BLOOD AND IRONY

In the new Germany, Ian Buruma writes, intellectuals on the Left and Right have lost their postwar roles

Berlin THE new Germany is a country of ironies. Take the following scene, one week after 3 October, the day of German unification: in the first parliament building of the German Democratic Republic, now the Academy of Arts, we gathered to hear an artist called Hans-Jurgen Syberberg warn us about the destruction of the German soul by leftists and Jews. Here, he said, in the former GDR, he could still say these things. In the western part of Germany, he complained, his voice was actively prevented from being heard.

Syberberg is the auteur of the controver- sial film entitled Hitler — A Film From Germany, an eccentric collage of documentary footage, Wagnerian music and Syberberg's baroque imagination. He has been accused of being a Nazi sym- pathiser, and his latest book of essays, a long lament for the lost German soul, the Volksgeist, the blood and soil and kings of Prussia, has been heatedly discussed in the German papers. Der Spiegel declared that this Nazi trash was 'not just abstruse chatter, but criminal'.

After Syberberg had vented his spleen at the shameless and shoddy materialism of our Americanised world, and hooted with rage at his 'enemies', a frail old man stood up in the audience. Rather reluctantly, since order must be maintained, the• old cultural commissar who led the panel discussion let him speak. The old man was a musician in east Berlin. He had been born in Poland and lost most of his family in the death camps. Seeing Syberberg's film and hearing him talk had filled him with such anger and astonishment that his voice shook. For about 15 minutes he spoke about Syberberg's irresponsible romanticism. 'All those speeches,' he shouted, 'by Hitler, Goebbels and Him- mler, and all the beautiful music — Wag- ner, Strauss and Mozart. What are our young disillusioned people to think? Why can't German artists be more responsible?

'Since you obviously require urgent emergency treatment I'm putting you at the top of the

waiting list.' Why is it, that when a forest burns in Germany, German intellectuals are always chattering about the deep meaning of fire instead of helping to put the damned thing out?'

I was reminded of the night of German unification, which I had spent in Frankfurt. I had watched Giinter Grass on television, discussing deep meaning with other earnest men. He said the usual Grassian things: that the soulless deutschmark was crushing the east German spirit like a steam-roller, that nothing good was being preserved in the old GDR, that communism would only be replaced by xenophobia, mass poverty and extreme chauvinism. I think he even mentioned Auschwitz a few times, as is his wont. But what struck me more than anything was the peeved tone of his dis- course. His was the voice in the wilderness. People were out to get him. People wouldn't listen to him any more. People wouldn't even let him speak.

It was, of course, exactly what Syberberg was saying too. Listening to these two famous men, one associated with the Left, and one with the Right, suggested that the Federal Republic of Germany was a tota- litarian state, like North Korea. But there, night after night, on panel after panel, in interview after interview, was Grass hold- ing forth at great length.

It is not hard to understand the peevish- ness of German wise men. Seldom has a generation of intellectuals been so de- moralised as this one — their illusions shattered by the grim reality of the com- munist state, their voices drowned in a sea of Western affluence. It is as though West Germany's very success were insupport- able. They are, in this sense, a little like Harold Pinter or Jonathan Miller, loathing the vulgar new riches that Thatcherism created. But if it is becoming increasingly hard for them to be heard, it is because they have been wrong much of the time, perched as they are on clouds drifting so far above their fellow men that they lost sight of them long ago.

Not that Grass is wrong about every- thing. His warnings about the social and economic dangers in the newly incorpor- ated part of Germany at least provided an antidote to the rather artificial enthusiasm pumped up by most West German papers on 3 October. 'All Germany rejoices' was the kind of headline favoured by the popular press on that historic day. In the cities of West Germany this was patently untrue. All I saw in Frankfurt were a few youths kicking beer cans. This was on the way to an 'alternative' celebration of lef- tists in a local cabaret. At the stroke of midnight a black American singer appeared to sing old jazz songs, rather badly. There was more fun in Berlin, but Berliners were rejoicing in their status as the future metropolis of Germany. And many east Germans celebrated the fact that they were free citizens at last. But the apprehension, articulated by Grass, was always there under the surface. As one east German artist told me, 'the celebrations were the sweet sauce to cover a sour atmosphere'.

What really disturbs Grass and many intellectuals of his generation, especially those on the Left, is not the precarious economy of eastern Germany, or the loss of socialist ideals. It is something more personal: they have lost their postwar roles as the voices of national conscience. By invoking Auschwitz at every opportunity, Grass is trying to hang on to this. Thus he trivialises a memory that should be kept alive, but not for the sake of Grass's moral reputation. This role, as the prophet of national conscience, as the guardian against resurgent fascism, is what gave many writers their voice. Without it, they feel mute, ignored, forsaken.

Auschwitz was often used as a kind of mantra, as a garlic clove to stave off the fascist vampire. Terrorist acts against the West German establishment, that hated bastion of materialism and greed, were sometimes condoned in the 1970s in the name of .anti-fascist resistance. The histo- rians' debate, in the late 1980s, which could have been so fruitful, became instead an acrimonious shouting match between `Nazi-sympathisers' and 'leftist fellow- travellers', all because of the anti-fascist legacy. This is why both Syberberg and Grass feel persecuted, the one by the `Jewish Left', the other by the `crypto- fascists'.

Both men are haunted by the past and obsessed with German cultural continuity, and both men sought that continuity in the eastern part of Germany. Part of the reason may be that both were born in areas of the old German Reich which now belong to Poland. But there is more to it than that. To Syberberg, the east, especial- ly Prussia, is where the true spirit of German Kultur lay. It flourished under the Prussian kings, it was exploited by Hitler, and it lived on, even under Stalinism, in the simple hearts of the East German people, as yet uncorrupted by American- Jewish materialism. Syberberg worships what John Wells (Diary, 6 October) called `authentic Germanness', represented by the Romantic poets, by Richard Wagner, by the German forests, and by the Volk of the east.

