Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  The result was that Germans of Jahrgang around 1945 discredited their parents and their parents’ generation as Nazis. That helps explain why student protests also took a violent form in Italy and Japan, the other two aggressor countries of World War Two. In contrast, in the United States the parents of Americans born in 1945 were not viewed as war criminals for fighting in World War Two, but instead as war heroes. That doesn’t mean that American teenagers of the 1960’s, any more than teenagers elsewhere, refrained from criticizing their parents; it just means that they couldn’t dismiss their parents as war criminals.

  Widely remembered as a symbolic moment of 1968 in Germany was an act by a young German non-Jewish woman named Beate Klarsfeld (several years older than Jahrgang 1945), married to a Jewish man whose father had been gassed at Auschwitz. On November 7, 1968 she shrieked “Nazi!” at West Germany’s chancellor Kurt Kiesinger and slapped him in the face, because he had been a Nazi party member. But while their parents’ complicity in Nazi crimes made Germans born around 1945 particularly prone to despise their parents, the Nazi past itself was not the only cause of the German protests of 1968. German students were protesting even more against things similar to what American students and “hippies” of 1968 were protesting: the Vietnam War, authority, bourgeois life, capitalism, imperialism, and traditional morality. German 1968-ers equated contemporary capitalist German society with fascism, while conservative older Germans in turn regarded the violent young leftist rebels as “Hitler’s children,” a reincarnation of the violent fanatical Nazi SA and SS organizations. Many of the rebels were extreme leftists; some actually moved to East Germany, which in turn funneled money and documents to sympathizers in West Germany. Older West Germans responded by telling the rebels, “All right, go to East Germany if you don’t like it here!”

  German student radicals in 1968 turned to violence far more than did contemporary American student radicals. Some of them went to Palestine for training as terrorists. The best known of those German terrorist groups called themselves the Rote Armee Fraktion = Red Army Faction (acronym RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang after two of its leaders (Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader) who became especially notorious. The terrorists began by carrying out arson attacks on stores, then proceeded to kidnappings, bombings, and killings. Over the years the victims whom they kidnapped or killed included leaders of the German “establishment,” such as the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, a candidate for mayor of West Berlin, Germany’s federal prosecutor, the chief of Deutsche Bank, and the head of West Germany’s Employers’ Association. As a result, even most German leftists themselves felt increasingly endangered by the violence of the radical left, and withdrew their support. West German terrorism peaked during the years 1971 to 1977, reaching a climax in 1977 when Andreas Baader and two other RAF leaders committed suicide in prison after the failure of a terrorist attempt to free imprisoned terrorists by hijacking a Lufthansa airplane. Two further waves of terrorism followed, until the RAF announced in 1998 that it had dissolved.

  The German student revolt of 1968 is sometimes described as “a successful failure.” That is, while the student extremists failed in their goals of replacing capitalism with a different economic system, and of overthrowing West Germany’s democratic government, they did achieve some of their goals indirectly, because parts of their agenda became co-opted by the West German government, and many of their ideas were adopted by mainstream German society. In turn, some of the 1968 radicals later rose to leading political positions in West Germany’s Green Party—such as Joschka Fischer, who after being active as a stone-throwing radical developed a taste for fine suits and wines and became West Germany’s foreign minister and vice-chancellor.

  Traditional German society had been politically and socially authoritarian. Those qualities, already present long before Hitler, were made explicit in Nazi society by its emphasis on the “Führerprinzip,” literally “the leader principle.” Not only was Hitler himself officially known as the “Führer” to whom all Germans swore unquestioning political obedience; social as well as political obedience to leaders was expected in other spheres and at other levels of German life under the Nazis.

  Although Germany’s crushing defeat in World War Two discredited the authoritarian German state, the old elites and their thinking remained alive after World War Two. Here are some non-political examples that I encountered during my stay in Germany in 1961. Spanking of children was widespread then, not merely permitted but often considered obligatory for parents. I worked in a German scientific research institute whose director completely by himself made the decisions controlling the careers of his institute’s 120 scientists. For instance, to obtain a university teaching job in Germany required a degree beyond the PhD, called “Habilitation.” But my director permitted only one of his 120 scientists to be “habilitated” each year, and chose that person himself. Wherever one went—on the street, on lawns, in schools, in private and public buildings—there were signs saying what was forbidden (verboten), and instructing how one should and shouldn’t behave. One morning, one of my German colleagues arrived at work livid, because the previous evening he had come home to find the grass lawn outside his apartment building, which served as his children’s play area, surrounded by barbed wire (indelibly associated in Germany with concentration camps). When my friend confronted the apartment manager, the latter was unapologetic: “It’s forbidden to walk on the grass (Betreten des Rasens verboten), but those spoiled children (verwöhnte Kinder) were nevertheless walking on the grass, so I felt entitled (ich fühlte mich berechtigt) to prevent them from doing so by putting up barbed wire (Stacheldraht).”

