History of the Present
Page 15
Talking of money, the Portuguese are determined to be a founding member of the European monetary union. But won’t the participation of currencies such as theirs mean that the new single currency will be softer than the deutsche mark? “Yes, exactly,” says a former finance minister. “That’s just what we want.”
23 MAY. Roman Herzog is elected president of Germany, succeeding Richard von Weizsäcker.
26-21 MAY. The inaugural conference for a Pact on Stability in Europe is held in Paris.
27 MAY. Alexander Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia.
29 MAY. The former East German leader Erich Honecker dies in Chile. Former communists, now called socialists, win parliamentary elections in Hungary.
30 MAY. A new currency, the kuna, is introduced in Croatia and in Croatian-controlled parts of Bosnia.
1 JUNE. Partial legalization of euthanasia in the Netherlands.
6 JUNE. Politicians and veterans commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. Germans are not invited to participate.
FATHERS AND SONS
LIKE MANY BRITISH CHILDREN OF MY GENERATION, I GREW UP AMID tales of D-Day and the memories of war. When I was six or seven, my mother showed me the citation for my father’s Military Cross: “He landed on 6th June 1944 with the first assault wave of 6th Battalion The Green Howards and in the bitter and continuous fighting in the Normandy bridgehead his coolness and disregard of danger were quickly apparent…. His conduct, bravery and devotion to duty throughout the whole campaign are deserving of the highest praise.” With all their formulaic stiffness, the words move me as deeply now as they did then.
When my children were about the same age, I sat them on a tank outside the D-Day museum in Bayeux and told them how their grandfather had fought to liberate Europe from Nazism. There are few satisfactions to compare with that of passing on history with pride. “This story shall the good man teach his son…” It is a satisfaction that many Polish friends of my generation can share, but only a very few German ones. For, while their fathers often fought with extraordinary courage, resourcefulness, and, yes, devotion to duty, they did so in an abominable cause. The brave men and women of the resistance whom Germany will commemorate on 20 July, the fiftieth anniversary of Count Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler, are the exceptions.
Yet the subsequent fifty years offer Germany some other causes for quiet pride. Last weekend, I took my eldest son, Thomas, now ten, to visit his godfather in Berlin. Thomas’s godfather, Werner Krätschell, is an East German priest with a remarkable story. When East Germany was cut off from the West by the building of the Berlin Wall, in August 1961, Werner was on holiday in the West. He made an extraordinary decision. While thousands of East Germans were still desperately trying to get out, he decided to go back. “People will need me there,” he said. And they certainly did. For twenty-eight long years, Werner did what a churchman could do to alleviate the suffering caused by the communist dictatorship, with quiet courage and devotion to duty. And this story, too, shall the good man teach his son…
Thomas can be proud both of his grandfather and of his godfather. That is a fine beginning. But if one takes the argument from the individual to the collective, from single people to the nations to which they belong, things are not so easy. So much of our national pride still derives from our part in the defeat of Nazism, and this is remembered not just as a defeat of Hitler but also as a defeat of Germany. Now Thomas’s history teacher at the Dragon School in Oxford will remind him of the complicating truth that the Wehrmacht’s back was broken by the Red Army, fighting in the service of another tyrant. But in the British memory it is “the longest day.” And before that “the finest hour.”
Yet, read again today, Churchill’s famous remark about the Battle of Britain—“if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour’”— seems to contain the hint of a dark premonition: There might not be many more fine hours to follow. It is, I think, really a little worrying that a British schoolboy in the 1990s is still expected to derive so much of his national pride from the achievements of fifty years ago, as if nothing really important had been done since. But of course he asks questions. What has happened since? Is Britain or Germany now the richer and more powerful country? Which has the stronger currency? And it is not easy to avoid, in the substance if not in the phrasing, the hoary old cliché that “Britain won the war but Germany won the peace.”
Germany has a different problem—or, rather, the other side of the same one. It was well illustrated by the little rumpus last year about Chancellor Kohl’s possible participation in this year’s ceremonies to mark the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Denying that Chancellor Kohl had ever sought to be included, his spokesman remarked at a press conference, “Do you seriously think that the chancellor would wish to take part in a ceremony [marking an event] in which German soldiers suffered a defeat?” While the spokesman subsequently elaborated his off-the-cuff remark—the chancellor, he added, would not want to celebrate the German victories of 1870 either—it in fact perfectly encapsulates a deep ambivalence about a liberation that was also a defeat.
My father, who as I write these lines is once again embarked for Normandy, felt the Germans should not be invited to the veterans’ commemoration. It seems to me that the veterans have an absolute right to say this. They risked their lives so that others—including the Germans—could be free. They must decide. But, insofar as the commemoration is also an act of contemporary states, this was, I think, a missed opportunity.
