The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  “We have been politically liberated now,” Itami wrote, “but so long as the Japanese persist in slavishly passing the buck to the military, or the police, or the bureaucrats, they will never reflect seriously on their own guilt in allowing them to dominate us, and there never will be any hope for the Japanese people.”

  Itami, then, came to the same conclusion as Karl Jaspers. People must be held responsible for the society they live in. It is a harsh judgment, to hold the slave accountable for his condition, or worse, for the actions of his master. But it is an important idea, without which the institutions necessary to maintain open, liberal societies cannot survive. This is why Motoshima’s statement was so vital, and so provocative. For by holding the emperor responsible for the war, he was not absolving the Japanese people. On the contrary, by exposing the fiction of the unresponsible high priest, he was challenging the self-image of his followers, the image of submissive victims, the image of pawns in some great impenetrable game.

  Jaspers, like Motoshima, was a devout Christian. And as with the mayor, his sense of justice sprang from his faith. But Itami—like others who shared his views—was not a Christian. Christianity—like the distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures—was never really the point. By breaking a Japanese taboo, Motoshima struck a blow for a more open, more normal political society, and very nearly lost his life. Jenninger, I like to think, wanted to strike a blow for the same, but failed, and lost his job. Perhaps he wasn’t up to the task. Or perhaps even West Germany was not yet normal enough to hear his message.

  TWO NORMAL TOWNS

  PASSAU

  PASSAU, LIKE MANY TOWNS along the great German rivers, is pretty rather than beautiful. It is too sentimental to be beautiful. It lies, like a handsome little jewelry box, at the confluence of the Danube, the Ilz, and the Inn. The landscape, so green, so picturesque, with pretty houses nestled on the woody mountain slopes, is straight out of a German fairy tale. Siegfried’s widow, Kriemhilde, passed through Passau: reason for Bishop Wolfger to have the Nibelungen saga transcribed there in the twelfth century. The architecture of the town, with its baroque cathedral, its narrow cobbled streets, its low-slung arches, its corners filled with stucco saints and putti, is so freshly painted, so well tended, that it gives a faint impression of a beautifully laid-out corpse, expertly made up to resemble a living being.

  As in all popular tourist sites, the prettiness of Passau tends to collapse into kitsch. Passau kitsch is an exaggerated German folksiness: souvenir shops offer wood carvings of gnarled peasants with pointed hats, bone-handled hunting knives with Gothic inscriptions, outsize beer mugs, and cut-glass saints. Tourist boats with names like Nibelungen and Kriemhilde glide along the rivers, with the sound of yodel music wafting from their decks. I had a cup of coffee with thick cream at an outside café, and read the local paper, which devoted entire pages to the meetings of shooting clubs (men in green uniforms and feathered hats). German and Austrian tourists walked by, clutching ice-cream cones and beer in plastic cups. The men wore shorts, ankle socks, and sandals, and the women flowered frocks.

  Graffiti on the walls along the riverbanks showed the darker, aggressive side to the sentimentality of “Nibelungen City.” Some of the texts were downright weird: “To burn of love or hate”; “Fear comes after death”; “Schönhuber, you must croak!” (a reference to the leader of the right-wing Republican Party). And oddest of all: “We won’t wait for Santa Claus.”

  I retreated to my hotel room, which had a good view of the Inn. Just a few miles up the river was Braunau, where Hitler was born. He spent part of his childhood in Passau. I switched on the television and caught the end of a German film made in 1940. It was a romantic comedy, set in the 1870s, about Prussian officers and their Fräuleins in crinolines. I changed to another local channel. It was showing a documentary film called Our Home. Silent images of a village in a green Bavarian valley with red-roofed houses clustered around a creamy church, and swans swimming in the lake, as the mist came down from the hills, were accompanied by a Beethoven sonata. The narrator spoke in a tone that was meant to sound poetic: “The land behind the clouds, so wide, so strange, yet so familiar, like the land of my childhood …”

