The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  The aim is to foster what Jürgen Habermas calls constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus): “Constitutional patriotism is the only patriotism which does not alienate us from the West. Alas, a loyalty to universalist constitutionalist principles, rooted in conviction, could be established in the cultural German nation [Kulturnation] only after—and by virtue of—Auschwitz.”

  One might call it the social science approach to history. Schoolchildren are no longer asked to identify with flags, songs, heroes, or a carefully constructed sense of historical continuity, but with an idea, the liberal democratic order. It differs from the socialist order of East Germany in form and in substance, since the socialist state did not believe in basic individual rights, but rather in sacrifice for a collective ideal, inculcated with all the paraphernalia of the old regime: flags, torchlight parades, great leaders, militarized youth organizations, and so on. The worship of Communist resistance leaders was also worship of the state they supposedly built, and in some cases ruled. Constitutional patriotism, as conceived by Habermas and West German textbook authors, was expressly not meant to make a cult of the state. And since, in Habermas’s view, liberal patriotism came “by virtue of” Auschwitz, it meant a break with the past, with the Kulturnation.

  What it lacks is the symbolism of national identity. It is criticized for being dry, abstract, shallow. “We are in danger of becoming a nation without history,” said the president of the Federal Republic, Walter Scheel, in 1975. Ten years later, the historian Michael Stürmer fretted over the spiritual vacuum and loss of national orientation in West Germany. This was one of the issues of the “historians’ debate,” which began in 1986, with the publication of an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by the conservative historian Ernst Nolte. It was entitled The Past That Will Not Go Away. Nolte, Stürmer, and other conservatives argued that Auschwitz should not be allowed to drive a wedge into the continuity of German history. For history must provide a nation with identity—spiritual, political, aesthetic. Germans must be able to identify with national heroes, even, in the opinion of one famous historian, Andreas Hillgruber, with the common German soldier in 1944, defending the German homeland against the Communist hordes. Habermas accused the conservatives of reviving reactionary historicism to propagate anti-Communist German nationalism.

  But in fact West German textbooks did provide an identity of a kind, both national and regional. As in the East German books, it was based on the notion of resistance; an identity, that is, erected in opposition to the Nazi state. The case is made that Germany between 1933 and 1945 was not entirely absorbed by the Nazi movement, “even though the Allies would not recognize this during the war.” Every textbook includes detailed descriptions of the various resistance groups, including Communists, priests, pastors, students (the White Rose), social democrats, and finally, of course, Count Schenk von Stauffenberg and his mostly aristocratic army colleagues, who just failed to kill Hitler in July 1944. Hitler wreaked a terrible revenge and thousands of Germans were murdered. The plotters were hanged in a dark chamber at Plötzensee prison, which is still kept as a lugubrious shrine. Just before his execution, Stauffenberg is said to have cried: “Long live holy Germany!” Hitler watched a film of the hanging, over and over, in the comfort of his Bavarian mountain retreat.

  Since Stauffenberg, although undoubtedly a heroic figure, was part of a “bourgeois-military” conspiracy, which had no intention of building a socialist state, East German textbooks had to make it clear that he was not one of us, so to speak, without actually condemning him. And so we learn that his circle included men with “progressive political ideas,” who had contacts in the Communist Party. But in West Germany, too, his reputation has not been entirely without controversy. “Long live holy Germany!” was not a slogan that appealed to the left. And however much one might have detested Hitler and his satraps, an assassination attempt still smacked of treason in right-wing eyes. Although a street was named after Stauffenberg in Berlin in 1955, it was only in 1967 that the Berlin Senate decided to build a memorial and documentation center in the former military headquarters where Stauffenberg planned his coup.

