The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  In 1992, the Filmmuseum in Munich showed a film which is hard to watch without feeling sick. It was Veit Harlan’s Jew Süss (Jud Süss), the antisemitic propaganda film made under Goebbels’s auspices in 1940. Ferdinand Marian plays the wicked Jew who, through his evil schemes, almost succeeds in wrecking the Gemeinschaft of eighteenth-century Württemberg. At the end the Jews are driven out of town like rats. The showing of the film in Munich was followed by public discussions. On one occasion, two right-wing radicals took part. They tried to deny the Holocaust. But that couldn’t be helped, said the professor of German literature, who led the discussion: “It is part of being a democracy that we show such a film nonetheless.”

  I saw Jew Süss that same year, at a screening for students of the film academy in Berlin. This showing, too, was followed by a discussion. The students, mostly from western Germany, but some from the east, were in their early twenties. They were dressed in the international uniform of jeans, anoraks, and work shirts. The professor was a man in his forties, a ’68er named Karsten Witte. He began the discussion by saying that he wanted the students to concentrate on the aesthetics of the film more than the story. To describe the propaganda, he said, would simply be banal: “We all know the ‘what,’ so let’s talk about the ‘how.’ ” I thought of my fellow students at the film school in Tokyo more than fifteen years before. How many of them knew the “what” of the Japanese war in Asia? Or more to the point: how many of their professors would have thought of showing them the “how,” by screening old propaganda films?

  Witte made some remarks about the use of music: how Bach’s choral music is gradually submerged in the sound of a cantor singing a Hebrew prayer during the opening credits. One of the students, a man of about twenty, raised his hand and said he had noticed a similar trick in the visual presentation: how the coat of arms of Württemberg dissolved into a sign in Hebrew. Another student observed that snow fell in the final scene of the wicked Jew’s public execution. He attempted to paraphrase the intended message: “The snow cleanses Germany, purifies the land. Winter will then turn to spring, the season of regeneration.” Someone else remarked that the wealth of the Württemberg court was always on display: fine paintings in large rooms, great palaces, and so on, whereas Jewish wealth was hidden away in secret cupboards, in cramped, fetid rooms. “This is meant to show that German wealth was the fruit of a long and glorious tradition, of history and culture, while Jewish riches were nothing but money.”

  Karsten Witte, whose pale skin, red lips, and short-cropped blond hair made him look curiously like the Nordic ideal in Nazi art, was clearly pleased with his students. They had analyzed the film intently, without missing a trick. The more grotesque examples of racist propaganda provoked bursts of quiet laughter, but their concentration was intense. I listened to their comments, sharp, reflective, critical without being moralistic, confident but never aggressive, above all unblocked by guilt. And I remembered something Oda Makoto, the novelist and peace activist, had said to me when I visited him in Japan during the Gulf War. I was educated from the point of view of the victim, he said, whereas he had been raised as an aggressor. Sitting in that tiny screening room in Berlin, five minutes away from the building where Goebbels had broadcast his radio speeches, I realized with a sense of relief that we had all been watching this odious film from exactly the same point of view.

  NOTES

  1. WAR AGAINST THE WEST

  1 “Amos Oz was interviewed”: Amos Oz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 14, 1991.

  2 “ ‘No blood for oil’ ”: Wolf Biermann, Die Zeit, February 1991.

  3 “ ‘The heart of Pietism’ ”: Gordon Craig, The Germans (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 87.

  4 “He compared Saddam to Hitler”: H. M. Enzensberger, Der Spiegel, February 1991.

  5 “the most unique fusion”: Albrecht Hürst von Urach, Das Geheimnis Japanischer Kraft (Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1944).

  6 “ ‘When speaking of the New World Order’ ”: Nakamura Tetsuo, Asahi Shimbun, February 22, 1991.

  7 “Hayashi’s anti-Western nationalism”: Hayashi Fusao, Daitowa Senso Koteiron (Tokyo: Yamato Bunko, 1964), p. 22.

  8 “Several months after the Gulf War”: Matsumoto Kenichi, Tokyo Shimbun, April 8, 1991.

  9 “ ‘For the ancient Greeks’ ”: Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 24.

  2. ROMANCE OF THE RUINS

  10 “ ‘The ruin of the city’ ”: Stephen Spender, European Witness (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946), p. 15.

  11 “How to purge”: Lingua Tertii Imperii, or LTI, is the title of Victor Klemperer’s book: LTI (Halle: Niemeyer Verlag, 1957).