A missed opportunity, above all, for Germany. Had the German president, Richard von Weizsäcker, been invited to participate in some form—and, as head of the state, he would have been the appropriate person to invite—he would have had the opportunity to deliver one more great speech, comparable to that which he delivered on the fortieth anniversary of V-E Day in May 1985.
This speech would have explained how the defeat of the German armies meant liberation even for the soldiers who were defeated. How everything that has been achieved in Germany over the past fifty years—security, prosperity, democracy, and, finally, unity— began with and was founded upon that total defeat and unconditional surrender that precluded any but the civilian path to recovery. How, in short, the defeat of Germany was a victory for Germany. (He might have added, but would have been too diplomatic to do so, that Russia today faces a rather similar question—was the end of the cold war a defeat for Russia or just for Soviet communism?—but in a situation more like that of Germany in 1918 than that of Germany in 1945. For Russia, even more than for Weimar Germany, the military option still remains very much available.)
The German president’s great speech would have concluded by explaining why this memory is still important for a united, fully sovereign Germany, the richest and most powerful country in Europe. For if the danger for Britain is that we dwell too much on the past, often in romanticized, Merchant-Ivory colors, the danger for Germany is now rather the opposite.
The public memory of the old, preunification Federal Republic dwelled almost obsessively on the Nazi past. Everything the Bonn republic did was interpreted in the light of “the past”—meaning the twelve years of Hitler. But, even then, the private memory was rather different. James Fenton captured this wonderfully in a poem called “A German Requiem,” which he wrote when living in Berlin in the late 1970s: “How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times.” And again: “But come. Grief must have its term? Guilt too, then.”
With unification has come a strong inclination to say, “Enough is enough.” Germany has done its penance through forty years of division, with the East Germans, such as Werner Krätschell, bearing a disproportionate part of the burden. You cannot walk forever in sackcloth and ashes. What matters now is for the new republic, the Berlin republic, to concentrate on building Europe’s future. Anyway, the German past is more than just those twelve years. There are oth
er aspects of German history, before 1933, after 1945, even a very few between those dates, about which Germans can be proud—patriotic, even.
This reaction is not only understandable but right and proper—up to a point. The task, the extraordinarily delicate task, for Germany’s political, intellectual, and spiritual leaders is to determine: up to what point?
Now, one of the passages of history that I think is already slipping down the memory hole is the specifically British contribution not just to the liberation of Germany from Nazism but also to the reconstruction of what was to become West Germany after 1945, the defense of West Berlin, and the secure position in the West from which the Federal Republic could develop its own relations with the East. I am struck by the extent to which, in the German public debate, the three Western Allies have really become two: France and the United States. (German politicians and officials will of course deny this—unconvincingly.)
This has happened partly because France and the United States have known how to combine the proper memory of war with effective signs of reconciliation—like the “Eurocorps,” in whose ranks German troops will march through Paris on 14 July. But it is even more because France and the United States both seem to have some vision of a new partnership with Germany in Europe, while Britain does not. At which it will be the turn of British politicians and officials to protest—unconvincingly.
In 1944, Britain had a policy for Europe: to liberate as much of it as possible and then to help reconstruct it. Fifty years on, Britain has neither a policy for Europe nor any coherent vision of our own place in Europe. If we carry on like this, I fear to think what my sons will have left to teach their children.
CHRONOLOGY
1994
9 AND 12 JUNE. Direct elections to the European Parliament.
12 JUNE. In a referendum, 66.4 percent of Austrian voters support their country joining the EU.
22 JUNE. Russia signs a Partnership for Peace agreement with NATO.
24 JUNE. The UN endorses deployment of Russian “peacekeeping” forces in Abkhazia, which has effectively seceded from Georgia.
24-25 JUNE. An EU summit in Corfu. Signature of accession treaties for Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. A partnership and cooperation agreement is signed with Russia.
2 JULY. Former Albanian president Ramiz Alia is condemned to nine years in prison for abuse of power.
6 JULY. The Contact Group unveils its proposal for division of Bosnia, giving 51 percent of the territory to the Bosniak-Croat federation and 49 percent to the Bosnian Serbs.
10 JULY. Leonid Kuchma, a former director of a missile factory, is elected president of Ukraine. Alexander Lukashenka is elected president of Belarus on a pro-Russian and anticorruption platform.
12 JULY. The German Constitutional Court decides that it is constitutional for German forces to participate in operations outside the NATO area.
15 JULY. Jacques Santer is appointed president of the European Commission as of 1 January 1995. A new Hungarian government is formed, with postdissident Free Democrats serving under postcommunist prime minister Gyula Horn. Horn promises a “historic reconciliation” with Romania.