  Religion played a role in the German resistance, and the Bavarian textbook makes the most of this. Hitler’s politics, the authors observe, stood in contrast to Stauffenberg’s religious humanism. But this being Bavaria, special attention is paid to the Catholic Church. One learns, for example, that most Bavarians, being Catholic, did not vote for the Nazi Party in 1932. And the bravery of individual priests, such as Augustin Rosch, a Munich Jesuit, is singled out. This is all perfectly proper, but it did not mean that the Nazis were unpopular in Bavaria. It just showed that Catholics voted the way their priests told them to—for the Catholic conservatives, who were, in any case, forced to disband after 1933.

  But these specifically regional interests make way in the end for a strong political message, or framework, if one prefers: “The representatives of Communist, socialist, bourgeois, religious, military, and aristocratic circles in Germany paid for their rebellion against Hitler with their freedom and their lives. But this alliance of rebels against the Nazi dictatorship provided a starting point for the development of a constitutional and social order in postwar Germany … The resistance movements forged a link to the German freedom movements and made it easier to anchor human values and the principles of rule of law, democracy, the welfare state, and federalism in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

  Both Germanys, then, in their textbook versions of history, were built upon the legacy of resistance. It is an appealing idea, and if identification with historical figures is to be encouraged, it is surely better to identify with Count von Stauffenberg than with, say, Heinrich Himmler. (Such heroes of the East as Ernst Thälmann and Erich Honecker were less attractive role models, though still better than Himmler.)

  But the consequences were not entirely benign. Enforced worship of heroes in the East was part of totalitarian propaganda and a gross distortion of history. When the heroes crumbled to dust, and the propaganda lost its force, hundreds, maybe thousands of disillusioned youngsters rebelled by reviving the heroes and symbols of the earlier dictatorship. They cried “Sieg Heil!” in the streets and worshipped the Nazi leaders, as though they were hankering after a more heroic age, whose glory had been suppressed by the elders who had failed them.

  In the West the official legacy of resistance left many of “Hitler’s children” with the idea that any resistance against the state not only was justified by the past but was a moral imperative. The Red Army Faction, no matter how grotesque their methods or aims, could count on some sympathy among the generation of ’68, if only because it dared to do what the majority of Germans had failed to do when it really mattered, some thirty years before.

  And yet the cooler heads of that same generation also understood that liberal democracy in Germany had to rest on an openly critical attitude toward the Nazi past. It was time to break with the discretion, the silence, the evasions that were thought to have been necessary to turn millions of former Nazis into republican citizens. If that break was sometimes too abrupt, too abrasive, too self-righteous, it also freshened the atmosphere with debate and intellectual challenge. Instead of turning away from politics in disgust or snobbish disdain, as had been the custom of previous generations of German intellectuals, many of “Hitler’s children” took part in it. And when they saw things going wrong—not always without a touch of hysteria—they at least stood up to be counted. When thugs sporting Nazi regalia became a serious menace in 1992, setting fire to asylum homes and murdering foreigners, millions of Germans came out to protest. More than half the population of Munich took part in candlelight parades, to demonstrate its opposition to violent xenophobia. Symbolically, at least, Germans had learned the value of dissent.

  JAPAN

  Ienaga Saburo is a Japanese history professor and former high school teacher. He wrote a widely used history textbook for high school students in 19
52. But four years later his troubles began. The Ministry of Education decided that Ienaga’s text was too “one sided,” that is, too negative about the Japanese war in Asia. He was frequently told to rewrite his manuscript. But in 1964, he had had enough, and in the following year he sued the government for acting unconstitutionally. This was followed by two more lawsuits, in 1967 and 1984. In the 1980s he was told to delete passages about, among other things, the Nanking Massacre, rape by Japanese soldiers, and Japanese medical experiments in Manchuria. Censoring textbooks, Ienaga claimed, was against the postwar constitution, which guaranteed freedom of expression. He was still fighting his case, after appeals and counterappeals, in the Tokyo High Court in 1992, when he was seventy-nine years old.

