The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  After a tour of the museum, one of the curators showed me the way to the roof terrace. From there we gazed at the large park surrounding Osaka Castle, where the Imperial Army used to practice drills and maneuvers. And I reflected on the Japanese war museums I had seen, in Osaka, in Kyoto, on the former kamikaze base in Kyushu, in Hiroshima, and at Yasukuni Shrine. Yes, there had been change in Japan since the war, yet the basic arguments had remained the same. On the one side was a vision of Japan that had learned from its crimes and would never fight in another war again. On the other was a Japan that should be free once more to be a “normal” military power. As long as one side used historical sins to support its vision of peace, the other would deny them.

  Dieter Schulte was one of the most bitter men I met in Germany. For seven years he had been the curator of the history museum in Potsdam, the city of palaces and barracks, located in the former GDR. He was fired from his job after unification. His successor, a medievalist from West Berlin, appointed to revamp the museum, described him as a “stiff party man.” She also told me that the secret police, the Stasi, had occupied an office above his.

  We met in the Kino Café, a dingy modern place in the wing of a dilapidated palace. Schulte was a dapper man, dressed in pressed blue jeans, a patterned sweater, and soft slip-on shoes. His white hair was perfectly groomed. His nails bore the sheen of a recent manicure. His eyes strayed around the room as he spoke, and he pursed his lips when silent.

  It had not been easy, he said, to let go of the museum, for it had been so much a part of his life. And he was not happy with the way things were changing. He talked about the historical significance of Potsdam. Every regime since the days of Frederick the Great had used Potsdam to project its image, he explained. Potsdam was a center of right-wing politics in the 1920s. Hitler’s top generals were stationed there during the war, including the plotters of the failed coup in 1944. Yet none of this was given sufficient attention in the museum, he said. The most important function of a museum, he believed, was to “show the laws of history.”

  His successor, Frau Bierschenk, had shown me parts of the old museum, including the rooms with exhibits on World War II, which had not yet been changed. They had been closed to the public since unification. There was already a moldy smell inside, like that of ripe mushrooms. The new curator switched on the lights and lifted a white sheet off a glass cabinet to reveal the “symbols of the new regime,” meaning the old regime, before the birth of a Communist Germany. There they were, in a straight row: a World War I spiked helmet, a plutocrat’s top hat, and an SA man’s brown cap. It was as logical as that, the laws of history, as neat as a progression of dominoes. Elsewhere in the room I learned how fascism was the logical outcome of “the contradictions in the Weimar Republic between democracy and imperialism.”

  I asked Schulte, who had written these explanations, whether he still believed them. He pursed his lips, looked over my shoulder, and said, almost in a whisper: “Those were written almost seven years ago. Scientific knowledge has progressed since then …”

  In what way had he changed his mind? “I still believe that socialism must be the basis for tracing relations, contexts. History cannot be just a mosaic of details. A museum showing nothing but objects would not be a museum.”

  Then he suddenly changed tack and spoke of his difficulties under the Communist regime, how every exhibit had to be approved by the censors before you could get access to the simplest things, such as paper to print on.

  Did he feel that Germany was freer now? “No, we are never free, never!” Even relatively speaking? “No, you see, just as we had to compromise before to get paper or money, you won’t get anything done now if it doesn’t fit in with the capitalist system. It has to be sexy, and so on. Well, maybe it is true that the history museum will be more entertaining …”

  I did not like Schulte much. He was an apparatchik, like so many before him. He even spoke like the petty officials who suddenly found their world had collapsed in 1945. Asked about the Stasi above his office, he said he had known nothing: “I was never told. I didn’t know. How could one have known? I knew nothing, nothing.”

  But he had a point about museums. A museum, especially a history museum, cannot just show random objects. Objects must be organized according to ideas. Without stories history is unintelligible. Which is not to say there is no truth and all stories are propaganda. But to catch the truth there must be conflict, debate, interpretation, and reinterpretation—in short, a discourse without end. The problem is how to show this in a museum.

