Amnesia in Germany
Edward Marston
Berlin Profumo and Thorpe, Lambton and Jellicoe. These names, familiar to us, came strangely off the tongue of a young Berliner. She was comparing British and German political scandals. British politicians appeared to her to suffer from weaknesses of the flesh. Germany's leaders by contrast from weaknesses of the spirit. Or more particularly of the memory. They are chronically prone to selective amnesia. They just cannot seem to remember what they did between 1933 and 1945. The ailment has afflicted some distinguished figures. Hans Globke, Adenauer's right hand man, forgot the commentary he wrote on the Nuremberg laws. Heinz Luebke, president of the Federal Republic from 1959 to 1969, forgot having designed concentration camp barracks. More recently the hapless Hans Filbinger simply could not recall how many people he had condemned to death during the war. And now it is the man who two months ago looked certain to be elected president in May 1979, the CDU Bundestag leader Karl Carstens.
But public-spirited citizens are at hand to help the sufferer back to full health. After all, it wouldn't do to have an amnesiac president. So they have been filling some of the gaps in his recollections. Ten weeks ago Heinz Troekes, a much respected artist and professor, wrote a letter to Berlin's leading daily newspaper. Professor Troekes served as a private soldier in the artillery school where Carstens was employed as an instructor during the last years of the war. He recalls that Carstens regularly wore the Nazi party badge, popularly known as the 'bonbon', in his lapel — an exceptional gesture. The letter was sent by the newspaper to the Bundestag leader. Was he grateful to have his memory jogged? Apparently not. A short communication from his personal assistant explained that he 'did not propose to comment'. Only when one of the country's foremost weeklies publicised the fact that he had applied to join the Nazi party in 1937 did he deign to do so.
CDU circles claim that Carstens has 'never concealed' his 'nominal' party memt bership. No doubt this is strictly true. But non-concealment is not the same as openness. Today he declares that the interest in his past is 'justified' and he has 'put all the relevant evidence on the table'. A professor of law really ought to know better. The testimony and documents which he has produced would certainly not suffice in an English court of law. They would barely be sufficient for an edition of 'This is Your Life'. Here, for a start, are two questions which have yet to be answered. Was it really necessary for the nineteen year old Carstens to do service in the Hamburg Sturm Abteilung in 1933 — to be sure of a university place, as he maintains was his motive?
This is a question of particular interest to those at university in West Germany at the moment. For Carstens, a familiar of Franz Josef Strauss, is a hard-liner on debarring 'radicals' from public service. He stands no truck with talk of 'youthful errors of judgement', believing that students should take full responsibility for their political actions. He would not allow a communist to become a teacher in Hamburg, for example. For him there is no such thing as 'nominal' membership of the communist party. Some people are accusing him of double standards. The second question is just as pertinent: what exactly did he do between 1939 and 1945? 'I have such murky memories', he says.
Of course we shouldn't expect of him Harold Wilson's total mental recall. But, fortunately, he doesn't need it. He can go and refresh his memory at the Berlin Document Centre, which holds, amongst other things, the almost complete membership records of the Nazi party. This American-run institution resembles a bomb factory, surrounded by barbed wire and sunk deep into the ground. Indeed it is a sort of bomb, sitting under the German establ Spectator 2 December 1978 ishment, albeit one with a very short life: the remaining few score years of the gen' eration whose participation in the Thir.d Reich it documents. In twenty years it 'Will have lost most of its explosive potential,' What is called here the 'biological amnesty — the ultimate amnesia — will have come into effect. In the meantime the documents made available by the American authortnes to members of friendly Western goy' ernments. I presume that includes the Fed a Republic.u es I These have rather been for e r q a Republic.u es I These have rather been for e r q gotten in the subsequent discussion. This may be because the incomparable armY °f West German investigative journalists has moved on to more recent battlefields. TheY are helping the forgetful politician to bring to mind things that happened only a decad.e ago. He was at that time a very senior OM servant with overall responsibility for the Federal Secret Service. In 1974, before the parliamentary commission investigating the Guillaume spy affair he Was asked if he had known anything about international armaments deals being handled by the secret service. 'I must say,' he frankly rephed' 'that today is the first time I've heard about that.' Doesn't that sentence have a familiar ring? Doesn't it transport you back to Westminster and the debate over oil sanctions? Perhaps our political scandals are not so dissimilar. Perhaps there is something Wilsonian about Karl Carstens after all.
An uncharitable colleague, the former SPD parliamentary leader Guenther Metzger, accuses him of lying. Of course We know better. He was merely suffering another fit of that selective amnesia. But the case which has ensued, ironically at Carstens's instigation, comes up in court just before the presidential election. It looks as if the prospective candidate will lose it. The CDU/CSU Union are beginning to wonder if it's a good idea to have quite such an absent-minded candidate.
The Carstens faction are fighting back gamely. Their biggest shot so far is the revelation that the current (FDP) president was a Nazi party member too. It looks as if even Walter Scheel may have temporarilY succumbed to amnesia. He acknowledges that he was 'taken into' the party in 1942 while serving at the front, but he is 'not certain' if he filled in an application for membership. One might ask: why don't you get someone to look it up? But all the parties agree that people don't do things like that. It is taboo. On this, as at an order inaudible to the rest of us, a whole generation smartly closes ranks. And this Is what most worried my young Berlin informant. The problem, she explained, is not how they behaved then. That we can understand. It is how they behave now. The whiff of concealment — of 'murky memories' is far more damaging to Scheel's reputation among the young than anything the archives could reveal about him. It is a pity that his reputation should be besmirched. For he is the best president the Federal Republic has got.
Previous page
