by Ian Buruma
Zuckerman’s transportation bombing might sound more humane than Harris’s terror, but to judge from Friedrich’s account, raids on transportation centers and other forms of tactical bombing were not necessarily less costly in human lives. Railway stations were usually located in the center of cities. The bombing raids on transportation lines in France and Belgium, in preparation for D-Day, killed 12,000 French and Belgian citizens, double the number of Bomber Command’s victims in Germany in 1942. Yet all these attacks had a clear military purpose.
It is hard to see, however, what purpose was served by bombing German cities and towns long after much of Germany had already been reduced to rubble. As late as 1945 huge US and British air fleets still went on dropping bombs on destroyed cities, as though they wanted to kill every rat and fly that remained in the ruins. The RAF dropped more than half its bombs during the last nine months of the war. From July 1944 until the end of the war 13,500 civilians were killed every month. And this at a time when the Allied air forces refused to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz because that was not a military priority. Why? Why did Würzburg, a town of baroque churches and medieval cloisters, a place without any military importance whatsoever, have to be obliterated in seventeen minutes on March 16, 1945, less than one month before the German surrender? And why, for that matter, did Freiburg, or Pforzheim, or Dresden have to go?
Zuckerman believed that “Bomber” Harris liked destruction for its own sake. Possibly that was it. There were also those, in Washington and London, who believed that Germans had to be taught a lesson once and for all. General Frederick Anderson of the US Air Force was convinced that Germany’s wholesale destruction would be passed on from father to son, and then on to the grandchildren, which would suffice to stop Germans from ever going to war again. That, too, may have been part of it. No doubt there were feelings of revenge and sheer bloody-mindedness as well.
But a more mundane explanation might be a combination of bureaucratic infighting and inertia. Once a strategy is set in motion, it becomes hard to stop or change. Zuckerman drew attention to the struggles before D-Day between Harris and USAF General Carl Spaatz on one side and, on the other, proponents of transportation bombing, such as Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. He wrote:
Harris and Spaatz soon joined forces in trying to prevent what they regarded as the subjugation of their “strategic” aims to the “tactical” needs of Overlord. Spaatz had an additional worry. The proposed “transportation plan” threatened his independence, and would place him under the command of Leigh-Mallory.
Such petty quarrels have consequences. And Friedrich has surely done us all a service to chronicle just how severe they were. Something can be true even if it is believed by the wrong people. The fact that Friedrich’s book was hailed in some very unpleasant quarters, such as the already mentioned far-right National-Zeitung, is not proof that he is wrong. Nor is the fact that Martin Walser, the controversial novelist who believes that the Germans have repented enough, endorsed The Fire by comparing it to Homer’s description of the Trojan War. In both cases, Walser says, the narrative is above distinctions between killers and victims. This kind of statement should be treated with care. There is still a difference between a state bent on conquering the world—and exterminating a given people on ideological grounds—and a state fighting to stop that. And although most German citizens may have been innocent of atrocities, there is a difference between concentration camp victims and a people that followed a leader bent on mass murder.
Again, Friedrich cannot be accused of nostalgia for the Third Reich or excusing its crimes. But he has done little to distance himself from the wrong supporters either. First of all, he chose the right-wing, mass-market tabloid Bild-Zeitung to serialize parts of The Fire. It is as though he deliberately aimed his message at the crudest readership—not neo-Nazi, to be sure, but relatively ill-informed, mostly illiberal, and prone to sensationalism. More serious is Friedrich’s odd terminology, which comes uncomfortably close to the rhetorical tricks of the National-Zeitung. Cellars are described as Krematorien, an RAF bomber group as an Einsatzgruppe, and the destruction of libraries as Bücherverbrennung, or book burning. It is impossible to believe that these words were chosen innocently.
The question is why a former leftist Holocaust researcher and neo-Nazi hunter would do this. There are, of course, examples of people switching from one form of radicalism to another. One of the most odious books written on the alleged amnesia about German suffering is by Klaus Rainer Röhl, an ex-Communist who turned to the far right.10 Röhl blames the Americans, Jewish “emigrants,” and German ’68ers for brainwashing the German people into feeling guilty about the Jewish Holocaust, while denying the destruction of Germans in death marches, terror bombing, and “death camps.” Here speaks the fury of a disillusioned radical, swapping a leftist utopia for the sour resentment of the self-pitying right.