  One possible way was demonstrated in East Berlin. Before the collapse of the GDR, every housing project, every school, every factory, and every military base had a so-called Traditionskabinett, a tradition room. These were miniature museums showing the same potted history of the German workers’ movement, the Communist antifascist resistance, the Red Army liberating Germany east of the Elbe, and the founding of the German Democratic Republic. Here, in its purest form, was the historic “tradition” that lent legitimacy to the Communist state. Like the ubiquitous busts of Lenin, most of these places were demolished after 1990. Yet one, in the corner of an East Berlin park, was left entirely intact. Its subject was no longer history, however, but propaganda. Tags were pasted around the exhibits explaining and criticizing what was shown, deconstructing, as it were, the myths left by the old regime.

  It was not quite the same thing, yet I was reminded of the famous warning monument in Hamburg, sculpted by Alfred Hrdlička. Hrdlička’s monument of grotesquely mangled corpses and emaciated prisoners was a critique of an older monument next to it—a hideous block, like a massive bunker, erected in 1936 in honor of the Second Hanseatic Infantry Regiment 76. Rows of identical soldiers, carved in relief, march around the block. Above their helmets is a quotation, in Gothic letters, from a poem by Heinrich Lersch, written in 1914: “Germany must live, even if we have to die” (“Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben müssen”). Instead of tearing it down, as happened with virtually all Nazi memorials, Hrdlička’s stone corpses were chosen as a more appropriate response. Here was a Mahnmal used as argument.

  Such examples are rare, though, and they do not offer a practical solution to the problems of history museums or memorials. It was certainly not what Chancellor Kohl had in mind when he suggested, in 1983, that the Federal Republic should have its own museum of German history. Work on the museum was to begin in 1987, to celebrate Berlin’s 750th anniversary.

  Helmut Kohl, inspired by his advisers, such as the conservative scholar Michael Stürmer, was interested in history. Like other conservatives, he worried about the lack of a historical identity in the Federal Republic. Richard von Weizsäcker, mayor of Berlin when the museum plan was hatched, observed that the East Germans at least had a more coherent sense of the past—East Berlin also had a German history museum, a kind of oversized Traditionskabinett in the splendid baroque Arsenal. Michael Stürmer wrote that “the search for our lost history” was “morally legitimate and politically necessary, for at issue is the inner continuity of the German republic and the predictability of its foreign policy.” And the Christian Democrat member of parliament Alfred Dregger was concerned that without enough knowledge of “the entire history of Germany” young Germans would not fully support “the democratic state.” “The entire history” (die ganze Geschichte) was a code phrase; what he meant to say—and did say on some occasions—was that too much attention was being paid to the history of the Nazi period. In short, German conservatives above a certain age worried that citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany, one half of a split nation, would not feel sufficiently German. History—that is, “the entire history”—would help them do so.

  So when Kohl made another speech in parliament, in 1985, about the museum project, he spoke about the need to know “where we came from, where we are today, as Germans, and where we will be going.” But he also spoke about relations with East Germany, the Deutschlandpolitik, which dealt with the “core
of our national identity and our national as well as European destiny.”

  A committee of historians and museum experts was duly appointed and a debate followed. Politicians and intellectuals of the left were unhappy about the whole idea. They distrusted the motives behind the conservative government’s plans. They deeply distrusted the conservative idea of national identity. Indeed, they felt identity was really none of the government’s business. The Social Democrat politician Freimut Duve argued this case in 1986: “History does not belong to the government. Nor does it belong to politics. In a democracy the government neither can nor should be building museums in the manner of feudal lords in the olden days.” And so it went, to and fro, on and on. Until 1990, when the whole issue became redundant: the two Germanys had become “Germany” once again.

