS, an elite German military unit, as a 17-year-old in 1944. In the interview (G) in the FAZ which he spilled the beans, Grass reports that he originally volunteered to join the U-boat service when he was 15, but then received the call-up order a year later, and found he would instead be sent to the SS. He joined, he says, not out of ideological conviction but to escape a restrictive family atmosphere and a "feeling of being cooped-up."

After the admission, all hell broke loose. In recent times, Grass has been better-known for his political engagement than for his creative output. Grass is a left-wing member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and is unafraid to mix himself into politics; even appearing onstage at SPD rallies (see left; Grass with former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder). Grass has attacked conservative politicians with rhetorical daisy-cutters, and has made plenty of enemies.

They are all coming out in force now. Some juries are considering withdrawing literary prizes they've given him, the "culture expert" of the conservative party has already called for him to return his Nobel Prize, and former ally Lech Walensa has called on Grass (G) to consider returning his honorary citizenship of the city of Gdansk.

Historian Joachim Fest says Grass' moral authority has been "heavily damaged" and snarked: "Now, I wouldn't even buy a used car from this man anymore." Further, Fest -- a World War II expert -- calls Grass' story of initially volunteering for the U-boat service (then seen as heroic and relatively uncontroversial), but later being called-up to the SS, as "very incredible." Robert Menasse, an Austrian writer, comes to Grass' defense, pointing out that Grass voluntarily admitted the fact, and that one could surely understand the desire of a young, "sensitive" writer to escape a stifling family atmosphere.

Nevertheless, Grass' credibility does seem to be taking a selective, but deep hit. The mere fact that he joined the SS is not necessarily a problem; thousands of young German men who were not enthusiastic Nazis did the same thing. The problem is that (1) he concealed the fact out of "shame" for 62 years (only his wife knew); while (2) attacking numerous politicians as former Nazis and/or accusing them of covering-up or minimizing the horrors of the National Socialist regime. The cliche is that Grass became the "moral arbiter of the nation" (moralischer Instanz der Nation). This authority seems to be history now. Another illustration of the old adage: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up."

As a high point of hypocrisy, many critics are zeroing in on Grass' bitter critique of Ronald Reagan's decision to join then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a 1985 visit to the Bitburg cemetery, which contained the  the graves of almost 50 SS members. Reagan's speech portrayed some of the SS members -- many of whom were young boys at the time of their death -- as "human beings crushed by a vicious ideology." At the time, Grass slashed Reagan and then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl for a "distortion of history (Geshichtsklitterung) whose cold calculation as a media opportunity equally injures Jews, Americans, and Germans."

I think Reagan's visit was a dumb idea, and his speech clumsy and naive. Grass' problem, however, is explaining his own past without reminding people of parts of the speech he once so memorably attacked:

[T]he crimes of the SS must rank among the most heinous in human history — but others buried [here] were simply soldiers in the German Army. How many were fanatical followers of a dictator and willfully carried out his cruel orders? And how many were conscripts, forced into service during the death throes of the Nazi war machine? We do not know. Many, however, we know from the dates on their tombstones, were only teenagers at the time. There is one boy buried there who died a week before his 16th birthday. There were thousands of such soldiers to whom nazism meant no more than a brutal end to a short life.

Nein, George W. Bush is not a Nazi

Godwin's Law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Fatih Akin, the German director of the rather grueling but not uninteresting Gegen die Wand (English title: Head-On), which won the Berlin Film Festival in 2004, is a walking illustration of Godwin's law.

He had a T-shirt printed up that replaces the 'S' in Bush's name with a swastika, and has been wearing it during a film shoot in Hamburg. It is illegal to display the swastika in any context in Germany, so Hamburg prosecutors are investigating (G). Akin defends his T-shirt in the most recent Spiegel magazine: "Bush's policies are comparable with those of the Third Reich. I believe that in Hollywood, under Bush, certain films have been directed on behalf of the Pentagon, in order to normalize things like torture and Guantanamo. The Bush Administration is gunning for a third world war, I'm convinced of that. In my opinion, these people are fascists."

