The German Genius Read online

  No less damaging to Goldhagen’s scholarship was the fact that he had mistranslated some German passages—and in telling fashion. In one instance, he refers to a poem written by a member of an Einsatzkommando and writes that this individual “managed to work into his verse, for the enjoyment of all, a reference to the ‘skull-cracking blows’…that they had undoubtedly delivered with relish to their Jewish victims.” Although the verse was indeed extremely anti-Semitic, the phrase in quotes actually referred to “the cracking of nuts.”48 Evans concluded—and he was just one among many—that Goldhagen’s book was disfigured by a “startling failure of scholarship,” that it was written in the “pretentious language of dogmatism,” and betrayed a “disturbing arrogance that is of a piece with the exaggerated claims for novelty.”49

  Hitler’s Willing Executioners conforms exactly to what Novick is saying. Far from interest in the Holocaust declining in our (or Goldhagen’s) historical consciousness, its enormity—its singularity—has now grown in salience to the point where it was caused, not by Hitler alone, or his elite entourage, or the SS, but by all Germans, including the ordinary ones, and this was so because, throughout history, Germany has always been anti-Semitic, far more so than any other country. This comes close to making the Holocaust inevitable in Germany.

  It also alerts us to a phenomenon we shall have occasion to examine and criticize and where the Germans (among others) have been at fault: the writing of meta-history, by which I mean the attempt to understand the past via simple, all-embracing theories, the “dangerous simplifiers” as Jacob Burckhardt called them.

  The “Goldhagen affair” shows how history writing can be distorted. Given the distortions and omissions he employed, one is entitled to wonder whether he could not see past or around the Holocaust to begin with, and this author at least is prompted to suspect instead that he started with his conclusions and then found the “facts” to fit his theory. Goldhagen’s account is not so crude as that of the British tabloids, but it does have the same obsessive quality. As Fritz Stern saw it, “the book also reinforces and reignites earlier prejudices: latent anti-German sentiment among Americans, especially Jews; and a sense among Germans that Jews have a special stake in commemorating the Holocaust, thereby keeping Germany a prisoner of its past.”50 As the German historian K. D. Bracher has said, all modern developments in Germany are inevitably linked back to events in the Third Reich. The Germany of before that time, for most people, simply does not exist.

  Dismaying as all this is, there is another perspective, put by two British observers, Ian Kershaw and Steve Crawshaw. History, particularly in the age of television, is almost as much about perception as about reality, and one of the misrepresentations about Germany in the world at large is the ignorance in other Western countries in regard to the events of 1968. The Prague Spring, the student riots in Paris and elsewhere in France in May 1968, and the student sit-ins at American universities are well remembered. Much less well remembered—hardly remembered at all, it seems—are the events in Germany in that same year. Those events are covered in more detail in Chapter 41, of this book. Here we need only say that 1968 in Germany saw a new generation of sons and daughters (die Achtundsechsiger) confront their fathers and mothers about their “brown” past, their involvement with the Nazis. This was a genuine upheaval in Germany, a searing and serious attempt by those born in the wake of the war to force the nation to confront its past. Many Germans believe they began to “move on” then and are now well past the traumas. Not everyone agrees that this has happened, of course: the Bader-Meinhof violence lasted through much of the 1970s, the historians’ dispute did not erupt until the 1980s, German novelists were still writing about the war in the early twenty-first century. Older Germans say the youthful rebellion was a myth, that the young were jealous of their elders—with a brown past or not—who had made such a success of the “economic miracle.” But Kershaw and Crawshaw believe this helps explain the “Goldhagen phenomenon”—that his book was welcomed by the public, despite being censured by more knowledgeable critics. The book, they say, helped a fresh generation, the grandchildren of the Nazis, come to terms with the past. “The acceptance of any and all attacks on the old Germany provided a yardstick for modern Germans to remind themselves that they had indeed confronted the terrible past, thus helping to neutralise its demons. Goldhagen became a player, at just one remove, in Germany’s own arguments with itself. The details of his arguments—untenable or otherwise—mattered less to the Germans than his readiness to be tough on Germany.” In 2002 a sociological analysis of family discussions about the Third Reich was published, entitled Grandad Wasn’t a Nazi. This revealed “the unsettling extent” to which children in Germany were inclined to “blank out” the evidence that their grandparents were complicit, “even when that evidence is acknowledged and uncontested.”51

