THROWING THE BOOK AT GERMANY

Anne McElvoy says Germans believe that the American bestseller blaming so many of their forebears for the Holocaust is more to do with their future than their past

Berlin TWO WEEKS ago, on what would have been Adolf Hitler's 107th birthday, an impromptu message was broadcast over Hamburg Police radio. 'We greet all good German police officers on the Fiihrer's birthday,' the voice said, 'And issue three "Heils" in his memory.' The monitors at police HQ sighed and dutifully pressed the panic button. These unscheduled announcements, made from time to time by neo-Nazi radio hackers, are a perennial nuisance. The police treat them as the equivalent of a dirty phone call — annoying, a trifle unsettling, but of little consequence. Ger- many's strict anti-sedition laws, however, insist that they ' are taken seriously. So three cars equipped with tracers were dis- patched to hunt down the cul- prits and house-to-house calls were made among the usual suspects. In vain.

`What a pain in the arse' was the considered verdict of the harassed duty officer dealing with calls about the incident. The content of the message worried him far less than the fact that it had intruded into the smooth course of the working day. One of the uncomfortable things about being Ger- man is that half a century after Hitler's death in the Potsdamer Platz bunker, his memory can pop up amid the ordinariness of a well-ordered, democratic society like a malign jack-in-the-box. 'Off the record,' the officer said, 'this is a lot of fuss about nothing. If no one paid attention to those fools they would stop doing it. But we have to be seen to take it seriously for form's sake.'

The postwar German state's relations with the Third Reich, Hitler and the Holo- caust are carefully codified in law. The Federal Republic still defines itself by its difference from and rejection of what went before. This results in peculiarities like the exception from the constitutional guaran- tee of free speech, under which it is illegal to deny that the Holocaust happened, or even that its number of victims was smaller than commonly believed. At the same time, commemoration of the mass destruc- tion of Germany's Jews has become a rou- tine affair. Conducted in highly formal rituals, in set places and on specified days, it rarely intrudes into daily life. Trauerarbeit — 'the labour of mourning' — has become the burden of the non-Jewish German political and intellectual classes. The Holocaust', writes the waspish commenta- tor Henryk Broder, 'is now not a problem for the Jews. But what a problem for the Aryans!' The publication of Daniel Goldhagen's American bestseller Hitler's Willing Execu- tioners emphasises how much of a problem the Holocaust remains for the new Ger- many. British newspaper readers will have gathered by now that a young assistant pro- fessor of history at Harvard has published a noisy book. Its thesis is that ordinary Ger- mans took part in the killing of Jews not because they were obeying orders, were afraid of the consequences of resisting or were mesmerised by Hitler's demagoguery. Goldhagen sets out to demonstrate that Germany in 1933 was 'a society pregnant with murder' because violent anti-Semitism was so deeply rooted in the consciousness of ordinary people that all Hitler needed to do for annihilation to proceed was give the starting signal. Far more ordinary people than hitherto supposed — between 100,000 and half a million, the author estimates were involved in the liquidation of the Jews. They were not reluctant or ashamed about it, he claims, but pursued their task with cold, ruthless glee.

The result is certainly a gruelling read, although I am not sure that, beyond statis- tics, it adds much to more temperate accounts of the little man's (and woman's) involvement in the killing of the Jews, like Christopher Browning's painstaking account of the activ- ities of Reserve Battalion 101.

pad 1 But Goldhagen has, undeniably, compiled an unsparing and wide-ranging audit of atrocities. The problem with this approach is that even the most bizarre evils, when subjected to the dis- cipline of list-making, can grow tedious. The thesis that the involvement of more civilians than hitherto thought in the killing means that German soci- ety as a whole was consumed by bloodlust is also highly question- able, the more so since the author gives scant weight to con- flicting evidence. In short, Gold- hagen's approach is more like that of a prosecutor than a historian, in that he stages a second Nuremberg trial against an entire people.

The reaction in Germany has been swift and angry. The German translation has not yet been published here, but it has already managed to attract relentless opprobrium. Like any good controversy, this one has sprung over the boundaries of the books pages and crossed otherwise immutable ide- ological lines. The conservative Die Welt dedicated half a lead news page to discussing the book and predicted a cooling in relations between Bonn and Washington in its wake. The erroneous assumption of many critics is that Goldhagen wrote the book to embarrass and humiliate today's Germany. Frank Schirrmacher, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote: 'He is trying to make a myth of the Holocaust. If one believes the central thesis of this book, the progress of the Ger- mans in the 21st century can only be viewed with scepticism and fear.' The left-wing Frankfurter Rundschau agreed that the book was 'a provocation intended to insult'.

