CENTREPIECE
The German abandonment of being German
COLIN WELCH
What were we celebrating last week? Few seemed absolutely sure. Were we celebrating the death in disgrace of historic Germany? Were we celebrating the ashamed and horrified rejection of German-ness, not only by others but by the Germans themselves? And if this is what happened in and around 1945, is it truly matter for unreserved rejoicing or sorrow?
For some the phrase `historic Germany' has little meaning. A German writer de- scribed the successive epochs of German history as isolated logs floating down a river, each with no connection at all with the one before. Whatever truth may lie in this simile serves only to shift the continui- ty of German history from the separate logs to the turbulent river which tossed them along. Till 1945 each epoch was in fact connected to its predecessor and suc- cessor by the continuing life and conscious- ness of the German people underneath till 1945, but since?
For others like Lord Vansittart, `historic Germany' has a very precise meaning, malign, predatory, the bully or butcherbird of Europe, responsible since Arminius or Hermann for ceaseless and ever worse crimes, all tending towards and culminat- ing in the atrocities of Hitler. This view made more sense while Hitler was alive than it does now. It failed to predict or even allow for what has happened since. You might just as well say that all German history culminated in Adenauer. No one does say this; perhaps it isn't true; yet Adenauer did represent a strand of stiff probity and industrious self-restraint which, though often submerged, has never been absent from German life.
If Germany as a united entity has dis- appeared from the map, it is not for the first time. Indeed, it existed as such only for a twinkling of God's eye. Like the Poles, the Germans are used to being divided and oppressed. Indeed, no one can make much sense of Germany history without realising that the Germans, huge and frightful as they have looked to us, see themselves as small and vulnerable. Small for many centuries compared to France: between the Thirty Years War and 1815 the French are said to have invaded Ger- man soil some 145 times, and there were French soldiers billeted in the house when Goethe was born. Small too always in relation to the eastern Slays, whose con- quest of Germany was always feared (not least in 1914) and has now half come to pass. Lacking natural frontiers to east and west, Germany has existed only where force established and preserved her. Hence her exaggerated militarism.
If Germans move now through their cities as strangers, that too is not for the first time. Treitschke relates how, after the long horrors of the Thirty Years War, the famished survivors viewed their great cities with awe, products of a prosperity vanished and become inexplicable, as if they had been built not by their forefathers but by Kobolds or giants. Far more pro- found is the present alienation. The cities themselves were destroyed, for reasons which seem now, with rueful hindsight, inadequate. Whatever has been restored has the waxy, macabre lifelessness of a body embalmed, smoothed and made up to deceive: it is not what it seems. What has been built anew has nothing of Germany or the past in it. Never were the cities more weirdly or poignantly German than in their final agony and ruin, with tottering Gothic towers and mutilated Nordic statues, ges- turing hysterically, shrieking or trumpeting silently, rising above miles of rubble and roofless walls. An eerie moaning and whistling was often heard. It sounded like funeral music, thought I suppose it was the wind soughing in glass-less windows. On that wind was borne a stench which history cannot record, though it will haunt forever those who smelt it: the stench of evil and death.
As the cities recovered, they ceased to be German. Stand in the middle of Frank- furt or Dusseldorf: you might be any- where. In West Berlin too, though Com- munism, as everywhere the foe of growth and change (its only virtue?), preserves some but not all of what remained of historic East Berlin. I asked the lady guide what had happened to the Hohenzollerns' vast palace. `It has become unsafe and has gone away,' she explained. Unsafe? In fact it took a week of shattering explosions to destroy, the wall of the old part being ten feet thick. The baroque garrison church at Potsdam was also removed as `an obstruc- tion to traffic'. What traffic? The odd Russian convoy? An ambulance? A few old men pushing handcarts over the cob- bles? What was unsafe and obstructive to Communism was not buildings, but memories.
The cities ceased to be German, so did their inhabitants. Those who survived in the post-war ruins looked haggard and pale, but unmistakably German. You still saw the odd towering stiff white collar, from which rose, like an egg in a cup, the cropped head of some indomitable old Prussian. The women were in rags, but German rags: French rags, after liberation, were infinitely more chic. Boys and young men all wore German leather or corduroy shorts, or bits of German army uniforms.
As prosperity returned, German-ness was abandoned. Germans started to look like everyone else. Jeans became univer- sal. Rarely now do you see Lederhosen or Tracht, except as fancy dress. The Dirndl happily survives, but then it was always less shameful to be a German woman.
Nor is this abandonment of German- ness, I fancy, purely superficial and protec- tive, like a chameleon changing colour. It goes deep, de-Germanising German hearts and heads. It has estranged the young from the old, perhaps even from their own parents (though President Weizsacker did, as a young lawyer, honourably defend his father, formerly of Hitler's foreign office, in an Allied court). It estranges the old from their own youth.
All such old German art and literature as was not actively proscribed by the Nazis has become suspect, the more so if it was taken up and prostituted by them. German music, because of its abstraction and uni- versality, because of its general lack of any precise and potentially corrupt 'message', has perhaps suffered less by rejection than the other arts. Yet Wagner's written works have incited all to ransack his music dra- mas (not without success) for expressions of anti-semitism, brutality, cruelty, aggres- sion and excessive nationalism. When Hit- ler committed suicide, moreover, the Nazi radio thought it appropriate to broadcast repeatedly the solemn adagio from Bruck- ner's seventh symphony. Thus did the Nazis exploit and taint even the most innocent.
The ignorance among the German young of German classical music, its failure to grip and hold them, its meek surrender to pop, seems to me truly amazing. It is paralleled, I know, everywhere else. But these young people are or were Germans! why, even German brutes were once moved to tears by Beethoven and Schubert!
Even more rejected and seemingly re- mote is German classical literature. But there — an old German professor begged his English students to read not only Part One of Faust but Part Two as well: 'Yoe will find zere all ze verbs.' May I let you have my verbs next week, DV?
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