by Ian Buruma
I arrived in Adenauer’s chosen, western capital, Bonn, during the second week of the Gulf War—that is to say, the last week of January 1991. It was snowing heavily. Bonn was an interesting place to be for the conflict constantly released memories of the last world war. At times the old wounds looked so fresh, it was as though Germany were still in ruins.
I had spent the previous week, like most people in the world, watching the war on television. British television, in my case. The mood on British TV was almost cheerful. Retired air marshals and naval commodores in double-breasted blazers appeared every day and night to point out battle lines on maps. They spoke with a sense of professional as well as patriotic pride. Behind the technical talk and the speculation of journalists was the feeling that Britain was reliving, in a small but heartening way, a little bit of her finest hour. It was as though decades of economic humiliation, the loss of empire, and general decline had been but a bad dream. It was war: finally the men would be sorted from the boys.
Foreigners might be better at making cars or computers, wrote a British newspaper columnist, famous for his provocative jingoism, but when there is fighting to be done, when the defense of the West, our way of life, freedom, and so forth, was at stake, the British could be counted on to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Yanks. Could the same be said of the Germans? When the German government hesitated about lending its full support to the war, doubts were cast on its reliability as a Western ally. Once again the timid continentals would look up to England as their savior. At this time of peril (such words were back in fashion: peril, valor, honor), Common Market policies were but trifling affairs, the bickering of merchants: at this time of peril, British was best again.
There was something both touching and pathetic about England then. Less than a year before Saddam Hussein’s war broke out, a fleet of Spitfires, Hurricanes, and a Lancaster bomber had flown over London to commemorate the Battle of Britain. It was a sunny day and the planes glinted as they dipped their wings over Buckingham Palace. I watched from the top of a hill in North London. The hill was blanketed with people, young people, old people, children, peering at the vintage machines in the sky. There was no shouting or cheering or laughter. There was, rather, an atmosphere of quiet pride and sadness, a sadness that was almost painful, the way nostalgia always is.
The spirit in Bonn was quite different. The first thing I noticed as the airport bus drove into town were bedsheets hanging from the windows of old town houses, with slogans painted in red and black: “No blood for oil!” “We are too young to die.” “There can be no just war.” “Our hope crashes with every bomb.” There had been a massive antiwar demonstration in Bonn the week before. Posters saying “We are frightened!” or “Never another war!” or “Bush is a war criminal!” were still pasted to windows and walls. There was a barely contained hysteria in the air, an atmosphere of impending apocalypse, of Weltuntergang, of a world brought down by military as well as ecological disaster.
The simple eighteenth-century architecture of Bonn reflects the classicism of the Enlightenment. Bonn lacks the pompous grandeur of Wilhelmine Berlin. On the central market square, covered with a grubby blanket of snow, stood a bronze statue of Beethoven. In his icy hand was a white flag with the ban-the-bomb sign. In front of the statue were several tents, decorated with banners, and outside the tents boards had been set up to display various images and texts. The banners were the same ones I had seen before: “No blood for oil!” and so on. One of the boards said: “Remember these images.” Underneath was a series of photographs, newspaper clippings, and drawings: of soldiers in the trenches during World War I, of cities being bombed in World War II, of Nazi soldiers marching through the Ukraine, of the naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack, of Israeli troops in Lebanon, and of U.S. bombers taking off for Baghdad. “There can be no just war,” it said.
A bearded man in his early forties, wearing an anorak, handed out pamphlets. I took one and he began to explain his views: “This war is fought for purely materialistic reasons. When Iraq gassed the Kurds, we didn’t do anything. Now we are starting a war. We must stop it at once.” He did not speak in a hectoring manner; more like a prophet who was used to being misunderstood, a man who had seen the truth to which others were still blind.