I don't have much interest in addressing rhetoric like this, because it's poking a stick into a nest filled with dumb and angry wasps. But the "Bush is a Nazi" meme comes up enough that it seems to merit a closer look. The federal Justice Minister under the former German coalition government, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, had to step down after comparing (G) Bush to Hitler in September of 2002. At a conference I recently attended, an American professor from a big, mainstream American university earnestly tried to convince German colleagues that George W. Bush was "worse than Hitler." Germans then tried to convince this American (!) that the comparison was inappropriate, a pretty amusing spectacle.

Two points: (1) The Germans are right: the comparison of George W. Bush with Hitler, or the claim that the Bush Administration's policies are "comparable to the Third Reich," is unfathomably stupid; (2) The claim also plays into some unsavory tendencies in revisionist discourse, a fact which may not be obvious to non-Europeans.

George Mikes on the "Collective Guilt" Hypothesis

A few weeks ago, I posted a short excerpt from a book called Über Alles by George Mikes.  A refresher: Mikes was born in Hungary, emigrated to England, and became a reasonably famous English comic.  They sent him all over the world to write humorous travel books, which became huge bestsellers. 

Because he spoke fluent German, his publishers sent him to travel through Germany in 1953, to see how the Jerries were getting on.  The result is hardly brilliant.  Mikes himself reminds the reader routinely that he's just a comedian, and that nothing he says should be taken seriously.  The book does, however, provide an intermittently interesting time-capsule of a foreigner's take on immediate post-war Germany.

In a chapter called "Shall We Love Them?" Mikes addresses the "collective guilt" hypothesis.  He also, of course, takes a few more swipes at humans who are foolish enough not to be British:

I met altogether two persons in Germany who thought in a balanced, logical and unemotional way about the German problem. Both were Germans. I heard many intelligent, brilliant and illuminating things from others, but everybody else I talked to was carried away by emotion as soon as this so-called German problem was mentioned.  The English in England have no bitter feelings against the Germans, in fact, they like them better than they like the French and much better than the Americans. There is something paternal in their attitude. And they seem to believe that there's something irresistibly funny in being German.

In Germany, however, with very few exceptions, this attitude changes to dislike. This antipathy has nothing to do with former Nazi crimes or anything of the kind. The British dislike the Germans because they have their hair cropped in a funny way; because they eat sandwiches with a knife and fork; because they are formal, stiff and click their heels; and because they work too hard and take themselves deadly seriously. The Americans, on the other hand, always have the past crimes in mind. The Germans killed 6 million Jews, consequently every tenth German must be a murderer; no, it is even worse: every German must be one tenth of a murderer. That is a matter of clear calculation for the Americans. Americans feel very strongly against the persecution of races, provided (a) it is white races that are being persecuted and (b) it is outside the U.S.  And outright killing goes too far, in any case.

Eerie Parallel Communist Worlds

While in France, I bought a copy of La Mythologie Scientifique du Communisme, by Romanian history professor Lucian Boia.  As its title suggests, it treats Communism as a sort of mythology, and explores the similarities Communism has with other mythologies.  I'm about halfway through it now (goes a little slow, since it's French), I'll be sure to post something when I'm done.

I the parallel world Communist countries created fascinating.  In the most advanced and isolated ones (such as East Germany or the Soviet Union), the authorities worked hard to create versions of everything the West had.  Televisions shows, highways, car brands, Westerns, instant coffee, dance crazes, rock bands, psychotherapists, office buildings, package vacations -- there was a socialist version of them all.  I always imagine that, for someone from a non-socialist country, visiting East Germany would be like some sort of Star Trek episode.  You visit a remote planet, walk through a shimmering portal, and end up in a world very much like your own -- but with eerie differences (everyone's driving the same brand of car!).

And it goes deeper.  The most doctrinaire socialist countries also created parallel thought-worlds.  Between them, Marx and Engels wrote something about just about every single aspect of human history and society, and even the most casual remark from one of their works (plus, of course, the underlying 'dialectical' structure of Marxist ideology) could end up having decisive influence on some branch of the sciences or liberal arts.

