The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  The square outside my hotel was cold and mostly empty. There was one small beer stand where a few young men drank, danced around a bit, and shouted in what was meant to be a festive manner. I could hear their beery songs waft in through the window of my room. The heavy, foot-stamping rhythms brought to mind countless war movies in which German hilarity is meant to serve as an ironic counterpoint to some act of brutality. It is better to learn to resist such associations in Germany, for it is all too easy to become self-righteous and obsessed, even if one’s memories can only be of films.

  I watched television and once again marveled at the contrast with Britain. German television is rich in earnest discussion programs where people sit at round tables and debate the issues of the day. The audience sits at smaller tables, sipping drinks as the featured guests hold forth. The tone is generally serious, but sometimes the arguments get heated. It is easy to laugh at the solemnity of these programs, but there is much to admire about them. It is partly through these talk shows that a large number of Germans have become accustomed to political debate.

  During the Gulf War, it was hard for a television viewer to avoid the roundtable discussions. There were so many, you could switch channels and follow several debates at once. Pastors were frequent guests. Some wore suits, some wore jeans. Their presence was fitting, for at the center of the debate was the question of conscience. Could one fight in a war with a good conscience? A German fighter pilot said that he found it hard to accept the idea of killing people. He didn’t know whether his conscience would allow it. A young doctor working in a hospital near an American air force base said his conscience was troubled by the idea of treating American pilots wounded in the Gulf War, for this would make him an accomplice.

  In one typical show, the discussion group consisted of a man who had resisted the Nazis, an army conscript, an elderly housewife, a working mother, and some high school students. The twenty-seven-year-old mother, Angelika, said that Germany had to help Israel, because of “what we did during the war,” but surely nothing would be gained by fighting this war in the Gulf.

  “What about the British and the French?” said the former resistance man. “Should we leave it up to them to do the dirty work while we stay at home?” (There was no mention of the Americans.)

  “Well,” said Angelika, “we can’t go against our own convictions. How can we ignore our education, which taught us never to fight another war again. In other countries, we were ashamed to be German. People were always afraid of us, and now they blame us for not being more aggressive …”

  Andrea, an eighteen-year-old high school student, said: “We unleashed two wars on the world. How can we forget that? I can’t say I’m proud to be German.”

  But when the elderly housewife talked about her suffering in World War II—the bombings, the lack of food, the fathers and sons who failed to return—and said that we should oppose all wars, a young student said: “I understand that terrible things happen in war, but terrible things can also happen if we don’t fight when we have to.”

  There were cries of disbelief from the audience, but the student was supported by the old resistance fighter. He compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler and said he had to be stopped for the same reason Hitler had to be stopped: “Saddam has already killed hundreds of thousands. Do we let him go on just because we cannot morally allow ourselves to shoot?”

  Finally, the young soldier, dressed in jeans and a flowered shirt, spoke up. Asked how he felt about killing people, he said: “If Germany or NATO were attacked, I would have to. But if I didn’t agree with the war, I would refuse.”

  He was sticking to the orthodox interpretation of the postwar constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. A German conscript can refuse to fight on grounds of conscience. Never again can “Befehl ist Befehl” (“Orders are orders”) count as an excuse for atrocities. And German military forces can only act in defense of German or allied territory. Since Germany is part of NATO, allied territory is commonly interpreted as NATO territory. The right wanted to broaden this interpretation; the left, so far, had resisted.

  But the soldier was not engaging in a legal discussion. He was trying to answer a moral question, a question of conscience. And he gave an honest answer, one that reflected better, perhaps, the feelings of young Germans today than the complete rejection of war, any war, by many pacifists. The 68ers had one overriding moral aim: to be utterly different from their parents, to crack their guilty silence, to spread the word of peace, or simply to make sure Germans would never be tempted again. The leader of the Social Democrats, Oskar Lafontaine, said during the Gulf War that asking Germans to participate in military activities was “like offering brandy chocolates to a reformed alcoholic.” You could almost hear the anxious shriek.