  I had come to Passau because of a film I had seen some months before in London, entitled Das schreckliche Mädchen, translated, rather clumsily, as The Nasty Girl. It was based on the true story of a high school girl who entered a national essay contest. The theme was “everyday life in your hometown during the Third Reich.” The girl, who had never misbehaved, who was her teacher’s pet and got on well with her conservative Catholic parents, began to ask around. She spoke to the prelate, the newspaper editor, her grandmother, the city archivist, and so on. But when she began to stumble across evidence that people who had always been known to her as anti-Nazis, even “resistance fighters,” had in fact been Nazi sympathizers, even Nazi officials, she ran into trouble. She was told to drop her project. Why not write about more important subjects, like Europe? What could she possibly understand about the past? When, some years later, she decided to turn her findings into a book, she ran into even greater trouble. Libraries and archives shut their doors. Death threats, to herself and her family, poured like poison out of the phone. Her cat was killed and nailed to her door. Bombs came through her window. All the town’s dignitaries turned against her. Her respectable parents—mother, a teacher of religion, father, a headmaster—were embarrassed. Yet, encouraged by her grandmother and an old ex-Communist, she persisted. She wrote her book, became a national figure, and put her town, or at least its most prominent citizens, to shame.

  It was an arresting film. The story was about repressed history, but the underlying theme was a conflict of generations. Even though the heroine was not born until 1960, the film expressed the rage of an earlier generation, the director Michael Verhoeven’s generation of 1968. It is interesting how often in German accounts of Third Reich history, common cause is made between the young and their grandparents—the people who sent supportive letters to the mayor of Nagasaki and Philipp Jenninger. The Nasty Girl was too young to be Hitler’s child, but her grandmother was a typical example of the pre-Nazi voice of reason. Amnesia is always the parents’ disease. This point was made in another German film about memory, Edgar Reitz’s Heimat (Home). There, too, the grandparents, born in the nineteenth century, represented the old virtues, uncorrupted by modern materialism and totalitarian propaganda: decency, honesty, self-reliance, family values.

  In a way, Reitz’s Heimat and Verhoeven’s The Nasty Girl sprang from the same source, to which many German artists and scholars turned in the 1970s and 1980s: Heimatgeschichte, or local history. The old nostalgia for the paradise lost, the childhood village, the “land behind the clouds,” under constant threat from soulless modernity, was given a new twist. The idea of history as a puppet play, moved at will by great men, was replaced by histories of everyday life, the past as a million stories, lived by common men and women. Not the great cities, but the small towns and villages were the stages upon which these little histories were played out. History of this type was partly a reaction against the often arid theorizing of those who sought to expose structures and systems, to explain history. No doubt Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s descriptions of French peasant life had an influence too. But there was in local German history a tone of nostalgia, as lush as nineteenth-century romantic music. This could lend an odd perspective to histories of the Third Reich.

  Reitz’s Heimat was an interesting example of this oddity. Filled with nostalgia for old-fashioned values—honest handwork, warm family life, etc.—it is also nostalgic about “normal” daily life in the 1930s. The loving creation of an imaginary village in the Rhineland, called Schabbach, celebrates simple country pleasures, as well as the popular culture of the time: nights at the movies of Zarah Leander and so on. The wealthy landowner’s son becomes an SS man, there are glimpses of slave labor, and one of the dimmer, though always decent, characters joins the Nazis and be
comes mayor of a local town. So the rise of the Nazis is not ignored, but it never really poisons the warm normality of local life. Nazism’s peculiar modernity—Autobahns and the like—is shown to be a greater threat to the old values than, say, the Kristallnacht, which is not shown at all. Schabbach is a village. Perhaps nothing of consequence happened there. But people barely mention anything much happening anywhere else.