Here's an example: while in Berlin a while ago, I bought a book called Intimverhalten, Sexualstörungen, Persönlichkeit ("Intimate Behavior, Sexual Difficulties, and Personality"), by Dr. Siegfried Schnabl, who was a popular East German relationship counselor and sex therapist.  The book is mainly a report of a study of 3,500 East German citizens about their sexual behavior.  It's full of fascinating tidbits.  Did you know that in East Germany, the more educated you were, the more likely you were to masturbate?  Among university graudates, fully 60% of the women, and 92% of the men reported engaging in self-satisfaction (p. 180).

Wolf Biermann on The West on the East

Wolf Biermann, songwriter and dissident in the former Communist regime in East Germany, doesn't think too highly of left-leaning West Germans who pretend not to know how they would have reacted had they lived in the East: 

There are increasing numbers of West people in Germany who dilettantishly play the role of the noble procrastinator. In an argument about the involvement of East people in the crimes of the GDR regime they prefer to opt for the worldly-wise option of holding their tongues. This sort of eloquent silence always sets a twisted Hamlet soliloquy ringing in my ears: "...To be or not to be. ... No...to get involved or better not ... that is the question. Whether t'is nobler in the mind to keep stubbornly quiet about the Stasi troubles of the Ossis, or to dive headlong into a sea of slanging matches.... No! I'm a Wessi. Who has never had to suffer that sort of repression and who has never lived under the weight of a dictatorship. So I won't take an inflated moral stand, I prefer to confess modestly to being one of the little people, with fears and weaknesses. Whether I would have been courageous in the GDR or cowardly, whether I would have gone along with everything or at least cautiously refused, or whether I might even have dared oppose the regime – I cannot say. And this is why I'd rather not judge these things, not to mention judging the people who – who knows – only swam with the tide, or in good faith that they were doing the right thing collaborated with the secret police or simply in ignorance or fear, and with great sadness in their hearts, inflicted misery on others. I'll keep out of all this. I thank providence that I was never forced to denounce, inform on or torture anybody, and I'm very thankful that I never had to find out. Luckily it's all over, its all in the past."

A "bogus declaration of bankruptcy," Biermann calls such thinking.  [Translation courtesy of Sign and Sight, original version here.] 

This is Biermann's introduction to a review of a film called "The Life of Others."  The film, which deals with Stasi spying in East Germany, was directed by by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who not only grew up in West Germany but also bears a title of nobility. 

Biermann, who was stripped of his East German citizenship in 1976, is pleasantly surprised; Von Donnersmarck has created an "unbelievably realistic genre study." 

I will be sure to see the movie and post any comments soon.  First, though, must get rid of a nagging Parisian cold...

Germany in 1953 Seen Through English Eyes

While in Paris, I dropped by an English-language bookstore named Tea and Tattered Pages.  The owner is a very friendly woman of a Certain Age.  As you might guess, there are cats about.  In T & TP, you'll find everything from well-thumbed paperback thrillers to diet books to back-issues of Granta. 

I found something a book called Über Alles, by an Hungarian-born English writer named George Mikes.  Mikes became slightly famous in England after writing a 1946 book called How to be an Alien, in which he took a bit of piss out of Britain.  The one-sentence chapter on English sex read: "Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles."  The book sold well, and his English publishers sent Mikes all over the world to report on the doings and dealings of various foreigners, from a mostly-English perspective.

They sent him to Germany in 1953.  Germany was still occupied, all the wounds were still fresh.  He traveled all around, apparently speaking to people in Germany (which he probably would have learned, having grown up in Hungary).  He then wrote Über Alles.  In the next few days, I'll post a few excerpts from the book, to give you an idea of how a Hungarian-Englishman saw Germany while it was still under occupation.  Here's a chunk from the chapter entitled "First Impressions":

I discovered in Germany that our own officials at home are polite and charming. I realised for the first time that they have certain engaging characteristics which I had never noticed before. An ordinary English official is not devoted to his work, and slightly detests the people with whom he has to deal. This is an attractive human trait in his character. German officials on the other hand love their work, they are zealous priests of a modern. almighty God - the State - and are fully aware that they are representing Deity. The State exists for its own sake, and the people's only duty is to supply raw material for administration.