  The first thing I noticed about Ienaga was his frailty. He walked with some difficulty and tired easily. His pale bald head sat, egglike, on a small, brittle frame. His glasses looked too large in relation to the rest of him. I wondered where he found the energy and the motivation to carry on his struggle for twenty-seven years. Sitting in his study in a suburb of Tokyo, he answered my question by talking about his war:

  “I taught history then at a high school in Niigata. The Ministry of Education ordered teachers of middle schools and junior high schools to teach the imperial myths, about the divine ancestry of the Japanese race, and so on.”

  He produced a textbook of the time. Ancient Japanese gods and mythical emperors were described as carriers of unique Japanese virtues. Myth was presented as history. Ienaga sighed as he leafed through the brittle pages, and said that he never wanted Japanese children to have to read such books again.

  “The schoolroom was a place of apostasy, where we had to stamp on our own principles. I am ashamed that I didn’t resist teaching the view of history propagated by the state. I shall always be ashamed of it. Mind you, I was not a propagandist for the war, but I did nothing to stop it either.”

  He had spoken of his sense of shame in court when he first pleaded his case in 1965: “I only thought of my own conscience, but I committed the sin of standing by as my ancestral land was being destroyed. Millions of my countrymen died in that war, and I was lucky enough to survive. I feel deeply guilty about having been a passive witness to my country’s ruin … I am just a humble citizen now, but even if I cannot do much, I wish to make up for my sin of not offering any resistance before. This is why I am filing this suit today.”

  It is a refrain running through all his writings and speeches: the lack of resistance in Japan. He said it again after his last appearance in court in November 1992. He spoke to his supporters, who had gathered in a large rented hall not far from the High Court building: “The great difference between Nazi Germany and its Axis partner Japan was that many Germans resisted and lost their lives. In Japan, hardly anyone resisted. We were a nation of conformists. That’s why the most important thing now is not whether we win or lose this case, but our resolve to fight on.” When it was time for him to go, his supporters stood up and cheered as he shuffled slowly down the hall, his narrow shoulders bent, as though burdened by a heavy weight, his eyes blinking behind his owlish glasses.

  He lost his case, of course, on all counts. The verdict was announced on March 16, 1993. Ienaga had expected it, but even he was taken aback by the shabbiness of the decision. He gave a spirited press conference, saying he could not contain his anger and that the verdict had brought shame upon Japan. I rang him up a month later, hoping to see him again, but he was too exhausted, he said. Would he fight on? “Of course, of course. The textbook trial is my reason to live.” He observed that the provincial press had been much more supportive than the metropolitan papers, whose editorials had been lukewarm. “The farther away you get from Tokyo,” he said, “the more freedom you have to be critical of the government.” The Ienaga case is not the only instance where this has been true.

  It had all seemed so promising when the war was over. Immediately after the Japanese surrender, there were no new textbooks, so the old ones were used with the militaristic passages blotted out with ink. But in 1946 a new book was published, entitled The Course of Our Country. It was the first history textbook since 1881 that began with a description of the Stone Age instead of national myths about ancient gods and their imperial descendants. A year later, the Fundamental Law of Education was passed, which limited government control over educational materials. The aim of education was “to bring up a people that loves truth and peace” and to build “a democratic and cultural state” in “accordance with the constitution of Japan.” Schools would be free to choose their own textbooks, which would be prepared and published privately. Ethics was abolished as a subject, and history became part of the social studies course.

  It amounted to a revolution. At least since the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890, Japanese education had been an exercise in imperial propaganda. The Prime Minister at the time, Yamagata Aritomo, said that “education, just like the military, ought to possess an imperial mandate.” He also said that in national crises, all Japanese should be taught to offer themselves “courageously” to the state, and “thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne.”

  Even geography lessons were harnessed to the imperial cause. In a wartime geography textbook, “the shape of Japan” is described as “not without significance. We appear to be standing in the vanguard of Asia, advancing bravely into the Pacific. At the same time we appear ready to defend the Asian continent from outside attack.”

