Books
A culture that went wrong
Richard Cobb
Germany 1866-1945 Gordon A. Craig (Oxford £10) This is indeed a book in the grand manner, old-fashioned perhaps. in that it gives full scope to personalities and, as the author states, in a narrative that includes Bismarck, the Kaiser, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, Ebert, Stresemann and Hitler, personalities are not a negligible factor sombre and sober, briefly contemptuous, occasionally humorous for there are buffoons among the rogues and the men of blood and power, and even Hitler can achieve a ghastly sort of sick humour. The history of the seventy-five years of the German Reich represents an almost constantly tragic theme, interrupted by examples of sharp Berlin humour, and illustrated, appropriately, in the dark poetry of catastrophe: the long trains steaming east, the wheels sounding Death-Death, as if in response to a novel by Heinrich B011, the long trains falling off the bridges a poet's vision, yet near enough to reality, or even bettered by reality, and consciously suited to the unique topography of a proud capital city, situated in a vast open plain and cut in two by an east-west axis, designed not for the natural flow of goods and people, nor for idling or for getting to and from work, but for the triumphal processions of conquering armies, as they march under great arches. A poetry that ends starkly, stripped down to winter bareness, the dead branches like those of a discarded Christmas tree, in the 1944 words of Hermann Hesse's Die letzen Tage: Winter peers, bitter as death And Night reaches out for us . . .
It is so often a scene of horror and darkness that has found the strange and powerful, the brutal and denuded language in which to celebrate itself, in phrases as devoid of softness as the brief, barking words of military command, a language of cataclysm and despair that lends a sort of grandeur to the colossal banality of a regime latterly most at home in chintzes, and to the oppressive vulgarity of a previous regime that luxuriated in Gothic texts, in gigantic railway stations always the railway theme in heavy tassels, thick curtains, the imperial ugliness of Wilhelminian hugeness.
The author, after nearly forty years' cohabitation with his demonic subject, is at once repelled and attracted by the bizarre blending of sentimentality and ruthlessness (Hindenburg, we learn, in old age, was much given to tears), of insensitivity and inventiveness, of blaring conceit and blinding self-awareness of a people that, in this sombre chronicle, emerges above all as amputated, unfinished, almost childlike and, like a child, sometimes vicious and often lacrimoseinnocent and cruel. To have thus remained so long chained to the unpredictable, sentimental and insatiable Germania, this American historian must have been driven on by an amazed fascination and an overriding need to try to understand what so often defies comprehension; for German history, in its sudden swerves into crudely obscene and readily accepted violence to be shrugged off as a routine spring clean or as the most expeditive political solution (the ambulance and the undertaker coming along to complete the work of the State while the Piltzfrauen wipe the blood off floor and walls) is unique. To capture its strangeness and its barbarity, it is necessary first to come to terms with the language of its poets, so often the best, the most perceptive historians of a nation too savage to be chronicled in disciplined prose. He lets the poets speak to us in their own apocalyptic voices illuminating, with their sudden shafts of fierce light, the prevailing night of a narrative of tragedy, irresponsibility, and stupidity. And so Professor Craig is the very best, most acute sort of historian of an alien culture and of a nation for seventy-five years uneducated and unskilled in the delicately balancing arts of democracy, which could produce brilliantly destructive satirists and cartoonists and hardly one political thinker of any pragmatic experience; and of a people quick to respond to any irrational appeal, to the unattainable and the impossible, thoughtlessly dis Spectator 4 November 1976 ciplined and unimaginatively patient and courageous in discomfort. He has succeeded a dry, very sober, very observant American in penetrating the nightmare Cabinet of the mad Dr Caligari German history of the Twenties and Thirties is as much cinema as the wintry poetry of doomand in coming w terms with a language hardly amenable t° translation and with thought processes that appear to most of us muddily obscure, pretentious, idiotic, universalist and apocalyptic. His book is not so much about the German people the German people hardly get a look in, save as pawns and docile victims, save as a concept, an emblem, a moral slogan, a vague volkisch entity, constantly t° be evoked, and assigned to the role of a disciplined chorus in the wings or in the stupendous statistics of the dead, the fallen as about the intellectuals, the educated men, the terrible university professors who bet' rayed their trust, who rejected doubt, a1'. who turned their backs on truth, a trahison des clercs on a national scale with, unfortunately for others, international repercussions. Any history of the German Reich has to be intellectual, for its central theme has to be the development of ideas and ambitions divorced from everyday realities and of abstractions that deny the evidence of common sense and of historical experience. So his study is above all the history of a