  Fest may have been right. It probably was because of Hitler. But the Gulf War showed that German pacifism could not be dismissed simply as anti-Americanism or a rebellion against Adenauer’s West. There was a real dilemma: at least two generations had been educated to renounce war and never again to send German soldiers to the front, educated, in other words, to want Germany to be a larger version of Switzerland. But they had also been taught to feel responsible for the fate of Israel, and to be citizens of a Western nation, firmly embedded in a family of allied Western nations. The question was whether they really could be both. What if Saddam really was another Hitler, and Germany failed to help the Jews?

  This is why Hitler analogies were painful. And this is where Hans Magnus Enzensberger decided to plunge his sharpened knife. He compared Saddam to Hitler in Der Spiegel. Enzensberger is a fine poet and essayist. He also knows precisely how to hit his fellow Germans where it hurts. He can be an exquisite provocateur. His article was acclaimed by some, but made many others furious, especially intellectuals of the left. I heard one critic in Berlin say that Enzensberger was a traitor. A traitor to what? I asked. To the spirit, he said, the Geist. For many years, Enzensberger was himself an intellectual of the left. He is a member of the generation that went to school under the Nazis, joined the Hitler Youth, and was drafted into antiaircraft units at the end of the war. With other writers, such as Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, Enzensberger formed a kind of leftist Maquis after the war against the vestiges of German authoritarianism. Chasing the ghosts of Nazism was for many years a more or less full-time occupation.

  In his Spiegel article Enzensberger argued that Saddam, like Hitler, was not just another dictator; he was an enemy of mankind, a self-destructive monster in love with death. If he had the means, he would be capable of destroying the world, including, of course, his own people, for whom, like Hitler, he felt contempt. The question, then, was what produced such monsters? Enzensberger’s answer was that humiliated peoples produced them, masses of permanent losers who have been demoralized for too long, by intellectual failure, by poverty, by a sense of impotence to affect their own lives. The Germans, Enzensberger wrote, should be able to recognize themselves in the Arab masses.

  Yet nothing could have been further from German minds. For such an insight, said Enzensberger, “would destroy the basis for any racial interpretation of the present conflict. Besides, it would bring to light hidden continuities, remnants of fascism which no one wants to remember. German industry never had occasion to regret the good services it rendered Hitler. That it rushes out to help his successor with equal zeal can only be called consistent. And ignorance alone cannot explain why a considerable proportion of German youth identifies more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, or would rather protest against George Bush than Saddam Hussein.”

  This is the voice of the postwar Maquis, the scourge of hidden continuities, but with a new twist. He may have been unfair to the Iraqis, who hardly supported Saddam with the same zeal that Germans accorded Hitler, but he was finding continuities among the very people who thought they had shaken them off, by doing their labor of mourning, by holding the candle for peace a little too zealously.

  Enzensberger’s generation l
earned to distrust Germans. The continuities in the forties and fifties were still too visible, the experiences of the Hitler Youth and the flak battalion too raw. Enzensberger’s Maquis distrusted the complacent rush of the West Germans toward material prosperity, which covered the past like a blanket of snow, hiding all traces, muffling all sound. Enzensberger wrote a famous poem which began:

  What have I lost, here

  in this land, to which my parents

  brought me in all innocence?

  Native-born, but unconsoled,

  I am here without being here,

  resident in cozy squalor,

  in this nice, contented grave.

  The distrust of Germans was especially acute during the Gulf War because of what had happened the year before. The unification of Germany was watched with dismay in neighboring countries. This was understandable; they had been occupied and knew very well what Germans had been capable of. But it also showed, once again, the distrust of Enzensberger’s generation, or at least the members of the Maquis. When Günter Grass protested against unification, because a unified Germany had produced Auschwitz, he used the word “Auschwitz” almost in a religious sense, like a negative talisman. He brandished it like an evil eye to ward off evil. “Auschwitz” had been for a long time the main amulet against hidden continuities.