I then did what foreigners in Germany are so often tempted to do, with varying degrees of self-righteousness. I reminded him of the Nazis: “We did nothing after the Kristallnacht in 1938. Was that a reason not to fight in 1939?” “Well,” he said, “I wasn’t born then, so I wouldn’t know about that. But I do know that Israel massacred Palestinians in 1948. And now our own Foreign Minister, Genscher, goes to Israel to give them money and weapons—all because of our guilt complex. Do you think that’s right?”
This reference to a German “guilt complex” was unexpected. For he was a peace activist, a member of the Green Party, by age a “68er,” a child of the radical sixties. The rhetoric about Israel and the German guilt complex is something one expects to see in extreme right-wing publications such as the Deutsche National-Zeitung, published in Munich by Gerhard Frey, a veteran of the far right fringe, an enemy of Adenauer’s West. In the latest edition of that paper German politicians were ridiculed for going to Israel to offer help and consolation. The war was condemned as an example of American genocide: “Genocide in the Gulf,” it said, “a typical crime against humanity.” Other articles in the paper included “the Holocaust of American Indians” and “Israel’s war of terror.” Not that the National-Zeitung is a pacifist paper. The virtues of the German Wehrmacht and even the Waffen SS are proudly saluted. Calendars with pictures of German soldiers in uniform are on offer to readers at discount prices. Videotapes of the Blitzkrieg are advertised.
Yet these advertisements hardly reflected the same air of pride that made those retired air marshals glow on British television. They were defensive, as though something had to be covered up. It was as though German guilt was eased, even negated, by writing about Israeli terror or American Holocausts. It is here—perhaps only here—that the two extremes of German politics meet. On one side the National-Zeitung, on the other a spokesman for the peace movement in Berlin, who called the air attacks on Iraq “the greatest war crime since Hitler.”
Echoes of the last world war were everywhere, but they were loudest at the political extremes. The fear that American materialism would bring down the world had long been part of the rhetoric of both right and left. In the Gulf War, these fears appeared to be coming true. But there was an older resentment, which one would expect of the right, but which emerged on the left as well. In November 1991, an unofficial war crimes tribunal was staged in Stuttgart, where “ecological war crimes” committed by the Americans as well as their “genocide” in Iraq were judged. Alfred Mechtersheimer, a prominent peace activist, reminded his audience that the Nuremberg war crimes trials were a case of victors’ justice. And a socialist politician criticized West German slavishness toward the United States. But if the shared animosity of right and left toward the United States was relatively straightforward, attitudes toward Israel could never be simple. America evoked memories of bombers destroying German cities, of battles fought in Normandy or the Ardennes, of black markets and of black GIs seducing German girls with chocolate and silk stockings. Israel could not be dissociated from the Holocaust.
I had been introduced to an Israeli living in Bonn. I shall call him Michael, since he did not want to be mentioned by his real name. Michael was an embittered expert on German guilt. I met him at the Israeli embassy, a well-defended villa in a suburb of Bonn. We talked in a room without windows, with a bare desk and posters of Israeli landscapes on the wall. He was a stocky man with curly hair, in his early thirties, a post-68er. He was born in Russia, but had come to West Germany as a child. He grew up near Cologne, the only Jewish boy in his school. It had been an unhappy experience. For he was singled out as a special case. Teachers would ask him to talk to the class about Auschwitz. He got away with mis
chief for which the other boys were punished.
I was reminded of Michael when, a few months later, I read a novel by Peter Schneider, entitled Vati (Daddy), about the son of a Nazi war criminal, based on the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele. The son complains about the way he was treated at school: “It was their consideration which oppressed me. My biology teacher actually apologized for giving me a bad mark: I was by no means to regard this as punishment for what some relative of mine had done. When I neglected my homework, I was not called lazy. It was, they said, because of ‘difficult family circumstances.’ ”
Germany, said Michael, was sick. “I believe that if you were to do a heart test on a German, any German, young or old, you would see the adrenaline surge at the mention of the word Jew.”