  At the same time, their elders have become progressively more interested in the war. Wulf Kansteiner’s studies of German television, especially the broadcasts of ZDF, the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, and the documentary films of Guido Knopp, show—among many other things—that programs about the “Final Solution” have risen from less than 100 minutes a year in 1964 to more than 1,400 minutes in 1995, with far more interest being shown after 1987. Kansteiner says there was in Germany a “memory revolution” in the 1980s and 1990s as Germans “retrieved and reinvented their history,” and that there was a “repackaging of the Nazi past” around 1995, and a reorientation of Holocaust studies after the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, when the “elusive goal” of normalization had become a “tangible reality.” This was essentially the same point as that made by Hermann Lübbe: “The memory of the Third Reich has intensified with increasing temporal distance to the Nazi past.” Again, the crucial decade, the turning point, is the 1990s.

  An explanation for the delay inside Germany in facing up to its past has been constructed by A. Dirk Moses, a historian at the University of Sydney (though he has also worked in Freiburg), who gives a “generational account.” His study, published in 2007, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 41 but, essentially, Moses—whose references are admirably copious—says that the generation known in Germany as “Forty-fivers,” people who were born in the late 1920s, who received their socialization in the Third Reich in the 1930s, and were on the edge of adulthood in 1945, had no other sociopolitical experience than National Socialism to go by, did not feel personally responsible for the atrocities (because they weren’t yet old enough), but afterward withdrew into the “private spheres” of family life and work, their psychological rivalries with their fathers remaining unresolved; “emotionally bound” to Hitler, they threw themselves into rebuilding the country, and remained largely silent about what had gone on in Nazi times—lest that disrupt the task of reconstruction. This meant, he said, that the nation in the 1960s was largely the same one as had existed in the final years of National Socialism, that the hierarchical and authoritarian cast of mind continued and this “silent majority” “remembered the sufferings of its own rather than those of its victims.” Furthermore, he said, many of the younger generation felt that the educated middle class incarnated these pathologies “in a particularly virulent way.” All this accorded well, he said, with the picture painted in 1967 by two psychoanalysts, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, in their book The Inability to Mourn, who had argued that, even at that late date, Germany was gripped by a “psychic immobilism,” unable to admit its culpability in the crimes of National Socialism, because that would involve the admission of shame and guilt on such a scale that “the self-esteem needed for continued living” would be unattainable.

  The “psychological” explanations are plausible. At the same time, the studies carried out at the Potsdam Institute for Military Research into “Germany and the Second World War,” the ninth volume of which was published in 2008, provide two new lights on this aspect of affairs. In the first place, this meticulous project (volume nine is 1
,074 pages long) removes any lingering doubt that “almost every German” in the Third Reich knew what was happening to the Jews. The evidence is now too overwhelming, from the public auctions in Hamburg, where the property of 30,000 Jewish families was sold to 100,000 successful bidders, to the prisoners in Bremen who worked in full sight of the population, especially to clear bomb damage, and were known as “zebras” on account of their striped uniforms, to the ship moored in the Rhine at Cologne, filled with Jews held ready to clear the bomb damage as soon as the air raids were over, to Düsseldorf, where the mayor wanted the captive Jews worked harder. The historians concluded that, after the war, there was a “collective silence” in Germany, protecting former Nazis who had taken part in the Third Reich’s crimes, “because everyone had, before 1945, benefited from the Nazi regime in one way or another.” At the same time, and as Max Hastings concluded in a review of the book, this study is a “notable tribute” to a new generation of Germans, most born long after the war, who are ready at last to compile a totally objective picture of the Third Reich, in so doing passing judgment on their parents’ generation in a way few other countries have managed. 52