  On a less abstract, and hackneyed, level, there was the West German mistrust of East Germans—the East Germans whose soldiers still marched in goose step, whose petit bourgeois style smacked of the thirties, whose system of government, though built on a pedestal of antifascism, contained so many disturbing remnants of the Nazi past; the East Germans, in short, who had been living in “Asia.” Michael, the Israeli, compared the encounter of Westerners (“Wessies”) with Easterners (“Ossies”) with the unveiling of the portrait of Dorian Gray: the Wessies saw their own image and they didn’t like what they saw.

  One famous West German writer rolled his eyes when I mentioned the Ossies. He told me how bored he was with the prospect of seeing history repeated. “Purification, reeducation, I have seen it all. I don’t like those people in the East. I feel I know them. I want nothing to do with them.” I was surprised to hear this, and repeated what he had said to the literary critic Roland Wiegenstein, at his handsome flat in Berlin. The furniture was made of steel and black leather; on the walls were large abstract paintings.

  Wiegenstein dressed fashionably and with care. He is demonstratively après guerre in his tastes. “I understand him very well,” he said. “I’m only a few years older than he is. It is a miracle, really, how quickly the Germans in the Federal Republic became civilized. We are truly part of the West now. We have internalized democracy. But the Germans of the former GDR, they are still stuck in a premodern age. They are the ugly Germans, very much like the West Germans after the war, the people I grew up with. They are not yet civilized.”

  This cultural distaste for the ugly Ossies in their badly cut suits, their stone washed denims, and their plastic shoes, was more than simple snobbery. The unspoken message was that Wessies had only barely escaped from being crypto-Nazi, goose-stepping Germans themselves, by becoming something else, modern Europeans perhaps. Just before the unification of Germany, a novelist of the ’68 generation, Patrick Süskind, wrote that Tuscany felt nearer to him (and by implication to his friends and fellow Wessies) than Dresden.

  Distrust is part of the political language in Germany. Norbert Gansel, a Social Democrat member of the Bundestag and a specialist on foreign affairs, was fifty during the Gulf War. He, too, dressed fashionably, in a plum-colored suit. He poured us both a cup of Japanese rice wine. “Goes down like oil,” he said. I suppose the irony was intended. He chose his words with care: “My personal political philosophy and maybe even my political ambition has to do with an element of distrust for the people I represent, people whose parents and grandparents made Hitler and the persecution of the Jews possible.” Above his desk was a picture of Kiel, the northern German port city, where Gansel was born. The picture was of Kiel in 1945, a city in ruins. He saw me looking at it and said: “It’s true that whoever is being bombed is entitled to some sympathy from us.”

  Gansel had spent much time on the Nazi legacy. His university thesis was on the SS. And in the seventies he had tried to nullify verdicts given in Nazi courts—without success until well into the eighties. One of the problems was that the Nazi judiciary itself was never purged. This continuity was broken only by time. The failures of justice in the fifties and sixties, Gansel said, were no longer possible. A new political generation had come of age. The grandchildren of the Täter were asking questions about the past with less self-righteousness than the generation of ’68. The Germans had become realistic, said Gansel, much more so than the Japanese. The Gulf War had come like a bracing cold bath.

  It is hard to say which was more bracing: the Gulf War or the coming of the Ossies. That the two events more or less coincided caused an extra strain. There had been a tradition in the Social Democratic Party of nationalist neutralism. Many politicians on the left thought the Western alliance had prevented German unification. In the fifties the Social Democrats had been more nationalistic in this respect than the conservative Christian Democrats. For years the left had attacked Adenauer’s Germany for its Nazi inheritance and its sellout to the United States. But now that Germany had been reunified, with its specters of “Auschwitz” and its additional hordes of narrow-minded Ossies, Adenauer was deemed to have been right after all. Germany needed the West. But the West now needed Germany too, in a way the Germans, particularly the Social Democrats, found deeply troubling.

