The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  But by 1991, when I visited Buchenwald for the second time, things had begun to change. The grandiose monuments were still there, of course. So was the documentary film shown in the movie theater, which contained footage of Otto Grotewohl and Walter Ulbricht and Frau Thälmann marching along the Street of Nations. But I was also handed a new pamphlet in the museum, which announced, with excruciating delicacy, that it had been decided in the spring of 1990 to “institute some changes, as far as technically feasible, to overcome a certain one-sidedness in the presentation.”

  These words did little to convey the controversy involved in rewriting the myths of the German Democratic Republic. Rewriting myths on a historical site, a “warning and memorial place” so loaded with symbolism, is difficult. Old myths had to be challenged without replacing them with new ones. The shrine of Buchenwald offered particular problems, since one or two skeletons had come tumbling from its cupboards.

  In 1983 builders came across a mass of human bones, dumped into a common grave in the woods outside the perimeter of the Nazi camp. The East German government immediately ordered the grave, and the matter, closed. But after 1989, more bones were discovered, and what could not even be mentioned for forty years was now openly discussed: Buchenwald, as well as other concentration camps in East Germany, such as Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, had remained fully operative until 1950. As soon as the Soviet army arrived in Weimar, Buchenwald had been pressed into service again, this time to punish former Nazis, class enemies, and counterrevolutionaries, including Social Democrats who refused to let the Communists take over their party. There is no evidence that the Soviets subjected their prisoners to the Nazi regime of murder by hard labor. Still, one third of the 30,000 prisoners interned in Soviet Buchenwald died, mostly of hunger and disease.

  I met Robert Zeiler, one of the survivors, in West Berlin. His story, which he has told for years—to students, journalists, survivors’ associations—is a kind of epic myth in itself. Zeiler’s father was an “Aryan” orchestra conductor; his mother was Jewish. When Zeiler was eleven, the first racial laws were passed; shortly afterward his parents were divorced. As a Mischling (half-caste), Zeiler was able to protect his mother for some years by living under her roof. His sister was less lucky. She was sent to Ravensbrück for sheltering her Jewish fiancé.

  By 1943, the Nazis had decided that no Jew was to be spared, and Zeiler’s mother was picked up and sent to Theresienstadt. Soon after, Zeiler, at the age of twenty, was arrested too, for harboring Jews—that is to say, his own mother. He was sent to Buchenwald. Before long he weighed only ninety pounds. It was hard to imagine, seeing him today, a roly-poly man in a jogging suit.

  After being liberated from the camp, Zeiler went to Czechoslovakia in an American jeep to find his mother, who had survived. Together they drove back to Berlin, stopping for the night in Potsdam. While his mother was resting, Zeiler set off in his jeep for Berlin, to see what was left of their house. But he was stopped on the way by the. Soviet secret police, who accused him of being an American spy. When he claimed to have been a Jewish victim of the Nazis, he was told he was a liar, since all Jews were dead. After some months of being shunted from one camp to another, Zeiler found himself in Buchenwald once again. He was to stay there for three more years. The Soviet guards, he recalled, had not behaved particularly badly, not as badly as the young Communist block leaders in the Nazi camp. They were mostly homesick young men who liked singing sentimental songs. The worst thing about the Soviet camp, Zeiler said, was the boredom.

  I asked Zeiler what people thought of his story when he finally got home. He studied the tea cloth on his table, embroidered with a picture of the Hiroshima Peace Dome. He had told his story to many people, he said, Germans as well as occupation authorities. Then he fell silent. I studied his room, filled with knickknacks and his father’s musical mementos. Again I asked him how people had responded to his story. He said that nobody had shown any interest at the time. Everyone was still preoccupied by the Nazis. Some West Germans had begun to complain about the treatment of German prisoners by the Allies—in Dachau, for example. But in the German Democratic Republic, the subject of Soviet camps simply did not exist.

