COOKS Waltzing with Strauss
By D. C. WATT
*THE GRAND DESIGN. By Franz Josef Strauss. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 18s.) TII1S GERMANY THE STORY SINCE THE THIRD R,I1(.11. By Rudolf Walter Leonhardt. (New York (Jraphie Society, $7.95) THE BURDEN OF GUILT: A SI.MRT HISTORY OF (.PERMANY, 1914-1945. By Hannah Vogt. (0.U.P., 38s.) Wi the approach of the German elections, mone would hope that British attention would again be turned to what was happening in Europe's centre. But the accelerating provincial- ism of the British daily press has once again failed the country. All one has seen so far have been re- ports of those of Dr. Adenauer's and Chancellor Erhard's speeches which have seemed most to threaten the test-ban negotiations in Geneva, and a series of reports about the activities of the extremist fringe nationalist parties. For a time during the Queen's visit it was possible to hold the impression that Britain had begun thinking seriously about her former enemy; but while the visit and the attention it focused on contempor- ary Germany did go a long way to force the abandonment of old shibboleths and stereotypes, the intellectual processes it set in motion seem to have stopped there. It is fortunate, there- fore, that there are still a number of publishers who do not share the pessimistic views of the British intellectual market. For here are three Works*. all of which stem from German pens, admirably translated, and aimed at stirring some glow of interest into the ashes of the fires kindled by the Queen's visit.
The problems presented by the division of Germany in the four years after the war are still central to peace and security in Europe. It is ludicrous to think that they can be ignored out of existence, just as it was, unfortunately, ludi- crous to expect in 1945 that the Soviet authorities would co-operate in holding down Germany politically and building her up economically or that they and we could ever agree on what con- stituted re-education in Germany. The only thing that can be said of Britain in 1945 is that it did then at least have a German policy. Since 1955 Britain has had no German policy at all. Of course, Britain is committed formally, to the reunification of Germany; but no one ^■ has any idea how. And those who are at least prepared to think in European terms have their minds and energies filled—no, obsessed—with the problems of the Common Market and of President de Gaulle.
In part this is a problem of historical imagina- tion and writing, in part of our ignorance of European (as opposed to French) culture. Yet all the leading figures of contemporary Europe lived through and were formed in the mould of the years between 1939 and 1949. It is one of the many merits of Dr. Strauss's book that its autobiographical chapter reminds one of this fact. Someday soon, someone will have to attempt a revision of European history to focus on those developments since 1900 which have formed the Europe of 1965, and not merely those which led UP to 1939. It is equally one of the merits of Dr. Leonhardt's book (he is literary editor of that excellent German weekly, Die Zeit) that he focuses attention in one chapter on Anglo-Saxon ignorance of most European culture, other than music, which is not of Parisian origin. His com- ments on British ignorance of the flourishing school of writers in contemporary Germany are mild, though a little shaming after one has seen the number of contemporary British authors on sale in bookshops in Germany. And why the only German playwright to be performed in Britain is Bert Brecht is 'something he fails to explain—it has too much to do with the present dominance of the British theatrical world by the reactionary popular-frontism of Mr. Tynan et hoc genus otnne.
For the. trouble with Germany is that it is always with us. Federal Germany is the largest industrial and, apart from its lack of nuclear weapons, military power in the west after the United States. The so-called German Democratic Republic, according to Dr. Strauss, occupies a similar position in Eastern Europe. What hap- pens in Germany (and what has happened and what will happen) is something which cannot help affecting Europe profoundly. And one can no more expect the rest of Europe to remain in permanent confederacy to keep Germany successfully down than one can expect the Negro population of South Africa to accept for ever their present subordination to the Euro- peans. Nor can one expect the German political elite to accept for ever that there are certain things they may not have and certain things they may not do; or that they must for ever accept the existence of two Germanigs, or the de-Germanisation for ever of such cities as Stettin, Allenstein, Marienburg, Danzig, Konigs- berg. No one in Germany can conceive of going to war to recover those cities. As Dr. Strauss writes, this would mean only the reunification of Germany in a cemetery. But one cannot dis- cuss Germany as a historical entity even in cultural terms or teach German history to German schoolchildren without confronting the question of historical continuity. It would be a little unrealistic to expect successive generations of Germans in the future to accept the argu- ments which justify the amputation of these central pieces of Germany's past by reference to the dreadful record of German occupation in Poland and the Soviet Union.