  The film is a true exercise in identification, for we see the past through the eyes of the people who lived it. The film is a memory. And to the good people of Schabbach, the 1930s, by and large, were a time of happy memories, before the war took their sons away, in some cases to die. It is as though Heimat were made as a reaction to all those postwar years of denying a local, German identity. Intellectuals of the ’68 generation had always mocked the kitschy taste for Heimat nostalgia. They were Europeans. Now it was their turn to look back and dig up roots. Heimat was a glorious—and beautifully contrived—effort to retrieve the Heimat, or, to paraphrase Reitz’s comment on Holocaust, to take back “our narrative,” which the Americans had stolen.

  In the case of the much younger Nasty Girl, it was the other way around. Her subject was also Heimat history, but she had always been at home. She had never rejected her local identity; it was her opponents who tried to take the Heimat away from her, by making her feel she didn’t belong, that she was a “Jewish whore,” to cite one of the more common phrases in her hate mail. Yet the past she managed to retrieve from the murky swamp of willful oblivion was less benign than Reitz’s re-creation of his village idyll.

  The Nasty Girl was more like a book of photographs taken by a local photographer in a town not so very far from Reitz’s Schabbach. Otto Weber became a photographer in Kleve in 1932 and took pictures of the town until his studio was destroyed by a bomb in 1944. The collection, published in 1987, is entitled A Thousand Absolutely Normal Years (the Reich was supposed to have lasted that long). It starts quite normally, with photographs of old cobbled streets after a snowfall. People greet one another in the town square as they help to clear the snow with their shovels. A procession of choirboys from the Catholic church goes by. In these early pictures, the burghers look content, harmless, respectable, a bit dull. Then, gradually, things change; a creeping brown blot stains the picture. First there is one dignitary standing in the square, hesitant but proud in his new uniform. Then there are two, three, four, and finally the whole square is filled with brown and black uniforms, swastika banners, marching boots, and thousands of shining eyes gleaming in the torchlight. This is local history too, for these were not great villains; these were the headmasters, the vergers, the town hall officials, the newspaper reporters, the dentists, the factory foremen, the printers, the butchers and the bakers. It was this page in the history of Heimat that the Nasty Girl was not allowed to see.

  It was a strange sensation at first to be sitting in the living room of the Nasty Girl herself—the real person, that is, not the actress. Her name is Anja Rosmus. She has frizzy blond hair and keen blue eyes. She dressed with care in a slightly dowdy fashion. She was no longer a schoolgirl, but a divorcée with two children. Since she wrote her first essay, she had published several books on the brown history of Passau. One wall of her living room was decorated with pictures she had painted herself, of rabbis and bearded Jews, and mud-colored villages in an imaginary desert homeland. There was also a death mask hanging on the wall. It was the face of Kurt Tucholsky, the German satirist, who took his life in despair in 1935, after escaping from Nazi Germany to Sweden. It was a gift from Tucholsky’s widow.

  “It was pretty much all true,” she said about the film. Except for a few details, like the bomb tossed through her window. That didn’t really happen. But she showed me some of the hate mail. “Jewish whore” was by no means the most offensive phrase. She and her two small children were promised death by gassing, among other things. She had spent many nights awake in terror, hearing people beating on her windows and rattling her doors. She was sued for defamation by the brother of a man whose past was actually worse than she had suggested. The man in question, a pillar of the local Catholic church named Emil Janik, was known during the war as “brown Emil” for his Nazi sympathies. Rosmus was asked during a public meeting whether she thought he had really been a Nazi. She said that even though he wasn’t a real Nazi, he certainly had not been a resistance fighter either. Janik’s brother sued her, so she had to produce documents to support her case. These showed that Janik had not just been antisemitic but had told all Catholics to vote for Hitler. The charges against her were finally dropped. But an attempt was made during the trial to use the security service against her, for being a “threat to the state” (staatsgefährdendes Element).