The Federal Republic has always been keenly sensitive to radical reinterpretations of the causes (and thus the possible after- effects) of Nazism. But the fury over Gold- hagen's contribution to Holocaust scholarship is the fiercest since the infa- mous 'historians' quarrel' in the 1980s about the roots of National Socialism. At least that was a disagreement among Ger- man historians about Germany: Goldha- gen's status as an outsider (and, dare one say it, as an American Jew) makes his judg- ments far harder for Germans to bear.

The reunification of the country and the 50th anniversary of the end of the second world war have induced a heady sense of liberation from the role of penitent. Popu- lar polemics suggest that the country needs to thoroughly reassess its interests and identity, to shed its cautiousness and reassert itself as a major power. A recently published collection of new writing has been grouped together in an anthology called About Germany — an approach and title unthinkable five years ago. And now along comes Goldhagen with his theories of Jew-murder by popular demand, of col- lective sin and inherited guilt. The illusion of a Stunde Null or Zero Hour — second time round — is shattered. Of course there never was such a new beginning — time and history cannot be stopped and reset in the way that the popular image of 1945 suggests. But Germany is like Sisyphus, always hoping that it can overcome the past in one heave, and always disappointed in that hope.

Any book which harvests such unani- mous condemnation must have hit an exposed nerve. Goldhagen's is seen as an attack not simply on the Germans of the Third Reich, but on their compatriots today and, by extension, on Germany's role in a future Europe. Like a lot of debates in Germany which appear to be about some- thing entirely different, this one, although superficially about interpretation of the past, is really about the future. The 'scepti- cism and fear' with which some outsiders do indeed view that country are less the product of the Holocaust than a rational response to the united Germany's might and its assumption of Europe's leadership. The wonder is that intellectual Germans like Herr Schirrmacher expect outsiders not to be wary.

Next year, a book will be published in Britain which will probably elicit but a frac- tion of the attention gained by this one. It will, however, teach its readers far more about the complex nature of National Socialism by concentrating the dreadful extremes of the regime, but on everyday life. Weidenfeld & Nicolson have bought English-language rights to the surprising German bestseller, the late Viktor Klem- perer's diaries. These were kept by an emi- nent Jewish philologist in Dresden from 1933-45 as the Third Reich unfurled around him, robbing him of his livelihood, his research, his house and the totality of small tiny freedoms that make the differ- ence between civilisation and barbarism.

Ten thousand people recently attended a round-the-clock reading of the work in Munich — welcome evidence that commem- orating the Holocaust need not necessarily be a dull or forced affair Young people attended the event because they found the content of the diaries interesting and surpris- ing, and not because they felt under moral pressure to do so. 'This', said one student, 'is what we all thought we knew about life for Jews in the Third Reich, but didn't.'

Klemperer settled in East Germany, where his diaries went unpublished because of their unflattering comparisons between National Socialism and communism. Their posthumous publication is the literary equivalent of finding the lost treasures of Priam behind the Iron Curtain.

Paradoxically, Klemperer, who lived in daily fear of his life in the darkest years (in October 1943, a spotty member of the Hitler Youth points at his yellow star in the street and taunts him, 'You Jew, why are you still alive?'), produces a far more rounded and moving account of what Nazi society was like than Goldhagen has done writing five decades afterwards in the safe- ty of his Harvard study.

Whereas the American academic acknowl- edges only absolute guilt and total terror of the Jews in Hitler's Germany, the professor, who lived through it, records that he survives only because of the random kindness of Aryans. An entrepreneur employs him and begs him not to report that he is failing in his `duty' to maltreat Jewish workers, market stall-holders slip him extra supplies, neigh- bours fail to denounce him when he leaves his home at prohibited times. Lured by these kindnesses, Klemperer concludes: 'The Nazis are really un-German.' Five years later, when the first whispers of the gassings of Jews in the East reach him, he reconsid- ers: 'Perhaps this Hitler business has deeper roots in the people and the German nature than I realised.'

The tension between these two views will always accompany attempts to define what National Socialism really was. Today, films such as Schindler's List and books like Klem- perer's diaries — stories of Jews cheating death and good Germans helping them are replacing the guilt-obsession of Werner Fassbinder and Heinrich Boll in the 1960s and 1970s. 'Just wait,' a gloomy Jewish friend advised, 'they're starting to convince them- selves that the Holocaust had a happy end- ing.' For Germans, Goldhagen's book contains the unhappiest ending of all — a vision of Hitler's Reich as a world in which they might just as well have been execution- ers as saviours.