Which is why, he said, the Gulf War had caused such panic in Germany. People had been calling the Israeli embassy in tears, at all hours. Some asked whether they might help Israeli children if something terrible happened, and whether they could return the children once the war was over. These Germans had to be calmed down, he said. Then he shrugged. “Ach,” he said, with the hint of a smile, “it is hard to be a German.”
Michael despised young pacifists as much as he did the older generation, the fathers, the guilty ones (Täter in German). The older generation, he said, were almost all philosemitic after the war. Pastors, mayors, teachers, priests, all would go to Israel at the first opportunity. An odd reversal of roles had taken place. Before the war, Michael said, Jews were seen as gentle, bookish pacifists. The Germans, on the other hand, had Prussian discipline. They were “hard as Krupp steel,” and so on. But now the Israelis had become the disciplined, hardworking warriors. Many older Germans admired them for this, as much as they despised the Arabs for being lazy and dirty. Now it was the Germans who had become the pacifists. “We Israelis laugh at German soldiers now,” said Michael.
In the late sixties, particularly after the Six-Day War in 1967, attitudes began to change. Many young Germans rejected everything their parents stood for. They sat in judgment over their past, hated them for their silence, and despised their philosemitism too. The student radicals claimed to be on the side of the victims, especially the Palestinians. They would never associate with the guilty, the Täter, not in Germany, not in Vietnam, not in Israel. They would make up for their parents’ cowardice. They would resist. They were idealists. They would fight to save the world from ecological disaster. They would resist American consumerism and Israeli militarism. Michael said: “They believed that being on the left was a vaccination against being antisemitic.” So when Michael sees thousands of German peace demonstrators, he does not see thousands of gentle people who have learned their lesson from the past; he sees “100 percent German Protestant rigorism, aggressive, intolerant, hard.”
In February 1991, the Israeli writer Amos Oz was interviewed about the Gulf War in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Oz is a liberal. The FAZ is a conservative newspaper, with little sympathy for peace movements, Greens, leftists, or 68ers. The editors were in favor of German participation in the Gulf War, or at the very least a firm German commitment to support the allied cause. The FAZ is anti-Communist, pro-NATO, and liberal (more in the nineteenth-century European than in the twentieth-century American sense). One of the editors is Joachim Fest, who wrote a famous biography of Hitler. A film was made of the book, which made Fest a wealthy man. The Hitler period, especially in the film, is shown as a form of collective madness, a murderous opéra bouffe, a demented aberration in the history of a great nation.
Fest was agitated that week, for, in his view, Germany had shown itself to be a prisoner of its past once again, by its display of nervous pacifism instead of political and military resolve. Germany, Fest often argued, should be a normal, responsible power again. By which he meant what Adenauer meant: a normal Western power. This aim was blocked by what he saw as an instinctive guilty cringe, which resulted, perversely, in a feeling of moral superiority: we who committed terrible sins will now heal the ills of the world. This prevented Germany from doing its duty as a Western ally. As a German patriot, Fest was embarrassed, even humiliated that Britain, France, and the United States should be fighting a war without active German support. When I mentioned the antiwar demonstrations, he sighed and said: “All because of Hitler.”
Amos Oz was not really an FAZ type, for his liberalism is left of center, but in his interview he spoke critically of romanticism about the Third World in leftist European and especially German circles. He saw traces of Rousseau’s worship of the noble savage—an almost theological celebration of those who are doomed to suffer. “Perhaps,” he said, “this is the result of a highly simplified and sentimental image of Christianity, according to which the victim is purified by his suffering.”
The Jews, then, were “purified” by the Holocaust, “as though the showers in the gas chambers had sprayed the victims with a moral detergent.” They have to be purer and better than other people. But how did this purity rub off on the children and grandchildren of the Täter? Could it be that they had a secret wish to be among the suffering too?