Friedrich, however, appears to have fallen prey to a different kind of rage. The last chapter of The Fire and his book of photographs provide an indication. The Fire ends with a long lament for the destruction of German books kept in libraries and archives. The lament is justified, but its placement at the end of a 592-page book is curious, as though the loss of books, in the end, is even worse than the loss of people—which, from a particular long-term perspective, may actually be true, but that does not make it morally attractive. The choice and especially the editing of the pictures in Brandstätten leave a similar impression. There are horrifying pictures of corpses being scooped up in buckets, and other images of frightful human suffering. (The fact that these corpses are being handled by concentration camp inmates is mentioned without further comment.) But the real calamity, as it is presented in Friedrich’s book, is the destruction of beautiful old cities, of ancient churches, rococo palaces, baroque town halls, and medieval streets. The first thirty-eight pages of the book are given to photographs of Germany before Bomber Harris did his worst.
It is right to feel sad about the loss of all this historic beauty. For Friedrich this is something akin to losing the German soul. “Those who lose their lives,” he writes, “leave the places they created and which created them. The ruined place is the emptiness of the survivors.” The Germans, he believes, have been disinherited and lost their “central historical perspective.” The last photographs of the book contrast the beauty of old German streets with the ugliness of what came after.
Again perspectives count. Friedrich’s anger about feeling disinherited is directed not just at the Anglo-American morale bombers but also at the postwar Germans who refused to recognize the damage. Out of the catastrophic destruction came a zealous need to construct a new, modern postwar Germany, stripped of history, which had been so badly stained by Hitler’s legacy. Hans Magnus Enzensberger once observed that one cannot understand “the mysterious energy of the Germans” if one refuses “to realize that they have made a virtue of their deficiencies. Insensibility was the condition of their success.”
It is this insensibility that angers Friedrich, this lack of feeling for the “needlessly sacrificed old cities,” the collective turning away from German history and culture. Perhaps he puts too high a premium on material rather than human damage. Friedrich might have mentioned that by far the bigger blow to German Kultur was the murder and expulsion of many of the best and most intelligent people of an entire generation. The loss to Germany of the cultivated German-Jewish bourgeoisie is impossible to calculate. Wrapped inside Friedrich’s highly conservative lament, however, is a leftist rage against Americanization and West German capitalism. This is where the old ’68er meets the chronicler of German victimhood. His aim seems to be not only to wrest the history of German suffering from the clutch of the far right but to rescue the glories of German history from the twelve years of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. And this, despite the pitfalls that Friedrich has not always been able to dodge, seems a perfectly respectable thing to do.
1 “So muss die Hölle aussehen,”
Der Spiegel, January 6, 2003, p. 39.
2 Quoted in W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (Modern Library, 2004), p. 35. An English translation by Joel Agee of Nossack’s The End will be published in December 2014 by the University of Chicago Press, with a foreword by David Rieff.
3 Quoted in On the Natural History of Destruction, pp. 103–104.
4 “So muss die Hölle aussehen,” p. 42.
5 From Ein Volk von Opfern? (A People of Victims?), edited by Lothar Kettenacker (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003), p. 163.
6 The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2006).
7 Brandstätten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs (Berlin: Propyläen, 2003).
8 Quoted in Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Penguin, 1999).
9 “The Doctrine of Destruction,” The New York Review of Books, March 29, 1990.
10 Verbotene Trauer: Ende der deutschen Tabus (Forbidden Mourning: The End of a German Taboo) (Munich: Universitas, 2002).