  The nearest thing to an official German history museum today is the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. It is in the Arsenal in East Berlin, where the Communist German history museum used to be. Attempts at revising the Communist museum had already been made in 1989, just after the Wall was breached. A sign at the door explained that “we realize now that this museum, which reflects a historical view that justifies an increasingly bureaucratic-authoritarian society, prohibits a lively and active relationship with the past and the present … Everything must be revised and seen in a new light. We appreciate any help you can give to show history in a truly desirable manner.”

  There was a note of desperation in these words, a hint that the east Germans, with the best will in the world, could not hack it alone. As a result, west Germans were brought in, the inside of the Arsenal was gutted, and a new museum installed. The new German history museum does not have a permanent collection; instead, historical themes and topics are brought up in temporary exhibitions. “These are designed,” according to the curator, Christoph Stölzl, “to make people think.”

  Stölzl is an elegant liberal from Munich, well groomed in the style anglais, silk bow ties, tweed suits: an aesthete, as well as an experienced administrator, with the smooth talk of an advertising man. Stölzl was born just at the end of the war. Yet he does not share the moralistic preoccupation with guilt that torments so many intellectuals of the ’68 generation. He started our conversation with the remark that “you cannot mourn psychologically for something you didn’t do.” He was referring, of course, to the old issue of being a German after Auschwitz.

  “All you can do,” he said, “is something symbolic, ceremonial. It would be a fine thing to have an Auschwitz Day every year and donate money to Amnesty International. That would be more productive than all this soul-searching. But it is typical of German idealism to long for the impossible and neglect to do the possible.”

  I had come to see Stölzl to ask him about his museum, and here he was talking about memorials. Yet he did try to make distinctions between the two: “I believe in dealing with the past symbolically and artistically, but there are many people in Germany who think that discourse should replace ritual. The problem is they turn discussion into a pseudo-religious activity, instead of a political one.”

  In a museum, the combination of aesthetics and political discourse can work, even though some will always complain that art was sacrificed to discourse, or vice versa. In a memorial, ceremony and analysis simply don’t mix. Stölzl might stand accused of emphasizing the art in what is after all a history museum. He worries about form. In memorials it is perhaps all he worries about. And even he gets museums and memorials confused—though perhaps in some cases this is inevitable.

  Stölzl was critical of the Holocaust museum in the Wannsee Villa, for example, because it chose the wrong form. It showed the Jews of the Holocaust, as he put it, “in a perpetuum mobile of victimhood.” He objected to the photographs of death camps and ghettos. Realism, to him, was not the point. He wanted the forms of memory to be uplifting. He preferred the presentation of the dead in Catholic cemeteries, where the dead are remembered alive, so to speak, in photographs attached to their tombstones. “This,” said Stölzl, “is more like the resurrection. It seems better to me to remember the dead as human beings, not as skeletons or corpses in an industrial murder machine.”

  The problem with the Wannsee Villa, however, is the ambiguity as to whether it is a museum or a memorial. Presumably it is both, which is the core of the problem. You can remember the Holocaust through art, through ceremony, or through analysis and discourse, but you cannot do all this at the same time, or in the same place. I put it to Stölzl that the ritual, artistic approach to history is a Catholic one, while the demand for moral discourse is more in the Protestant tradition. He agreed that this was possible. Later I thought this generalization might be expanded even further, since the problems of memorial museums in Germany and Japan were essentially the same. Memory can be religious or secular. Both are valid. But the two should not be confused. Germany has hardly been more successful than Japan in avoiding this confusion. The religious mind still stalks both lands in just about equal measure.

  PART FOUR

  A NORMAL COUNTRY

  BONN, NOVEMBER 10, 1988, fifty years after the Kristallnacht. Philipp Jenninger, president of the Bundestag, insisted on commemorating the anniversary himself, with a speech to the West German parliament. He wanted no one else to speak, not even Heinz Galinski, the head of the Jewish community. If he had let Galinski speak—so he told me later, in Vienna—he would have had to let the Catholic primate speak too, and what about the Protestants? No, there would have been no end to it, and the Bundestag was not their stage. In any case, he, Dr. Philipp Jenninger, the president, was adamant that the heirs of the aggressors, not the victims, should speak and remember that day.