  12 “ ‘hearing such words as nation’ ”: Yoshimoto Takaaki, Seiji Shiso (Tokyo: Daiwa Shobo, 1956), p. 72.

  13 “Salomon describes the Americans”: Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragenbogen (Frankfurt: Rowolt, 1951), p. 648. The Questionnaire, trans. Constantine Fitz Gibbon (New York: Doubleday, 1954).

  14 “he described the bombing raids”: Sakaguchi Ango, Darakuron (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1946), pp. 95, 96.

  15 “ ‘There was a swell’ ”: Wolf Dietrich Schnurre, quoted in Vaterland Muttersprache: Deutsche Schriftsteller und ihr Staat von 1945 bis heute (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1979).

  16 “Böll identified himself”: Heinrich Böll, “Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur,” 1952.

  17 “ ‘Consumers’ ”: Heinrich Böll, Hierzulande (1960), pp. 367, 373.

  18 “The ‘inability to mourn’ ”: Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn (New York: Grove Press, 1975).

  19 “ ‘All those who were purged’ ”: Letter from Helmuth Wohltat to Ministerialdirigent Dr. Reinhard, June 30, 1951, at the Bundeswirtschaftsministerium.

  20 “a masterpiece in the short history”: Nosaka Akiyuki, American Hijiki, trans. J. Rubin, in Contemporary Japanese Literature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

  21 “He remembers how hungry”: Oshima Nagisa, Taikenteki Sengo Eizoron (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1975), p. 72.

  3. AUSCHWITZ

  22 “The past … is in our bones”: Christian Meier, Vierzig Jahre nach Auschwitz: Deutsche Geschichtserrinerung heute (Munich: Deutschen Kunstverlag, 1987), pp. 75, 63.

  23 “ ‘One comes to understand’ ”: George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (London: Faber & Faber, 1967; New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 137.

  24 “ ‘These Sprichworter’ ”: Stephen Spender, European Witness, p. 7.

  25 “ ‘the remaining rudiments’ ”: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Hitler: A Film for Germany, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p. 9.

  26 “Peter Weiss visited Auschwitz”: The same visit is described by Amos Elon in his book Journey Through Darkness (London: Andre Deutsch, 1967).

  27 “ ‘through the thousand darknesses’ ”: Peter Demetz, After the Fires: Writing in the Germanies, Austria, and Switzerland (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 47.

  28 “Weiss wrote a play”: Ibid., p. 55.

  29 “ ‘spiritual labor’ ”: Quoted in A. Söllner’s Peter Weiss und die Deutschen (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988), p. 184.

  30 “One of Hochhuth’s few”: Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Die Zeit, March 6, 1964.

  31 “ ‘there is not a single aspect’ ”: Demetz, After the Fires, p. 29.

  32 “ ‘One cannot really describe it’ ”: Elon, Journey Through a Haunted Land, p. 244.

  33 “ ‘As the teller’ ”: Das Brandopfer, by A. Goes (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1954). The new preface was written in 1965.

  34 “He told his story”: Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacob Littner’s Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1992).

  35 “An American television series”: Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 31.

  36 “the Americans have stolen”: Ibid., p. 184.

  37 “ ‘the last st
age’ ”: Heiner Müller, interview in Transatlantik (Berlin), July 1990.

  38 “After Holocaust”: Holocaust—Briefe an den WDR, ed. Heiner Lichtenstein and Michael Schmid Ospach (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1982).

  39 “ ‘he doesn’t have to think’ ”: Martin Walser, Über Deutschland reden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 25.

  4. HIROSHIMA

  40 “Hiroshima … should have been left”: Uno Masami, Doru ga Kami ni Naru Hi (Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 1987), p. 234.

  41 “One of the more eccentric books”: Koochi Akira, Hiroshima no Sora ni Hiraite Rakkasa (Tokyo: Daiwa Shobo, 1985).

  42 “ ‘this historical amnesia’ ”: Die Tageszeitung, January 18, 1991.

  43 “As late as 1949”: Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation 1945–1952 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 62.

  44 “In 1983, a compendium”: Nihonno Genbaku Bungakiu (Tokyo: Horupu, 1983).

  45 “films like Hiroshima”: Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson, The Japanese Film (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 219.

  46 “ ‘something that occurs’ ”: From Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, ed. and trans. Richard Minnear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

  47 “All the quasi-religious elements”: Oda Makoto, The Bomb, trans. D. H. Whittaker (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990).

  48 “His vision of the end”: From Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, p. 102.