6
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HEIMAT
EAST BERLIN, OCTOBER 1990: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the grand master of cinematic kitsch, walked into the old conference room where the German Communists founded their state. He had just seen part of his film Hitler—a Film from Germany for the first time in years. “My God,” he said to a gathering of people that included Susan Sontag, the actress Edith Clever, and various East German cultural worthies who smiled a lot and drank vodka. “My God, I was really provocative! If only my enemies had realized.… I am surprised I’m still alive!” Whereupon the artist stroked his beautiful tie, smoothed his superbly coiffed head, and looked around the table like the cat who had just eaten the canary.
Two days later, we met once again in the former government building, now the Academy of Arts, to hear Syberberg, Sontag, Clever, and other members of a distinguished panel discuss his works, in particular the Hitler film and his recently published book of essays, which has caused a big fuss in German literary circles.1 Syberberg began the proceedings by saying that only here, in the former Communist capital, could he openly express his views, unlike in West Berlin, where the academy was controlled by his left-wing enemies.
Syberberg’s delivery was remarkable: an almost silky tone of voice alternating with what can only be described as a theatrical tirade: a tirade against the filth, the shamelessness, the soulless greed, and the vacuous idiocy of contemporary (West) German culture, corrupted by America, by rootless “Jewish leftists,” by democracy. Syberberg also believes that the pernicious legacy of Auschwitz has crippled the German identity that was rooted in the German soil, in Wagner’s music, in the poetry of Hölderlin and the literature of Kleist, in the folk songs of Thuringia and the noble history of Prussian kings—a Kultur, in short, transmitted from generation to generation, through the unbroken bloodlines of the German people, so cruelly divided for forty years as punishment for the Holocaust.
Well, said some of Syberberg’s champions on the panel, shifting uneasily in their seats, these opinions may be absurd, even offensive, but he’s still a great artist. Then an elderly man got up in the audience. He had seen the Hitler film, he said, his voice trembling with quiet rage, and he thought it was dreadful. He was left with the impression that Syberberg actually liked Hitler. And although he was a Polish Jew who had lost most of his family in the death camps, he could almost be tempted to become a Nazi himself after seeing that film: “All those speeches, all that beautiful music.”
Then followed a remark that stayed in my mind, as I tried to make sense of Syberberg and of the literary debates raging in Germany, in the wake of November 1989: “Why is it,” the Polish Jew said, “that when a forest burns, German intellectuals spend all their time discussing the deeper meaning of fire, instead of helping to put the damned thing out?”
I thought of Günter Grass, who, with the lugubrious look of a wounded walrus, complained night after night on television that nobody would listen to him anymore. His constant invocation of “Auschwitz” as a kind of talisman to ward off a reunited Germany had the air of desperation, the desperation of a man who had lost his vision of Eden. His Eden was not the former GDR, to be sure, but at least the GDR carried, for Grass, the promise of a better Germany, a truly socialist Germany, a Germany without greed, Hollywood, and ever-lurking fascism.
I thought of Syberberg, who gloomily predicted that the awesome spectacle of a newly unified German Volk, his vision of Eden, would soon be replaced by the rancid democracy of party politics. And I thought of Christa Wolf, who had made a speech in East Berlin exactly a year before. The revolution, she said, had also liberated language. One of the liberated words is “dream”: “Let us dream that this is socialism, and let us stay where we are.”
Syberberg, Grass, and Wolf: they would seem to have little in common, apart from being earnest German intellectuals who loathe “Hollywood.” But they all bring to mind something the wise old utopian Ernst Bloch once wrote:
If an object [of political belief] appears as an ideal one, then salvation from its demanding and sometimes demandingly enchanted spell is only possible through a catastrophe, but even that does not always come true. Idolatry of love is a misfortune that continues to cast a spell on us even when the object is understood. Sometimes even illusionary political ideals continue to have an effect after an empirical catastrophe, as if they were—genuine.2
In her famous essay on Syberberg’s Hitler—a Film from Germany, Sontag makes much of the multiplicity of voices and views expressed in his work: “One can find almost anything in Syberberg’s passionately voluble film (short of a Marxist analysis or a shred of feminist awareness).”3 It is not that she ignores those aspects of Syberberg that upset many German critics—the Wagnerian intoxication with deep Germanness, for example—but she sees them as single strands in a rich combination of ideas, images, and reflections. They are not to be dismissed, she thinks, but they also should not be allowed to obscure the genius of his work, which cannot be reduced to certain vulgar opinions, to the quirks one almost expects of a great and eccentric artist.