  Ethical studies were given extreme importance. This is how such national virtues as self-sacrifice, military discipline, ancestor worship, and the imperial cult were bred. And as was true in most countries in the first half of the century, military heroes were held up as the cardinal models to follow. Kimigayo, a prayer for the everlasting imperial reign, was sung as the national anthem, and the Rising Sun flag hoisted all over Asia. It was the duty of all Japanese to spring to attention at the very mention of the divine emperor. Every Japanese school had a shrine with the emperor’s portrait. A speck of dust on the picture and careless hanging were reasons for severe punishment.

  All this was officially abolished in 1947 and 1948, when the Imperial Rescript on Education was invalidated by both houses in the Diet. Constitutionalism, pacifism (“truth and peace”), democracy, and social studies had arrived instead. When Ienaga wrote his first textbook, it was published without any official interference. But around that time, a year after the start of the Korean War, things began to change. A government committee for educational reform issued a report that said, among other things: “By basing our system on that of a foreign country where conditions differ, and by pursuing only ideals, we have incorporated many undesirable elements into our system.”

  To counter these elements, educational boards no longer would be elected but would be appointed by local governments. And the Ministry of Education once again assumed responsibility for preparing and publishing school textbooks. This pitted the government against the leftist Japan Teachers’ Union in a long struggle that pushed both institutions toward extreme positions. The union suspected the government of militarist revivalism, while the government regarded the leftist teachers, including Ienaga, as dangerous idealists at best and traitors at worst. As a result of this endless tug-of-war, Japanese history textbooks failed to satisfy either side. Leftists and liberals criticize them to this day for being dishonest, evasive, and nationalistic. Conservatives and nationalists see too many “alien” traces of leftist ideology. Neither side is entirely wrong: the compromised textbooks are evasive, and Marxists have dominated historical scholarship since the war.

  Ienaga never disguised his politics. In his 1962 history textbook, he used as an illustration a photograph of a maimed Japanese Army veteran, with the stump of one arm in a leather cast and a money box around his neck. The caption carried a message: “This tragic sight eloquently conveys to us the poignant meaning of the phrase from the preface to the constitution which reads: ‘… [we] resolve that we shall
never again be visited with the horrors of war through government action.’ ” It perfectly summed up Ienaga’s and the Teachers’ Union’s “constitutional patriotism” and their pacifist disposition. War, any war, was bad, but especially a war fought by “imperialist” powers on the Asian continent. Ienaga’s explanation for Japan’s failure to destroy the Chinese Communists was “the democratic power of the Red armies.” The Japanese war in China was “a struggle of political values: the democracy of China versus the militaristic absolutism of Japan.” Twenty years later, this was precisely his analysis of the Vietnam War too.

  Ienaga’s leftist pacifism and pro-Chinese bias were just the kinds of things Japanese conservatives sought to banish from the textbooks. The Ministry of Education wanted both the photograph of the maimed soldier and the caption to be deleted, since they conveyed “an excessively negative impression of war.”

  Ienaga had also included photographs of students going to war and young girls working in arms factories, with the caption: “The destruction of people’s lives.” Yet the ministry took a more positive view of these pictures. They were “good photos that show the bright faces of students devoting themselves to their country.”

  I looked at a high school textbook published in 1984. It was used in schools all over Japan. There were no pictures of maimed soldiers or Japanese atrocities. There was a photograph of Hiroshima in ruins, of the Arizona sinking in Pearl Harbor, of contemporary newspaper headlines, of Japanese evacuees from the bombings, and of citizens practicing fire drills. The caption of this last picture was in keeping with the spirit of the ministry: “The neighborhood association helps out during a fire drill. The women, dressed in baggy trousers and head scarves, are diligently practicing how to pass water buckets.”

  References to Unit 731, which carried out the fatal medical experiments on thousands of prisoners in Manchuria, were deleted in Ienaga’s books, because there had been “no credible scholarly research” on the subject. (Research was indeed difficult, since most of the information was in American or Soviet hands.) But enough evidence had emerged by the 1980s to prove that Ienaga had been right to include it. He was confident in 1992 that Japanese textbooks would deal with Unit 731 in future editions.