Grass, as well as many prominent writers in the former GDR, such as Christa Wolf, now under attack, shares this dream, though not quite in the same way. Even if he was more sympathetic to the communist ancien regime than, say, Syberberg, he was never a communist. But since the regime of the GDR was founded on the principles of anti-fascism, it was given the benefit of the doubt by many Western anti-fascists. Whereas Nazi judges and doctors and industrialists continued to flourish in the Federal Republic, most Nazis were purged in the GDR. The former Democratic Republic was, as the West German writer Peter Schneider put it, the place where Germans could have a good conscience. West German intellectuals needed the GDR as a counter-example to the wicked Western consumer society, where fascism always threatened to rear its head. And now that capitalism has moved east, so many intellectuals fear the last vestiges of authentic Germanness will vanish even there, for such 'authenticity' only survives in forced isolation.

The desire of German intellectuals to define the German identity, to find their way back or forward to an ideal Germany, and their ceaseless chasing of real or imagined enemies, is the direct result of the break in continuity in 1945. It was the Stunde Null, Zero Hour: in the West bygones had to be bygones in the rush to build, with American help, a Western liberal democracy. War crime trials were hastily ended (to be revived here and there in the 1960s), and in schools the war was discussed as little as possible. Instead of —7-177vi fr4t. , / evite , iMsys4.„„4 ev, /1,11 c.e.-e4o .

self-examination, there was an economic miracle, coated with a syrupy pop culture. In the East the national conscience was cleared of Nazism by purging the old Nazis, as well as anybody who resisted the brave new Germany. Since the communists had resisted fascism, the Democratic Re- public was not a nation of former agres- sors, but of victims and resisters. And so for a long time the recent past was buried, in the West by silence, in the East by Propaganda. The intellectual voices of conscience, so often misguided by extreme idealism and paranoia, were the product of that silence, and often the willing tools of that propaganda. Zero Hour was of course a convenient fiction. And here it is again. It is now the turn of the former communist state to start afresh and catch up with the western economic miracle. And once more history is in danger of being buried in the rush. There is talk of granting an amnesty to virtually all East German Stasi agents. (But not to West Germans, which means that some poor lonely secretary in Bonn, seduced into revealing secrets by a tough East German agent, might be convicted, while her Romeo will go free.) `Do you know,' said a designer to me in east Berlin, 'that civilian committees are selling Stasi files to west German maga- zines? This is typical of what is happening here. It's just like 1945 in the West, when the Americans came. Now it's the west Germans who come here as saviours. This is a big mistake. They are not our saviours. We must clear up our own mess. For when things go wrong, the outsiders will be blamed, first the Wessies [west Germans], then the foreigners, then the Jews . . •'. This designer, called Grisha, was pri- vileged in the old GDR. He was able to travel west during the last few years, and he lived in a large flat for next to nothing. He knows that soon the rents will drive him out, just as western competition will drive a large number of east Germans out of their jobs. 'About two-thirds of us know

we will be sacked,' said a highly educated

meteorologist working at a weather sta- tion. Competition for jobs is already hav-

ing some highly undesirable consequences,

such as the anonymous letters sent to new western employers denouncing fellow em- Ployees as former Stasi agents. `People are so demoralised that no work is being done at all,' said the meteorologist. But he, too, was privileged. His job, if not necessarily the job he wanted, was guaranteed. He was up until last year a party member. He believed that communism could be re- formed. And now, he says, 'the western Germans are shamelessly coming in to pick our best assets like cherries'. But fear of losing their privileges is not the main reason why such people worry. Everybody I spoke to was delighted that the Wall came down. What bothered these educated, and yes, privileged people was the idea that they should be dependent on outside saviours, that their fates, let alone the fate of their former country were no longer in their own hands, that their `revolution' was highjacked by Helmut Kohl. As a young woman working for the former Writers' Union put it: 'For years we were like squirrels running around dead trees. Nothing changed. Then, last year, things finally moved. We really thought we could do something. But now we are just making a crude copy of what exists in the West.'

They may be naïve, these privileged ones, to believe that any other solution was possible, that there was a Third Way for the GDR, something between capitalism and socialism. But dependence on a rich saviour robs people of responsibility. And without responsibility there can be no self-examination.

`It's always the same story in Europe,' said Grisha, his usually humorous face set in an apprehensive frown, 'the liberators come as carriers of food and drink, but also as rapists and robbers. I often think of that picture of the Soviet soldier hoisting the Soviet flag on top of the Reichstag in 1945. He was wearing a German watch on both wrists.'

The GDR was not the Third Reich. And yet one is reminded of the parallel with 1945. The dashed illusions, the misspent lives, the envious suspicion . of wealthy outsiders, the haste to forget about the past. These make for a fertile breeding ground for future extremism, of rancorous historians' debates, of embittered intellec- tuals, setting themselves up as national voices of conscience.

Back at the Syberberg conference in the old hall of the ancien regime the debate was heating up. Old German wounds were scratched open one by one: the complicity of intellectuals in authoritarian politics, the legacy of Auschwitz, the failure of the Left. The old cultural commissar, so un- used to audiences having a go at invited notables, so unused to open debate of any kind, became more and more anxious, until he could stand it no more and with a hint of panic in his voice declared the session over. 'Who are you,' shouted a young man in a thick Berlin accent, 'to stop the discussion just as it's getting interest- ing?'

'I'm afraid your pension has been docked you've got an overdue library book.'