culture that, from a very early date, went wrong. There is adottiness about Wilhelminian society that is sui generis, and that leaves the French or English observer stunned and bewildered; and there is a madness about Nazi society that makes a sober witness like Andre Frangois-Poncet into a tentative anthropologist. This tragic, yet uniforMlY exciting, book is about a society dominated by false hierarchies and devoured by impossible ambitions, that sought to banish tot' eration, good taste, moderation, and c001 passion. along with doubt, self-reliance, and individualism. It is a history of continuity, from Wilhelminian society which had totalitarian tendencies to Hitlerism which was totalitarian. Weimar emerges as the aberration. In this sense but society being used in the cultural sense only it is a social history of Germany. In the more general sense, stonishing successes and the. both not. As A ses, t tihs even more catastrophic failures of the German nation during these years were primarily political and military, the emphasis throughout has to be on political and militarY leadership (or the lack of it, or, on the Contrary, the plethora of parallel and often conflicting leaderships, in the plural), thou the author never fails to fill in the economic and industrial background that provided both the means and the directions of national ambitions. The resultant narrative is as familiar as it is foreboding to anyone unfor tunate enough to have been born into My generation; and so it is occasionally tap; talising and repeatedly infuriating. Here aii?! there, a chance emerges, it seems almost as it the country is about to take the right turn and to learn from the mistakes and the crudities Of the past; but then intransigence, incoherence, and undisciplined rivalry (the author makes short work of the legend of German efficiency) take over once again, to set Germany — and the rest of the world — on yet another suicide course. The dogged pe.rsistence of the Communists (KPD) In alliance with the Nazi party, and in common opposition to Weimar democracy, in the service of hate, social disruption and an evasive re volution is as predictable as it is depressing, though there is at least some sparse satisfaction to be derived from the fate of i many of its leaders. Equally predictable s the massive conversion of much of the rankand-file to Nazism; the politics of hate know no distinction between Right and Left; and the KPD and its irresponsible intellectual sYmpathisers — Brecht included — fought doughtily for the destruction of parliamentary democracy. Both were rewarded by a revolution violent even by German standards, though of a colour not of their Choosing. Other intellectuals stood aside, in arrogant indifference, claiming to be above politics, while the German Republic was steadily eroded. Not that this book is in any way a tract for our times; this is about a past German sickness and past German inadequacies. It is a moral story, with two moral endings, equally satisfying. Yet this is not quite the whole story, and, even after eight hundred pages, on reste sur 5f aim There are many questions that one would still like to ask, many levels of existence that remain unexplored. Where did nineteenth-century Berlin draw its expanding Population from? Is there no German Louis Chevalier? What were the social differentiations of the Berlin districts? What was the proportion of the rural population in 1900 or in 1914? What were the regional vanations in forms of land tenure and what Were the agricultural specialisations? What was the regional map of literacy? WhY was the Lutheran church so susceptible to pressure from the State? What were Nazi a. ttitudes to regionalism, as reflected, for instance, in the authorised encouragement nf Haus der Heimat? Did Nazism bring more or less urban crime? And how did Nazism a_ ffect morals? To what extent was the Hitterm. (th gend a breeding ground for homosex uality e leather shorts do seem to have he, en very short)? What happened to the i .1.ankers who stayed behind on their estates n 1945? What was life like in Berlin or in two in 1944? (The author does give us two delightful examples of the resilience of Popular humour, the one a cabaret song about Goering, the other one about the such Why did those young boys fight with °Lich fanaticism, in Magdeburg and elseWhere, in April 1945? What was the Nazi attitude to prostitution? How did middleClass families in the east react to the news of the steady advance of the Red Army? What were the social origins of the small-town Party bosses? Where is Thuringia? And Wabia? If only there had been a few maps! This is such a good book, one wants more of it: more at least about the poor, suffering, patient, cynical, humorous, tenacious German people: more about the ten-year-olds and twelve-year-olds one saw in 1945-6, roaming the streets of the ruined cities, begging for chocolate, food and cigarettes, boys and girls who had been born under and grown up with Nazism and who had come out the other end, the innocent ones, and, as we saw them, the proof of survival and the hope of the future. My last glimpse of Germany in 1946 was the platform of the station at Harborn: a small, blonde boy had caught a doughnut thrown to him by a soldier; a policeman seized the boy by the ear and shook him till he relinquished the doughnut, which the policeman picked up and ate. I could hear the child as the train pulled out towards the harbour, still blubbering.
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