  Dr. Irmgard Seidel was still the deputy director of the Buchenwald memorial place during my second visit to the camp. Her office was in one of the former SS barracks—a large building, with long corridors, built by the Buchenwald prisoners. It smelled of wax and washing detergent. On the wall next to the door of Dr. Seidel’s office was a drawing of an SS man, whip in hand, standing in front of a torture victim hanging by his wrists from a pole. The caption said: “Lord, forgive him, for he knows not what he does.”

  “I had no idea about this Soviet camp,” said Dr. Seidel when I asked her about it. “December 1989 was the first time I heard about it. You know, what happened here between 1945 and 1950 was a taboo. It could not possibly be discussed.”

  Dr. Seidel’s manner was not exactly impolite, but it was testy and betrayed a sense of pique. A former party member, she now lived in a new Germany unified by a conservative government. The tables had truly been turned: a committee of concerned Weimar citizens was agitating to have her removed from her job. Dr. Seidel’s boss had already been purged, only to be replaced by a West German historian, who was swiftly replaced in turn, when his connections with the West German Communist Party became known.

  Dr. Seidel was eager to show me documents proving her bona fides, and in particular her independence from Communist propaganda. She was conscious of the way the socialist state had ignored the Holocaust. But this didn’t mean she accepted the view of some of her conservative opponents, who claimed that the Soviets had been worse than the Nazis. To prove that she had the right kind of backing, she produced a letter from a society of Holocaust survivors in New York. It was a protest against any attempt to equate the victims of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, with the Nazi victims. The letter also mentioned the bravery of German political prisoners “whose sacrifices laid the foundation for the moral rebirth of Germany …”

  “Of course,” said Dr. Seidel, “we have neglected the Jewish victims, but this we intend to change. Our Jewish friends know this and support me fully.” Perhaps they do, and maybe Dr. Seidel had reason to feel maligned. But I didn’t quite believe her protestations. She must have known something about the postwar history of the camp. In a booklet printed in Weimar in 1988, and freely available at the camp museum bookshop, there was mention of the kind cooperation of the Soviet authorities in turning Buchenwald into a memorial place. This was made possible, it said, in 1950, when “the internment camp for Nazi functionaries was cleared in four weeks.”

  But what is to be done, now that the truth—or at least some of the truth—is out? German conservatives are quick to point out the similarities between Soviet and Nazi crimes. It is time, wrote a contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to dust off the totalitarianism theory once more, the idea, that is, that right-wing and left-wing tyrannies “may not be identical, but should be assessed in the same way. What better place for this theory to prove its worth than Buchenwald?” The Christian Democratic Party in Weimar wanted to turn the camp into “a memorial place for the victims of all dictatorships”—as though the Third Reich were just another dictatorship.

  Buchenwald, then, became the handy focus of a view which had gained currency, particularly in right-wing circles, since the collapse of the German Democratic Republic: the view that the Communist state had been a kind of continuation of the Third Reich. In a way, it was argued, the GDR had been worse than Nazi Germany: it lasted for more than forty years, whereas Hitler was around for only twelve. It was an attractive theory, since it reduced the Third Reich to more local, less horrific proportions. It also slipped rather easily into the conclusion that started the historians’ debate in 1986, the conclusion that Nazism was merely a defensive reaction to Soviet tyranny. Ernst Nolte, the conservative historian who proposed this theory, argued that Hitler had tried t
o defend Europe from Stalin’s “Asiatic barbarism.” The historians’ debate came only one year after Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s invitation to Ronald Reagan to stand hand in hand with him at the military cemetery of Bitburg, only hours after they visited the Gedenkstätte of Bergen-Belsen. In a great moment of reconciliation, Kohl thought, it would be churlish, indeed it would be missing the point entirely, to distinguish between the graves of SS men and other victims of war. The time had come to forget about distinctions. To paraphrase Ernst Nolte, it was time for the past to go away.

