The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  “Shameful!” cried a Christian Democrat as soon as it was over. “A black day,” said a Free Democrat. “A catastrophe,” said a Social Democrat. “Betroffen,” said another. The foreign press was unanimous in its rage: “Antisemitism in the German Parliament” was the top story of an Italian daily. The headline in a Dutch paper said: “Hitler Worship Causes Mayhem in the Bundestag.” The Times of London called it “a national disaster for West Germany.” Two days later Jenninger resigned. A year or so later he was appointed, somewhat oddly, to be ambassador in Vienna.

  Reading Jenninger’s speech, as he might have put it, from the distance of time, it is hard to understand why it caused such hysteria. He may not have chosen his words with sufficient care. He might have been clumsy in his quotations. But to look only at the words is not enough. To understand the outrage, one must picture the setting, or rather the staging of the affair.

  Jenninger admitted to me in his office in Vienna—modern, functional, without personal touches—that he had made one big mistake. He should not have followed Ida Ehre’s reading of Paul Celan’s poem. “It was so moving,” he said. Yes? “Well, it was not the ideal preparation for a sober historical speech.” No, I said, I suppose it wasn’t.

  Black milk of daybreak

  we drink you at night

  we drink you at midday

  Death is a master from Germany …

  It is impossible not to be moved. In the words of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “The forceful voice trembled. You could hear her drawing breath, the paper crackled in her hands. No one in the hall could fail to be moved by the power and the sorrow of her language. Then Jenninger stepped to the lectern and began in a businesslike manner: ‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ ”

  Jenninger is not a prepossessing figure, not the sort of man who could easily move an audience. He is a short, chunky Rhinelander, a self-made man of peasant stock, a type you could find at any beer-hall table in Germany. He has a rasping laugh and his suit looks too tight. None of this helped his performance that day. He looked bumbling, tactless, insensitive.

  Not once, complained a Social Democrat, did he use the word Trauer. The word can be translated as “sorrow” or as “mourning.” It was the tone of Jenninger’s speech that bothered many. It was not betroffen enough. Willy Brandt, a master of moral gestures, the West German Chancellor who fell on his knees in the former Warsaw ghetto to apologize for what the Nazis had done, called it “a dark day in postwar German history.” Jenninger “failed, not because he is a bad fellow, but because he was out of his depth.”

  Jenninger’s talk was compared to Richard von Weizsäcker’s celebrated speech in the same Bundestag three years before. His speech was drenched in Trauer. He spoke of the need to remember “so purely, so honestly, that it becomes part of one’s inner life.” Jenninger’s performance was even compared to a speech given the day before by his friend Helmut Kohl, not usually known for his grace or tact. But at the Westend Synagogue in Frankfurt, even Kohl had risen to the occasion, and had spoken about the Holocaust as “a reason for profound shame.” Jenninger’s failure, so almost everyone thought, had been to misjudge the occasion, which called for a memorial, not a “sober historical speech.”

  And yet Jenninger was not speaking in a synagogue as a German Gentile to Jews; he was talking in the worldly Bundestag, the great hall of German politics, as a Gentile German to other Germans. Recalling that painful day, in his Viennese office, he began to shout: “We had to speak out! But not in the usual way. It was not enough to say we were ashamed and would not let it happen again. I wanted to hold a mirror up to the Germans!”

  I felt a certain sympathy for Jenninger. Interestingly enough, so did many people speaking from the point of view of the victims. Michael Fürst, a member of the central committee of the Jewish community in Germany, saw no reason for Jenninger to resign. After all, he said, Jenninger had spoken the truth. And Robert Kempner, prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, thought Jenninger’s speech was “even very good.”

  So why were the Germans so upset? Why did so many insist on misinterpreting Jenninger’s quotations? Why did they think that he, Jenninger—and not just the people he cited—regarded Hitler as a mesmerizing statesman and Jews as “vermin”? Perhaps neither the setting of his speech nor the words entirely explain the debacle. It also had something to do with the climate of suspicion in Germany. Greens, liberals, and leftists suspected conservatives of using every opportunity to whitewash the war, and conservatives suspected Greens, liberals, and leftists of rubbing German noses in Auschwitz. The climate of suspicion was at its most feverish on the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht. For it happened near the end of a decade marked by conservative attempts to revise history, to escape from the burden of guilt. It was six years after Alfred Dregger, right-wing Christian Democrat, called for all Germans “to come out of Hitler’s shadow—we must become normal.”

  It was four years after Helmut Kohl’s visit to Israel, when he spoke of “the mercy of being born too late”—too late to have actively killed Jews, that is. He, too, used the word “normal,” as in “normal relations” between Germany and Israel. It was three years after Bitburg. And two years after Ernst Nolte unleashed the “historians’ debate” by proposing that the Holocaust was a defensive imitation of Stalin’s “Asiatic barbarism”; not at all unique, in other words, but a horridly normal event in the horrid history of man.