Former Synagogue as Gas-Chamber

The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra parked 6 cars in front of a former synagogue in the city of Pulheim, near Cologne. Rubber tubes extend from the autos' exhaust pipes into a top window of the building, pumping carbon monoxide into the building.

Visitors can take a tour, one at a time. They must wear a gas-mask, and are escorted by a fireman. During the tour, they are shown a read-out documenting that the level of carbon monoxide would kill them without the gas-mask.

The installation is part of an 11-year series of Holocaust-related installations and shows in the former synagogue. Sierra says the point of the work is to undo the banalization and the trivialization of the Holocaust.

The FAZ describes (G) the reaction:

The journalist Ralph Giordano criticized the action as an "unparallelled piece of infamy."  "If Sierra had even the smallest inner contact to the world of the victims, he would have ababdoned these doings in Pulheim," said the Holocaust survivor.  The Central Council of Jews in Germany renewed its strong criticism: "This fictional and tasteless artistic spectacle not only violates the dignity of the victims of the Holocaust, but of the entire Jewish community," said General Secretary Stephan J. Kramer.

On the radio this morning, an elderly woman phoned the call-in show supporting the work. She was a Jewish holocaust survivor who had lost over 90 relatives to the Nazis. She said she found Sierra's installation to be a refreshingly blunt way to convey the reality of the Holocaust to a generation which knows it only from TV screens. She admired the way in which the State was brought into the work. Previously, it had herded people into rooms full of invisible, deadly gas. Now, it provides them with protection and escort, precisely to ensure their lives are spared.

Private and Public Virtues

I'm reading Ralf Dahrendorf's 1965 classic Society and Democracy in Germany.  Dahrendorf is a Continental liberal -- limited government, freedom for the individual to develop his personality, tolerance and plurality toward your fellow-citizen's world-view, so long as it's consistent with a harmonious and efficient society.  Society and Democracy (which was translated into English in 1980 but is out of print) is a wide-ranging sociological investigation of Dahrendorf's version of "the German question" -- why did the notion of a modern, liberal, pluralistic democracy never take root in Germany? (Notably, as of 1965, Dahrendorf still believed that it had still not really done so).

One of Dahrendorf's answers is the cultivation of what he calls "private virtues" in lieu of "public virtues."  According to Dahrendorf, a cult developed in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries around virtues such as an ability to tolerate loneliness, loyalty toward one's friends, the capacity to be moved by nature, psychological and philosophical depth, and fundamental, unblinking honesty.  Dahrendorf contrasts these with "public" virtues: cheerfulness, friendliness, basic common sense, an ability to cooperate and reach compromise, tolerance of other worldviews, and concern for the basic issues of fairness and the welfare of society as a whole. 

Dahrendorf argues that the German private virtues tend to cultivate indifference, or at the most only an abstract engagement, with society as a whole.  They also do not require you to make demands on the political system.  Public virtues, on the other hand, draw you into contact with other people, encourage engagement with society, and, most fundamentally, permit different people to get along with each other with a minimum of strife and bitterness.  In fact, the public virtues are based precisely on the notion that we can get along with each other.

To Dahrendorf, the cultivation of private over public virtues is one key explanation for the failure of democracy to take root in Germany.  [Note that he is writing in 1965!]  The most gifted thinkers accepted society as it was, administering it was seen as somehow impure or corrupt, something to be left to mere bureaucrats or politicians.  As Kant once said (heavily paraphrased) about the German legal system: "You can engage in all manner of elegant philosophical reasoning about what the laws mean, as long as you obey them."  The particular form of government you find yourself under is unimportant; there's nothing you can do to fundamentally chan