  Victim against victim, grave against grave. Since 1988, a row about just such distinctions had been brewing in Berlin. The senator for cultural affairs had given permission for a Holocaust memorial to be built on the site of Hitler’s chancellery. The original idea was to dedicate the monument to the memory of the murdered Jews of Europe. But the central committee for Gypsy affairs protested and demanded that it should remember all the victims of racial persecution. This, the planners countered, would render the whole thing meaningless. The dispute became bitter, even grotesque. Arguments arose as to whether the persecution of one-quarter Jews was worse than that of one-eighth Gypsies. Soon members of both sides were talking like pedantic Nazi race theorists.

  History is all about distinctions. Which is why a committee of eminent historians was appointed in 1990 to sort out the historical disputes at Buchenwald. Should all the victims of the Nazis and the Soviets be remembered together? If not, how should they be separated? Must the GDR monuments be dismantled? What about the museum? And so on. It was a delicate mission, since most of the members of the committee were from western Germany. And Ossies did not always take kindly to Wessies meddling in their historical myths. Former Communists objected when too much emphasis was put on Soviet crimes, whereas others felt the committee did not go far enough. One of the western German historians, Dr. Eberhard Jäckel, told me it was “a frightfully embarrassing situation between us and the people of the former GDR, for they put us in the position of the victorious Allies in 1945.” In the event, the committee recommended some minor changes. The plaque in Ernst Thälmann’s old cell was changed to a simpler one, reading: “Chairman of the German Communist Party, imprisoned, murdered here.” And a small museum on Soviet Buchenwald, distinct from the larger one dealing with the Nazi period, was planned.

  But the question remains whether a history museum can be combined with a memorial place, or a Mahnmal, without distorting its purpose. A memorial is a religious or quasi-religious monument where remembrance of the past is a collective ritual. People pray at monuments, they light torches, they lay wreaths. But a museum is a secular institution, which ought, in a liberal society, to strive for independent scholarship. In a dictatorship, where everything—politics, scholarship, memorializing—is reduced to public ritual, there is no contradiction; in a liberal democracy there is.

  Until 1992, forty-seven years after the end of the war, there was only one war museum in Japan, and a very odd museum it was too. There was the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, of course, but that was only about Hiroshima. And there was a small museum in southern Kyushu, on the site of a former air base, with memorabilia of a kamikaze squadron. But only the museum of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo dealt with the history of the entire war.

  The shrine itself is controversial. It is a Shinto shrine dedicated to the worship of the spirits of those who laid down their lives for the emperor since the Meiji Restoration of 1868. A leaflet handed out at the museum said these patriots died for the “nation,” but this unquestioned equation of emperor and nation is typical of the place; indeed, it is its raison d’être. Several million spirits are enshrined at Yasukuni, including those of generals and politicians hanged as Class A war criminals after the Tokyo trial. Conservative politicians who visit the shrine each year to commemorate the Japanese war dead have claimed Yasukuni is no different from the war cemetery of Arlington, Virginia, or the Cenotaph in London. But it is.

  The “restoration” of the emperor as a political figurehead of the new government that had toppled the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1860s did not come without bloodshed. It was to the spirits of those who had fought on the imperial side against the shogun that the Meiji emperor dedicated the shrine. So in a way Yasukuni is a revolutionary or, better, a Bonapartist shrine. The Restoration was started by samurai, and until 1945 the armed forces, accountable only to the emperor, were often at the heart of the Japanese order. The first thing you see as you approach the huge gate of the shrine is a bronze statue of Omura Masujiro, military strategist and founder of the Imperial Japanese Army. He was assassinated by political rivals in 1869, the year the Yasukuni Shrine was opened.

  Although every Japanese regime in recorded history made sure it was blessed, voluntarily or not, by the emperor of the day, the militaristic imperial cult (sometimes called State Shinto) was a Meiji invention, indeed a Japanese variation of modern nationalism. The head shrine of this cult was Yasukuni. Wars were fought “for the emperor,” orders were obeyed “for the emperor,” and enshrinement as a deity would follow death “for the emperor.”