  49 “ ‘disgusted once again’ ”: Asahi Shimbun, July 20, 1992.

  50 “Only a British writer”: Alan Booth, Asahi Evening News, July 20, 1992.

  51 “One of the few literary masterpieces”: Ibuse Masuji, Black Rain, trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1969), p. 283.

  5. NANKING

  52 “His video and his booklet”: The video is entitled Katararenakatta Senso (Invasion: The War That Could Not Be Discussed). The booklet is called … So Shite, Mina Senso ni Itta (… And So We All Went to War).

  53 “She made this distinction”: Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989; first published in 1946).

  54 “The story made a snappy headline”: Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, November 30, 1937.

  55 “ ‘After we occupied’ ”: Quoted in Honda Katsuichi, “Nankin e no Michi” (“The Road to Nanking”) (Tokyo: Asahi Bunko, 1989).

  56 “He wrote it up”: Honda Katsuichi, Chugoku no Tabi (A Journey to China) (Tokyo: Asahi Bunko, 1981).

  57 “In 1984, an anti-Honda book”: Tanaka Masaaki, “Nankin Gyakusatsu” no Kyoko (The Fabrication of the “Nanking Massacre”) (Tokyo: Nihon Kyobunsha, 1984).

  58 “Ienaga Saburo, for example, wrote”: Ienaga Saburo, The Pacific War, 1931–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 187.

  59 “Heiner Müller observed”: Heiner Müller in Transatlantik (Berlin), July 1990.

  60 “ ‘Killing enemy soldiers’ ”: Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Ikiteiru Heitai (Living Soldiers), quoted in Donald Keene, Dawn to the West (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 913.

  6. HISTORY ON TRIAL

  61 “few things have done more”: Hellmut Becker, Quantität und Qualität: Grundfragen der Bildungspolitik (Freiburg: Rombach, 1968), p. 74.

  62 “When the American chief prosecutor”: Kranzbuhler, 14 DePaul L.R. 333, 1965.

  63 “ ‘The less the Nuremberg tribunal’ ”: Eric Reger in Vaterland Muttersprache (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1979), p. 35.

  64 “ ‘a trial never seen before’ ”: Süddeutsche Zeitung, quoted in Klaus R. Scherpe, Erzungener Alltag, in Nuchkriegsliteratur in Westdeutschland 1945–49, eds. J. Hermand, H. Peitsch, K. R. Scherpe (Berlin: Argument, 1982).

  65 “ ‘one of the four chief prosecutors’ ”: Christian Geissler in Vaterland Muttersprache, p. 219.

  66 “Stephen Spender ran into a friend”: European Witness, p. 221.

  67 “ ‘For us Germans’ ”: Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage: Für Völkermord gibt es keine Verjährung. My translation is not meant as a criticism of E. B. Ashton’s translation, published as The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial, 1947).

  68 “Peter Weiss, in his play”: Peter Weiss, Die Ermittlung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965). The Investigation, trans. Jon Swan and Ulm Grosbard (New York: Atheneum, 1966).

  69 “Martin Walser wrote”: Martin Walser, Unser Auschwitz (Berlin: Kursbuch, 1965).

  70 “He set out his views”: Joachim Gauck, Die Stasi-Akten (Hamburg: Rowolt, 1992).

  71 “confrontation with Japan was inevitable”: Hasegawa Michiko, Chuo Koron, April 1983, quoted in Japan Echo, vol. XI, 1984.

  72 “In a standard history textbook”: Nihonshi (Tokyo: Yamakawade, 1985).

  73 “West German textbooks”: Grundkurs Deutsche Geschichte (Frankfurt: Cornelsen, 1988).

  74 “The story of Unit 731”: A Bruise—Terror of the 731 Corps, prod. Yoshinaga Haruko, Tokyo Broadcasting System.

  75 “But the first time”: Morimura Seiichi, Akuma no Hoshoku (Tokyo: Banseisha, 1982).

  76 “Japanese leaders should have been tried”: Hata Kunihiko, Shokun, August 1987.

  77 “In 1970”: Kinoshita Junji, Between God and Man: A Judgement on War Crimes (Kami to Hito to no Aida), trans. Eric J. Gangloff (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1979).

  78 “The best-known Japanese book”: War Criminal: The Life and Death of Hirota Koki (Rakujitsu Moyu), trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1977).

  79 “ ‘from our point of view’ ”: Yoshimoto Takaaki, Bungakusha to Senso Sekinin ni tsuite, collected in Seiji Shiso, Zenshu 3 (Tokyo: Daiwa Shobo, 1986).