  In retrospect, authoritarian behaviors and attitudes in Germany were already starting to change by and just after the time of my 1961 visit. A famous example was the Spiegel Affair of 1962. When the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, which was often critical of the national government, published an article questioning the strength of the German army (Bundeswehr), Chancellor Adenauer’s defense minister Franz Josef Strauss reacted with authoritarian arrogance by arresting Der Spiegel’s editors and seizing their files on suspicion of treason. The resulting enormous public outcry forced the government to abandon its crackdown and compelled Strauss to resign. But Strauss nevertheless remained powerful, served as premier of the German state of Bavaria from 1978 to 1988, and ran for chancellor of Germany in 1980. (He was defeated.)

  After 1968, the liberalizing trends that had already been underway became stronger. In 1969 they resulted in the defeat of the conservative party that had ruled Germany uninterruptedly in coalitions for 20 years. Today, Germany is socially much more liberal than it was in 1961. There is no spanking of children; in fact, it’s now forbidden by law! Dress is more informal, women’s roles are less unequal (cf. the long-serving woman chancellor Angela Merkel), and there is more use of the informal pronoun “Du” and less use of the formal pronoun “Sie” to mean “you.”

  But I’m still struck today by all of those “verboten” signs whenever I visit Germany. My German friends with experience of the U.S. variously either rate Germany today as much less authoritarian than the U.S., or else tell me horror stories of current German hierarchical behavior. Conversely, when I ask American visitors to Germany whether they perceive the country as authoritarian, I get either of two answers, depending on my respondent’s age. Younger American visitors, born in or after the 1970’s, who didn’t experience the Germany of the 1950’s, instinctively compare Germany today with the U.S. today and say that German society is still authoritarian. Older American visitors like me, who did experience Germany in the (late) 1950’s, instead compare Germany today with Germany of the 1950’s and say that Germany today is much less authoritarian than it used to be. I think that both of those comparisons are accurate.

  Peaceful government’s achievement of many of the goals of 1968 student violence accelerated under West Germany’s chancellor Willy Brandt. He had been born in 1913, was forced to fl
ee from the Nazis because of his political views, and spent the war years in Norway and Sweden. In 1969 he became West Germany’s first left-wing chancellor as head of the SPD Party, after 20 uninterrupted years of conservative German chancellors belonging to Konrad Adenauer’s CDU Party. Under Brandt, Germany began social reforms in which the government pursued student goals such as making Germany less authoritarian and promoting women’s rights.

  But Brandt’s biggest achievements were in foreign relations. Under West Germany’s previous conservative leadership, the West German government had refused even to recognize legally the existence of the East German government, and had insisted that West Germany was the only legitimate representative of the German people. It had had no diplomatic relations with any Eastern European communist country other than the Soviet Union. It had refused to recognize the de-facto loss of all German territories east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers: East Prussia to the Soviet Union, and the rest to Poland.

  Brandt adopted a new foreign policy that reversed all of those refusals. He signed a treaty with East Germany and established diplomatic relations with Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries. He acknowledged the Oder-Neisse Line as the Polish/German border, and he thereby accepted the irrevocable loss of all German territories east of that line, including areas that had long been German and central to German identity: Silesia and parts of Prussia and Pomerania. That renunciation was an enormous step and constituted an unacceptably bitter pill for Germany’s conservative CDU Party, which announced that it would reject the treaties if it were returned to power in the elections of 1972. In fact, German voters endorsed Brandt’s swallowing of the bitter pill, and Brandt’s party won the 1972 elections with an increased majority.

  The most dramatic moment of Brandt’s career happened during his visit to Poland’s capital, Warsaw, in 1970. Poland had been the country that had had the highest percentage of its population killed during World War Two. It had been the site of the biggest Nazi extermination camps. Poles had good reason to loathe Germans as unrepentant Nazis. On his visit to Warsaw on December 7, 1970, Brandt visited the Warsaw Ghetto, the site of an unsuccessful Jewish revolt against Nazi occupation in April and May 1943. In front of the Polish crowds, Brandt spontaneously fell down on his knees, acknowledged the millions of victims of the Nazis, and asked for forgiveness for Hitler’s dictatorship and World War Two (Plate 6.5). Even Poles who continued to distrust Germans recognized Brandt’s behavior as unplanned, sincere, and deeply meant. In today’s world of carefully scripted, unemotional diplomatic statements, Brandt’s kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto stands out as a unique heartfelt apology by the leader of one country to the people of another country who had suffered greatly. By contrast, think of the many other leaders who did not kneel and apologize: American presidents to Vietnamese, Japanese prime ministers to Koreans and Chinese, Stalin to Poles and Ukrainians, de Gaulle to Algerians, and others.

  The political pay-off for West Germany from Brandt’s behavior did not come until 20 years after his Warsaw Ghetto visit, and long after Brandt himself had resigned as chancellor in 1974. In the 1970’s and 1980’s there was still nothing that a West German chancellor could do directly to bring about the re-unification of West and East Germany. The two chancellors who followed Brandt, Helmut Schmidt of the SPD and then Helmut Kohl of the CDU, both continued Brandt’s policies of trading with East Germany, seeking reconciliation with Eastern European countries, and cultivating good personal relationships with leaders of the major countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The U.S. and Western Europe reached the conclusion that West Germany was now to be trusted as a democracy and a dependable ally. The Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc partners reached the conclusion that West Germany was now to be valued as a major trade partner, and was no longer to be feared as a military or territorial threat.