  After the war, to separate state from church, the American occupation authorities insisted the Japanese abolish Shinto as a state religion. Shinto shrines, including Yasukuni, would henceforth be private enterprises. Most Japanese, glad to be rid of military oppression, welcomed the move. But by 1951, former military officers had formed right-wing groups and demanded the release of all war criminals and the rehabilitation of the Yasukuni Shrine. And it has been on the right-wing agenda ever since. Nationalist intellectuals still write angry books about the loss of “national identity,” and various pressure groups are eager to restore some of the prewar values. In an essay about Yasukuni, the critic Eto Jun argued that the Japanese, unlike any other people, “live with the dead.” Thus, he concluded, worship at Yasukuni was vital to the continuity of the Japanese nation.

  The Japan Association of Families of the War Dead, which has more than a million members, most of whom vote for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, is an important pressure group. And right-wing politicians, who wish to rewrite the constitution to reinstate the divine status of the emperor, and restore the sovereign right to wage war, naturally insist that Yasukuni be an official place of worship. And so each year the combination of right-wing agitation and personal conviction has prompted Japanese politicians, including Prime Ministers, to visit the shrine.

  To minimize controversy they would visit “as private individuals,” even though their collective worship was a public event recorded for the evening news. In 1985, however, Nakasone Yasuhiro was the first to worship in his official capacity, signing the visitors’ book as Prime Minister. His offering to the shrine, an expensive sprig from a sacred tree, was reimbursed from the public purse. Christians, leftists, pacifists, and the governments of South Korea and China protested. A member of a Japanese Buddhist group sued the Prime Minister for causing “spiritual damage in using our taxes.” But Nakasone insisted he was only there to pray for peace. Yasukuni’s official pamphlet says the same thing—it is a shrine dedicated to peace. Yasukuni means “to bring peace to the nation.”

  It is a peculiar concept of peace. The cherry blossom trees in front of the shrine bear white tags with the names of Imperial Army regiments and famous battleships. Behind the shrine is a stone monument in the shape of a globe, in memory of the Kempeitai, the Japanese equivalent of the SS. Nearby is a long concrete slab pocked with holes, containing different-colored rocks from the battlefields of Leyte, Guadalcanal, Guam, and Wake Island. There is also a “Mother’s Monument”: a white marble sculpture resembling a deep throat with water gushing through. It is, so the inscription informs, “the image of mother in the minds of men who were dying of thirst.”

  Along the gravel path leading to the main shrine, several blue-and-khaki trucks were parked, festooned with nationalist slogans. A wartime military march boomed from loudspeakers mounted on top. The trucks belonged to some of the extreme right-w
ing organizations that wished to restore the prewar order, what they called, before Hirohito’s death, the Showa Restoration (Showa being the name of Hirohito’s reign). Uniformed young men with shaven skulls barked in unison and bowed in the direction of the Imperial Palace.

  In front of the museum is a well-maintained display of vintage machine guns, a World War II tank, a howitzer, a torpedo, and the first railway engine to pass along the Burma Railroad. This is what the museum pamphlet describes as “sacred ground.” And the weapons on exhibit had been “used with love and care” by “the deities of the shrine.” Their “sacred relics” are shown in the museum.

  There, in the first room, the visitor is confronted by a large oil painting, in a heavy gilt frame, of Emperor Hirohito visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in the 1930s. He is dressed in military uniform and flanked by bowing priests in white robes. A sacred sword is shown too, forged by priests attached to the shrine. And there are various items left by soldiers who fought in the wars against China and Russia, just before and after the turn of the century.

  Other relics on display are a “human torpedo”—a steel sausage with enough room for one man, who would sacrifice his life by steering its explosive charge into an enemy ship. There are battle flags, signed by soldiers in their own blood, the names now barely more than faded brown smudges. There is a replica of a “cherry blossom” plane, used in kamikaze attacks. Letters from soldiers to their mothers or wives are preserved in glass cases. The torn, bloody shirt of a soldier who died in the Philippines is exhibited among the stained battle flags, as well as a cracked picture of his mother which he had with him when he died.