Moral purity was cruelly tested during the Gulf War by the news that poison gas sold by German firms was about to be unleashed on Israel by Iraqi Scud missiles. There can be no just war, yet Jews were threatened by German gas. It was not a pretty dilemma. It split the ranks of the peace movement. The poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann, who had demonstrated in the past against American missile bases in Germany and whose politics were far to the left of the FAZ, outraged many former comrades by voicing his support for the war. “No blood for oil,” he wrote in the weekly Die Zeit, “that’s the latest anti-American slogan. Dear me! Of course the Americans are also concerned about oil … And thank God for that, I say … Yes, I am happy that there are such lousy interests. Otherwise Israel would stand alone.” Biermann’s father died at Auschwitz.
There is a German word which is hard to translate into English but which sums up the mood of many Germans during the Gulf War: betroffen. Dictionaries offer the following translations: “stricken (with), affected (by) … shock, dismay, consternation, bewilderment.” None of these quite hits the right tone. Perhaps the French word bouleversé comes closest. Betroffen is much used by pacifists, liberals, and socialists, as often as the term “normal nation” is heard from German conservatives. To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment. To be betroffen is to be speechless. But it also implies an idea of moral purity. To be betroffen is one way to “master the past,” to show contriteness, to confess, and to be absolved and purified.
The frequent admonishments in West Germany to “mourn” the past, to do “the labor of mourning” (Trauerarbeit), are part of this act of purification. In their famous book, written in the sixties, entitled The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich analyzed the moral anesthesia that afflicted postwar Germans who would not face their past. They were numbed by defeat; their memories appeared to be blocked. They would or could not do their labor, and confess. They appeared to have completely forgotten that they had glorified a leader who caused the death of millions. Many Germans had reveled in the operatic self-glorification staged by the Nazi movement. By denying this after the Reich’s collapse, the Mitscherlichs argued, Germans wished to shield themselves not only from punishment or guilt but also from the sense of utter impotence that followed their defeat. Only those who have suffered a loss can mourn. But what exactly had the Germans lost? The Jews, of course, but that was hardly felt to be a German loss. Many Germans had lost their homes, their sons, their absurd ideals, and their Leader. But mourning these was not what the Mitscherlichs meant by Trauerarbeit: mourning Hitler, after 1945, was impossible. Thirty years later, Margarethe Mitscherlich would say that the inability to mourn no longer applied to the younger generations. She was right: the Jews are mourned in Germany, and so, in certain extreme circles, is the loss of Hitler.
There is something religious about the ac
t of being betroffen, something close to Pietism, which has a long and rich tradition in Germany. It began in the seventeenth century with the works of Philipp Jakob Spener. He wanted to reform the Church and bring the Gospel into daily life, as it were, by stressing good works and individual spiritual labor. Gordon Craig wrote: “The heart of Pietism was the moral renovation of the individual, achieved by passing through the anguish of contrition into the overwhelming realization of the assurance of God’s grace.” Pietism served as an antidote to the secular and rational ideas of the French Enlightenment. It inspired the nineteenth-century German middle class as well as Prussian officers and the men around Bismarck. It is this spirit, I think, that Michael, the Israeli in Bonn, was referring to when he spoke about the Protestant rigor of German pacifists.
During the Gulf War, Bonn was betroffen. It was supposed to have been very different, for it was carnival season, time for fancy-dress parties, beer, women, and songs. But this seemed inappropriate at a time of war and impending doom, so carnival committees became crisis committees. The regional government of Rheinland-Pfalz awarded money to all organizations willing to abandon the carnival feast. It proved an effective measure. Only in Cologne did an unofficial street celebration take place, under the motto “We stick to life.”
In Berlin a group of music school students organized an antiwar day, because, so their spokesman said, “all the students feel so sad and betroffen that we felt the need to get together to talk about our fears.” They built an altar and lit candles. And a local radio station broadcast their peace song, with a refrain that went: “We are betroffen and deeply shocked.”