  So up he got and spoke, or rather read, in the official drone of a bureaucrat reading a protocol. I quote:

  … We have gathered today in the German Bundestag to commemorate the pogroms of November 9 and 10, 1938, because it is not the victims, but we, in whose midst the crimes took place, who must remember and account for them. We Germans must be clear about our understanding of our history and the lessons we can draw for the way we constitute our politics in the present and in the future …

  The victims—the Jews all over the world—know precisely what November 1938 meant in the course of their suffering. Do we know it as well?…

  The [German] population was largely passive; as they had been in previous years, toward anti-Jewish actions and measures. Not many took an active part in the excesses, but nobody rebelled either. There was no resistance to speak of …

  Looking back, ladies and gentlemen, it is clear that a real revolution took place in Germany between 1933 and 1938—a revolution which turned a state ruled by law into a criminal state, into an instrument of destruction of precisely those legal and ethical norms and foundations whose preservation and defense is what the state—by definition—should be about …

  So far as the lot of German and European Jews was concerned, Hitler’s successes were even more fateful than his crimes and misdeeds. Even seen from the distance of time and with the knowledge of what followed, the years between 1933 and 1938 are mesmerizing, insofar as the march of Hitler’s political triumph in those first years are virtually without historical parallel …

  For the Germans who saw the Weimar Republic mostly as a sequence of foreign policy humiliations, all this must have seemed like a miracle. And above and beyond that, people were given jobs instead of being out of work, and mass misery turned into something like prosperity for most …

  As for the Jews, well, hadn’t they been too big for their boots? So it was phrased at the time. Shouldn’t they learn at last to be more humble? Hadn’t they deserved to be taken down a peg? Above all, didn’t the propaganda—apart from wild exaggerations which couldn’t be taken seriously—basically accord with one’s own assumptions and convictions? And when things went too far, as in November 1938, one could always say, in the words of a contemporary: “Why should we care? Look away if it horrifies you. It’s not our problem
.”

  Ladies and gentlemen, there was antisemitism in Germany, as well as in many other countries, long before Hitler …

  It is true that the National Socialists took great pains to conceal the truth of their mass murder. It is also true, however, that everyone knew about the Nuremberg [racial] laws, that all could see what happened fifty years ago today, and that the deportations happened in full public view …

  Many Germans allowed themselves to be blinded and seduced by National Socialism. Many, being indifferent, made it possible for the crimes to be committed. Many became criminals themselves. The question of guilt and its repression is one that every person must answer for himself.

  What we must all resist is the questioning of historical truth, the setting off of one category of victims against another, the denial of facts. Anyone who wishes to reduce our guilt, who says that it wasn’t all bad—or not really as bad as all that—is trying to defend the indefensible.

  To illustrate his points, Jenninger quoted an eyewitness account of a mass execution of Jews in 1942. Every detail—the twitching bodies of bleeding infants, the naked mothers, the young executioners, smoking between shots—was recounted, relentlessly, in a flat voice, without feeling. He quoted Himmler, admonishing his SS men not to flinch at the sight of a hundred or even five hundred or even a thousand corpses lying in a heap. Jenninger quoted the jargon of the time: Jews as “vermin” and so on. He quoted Nietzsche and Dostoevski. But it was all to no avail. The damage was done. The speech was a disaster.

  Soon after the beginning, most of the delegates from the Green Party had left the hall in protest, and by the end 40 percent of the Social Democrats had left. Members of Jenninger’s own Christian Democratic Party, according to a news report, “had shrunk in shame.” Ida Ehre, the elderly Jewish actress who had read Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” to great effect just before Jenninger’s speech, hid her face in her hands. Jenninger left the hall alone, streaks of sweat streaming down his ashen brow. Not even his closest political friends shook his hand. Jenninger had wanted to teach a history lesson. It had been received at best as a tactless exercise in missing the point, at worst as a crude attempt to let Germans off the hook.