  Jenninger, in his stumbling, mumbling way, had walked straight into this postwar German battle zone. Entrenched on one side were those who wanted Germany to be normal, graced by late birth, not guilty; and on the other were those who had made Auschwitz part of their identity. In the event, Jenninger was shot down by both sides, for talking about too much guilt and not appearing guilty enough.

  Like Helmut Kohl, Jenninger was graced by a birth that was too late for him to have been an active Nazi. He was born in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power. His father, a printer, had been against the Nazis, Jenninger recalled. Jenninger had older brothers, all of whom served in the army. Two of them didn’t want to go: one was immediately killed in Italy, the other in Russia.

  Jenninger is only slightly younger than Günter Grass (born in 1927). Theirs is an odd generation, too late to be Nazis, early enough to be educated as Nazis: Jungvolk, Hitler Youth, and so on. It has rendered many people of that age mute about the past. (It was their children who talked.) “Late birth” has given them perhaps the most complicated perspective on the past of all generations: too young to be responsible, yet tainted by guilt. Those, like Grass, who have talked and written about the war, have often done so incessantly, almost obsessively, and frequently, as in Grass’s Tin Drum, from a child’s point of view. Their burden is to explain their parents. It is the hardest thing of all to do, for to explain your parents, you have to try to imagine the world as they saw it. This implies identification, if only in the mind, and identification can so easily turn into justification. Which is why most people of Jenninger’s age have preferred to say nothing at all.

  One of the criticisms of Jenninger’s speech—from a Free Democrat politician—was that he tried “to explain the inexplicable.” It is a common accusation. Primo Levi wrote (about the Holocaust, not about Jenninger): “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘understanding’ a proposal or human behavior means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him. Now, no human being will be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are nonhuman words and deeds, really counter-human, without historical precedents …”

  One hesitates to differ with a witness such as Levi. And yet, to assume that the Kristallnacht and, by extension, the Holocaust are inexplicable, “c
ounter-human,” or acts of some Antichrist lurking in our murky depths is to diminish the question of responsibility. Certainly, one cannot look into Hitler’s mind. And the deepest wellsprings of human savagery are perhaps mysterious. But there were political reasons why such savagery came about. These reasons can and must be explained, especially in a German parliament. Jenninger was a politician, not a poet or a man of God.

  Showing Betroffenheit and speaking in religious terms about the past are the easier options. Jenninger, perhaps ineptly, wanted to explain his parents, or at least people of his parents’ age, the people who taught him to be a future Nazi. “Where were the professors and the writers when Hitler came to power?” he shouted in his office, stamping his feet, shod in cheap-looking, sand-colored shoes. “Why did I always hear that everybody had really been against Hitler? What was it that made them all cooperate? I think we can only reconcile ourselves with our history through the facts. To explain means telling the truth!”

  Jenninger adjusted his tie, which appeared to constrict his thick neck like a noose. Tiny pearls of sweat glistened on his forehead. He told me about the 30,000 letters he received after giving his speech. He said the positive ones were from either very old people or the very young. The older people would thank him for finally saying “what it had really been like.” The young were grateful for hearing the real reasons for what happened.

  To strip the past of its mystery, to relate history as a series of more or less coherent events—without being subject to fixed laws—and to explain and evaluate those events critically is the historian’s task. This is difficult, perhaps impossible to do when the events are within living memory, when the questions of guilt and shame are still vital. What happened in Germany and in the countries it occupied between 1933 and 1945 is not part of “normal” history. To German schoolchildren it is taught as a political morality tale. The same is true when a Mahnmal is unveiled, or an event, such as the Kristallnacht, commemorated. From the point of view of the victims it is a unique period, borne by the weight of its sheer wickedness out of the stream of time. But since the late 1960s there have been moves to treat 1933–45 more as “normal” history, not as a morality tale but as a period in history, structurally, politically, and culturally connected to what happened before and after. The German word for this process is Historisierung, “historicization.” The paradox built into Historisierung is that a process aimed at a more objective view of the past leads in fact to more and more divergent subjective views. Normal history means a plurality of interpretations.

  A conservative nationalist, for example, might argue that the Holocaust was a frightful but still normal form of genocide, to be understood in the context of its time, which was unfortunately rich in genocides. Or he might say that Germans in the Third Reich behaved relatively normally in the circumstances, as Hitler, after all, did restore the morale of the German people. And it was also understandable that Hitler, great master of ceremonies that he was, mesmerized a romantic people with a traditional taste for operatic spectacles. In fact, all these arguments have been made. It was Jenninger’s misfortune that his audience believed he was endorsing them.

  Another paradox of Historisierung concerns the question of identity. The object of historicizing is to take a cool distance from the past. Yet the reason why some conservative historians, such as Andreas Hillgruber, wanted to see Nazi history embedded in the continuous flow of normal German history was to identify more easily with the people who lived it—that is, with the non-Jewish German people; that is, with the point of view of the aggressors, the Täter. If 1933–45 is treated as sui generis, unprecedented, evil incarnate, isolated from the mainstream, identification is virtually impossible, except for a lunatic fringe. And by giving those “mere twelve years” too much attention Germans are robbed of historical pride. Now, if the Third Reich were more “normal,” just another era, then Hillgruber’s intention of boosting German identity and pride, by empathizing with the point of view of a German soldier defending the Fatherland against Asiatic barbarism, would be more feasible. But in the process of this willed identification, objectivity is undercut twice over: by the storyteller himself and by the imputed views of the story’s main characters.