It is a respectable view, which is, however, not shared by the artist himself. As he made clear in his essays, as well as on stage at the East Berlin Academy of Arts, Syberberg does not separate his political, social, and aesthetic opinions from his art. Indeed, they are at the core of his creative work.
His ideas, expressed in films, theater, and essays, are certainly consistent. In the collage of images and sounds that make up his Hitler film, which, as Sontag rightly observes, is a kind of theater of the mind, there is never any doubt in whose mind the action takes place. It is not Hitler’s mind, even though Syberberg salutes the dictator as a demonic colleague, a man who saw his destruction of Europe as an endless, epic newsreel. Hitler, in Syberberg’s opinion, was “a genius, who acted as the medium of the Weltgeist.” But it is Syberberg’s mind, not to mention his Geist, that has shaped everything in the spectacle; and the fascinating thing is that Syberberg’s philosophy, if that is what it is, is articulated most clearly by a ventriloquist’s dummy in the shape of Hitler.
This monologue, in which Hitler, as a melancholy puppet, talks about his legacy to the world, comes at the end of the third part of the four-part film:
Friends, let us praise. Praise the progress of the world from the other world of death. Praise from Adolf Hitler on this world after me.… No one before me has changed the West as thoroughly as we have. We have brought the Russians all the way to the Elbe and we got the Jews their state. And, after a fashion, a new colony for the USA—just ask Hollywood about its export markets. I know the tricks better than any of you, I know what to say and do for the masses. I am the school of the successful democrat. Just look around, they are in a fair way to take over our legacy.…
People like me want to change the world. And the Germany of the Third Reich was merely the Faustian prelude in the theater. You are the heirs. Worldwide.
On November 10, 1975
, the United Nations resolved by a two-thirds majority, quite openly, that Zionism is a form of racism.…
And in the United States? Nothing about gas at Auschwitz on American TV. It would damage the American oil industry and everything having to do with oil. You see, we did win, in bizarre ways. In America.…
Long live mediocrity, freedom, and equality for the international average. Among third-class people interested only in the annual profit increase or a higher salary, destroying themselves, relentlessly, ruthlessly, moving toward their end and what an end.4
It is disturbing to hear condemnations of Zionism, let alone sneers about “third-class people,” through the mouth of Hitler, even if he is just an effigy, a dummy transmitting Syberberg’s voice. But the message is not new. The rantings about America being the heir to Hitler’s projects would hardly surprise if they came from the pen of, say, Allen Ginsberg in full flight (Christa Wolf I shall leave until later). And the offensive trick of defusing German guilt by equating Hitler with Zionism also has a familiar ring. As for blaming democracy, Hitler’s first victim, for its own demise (as Syberberg puts it in one of his essays: “Electoral democracy logically leads to Hitler”), that is a favorite ploy of antidemocrats everywhere. But Syberberg’s disgust with the third-class postwar world goes further than that; it has turned his misty mind toward a dark and exalted vision of German Kultur, which makes many of his countrymen squirm.
Syberberg believes in Germany as a Naturgemeinschaft, an organic community whose art grows from the native soil. Art, he writes, was once “the balsam on the wounds of the ‘I,’ which was identical with the native land,” whereas now art has lost its meaning, for the postwar Germans have lost their identity as Germans, have severed their umbilical cord with the soil that nurtured them. Postwar German art is “filthy and sick.” It is “in praise of cowardice and treason, of criminals, whores, of hate, ugliness, of lies and crimes and all that is unnatural.”5 It is, in other words, rootless and degenerate. German art can only be elevated from this stinking swamp by dedicating itself once again to beauty, the beauty of nature and the Volk. Like many attempts to make a cult of beauty, Syberberg’s art often plummets from its exalted heights into kitsch: Wagner booming away on the soundtrack as a tearful Viennese aesthete reads Syberberg’s poetic vision of impending doom.
