Coming of Age
From SARAH GAINHAM
BONN
N the same week that 1 read the current issue I of Encounter, devoted to Germany, I heard too from a German girl of twenty that several of her friends had recently left their family homes to live in lodgings because of family quarrels over 'the past.' The appearance of an inter- national periodical of rank, full of serious and objective discussion of Germany, just as if Ger- many could be discussed—and in England—as any other country can be, and young people leaving home, are connected. The connection is the passage of time—and the trials. Up to Easter there were few public comments on this month's Encounter here. Not only time for translation and digestion are needed; a kind of shock has been caused in literary circles by such unwon- tedly well-informed and unpolemical treatment. But Germany is an echo-chamber very sensitive to foreign voices, and there will certainly be strong reactions.
One detail, often repeated, will probably not be commented on by Germans, but deserves to be mentioned. Both Louis Halle and Arnold Toynbee state as a fact—Toynbee in predicting a 'third' recurrence—that Germany has twice invaded Russia. In August, 1914, it is a matter of simple fact that the Russians invaded Ger- many and not the other way about; the Russians were defeated at Tannenberg in Prussia and were then pursued back into their own country in what was to he a long and terrible war. The important fact is the Russians invaded Germany. • Ygt this Encounter issue would hardly have been possible a few years ago; it is a straw in the wind of public opinion, and to those who have- falteringly—tried to stick to facts in discussing Germany, it is a powerful and flowering straw, Not only the passing of time has affected public opinion; like the young people quarrelling with their parents, something of it has been caused
by the long series of trials that began—though, in fact, they have hardly ever stopped completely since the end of the war—in 1958 at Ulm with the trial of members of a special task force who were in Tilsit during the war. The revelations in that trial led the provincial Justice Ministries to set up a joint central clearing-house for informa- tion on Nazi crimes. Once evidence was co- ordinated, the present and future trials became inevitable. It is important to recall that this was simply the course of the law; not propaganda, and not pressure from outside, but the working of neutral and indifferent law.
At Frankfurt, Brunswick, Limburg, Karlsruhe and Cologne the packed-away secrets, miseries and pressures of people who were young twenty- five and thirty years ago are coming out into the open with the force of a hurricane. What the parents of today's young Germans did, or failed to prevent, a generation ago, is now known to everyone who can read. The young start to read out of curiosity to learn what has been passed over in silence; they continue reading with incredulous disgust and finish with ques- tioning their parents. The cruel, youthful probing into old shames, often only half-known or sus- pected, leads to bitter quarrels. The young have no idea of the misery, starvation, bewilderment and violence of the Germany of their parents' youth; if they remember hunger it was—it now seems clear—caused by the chaos their parents had made of Germany and Europe. Since the twenty-year-olds went to school there has been no legalised coercion in their society, and they have as little understanding of the pressures of the Gestapo as young Britons can have. To the parents it seems bitterly unjust; the majority who did nothing and who in any country would have done nothing, neither evil nor heroic, say over and over again, 'But you don't understand. ,
No, they don't understand, and they don't want to. It seems quite simple, as if there were only one step between their warm homes and the ,dark outcast world of Auschwitz. The gap , between generations has a special meaning here and Enzensberger's contribution to Encounter is a foretaste (though he is older) of what is bound to become a wave of feeling which is going to change this society. The young reject the whole of the past, throwing away the good with the bad, and though they accept, with an inverted national feeling, that they are Germans, they are sure they must be a different kind of German. When my twenty-year-old acquaintance has children, she will be used to the idea of children challenging their elders' clichds. That will be the first German generation to take for granted the questioning and possible rejection of authority; that is how societies are changed, with the children. By the time all the trials now in preparation have been held, about 1970, even the professional bigots may have to admit that what the world has always de- manded of the Germans is being done : that they should face the facts of their own actions. This is the first time a civilised society has either tried its political murderers or compensated—as far as money can make good suffering, which is not very far—their victims.
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