23 JULY. Tony Blair becomes leader of the British Labour Party.
29 JULY. Former Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi is sentenced to eight and a half years’ imprisonment for fraudulent bankruptcy but remains in Tunisia, enjoying “ill health.”
5 AUGUST. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia imposes an economic blockade on Bosnian Serbs.
29 AUGUST. The Basque terrorist organisation ETA calls on six hundred imprisoned members to go on hunger strike.
29-30 AUGUST. The last Russian forces leave Estonia and Latvia.
31 AUGUST. The IRA declares a cease-fire in Northern Ireland.
1 SEPTEMBER. The last Russian troops leave Berlin, completing their withdrawal from Germany.
6 SEPTEMBER. Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds meets Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and SDLP leader John Hume to talk about peaceful solutions in Northern Ireland.
8 SEPTEMBER. The United States, Britain, and France withdraw their remaining troops from Berlin. The last Soviet forces leave Roland. SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER. NATO member Turkey threatens war against NATO member Greece if the latter extends its territorial waters in the Aegean.
1 OCTOBER. Vladimír Mečiar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia wins the Slovak parliamentary elections.
7 OCTOBER. Swedish social democrats return to power, with Ingvar Carlsson as prime minister. Ex-king Michael of Romania is refused entry at Bucharest airport.
16 OCTOBER. In a referendum, Finns vote to join the EU. Bundestag elections in Germany.
INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICIANS
IMAGINE A theater critic who is suddenly hauled up from the stalls to act in the play he meant to review. What should he do then? Write the review without mentioning his own part? Appraise his own performance? This is the strange dilemma in which I find myself as I sit down to write this essay. Yet it is a dilemma curiously appropriate to the subject—as will, I trust, emerge. Let me explain.
Earlier this year, I received a letter informing me that I had been elected an honorary member of Czech PEN. I was touched by the gesture. The letter also invited me to attend the Sixty-first World Congress of International PEN, which would be held in Prague in November.
Now there is a great deal to be said against attending any international congress of writers, anywhere, any time. But Prague is a city where writers and intellectuals, especially the numerous banned writers and intellectuals, published only in samizdat or in the West, had a singular importance up to 1989. This occasion was to take place five years to the month after the “revolution of the Magic Lantern” that had catapulted many of them quite unexpectedly into positions of power, which some retain but others have in the meantime left or lost.1 Those characteristic postcommunist mutations, dilemmas, and ironies are concentrated—almost as in an archetype—in the person of the writer-president Václav Havel. All this, I thought, might make this particular writers’ congress more than usually interesting.
It did.
1
On the plane out, I looked back through my notebooks from the heady days of November 1989 in the Magic Lantern theater, and recalled the leading actors in the play then directed by and starring Václav Havel. Among my visiting cards I found one given me in the Magic Lantern by someone who, at the time, had only a minor part—as an economist prized for his professional expertise by the writers, philosophers, journalists, and historians then leading the Civic Forum. I have the card before me as I write. Actually nothing more than a typewritten slip of paper, it reads, “Dr. Václav Klaus, Head of Department for Macroeconomic Analysis, Institute for Forecasting, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.”
In Prague, I soon found that the position of intellectuals was very much a live subject and one that, like so many others in the Czech lands today, had come to be politicized around the, so to speak, magnetic polarity between the two Václavs, now better known as President Havel and Prime Minister Klaus. Havel was understood to be calling for the voices of independent intellectuals to be heard more clearly, enriching the country’s political debate. Klaus, the intellectual anti-intellectual, was heard to be skeptical of this notion, both on general grounds and because Havel was for it.
I talked briefly to the prime minister in the days before the PEN congress opened. Dr. Klaus received me in his tastefully appointed office, its walls decorated with framed honorary doctorates, prizes, and photographs of himself with very important persons. In the course of an interesting conversation, mainly about Europe, he thrust into my hands a selection of his lectures and speeches from the last three years, which he had gotten his office to type up, photocopy, and bind. This collector’s item of, as it were, prime-ministerial samizdat—entitled Dismantling Socialism: An Interim Report—documents well his characteristic mixture of sharp economic analysis and bold political salesmanship. Helpfully, he pointed out the best pieces.
I once asked a friend of mine, a wonderful man and a wonderful writer, to fill a certain political post. He refused, arguing that someone had to remain independent. I replied that if you all said that, it could happen that in the end no one will be independent, because there won’t be anyone around to make that independence possible and stand behind it.
However, “I am not suggesting, dear colleagues, that you all become presidents in your own countries, or that each of you go out and start a political party.” But we should, he suggested,
gradually begin to create something like a worldwide lobby, a special brotherhood or, if I may use the word, a somewhat conspiratorial mafia, whose aim is not just to write marvelous books or occasional manifestos but to have an impact on politics and its human perceptions in a spirit of solidarity and in a coordinated, deliberate way.