  Virtually all her hate mail was, of course, anonymous. But the most interesting letter was signed, and was not abusive. It was from a former army officer who had served during the war in Western Europe as well as on the eastern front. His application for the Waffen SS, “our elite,” was turned down. And in all his war years he “never came across camps or people whose presence was in any way out of the ordinary.” He was arrested by the Americans after the war and “treated like a criminal,” even though he had “neither committed crimes nor seen any.” He had only “done his duty.”

  The letter was interesting because its use of language sounded much like Jenninger’s. But he actually believed the arguments that Jenninger was quoting. The old soldier painted the usual picture of Weimar Republic doom: unemployment, national humiliation, and “small businesses destroyed by Jewish capital.” So, obviously, when the Nazis came to power, “the majority of the German people were happy that at last something was being done …”

  Whiners, know-it-alls, and obstructionists were of course not wanted and “taken out of circulation.” They went to so-called preventive detention camps, later known as concentration camps … To rescue Germany from the claws of the Versailles Treaty, one thing had to be made clear: you were either with us or against us …

  I must say that things were moving in the right direction when I was young. We educated one another, defended ourselves against everything that was unnatural, and we were not exposed to any negative influences …

  The Jews had not made themselves exactly loved in Germany, and it became clear they were not wanted. But no normal person condoned the hatred being stirred up and the so-called Kristallnacht. After all, we had tolerated the Jews before …

  We who lived through that time have to ask ourselves why we should keep on besmirching our own name. Surely it is not in our interest to paint things blacker than they were. I find it monstrous that the likes of Mr. Galinski [head of the Jewish community in Germany] and Mr. [Simon] Wiesenthal stoke the fires ever higher. I myself am not conscious of having done anything wrong, and I cannot tolerate that my children and grandchildren should be made to feel guilty.

  Anja Rosmus, then, was besmirching her Heimat, and by extension her country. In fact, however, she found that some people had behaved more admirably than they had been given credit for. The wartime mayor, for example, had been vilified as a demonic Nazi and blamed for everything bad. In truth, he had tried to stop deportations and allowed Jews to escape. Rosmus found out about others who had taken risks to help the persecuted. Town hall clerks issued passports, her own grandmother brought food to prisoners in a local camp, housewives offered refuge. Their quiet heroism was never recognized. Nobody was much interested in them. And she found that these people themselves were reluctant to talk.

  I asked her why she thought this was. She said that they had helped for purely humanitarian reasons. They were not political in any way. But there was another reason too: “Most people don’t want to be criticized for breaking the law. People here feel very ambivalent about resistance. They confuse such things as patriotism and law. That is why resistance, even to the Nazis, was never really condoned. Passau is ninety-six percent Catholic. There were people who resisted for religious reasons. A priest was murdered for defen
ding the Jews in church. Another priest refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. He was killed too. But nobody ever spoke about these men with any respect. They had broken the rules. They were disobedient. And civil disobedience is thought to be a bad thing. My own grandmother still feels guilty about breaking the laws to help people. That is why I am hated so much here. Even if what I say is the honest truth, I am thwarting the authorities.”

  I wondered about her own religious feelings. Did they play any part in her activities? She laughed and Said: “I left the church when I was twenty-five. It was a great shock to my parents, since they lived for the church. Even now they don’t understand; they refuse to see that I’m not religious.” I still wondered, though. My eyes kept being drawn to the pictures on the wall, of Orthodox Jews. Anja Rosmus was too young to share the neurotic philosemitism of her parents’ generation. Then again, perhaps she was not. Perhaps it transcended age. I thought of the young people I had seen in Berlin, young Germans sipping tea in newly established Jewish cafés around the husk of the damaged synagogue, young Gentiles wearing Stars of David around their necks.

  As though she could read my thoughts, Anja Rosmus said: “I did get involved in the Jewish religion. I think Jesus was such a typical Jewish man. After all, you know, so many things in Christianity are not religious: Christmas, Easter—these are old German customs. At the same time, on Sundays we celebrated many Jewish rites in church. Later I read Freud. He wrote what I had always felt myself, that people invent their religious dreams out of a deep psychological need.”