The Germans
GEOFFREY BARRACLOUGH
I enjoyed this book immensely when I first read it in German, and I have enjoyed it immensely in the new English version, thanks to Marian Jackson's brilliant translation, which so ad- mirably catches the style and spirit of the original. She is to be congratulated on her achievement, for this is a book we simply cannot do without. So much has been written on recent German history and on the German 'problem' embedded in recent German history, that I, for one, am beginning to tire of the whole subject. Gob. Mann's 'book is like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room.
What is most refreshing about it, perhaps, is its sanity, a quality too often absent in recent writing about German history. It is not the only quality. With it go urbanity, good temper and a refusal to indulge in moralisa- tion. Gob o Mann's aim, he says, is `to try to understand as best we can,' and meanwhile to avoid 'false extremes and false alternatives.' He has no use for the kind of writing which sits in judgment and points an accusing finger, treating German history as a case-study in collective guilt, or at least as a series of 'wrong turnings' ending up in Hitler, dismemberment and partition. He has still less use for the type of well-meant apologia which still sometimes reaches us from Germany. Even the most liberal Germans who lived through the Nazi years have difficulty in shaking off 'the burden of guilt.' This is no problem for Gob o Mann. Absent from Germany from 1933 to 1958, serving part of the time in the us army, he has nothing to 'explain,' or excuse, or defend. At the same time, he is entirely free from the resentments which sometimes warp the judgment of imigrds. One of the paradoxes of this book is the way it combines detachment with warm commitment.
All this is true, but it still leaves the essen- tial qualities of Gob o Mann's work unexplained.
It could apply to any ordinary 'history' (though in fact it applies to few); but this is no ordinary history. I will say nothing of its literary qualities, though they are rare in his- torical writing, and doubly rare in German historical writing. What is so characteristic is its warmth. This is no cold dissection, methodi- cally providing the answers to stock questions, but rather a commentary, full of 'reflections,' 'interludes,' penetrating observations and acute characterisations. It expresses a philosophy of history which is unfashionable, but sorely missed. For Gob o Mann history is essentially an act of reflection, not diligent research piec- ing together 'evidence' from the records. Sheer erudition, the learned controversies and con- flicting interpretations which figure so largely in academic histories, do not rank high in his scale of values. Indeed, the past he views is not quite the same as the past on which most academic historians like to concentrate: institutions, politics, the evolution of the state, industrial development. His perspective is different. What he does, in effect, is to show what it was like to be a German at various times, in the old Germany before 1848, in Bismarck's pullulating Reich, in the dark days after 1919 and the miraculously bright days of Erhard's Wirtschaftswunder. I know no other book which does the same.
This does not mean that Gob o Mann ignores or underestimates politics—or economics either. He is only too well aware that the Germans, more than any other people, were the play- thing—and all too often the victim—of politics. In the 'sixties of the nineteenth century, he says, 'politics. . . shaped the future'; in the 'eighties, economics. The rest, using for once the well- known marxist term, is "superstructure."' But, he adds—and this is characteristic of Mann's whole approach—'the superstructure is impor- tant. Because the big question was how would the nation use this new energy? How would it . . . adapt its political existence to the most profound social changes which it had ever ex- perienced?' The answer, of course, is that it didn't. 'What developed in Germany could not be fitted into the construction of 1870, with the result that there was the most damaging tension.' The new nation-state 'brought prob- lems which have never been satisfactorily solved and which deny solution even now.' These remarks are typical. Mann never shirks judgments, and trenchant judgments at that, when they are in place; but they are tem- pered, characteristically, by awareness of the human predicament. Thus of Brtining, whose government began the slide towards Hitler: 'his historical guilt is great,' he says, which 'is par- ticularly sad, because personally he was completely innocent.'
Only extensive quotation could do justice to the flavour of this book. For example, the characterisation—warm but detached—of Gob's famous father, Thomas Mann, 'this noble, highly intelligent, honest muddle,' the representative novelist of the Stresemann years, who 'provided stimulus and first-class enter- tainment but did not tell people what to think and why.' Or Bismarck's 'heavy or fidgety hand.' Dr Adenauees foreign policy—could more be said in a nutshell?—`the negation of the status quo for the purpose of maintaining that status quo.' Or, last but not least, the Ger- man historians of the inter-war years, who for ever found excuses for the errors of German policy before 1914, such as Bismarck's de- parture, but 'never considered whether some- thing had not been fundamentally wrong in a state in whose history the dismissal of one old man could be such a momentous event.'
. And what of the present? Gob o Mann is aware that 'the' phantom of the German Reich' has 'prevented the new reality, the Federal Republic, from freely acknowledging its own identity.' He is also aware of the strength of 'restorative forces.' But he has no doubt about the substance of the changes either. During the fourteen years of Adenauees rule 'German society changed more profoundly than in the whole preceding century.' Paradoxically, it is only in the DDR that 'a little of the charm of the nineteenth and early twentieth century can still be found'—and also, as he more soberly remarks, of the old 'public spirit. But, he adds, if 'the structure of society has changed . . who knows whether its basic character has changed?' Happily 'the whole world is no longer the same.' The might of the mightiest is restricted by factors which did not exist in Adolf Hitler's day'—and this, he concludes, is no misfortune, 'either for Germany or for the rest of the world.'
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