  80 “ ‘in Japan and in the Orient’ ”: Mignone, quoted in Arnold C. Brackman, The Other Nüremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crime Trials (London: Collins, 1989), p. 231.

  81 “ ‘never forget the shock’ ”: Ishida Takeshi, Heiwa, Jinken, Fukushi no Seijigaku (Tokyo: Meiseki Shoten, 1990).

  82 “ ‘These men’ ”: Brackman, The Other Nuremberg, p. 441.

  83 “ ‘The Japanese people’ ”: January 8, 1953. Letter from Foreign Minister to Zentrale Rechtschutzstelle of the Ministry of Justice, II 16338/52.

  84 “the trial was rigged”: Yamashita’s trial: Meiron and Susan Harries, Soldiers of the Sun (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 464. Becker, Quantität and Qualität, p. 68.

  85 “system of irresponsibilities”: Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

  86 “Saburo tells a story”: Ienaga Saburo, The Pacific War 1931–1945, p. 107.

  87 “ ‘They had a belief’ ”: The Other Nuremberg, p. 276.

  88 “ ‘an object on which Germans depended’ ”: Margarethe and Alexander Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn, p. 23.

  89 “the military defendants”: Aristides Lazarus, letter to The Far Eastern Economic Review, July 6, 1989.

  90 “the general agreed”: The Other Nuremberg, p. 395.

  91 “ ‘Early critics’ ”: Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo, p. 143.

  7. TEXTBOOK RESISTANCE

  92 “During the war”: Nosaka Akiyuki, American Hijiki, in Contemporary Japanese Literature. See p. 370.

  93 “ ‘The non-aggression pact’ ”: Geschichte: Lehrbuch für Klasse 9 (Berlin: Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag, 1989).

  94 “a typical history textbook”: Grundkurs Deutsche Geschichte 2: 1918 bis zur Gegenwart (Hirschgraben: Cornelsen, 1987); written by Rudolf Berg and Rolf Selbmann of the Wilhelm gymnasium in Munich.

  95 “ ‘constitutional patriotism’ ”: Jürgen Habermas, “Apologetische Tendenzen,” reprinted in Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987).

  96 “ ‘education, just like the military’ ”: Yamazumi Masami quoted Yamagata Aritomo in The Japan Quarterly, 1981.

  97 “ ‘By basing our system’ ”: Japan Quarterly, 1981.

  98 “ ‘This tragic sight’ ”: Truth
in Textbooks: Freedom in Education and Peace for Children, published by the National League for Support of the School Textbook Screening Suit.

  99 “Ienaga’s explanation”: Ienaga Saburo, The Pacific War 1931–1945, p. 96.

  100 “I looked at”: Nihonshi, social studies textbook for high school students, published by Yamakawade in 1984.

  101 “One notable scholar”: Irie Takanori, “Amerika ga Tsukutta Sengo Shinwa,” in Chuo Koron, August 1982.

  102 “The textbook goes on”: Nihonshi (same as above).

  103 “ ‘zeal to make people reflect’ ”: Morikawa Kinju, Kyokasho to Saiban (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990), p. 13.

  8. MEMORIALS, MUSEUMS, AND MONUMENTS

  104 “ ‘People relate’ ”: Jürgen Habermas, “Kein Normalisierung,” reprinted in Eine Art Schadensabwicklung.

  105 “In an essay”: Eto Jun, Yasukuni Ronshu (Tokyo: Nihon Kyobunsha, 1986).

  106 “ ‘the search for our lost history’ ”: Michael Stürmer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 25, 1986.

  107 “ ‘where we came from’ ”: Helmut Kohl, speech in the Bundestag, February 27, 1985.

  108 “ ‘History does not belong’ ”: Freimut Duve, quoted in Deutsches Historisches Museum: Ideen Kontroversen—Perspektiven, ed. Christoph Stölzl (Frankfurt, Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1988).

  9. A NORMAL COUNTRY

  109 “ ‘Perhaps one cannot’ ”: Primo Levi, afterword to If This Is a Man and The Truce (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 395.

  110 “a blistering editorial comment”: Theo Sommer, Die Zeit, November 18, 1988.

  111 “He was shot through his lungs”: Motoshima’s shooting is described in Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century’s End (New York: Pantheon, 1991), p. 270.

  112 “ ‘an act of extreme indiscretion’ ”: LDP Disciplinary Committee, Asahi Evening News, December 16, 1988.