  GERMANY’S “WRONG TURN”

  There is one final sense in which the Holocaust exerts its influence on the writing of history and therefore on our understanding of the past. The Nazis in general, and the Holocaust in particular, were so extreme, and so unique (notwithstanding what Professors Nolte, Hillgruber, and Diwald say), that there is a tendency among some to see every episode of the past 250 years as leading up to the Holocaust, as if it were the culmination (as Goldhagen implied) of all events and ideas that occurred in modern Germany. This has had a further effect—that, because of this, because of the very nature of Nazism and the Holocaust, modern German history is inevitably seen as political history, the pattern and outcome of domestic and foreign policy, party-political, diplomatic, and military affairs. Here too the very existence of the Holocaust has had a narrowing and constricting influence.

  The most important example of this is the work of the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler. In a massive four-volume investigation published between 1989 and 2003, he advanced the view that the sources of Germany’s “descent into barbarism” in 1933 were to be found, not in its geographical position, at the center of Europe and threatened on all sides, as other historians had often argued, but in the “special path,” or Sonderweg, taken by German society as it evolved to modernity between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth (Leopold von Ranke, the eminent German historian, had spoken of a German Sonderweg as early as 1833).53 In this account, Germany had taken “a wrong turning” at some stage. One view had it that the deviant path began with the fragmented Reich of the Middle Ages. In another view Martin Luther was to blame—it was his vehement rejection of Rome that was the fatal turning point. Then there was the view that the German philosophers—beginning with Immanuel Kant—had considered the concept of freedom only in a narrow, intellectualized way, as concerning the realm of ideas and demoting politics to a less important role.

  More plausible, Wehler said, were certain specific political features and events of Germany’s history. Fundamental were the ravages suffered by Germany in the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated the infrastructure and decimated the population, which took generations to recover. Furthermore, in the seventeenth century, for example, British parliamentary elites won out over the Stuarts at a time when Prussian towns and provincial estates were in thrall to the Great Elector.54 At a later stage, so this argument went, in 1848 the German bourgeoisie failed in its attempt to usurp political power from the aristocracy as had happened with its counterparts in, for example, England in 1640, and France in 1789. This was A. J. P. Taylor’s famous historical turning point, “at which history failed to turn.” Because of this, the Prussian aristocracy maintained its sociopolitical dominance. It continued to consolidate its influence through a conservative “revolution from above,” in which Germany was united (under Prussian domination) from 1866 to 1871. Although industrialization provoked social changes that put still more pressure on the upper classes, the monopolization of important positions of power in the army, the civil service, and the Reich administration enabled them to keep a grip on government. These maneuvers were reinforced by a “feudalisation of the bourgeoisie,” who were lured into aping the aristocracy (dueling, the scramble for titles, and, most critically, the rejection of democracy and parliamentarianism). A third aspect of this Sonderweg came in the realm of big industrial conglomerates. As a result of the “great depression” of 1873–96, these industrial behemoths sought an alliance with one another (in cartels), and with the government, which intervened more and more.55 This strategy, says Wehler, transformed Germany from liberal competitive capitalism (as practiced in France, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere) to “organised oligopolistic capitalism.”

  Wehler’s was an impressive and coherent thesis. It was controversial but it was so in the best sense, provoking thought but also susceptible of research. And research there was, masses of it. Historians in Germany paid Wehler the compliment of setting up a comprehensive research project on the history of the German middle classes, centered on Bielefeld.

