CENTREPIECE
How German guilt can start to be expiated
COLIN WELCH
The German young, 1 suggested last week, seem estranged from German clas- sical literature, almost as if it were written in another language, which in a sense it was. Modern German novels are usually written in short, crisp sentences, as if translated from the English. Classical Ger- man is difficult even for Germans. I have asked young Germans what they make of old story-tellers like Raabe, Storm, Stifter. Most have never read them; some have never heard of them.
Many German writers and thinkers have been charged ,with acting, consciously or unconsciously, as John the Baptist for Hitler's Messiah. Books of wounding quotations appeared here during the war, linking great writers to the Nazis. Few indeed were unrepresented. Nietzsche suf- fered specially, perhaps because he was misunderstood: but he is perilously easy to misunderstand. Even Goethe was approved by the Nazis, arraigned by others, as anti-semitic. He cannot, how- ever, have been anti-semitic in the modern Final-Solution sense. The term meant something religious rather than racial. Yet a dark stain spreads back through German history, endowing with retrospective crimi- nality casual, even jocular expressions of prejudice. Had the Scots been murdered in our own century, how sinister Dr John- son's sallies against the Scots might appear!
The dark stain in classical German litera- ture disfigures guilty and innocent alike. Its spread is assisted by the habitual absolu- tion of the German young: 'They can't be blamed — they weren't born then.' Impli- cit in this kindly thought is the possibility that everyone who was born then, and even those dead long before, can be blamed, including perhaps the hermit who emerged from a German forest in 1945 and asked, 'Who is now Kaiser?'
An insupportable and seemingly inexpi- able burden of guilt of course explains this panic blanket rejection of German-ness and the German past. Ashamed of being themselves, Germans pretend to be no one in particular or someone else. Dr Ade- nauer's therapy for guilt was both Catholic and modern. Excessive guilt and despair are both sins. Hard work he prescribed as the remedy for both. Repentance, yes, restitution where possible, but above all no idle hands for the devil again to hire. I thought this true wisdom at the time, and so in a way it has proved. But undoubtedly it has postponed or evaded the need for Germans not to reject or deny the past but, as Germans, to embrace it, all of it, to make it fully part of repentant selves.
If it is to be expiated, guilt must first be limited and defined. We can acquit most Germans of ever having voted for Hitler in a free election. We can acquit them too of having consciously willed the war or the murder of the Jews and others. Most Germans wanted peace in the Thirties, as most Russians want it now. The visiting Chamberlain was more warmly received than the news of war when it came, which was greeted with silent apprehension. So was the Kristallnacht, and with shame too. If some Jews voted for Hitler, as various figures suggest, can they have taken his anti-semitic ravings seriously?
Did the Germans of that doomed gen- eration love Germany not wisely but too well? Not well enough, is my verdict. Who, truly loving this inexhaustible treasure- house of beauty, thought, piety and wis- dom, would have entrusted its destiny to an apparent madman or acquiesced in such a betrayal or endorsed it post facto? There was abroad in Germany a levity, a frivo- lous readiness for high risks and flirtations with barbarism (see Mann's Doktor Faus- tus on Kridweis Circle), which true patriot- ism would have checked. Nevertheless, it is salutary to ask, those who swear that never in any circumstances could they have voted for Hitler, for whom then in 1932 would they have voted? Who else offered even delusory hopes?
The madman too, as a shrewd and sceptical eye might have detected early on, did not love Germany at all. Hitler's patriotism is not questioned by those who confuse nationalism and patriotism, which are in fact as distinct as rape and love. Hitler did not seek to protect, as a patriotic statesman would, as Adenauer did, Ger- many's welfare and good name. More perverted artist than statesman of any sort, he saw in the Germans not a great people entrusted to his care but instruments and raw materials with which to create an appalling masterpiece, a loathsome drama of cruelty. The tasks he imposed on the Germans in the East were not a fulfilment but a hideous deformation of their historic role. If unloved, Germans had once at least been respected there as bringers of free- dom and order, builders of cities, traders and wealth-creators. Memories of this must have moved the millions of Soviet soldiers and serfs who welcomed the Ger- man armies with salt, wine and flowers. The German armies in fact brought only destruction, murder and slavery: a historic crime and mistake, pregnant with disaster for Russia, Eastern Europe, Germany and the West. No patriot would have commit- ted it. As an instrument the Germans failed Hitler. He pronounced them un- worthy of him. The earth he strove at last to scorch was German earth, enriched by centuries of German toil.
Can we acquit most Germans of blame for the Final Solution? Of course not. We may acquit them of exclusive guilt. The Spectator recently declared (27 April) that 'Hitler's crimes were executed by Ger- mans'. No by Germans alone, alas: they found many helpers among those oppres- sed peoples who thought the murder of the Jews was the only good thing Hitler ever did. The sad and shaming facts are set out in a recent horrifying article by Professor Theodore S. Hamerow in Commentary. One German excuse won't wash: 'We knew nothing about it.' Everyone who knew anything knew something, if not everything. German NCOs threatened idle soldiers, 'Get your hair cut, or you'll go up the chimney'. NCOs don't risk being mis- understood. As the troop trains for the Eastern front passed Auschwitz, soldiers crowded to the window to see the smoke pass from the ovens.
If knowledge was nigh universal, why did no one do anything to stop the car- nage? A few, exceptionally brave did: the heroes of 20 July, the unknown Berlin commuters who lay on the track in front of a train taking Jews eastwards to death. The effect of the knowledge on other decent Germans was paralysing. No one had asked, do you wish the Jews murdered? No one told them it was going to happen. The first they heard was that a crime (for which they had no name either) was already happening, in semi-secrecy, half-disguised as euphemism, on an unbelievable scale, and committed in their name. They were appalled by the horrors they had failed to prevent, might be presumed to have ac- quiesced in. They were stricken not only by guilt but by a crippling fear of retribution, which they expected to be savage and
indiscriminate. What could rebellion against Hitler secure save, if unsuccessful,
the Jews' fate for the rebels (a fate which the heroic dean of Berlin prayed for and met) or, if successful, retribution all the swifter?
Here, in their midnight of woeful in- decision, terror and despair, I have to leave them for a week.
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