  To bury Germany in the bosom of its Western allies, such as NATO and the EC, was to bury the distrust of Germans. Or so it was hoped. As Europeans they could feel normal, Western, civilized. Germany; the old “land in the middle,” the Central European colossus, the power that fretted over its identity and was haunted by its past, had become a Western nation. This blessed state was challenged twice in the space of a year: first reunification and then the Gulf War. The results, as was to be expected, were mixed. The instinctive rejection of uncivilized, un-Western Ossies was one result, the anguished hesitation to join the Western allies in an act of war was another.

  It was still snowing on my last night in Bonn. I had a meal of potato dumplings, sausages, and beer with a young political scientist. By young I mean a shade too young to be a 68er. He was not a pacifist. He was critical of his government’s wishy-washy support of the allied coalition. He did not seem hampered by a cultural distrust of his country. He was even eager to introduce me to the local food and to the ghastly carnival music played on the jukebox in one or two bars—Gulf War or no Gulf War. The German Army, he said, was a real citizens’ army now. Everyone had to serve, which is why debates on conscience and morality were so important. It was everyone’s concern. And because German security was tied up in the constitution with that of its allies, military adventures had become virtually impossible. “You see,” he said, “we Germans really don’t want to do anything on our own again.”

  It was late. We walked back to my hotel together. It was an old hotel, which in its time put up many distinguished guests, but which somehow overlooked the thirties and early forties in its potted history handed out at the reception desk. We went past Beethoven holding his peace flag, past the “warning post” where young people were holding a candlelit vigil to protest against the war, past the banners that said “No blood for oil” and “German money and German gas are murdering people all over the world.” I told him about my plan to write about the memories of war in Germany and Japan. He seemed a little put out, almost shocked, but said nothing. Then, after we had said goodbye, he suddenly turned around and said: “Please, please don’t overdo the similarities. We are very different from the Japanese. We don’t sleep in our companies to make them more powerful. We are just people, just normal people.” He did not say Western people. But he might as well have.

  TOKYO

&n
bsp; In Tokyo the Gulf War seemed far away. There were no banners, no warning posts, no candlelit vigils or peace demonstrations. The whole notion of war seems more remote in Japan than in Germany, where the ruins and bullet holes are still plain to see. There is nothing much in Tokyo to remind one of the last world war, since virtually the entire city went up in flames in 1945. The hotel that was occupied in the attempted military coup of 1936 had survived the war, but was torn down during the real estate boom of the eighties. The prison where Japan’s major war criminals were hanged was replaced by a skyscraper and a shopping mall.

  In the seventies and early eighties, you still saw the blind and maimed veterans of the Imperial Army standing on crude artificial limbs in the halls of railway stations or in front of Shinto shrines, wearing white kimonos and dark glasses, playing melancholy old army tunes on their battered accordions, hoping for some spare change. Young people, smartly dressed in the latest American styles, mostly passed them by without a glance, as though these broken men didn’t exist, as though they were ghosts visible only to themselves. Older people would sometimes slip them a few coins, a bit furtively, like paying an embarrassing relative to stay out of sight. The ghostlike figures in their white kimonos brought back memories that nobody wanted. And now they too had disappeared forever. The only reminders of the last world war in Tokyo were mere fragments in the air, like the military marches blaring from the pinball parlors.

  Roppongi is one of the most fashionable districts in Tokyo. Since 1945 it has always had a slightly Western air. There used to be an American military base there. Now the place smells of luxury. Foreign models rush to fashion studios, young men cruise down the main street in Porsches, and elegant ladies meet for light lunches at northern Italian restaurants. In the midst of all the glitter is a compound of ugly gray cement buildings. They are an oddly unkempt presence, incongruous, as though they shouldn’t really be there at all. The ministry of self-defense, housed in here, is not even called a ministry, but an agency, even though its director general carries the portfolio of a cabinet minister. These buildings are among the few reminders of the last war. They used to be occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army, and by the U.S. Army after the war.