  The Sonderweg was a theory of interest as much outside Germany as within, and some of the earliest criticisms came from foreigners. This was partly because Wehler had held up Britain’s political development, its path to modernity, as “normal” at a time when, inside Britain itself, controversy raged about why the country was “the sick man of Europe.” So it was no real surprise when two British professors of modern history (both of whom taught in the United States), published The Peculiarities of German History, which was nothing other than a full-scale attack on the Sonderweg thesis. David Blackbourn and Geoffrey Eley argued that there was no general path to “modernity” each nation had its own peculiar experience based on a particular mix of factors. The elements in the mix were the same in all countries—it was the proportions and interrelations that were different. They also pointed to the fact that German industries had produced very many modern technologies (see Chapters 17–20.)—how could such industry be backward when they were such a practical, innovative success? The same was true in the academic sphere—how could the professors have been so conformist when nineteenth-century Germany gave us so many new disciplines—cell biology, sociology, non-Euclidean geometry, quantum physics, and art history among them?56

  At first Wehler rejected these—and other—criticisms. However, by the time he published later volumes of his history, he had radically amended his theory. As one critic remarked, Wehler’s theory was now replaced by a list of twelve aspects “in which the German Reich’s experience was unique among that of Western European states.” These had to do with the army, the legislative assemblies, the civil service, the labor movement, the power of the nobility—in other words, strictly political matters though, as an afterthought, Wehler did include as important the role of the Catholic Church and of the educated middle class, the so-called Bildungsbürgertum. “Thus [Wehler] abandons a central element of the Sonderweg thesis—namely, the argument that society as well as politics failed to modernise. The entire thesis is now concentrated in the political sphere.”57

  Many of the issues raised by Wehler’s important volumes will be referred to later, but for now the issue to bear in mind is that, however successful or otherwise his theory is judged to be, it was above all an attempt to explain the special—the peculiar—path of German history, a political path to modernity that led to Nazism and the extremities and catastrophes of the Holocaust. As Richard Evans, again, has remarked, this led Wehler, if not to distort his history, then to leave out a mass of important and relevant material, a not dissimilar charge to that leveled against Goldhagen, Nolte, Hillgruber, and the history curriculum in British schools.58

  Hitler and the Holocaust are preoccupying the world to such an extent, I suggest, that we are denying ourselves important aspec
ts elsewhere in German history. We must not forget the Holocaust—this surely does not need underlining—but at the same time we must learn to look past it. Charles Maier, an American Jewish historian, wrote that “the effort to benefit from history [keeping the Holocaust alive] has disadvantages…Nietzsche feared that history could interfere with life…Can there be too much memory?”59 He also asked—and not rhetorically—if the Holocaust had not become an asset for the Jews, admitting that, “It is possible to make a fetish of Auschwitz.”60

  GERMANY’S CULTURAL “SONDERWEG”

  There can be no decisive break with Germany’s past, as the activities of Martin Walser demonstrate. Walser who, with Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, is one of Germany’s most distinguished postwar novelists, delivered a speech in 1998 in which he berated those who used Auschwitz as a “moral club” to continually remind Germany of its past, arguing that although he “would never leave the side of the victims,” he preferred to grieve and look back in private. Many who could sympathize with this must have been distressed subsequently to read that his next novel, Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic), was denounced as anti-Semitic.

  Other episodes show that the Nazi past continually intrudes. The works of much younger modern novelists such as W. G. Sebald and Bernhard Schlink are about the way the war, or the memory of the war, still colors people’s lives (see Chapter 42). In 2008 Volker Weidermann, literary editor and head of features of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, produced Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher, The Book of the Burned Books, a detailed examination of the authors whose books were burned by the Nazis at the celebrated auto-da-fé in Berlin on May 10, 1933. At almost exactly the same time, a plan to reintroduce the Iron Cross as a military award for bravery was withdrawn, the award being seen as too closely linked to the Nazis. In early 2008 also, plans to produce a definitive edition of Mein Kampf were discussed, as a way to prevent far-right groups from using the book for their own ends. Germany, as Focus magazine observed, is permanently on a tightrope walk between “the right to innocence and the duty of remembrance.”61