  Brandt’s treaty, and Schmidt’s and Kohl’s subsequent agreements, between the two Germany’s enabled hundreds of thousands of West Germans to visit East Germany, and a small number of East Germans to visit West Germany. Trade between the two Germany’s grew. Increasingly, East Germans succeeded in watching West German television. That enabled them to compare for themselves the high and rising living standards in West Germany, and the low and declining living standards in East Germany. Economic and political difficulties were also growing in the Soviet Union itself, which was becoming less able to impose its will on other Eastern Bloc countries. Against that background, the beginning of the end for East Germany was a step completely beyond the control of either West or East Germany: on May 2 of 1989, Hungary, an Eastern Bloc country separated from East Germany to the north by another Eastern Bloc country (Czechoslovakia), decided to remove the fence separating it on the west from Austria, a Western democracy bordering on West Germany. When Hungary then officially opened that border four months later, thousands of East Germans seized the opportunity to flee by way of Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the West. (That official border opening date was September 11, coincidentally also the date of Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile and of the 2001 World Trade Towers attack in the U.S.) Soon, hundreds of thousands of East Germans protesting against their government took to the streets in Leipzig, then in other East German cities. The East German government intended to respond by announcing that it would issue permits for direct travel to West Germany. However, the official making the announcement on television bungled it and said instead that the government would permit travel to West Germany “immediately.” That night (November 9, 1989), tens of thousands of East Germans seized the opportunity to cross immediately into West Berlin, unmolested by the border guards.

  While West Germany’s chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, did not create this opening, he did know how to exploit it cautiously. In May 1990 he concluded a treaty of economic and social welfare unification (but not yet political unification) between East and West Germany. He worked hard and tactfully to defuse Western and Soviet reluctance to permit German re-unification. For example, in his crucial July 1990 meeting with Soviet President Gorbachev, he offered the Soviet Union a big package of financial aid, and persuaded Gorbachev not only to tolerate German re-unification but also to tolerate the re-unified Germany remaining within NATO. On October 3, 1990 East Germany was dissolved, and its districts joined (West) Germany’s as new states (Bundesländer).

  Can we profitably discuss post-war German history, as we have now summarized it in this chapter, in the light of the same framework that we used to discuss the four nations of Chapters 2–5? Post-war German history was seemingly very different. The histories of all four nations of Chapters 2–5 were marked by a single crisis abruptly exploding on one day: Commodore Perry’s arrival in a Japanese harbor on July 8, 1853, the Soviet attack on Finland of November 30, 1939, Pinochet’s coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, and Indonesia’s coup attempt of October 1, 1965. In contrast, there was no single, overwhelmingly dominant explosion in post-war Germany, which seems instead to have experienced several overlapping and gradually unfolding challenges from 1945 to 1990. We shall see in the next chapter (Chapter 7) that post-war events in Australia as well followed the gradual German pattern and differed from the explosive pattern that we saw in Chapters 2–5. Is it misleading to extend the term “crisis” from the explosive cases to the gradual cases?

  In fact, there is no sharp dividing line between the two sets of cases: the differences between them are just ones of degree. Germany did experience abrupt blows, in fact three of them rather than just a single blow. First, Germany’s devastated condition at the time of its surrender of May 7 and 8, 1945 posed the worst crisis faced by any nation discussed in this book. The erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, and the student revolts peaking over several months of 1968, then represented two further crises. Conversely, Perry’s arrival in Japan and Pinochet’s coup in Chile actually weren’t unexpected isolated events of a single day. They were instead the culminations of developments that had extended over many previous decades, and whose (partial) r
esolution would take many subsequent decades: both of those statements also apply to post-war German history. In the following pages we shall see that the factors emerging for the so-called “acute national crises” of Chapters 2–5 are similar to those emerging for the so-called “gradual national crises” of this chapter and the next one.

  Hence I have found it useful to consider both sets of histories within the same framework. In particular, post-war German history not only illustrates most of our framework’s factors; it illustrates four of them to an extreme degree. Let’s begin by discussing those four features, then several other less extreme but still significant features.

  The first respect in which Germany is extreme consists of the geographic constraints (factor #12, Table 1.2) on its ability to undertake successful independent initiatives; hence the necessity, instead, to await favorable opportunities arising from actions of other countries. Among the six countries discussed in Chapters 2–7, only Finland rivals Germany in the limitations on its ability to act independently. This idea may initially seem absurd to non-Germans, accustomed to thinking of 20th-century Germany as doing the opposite of holding back from independent action, and instead (under Emperor Wilhelm II and Hitler) taking bold military initiatives leading to both world wars. In fact, the two world wars support my generalization: both ended disastrously for Germany, because Wilhelm and Hitler didn’t wait for favorable opportunities but instead did take initiatives, with dreadful consequences.