  Identification, then, stands in the way of Historisierung. The gulf between the victims and the Täter is still so wide, and the contrast of memories so great, that anyone (particularly a German) seeking an objective view risks slipping into the gap. Theo Sommer wrote a blistering editorial comment in Die Zeit about Jenninger’s speech. The headline was “About the Burden of Being German” (“Von der Last, Deutscher zu sein”). So Jenninger wanted to tell the truth, wrote Sommer. “Well, I agree. But please let’s have the whole truth then—the truth of the victims just as cogently as the truth of the murderers. And with feeling—outrage over the fate of the hunted should be as moving as, or indeed more moving than, any empathy for the motives of the hunters.”

  Strong words, noble feelings, but still missing the point. For Jenninger could not speak for the truth of the victims and would not pray for mercy through a mere expression of shame. He wanted to talk about history, to try to understand from a distance. It was not an ignoble enterprise, but he should have recognized that Historisierung, even forty-three years after the war, was still a highly risky business. For a “normal” society, a society not haunted by ghosts, cannot be achieved by “normalizing” history, or by waving cross and garlic. More the other way around: when society has become sufficiently open and free to look back, from the point of view neither of the victim nor of the criminal, but of the critic, only then will the ghosts be laid to rest.

  Nagasaki, December 7, 1988, the forty-seventh anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor: The emperor was dying very, very slowly, losing large quantities of blood every day. He was dying of cancer. But in the climate of “self-restraint” this was never mentioned in the Japanese press. The atmosphere in Japan, in the dying days of the Showa era, was muted, oppressive, as though on the cusp of a storm. Traditional New Year celebrations were canceled, normally garish window displays toned down. On December 7, a Communist Party representative in the Nagasaki city assembly asked Mayor Motoshima Hitoshi a straightforward question: What about the emperor’s war guilt?

  Motoshima answered: “Forty-three years have passed since the end of the war, and I think we have had enough chance to reflect on the nature of that war. From reading various accounts from abroad and having been a soldier myself, involved in military education, I do believe that the emperor bore responsibility for the war …”

  December 8, 1988: Nagasaki city legislators and the regional branch of the Liberal Democratic Party demand a retraction of the mayor’s words.

  December 12, 1988: Mayor Motoshima says that having come this far, he cannot “betray his own heart.” But he will resign as counsel to the LDP Association. His resignation is not accepted. He is dismissed instead and refused further cooperation. Motoshima, at a press conference: “I am not saying that the emperor alone was responsible for the war. Many people were, myself included. But I do feel the present state of politics is abnormal. Any statement about the emperor becomes an emotional issue. Freedom of speech should not be limited by time or place. In a democracy we respect even those whose opinions we don’t share.”

  December 19, 1988: Twenty-four extreme-right-wing groups ride through Nagasaki on thirty loudspeaker trucks, screaming for Motoshima’s death, “as divine retribution.” The LDP wants the prefectural governor to refuse political cooperation with the mayor. The governer agrees.

  December 21, 1988: Sixty-two right-wing groups from all over Japan demonstrate in Nagasaki on eighty-two loudspeaker trucks, demanding the mayor’s death.

  December 24, 1988: 13,684 signatures in support of the mayor are presented at city hall by the newly formed Nagasaki Citizens Committee for Free Speech. They were collected in just two weeks. Representatives of various conservative associations, including the prefectural office for Shinto shrines, call for
the mayor’s impeachment.

  January 7, 1989: The emperor dies.

  January 18, 1990: Mayor Motoshima is shot in the back by a right-wing extremist. Right-wingers quoted in the Japanese press declare that Motoshima had received “divine punishment.”

  The mayor only barely survived. He was shot through his lungs. After coughing up blood, he waited in a car for help. He was without police protection, since conservative assemblymen had complained about the expense.

  On the face of it, the Motoshima affair could not have been more different from the Jenninger debacle. Jenninger was accused of apologetics, Motoshima of laying blame; too little guilt on one side, too much on the other; glossing the truth here, exposing it there; whitewash and dirty linen. Jenninger had fallen afoul of liberals and leftists, Motoshima of the right. To his many supporters Motoshima is a hero; Jenninger left for Vienna in disgrace. Yet the two men, and indeed their two cases, have a few things in common. And these might reveal something about the state of Germany and Japan.

  Motoshima is ten years older than Jenninger and has the more subtle mind, but both have the brusque, no-nonsense manners of provincial politicos. Both made their careers in postwar conservative politics: Jenninger as a Christian Democrat; Motoshima, before his troubles began, as a Liberal Democrat. Motoshima was elected mayor in 1979 with the help of the very organizations that ousted him later. And even after he had almost been shot dead, he was still ready to collaborate with the conservatives.