Which brings us to Dr. Strauss. He has had a bad press in Britain; and he will do little to improve it by this book with its confusion of German and European nationalisms. But it is simply denying the realities of Europe to close one's mind and refuse the effort to understand his kind of reasoning. Dr. Strauss is not Hitler and is no Nazi, despite the efforts of his political enemies to make him seem one. He is a national- ist, however (and he has displayed in domestic matters an alarming streak of authoritarianism which has, for the moment at least, driven him from office). It behoves us, therefore, to observe him carefully and see how far his policy can be reconciled with the peace of Europe, and what it represents in Germany today. Dr. Leonhardt's book is an admirable introduction to much of contemporary Germany. Dr. Strauss's mixture of European content and nationalist tone is an excellent spur to thinking about the problems likely to be raised -by Germany in the future; which brings us to the third of the books under review, Dr. Hannah Vogt's study of Germany's recent past.
Shortly after the Queen's visit to Germany, the Spectator received and published a remark- ably silly letter, critical of the visit, from a group of young men at Balliol College. The letter ended, if I remember rightly, by saying what a pity it was that Russia and the states of Eastern Europe chose to be our allies in 1939-45; if they had been among our enemies then they, too, could now be enjoying a visit from Her Majesty. Passing over the inaccuracy of the idea that Russia-chose to fight as our ally at any time during the Second World War, or that she be- haved very much as our ally (ask the sailors on the Murmansk convoys), one could perhaps express the wish that these young Rip Van Winkles (one must assume that they have been asleep in some Oxonian cave these last twenty years) would bring themselves to read Dr, Hannah Vogt's book.
For one of the measures of a people's claims to be part of our western civiJisation is the re- spect they pay to their own history, and the accuracy with which they recall it. By this standard, the Soviet Union has a long way to go. Music., art, literature, architecture, philosophy— these are things in which Russia has greatly enriched the culture of Europe in the past and may, if her rulers will, do so again.' But in the last thirty-five years or so the muse of contemp- orary history has been a blind and compelled slave of the Soviet state—and the gyrations of Soviet historians ludicrous to all but thei-n- selves. In fifteen of these years the same could have been said of the dominant school of history in Germany. In the last twenty, German historians in the post-war generation have brought about a 'revolution in German historio- graphy, which is, in itself, one of the most important guarantees that Germany has re- deemed her claims to be part of the main Euro- pean cultural tradition. Critics of Germany in Britain used to pooh-pooh this as the activity of a small group of ivory-tower-imprisoned aca- demics, and point to the failure of this rethinking to spread to the school textbooks. This assump- tion is no longer true.
Dr. Vogt published her book in Germany (she is a political journalist now employed by the education authorities of the state of Hessen) in 1961. It sold 400,000 copies in the first two years. It is clearly and directly written and copiously illustrated, and it deserves the widest possible attention from English schools also; but not only Iron, English schools. The clerisy in Britain as a whole, or at least that section of it which pretends to practise an open-minded approach to contemporary international politics, should also read this book. Dr. Vogt's views do not always accord with those accepted in this country. But on all the critical issues she does not pull her punches. As Professor Gordon Craig, the leading American historian of Germany today, observes in his introduction— this book is an 'element of our times, a weapon in the continuing struggle for German demo- cracy.' Its success is one of the best auguries for a successful outcome to that struggle; and an indication, if that were needed, that Germany speaks with other voices than that of Dr. Strauss.
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