In my opinion there is no New Germany, only another Germany. Germany needs a revolution which it has not had and shows no signs of having; not a bloody, old-fashioned revolution, with firing squads and prisons, ending in one more dictatorship, but an interior revolution of the mind, the conscience. Obedience is a German sin. Possibly the greatest German sin. Cruelty and bullying are the reverse side of this disciplined obedience. And Germans have been taught obedience systematically, as if it were the highest virtue, for as long as they have been taught anything. They are still so taught, beginning at Mom's knee and continuing through the universities. Twice their victors have imposed “democracy” on a people who never fought for it themselves. Democracy may not be the most perfect form of government (E. M. Forster was right in saying “Two Cheers for Democracy"), but it is the best we have yet found, because it implies that the citizen has private duties of conscience, judgment, and action. The citizen who says Yes to the state, no matter what, is a traitor to his country; but citizens have to learn how to say No and why to say No. Germans are still trained as before in their old authoritarian way; the young are not rebels either. At their best they are deeply troubled by their state and suspicious of it; at their worst they are indistinguishable from their ancestors—the interests of the state come first—and they are potentially dangerous sheep.
The adults of Germany, who knew Nazism and in their millions cheered and adored Hitler until he started losing, have performed a nationwide art of amnesia; no one individually had a thing to do with the Hitlerian regime and its horrors. (This amnesia began as soon as the conquering Allies entered Germany; not a soul could be found who had approved Hitler or harmed a fly.) The young realize this cannot be true, yet one by one, each explains how guiltless his father was; somebody else's father must have been doing the dirty work. Santayana observed that if a man forgets his past he is condemned to relive it. Germans trained in obedience and dedicated to moral whitewashing are not a new people, nor are they reliable partners for anyone else.
There has always been a small minority of Germans who thought of themselves as members of the human race first, and Germans afterwards; there still is such a minority, and they are exiles-at-home. For the sake of humanity, it is to be hoped that their numbers will grow until, for the first time, they wield power in Germany. But if what makes Germans the way they are—the home, the churches, the schools, the universities—does not change, Germany will continue to be itself. It is fat, rich, and happy now, and no German wants a war; life is good. What happens if life becomes less good? And no one seems to notice that peaceful Germany is, nevertheless, the one great obstacle to peace in Europe. We quarrel with Russia over the divided Germans as over a festering bone; and no one considers that the fears of our former allies, now enemies in the Soviet bloc, are not hysterical fantasies but are based on a long memory.
It is worth remembering that the German national anthem is, as before, “Deutschland über Alles,” and that the second and third verses, deleted by the Allies as too aggressive, were restored immediately Germany became independent, and are sung with enthusiasm. There is a German problem, and it will not be solved by denying it or acting as if the problem were a geographical one; let Germany be united, and all will be dandy. The problem is moral, and only the Germans themselves can handle it. They talk ceaselessly about democracy, but “democracy” is a virtuous slogan, without meaning. Until Germans really believe that the state is the servant of the people, and each man is responsible for his acts and his conscience, and that orders are not their own justification, Germany merely changes its leaders, not its character.
The forms of teaching in German universities are the exercise (a small study group of twelve to twenty-four students), the seminar (up to two hundred students), and the lecture in the large amphitheater (about six hundred students). The students learn by dictation from above, the unquestioned professorial word, the assigned books: they listen for thirty hours a week or more. Many students said bitterly that the only sure way to pass examinations and get the essential degree was to repeat to your professor what the professor had told you. Young Germans, throughout their schooling, are taught to memorize facts but are not guided to relate facts, experience, observation, and emotion to produce their own personal thought.
High school teachers and professors (like judges) have tenure of office; regimes may come, regimes may go, but the opportunist pedagogue or jurist can remain at his post. Denazification courts (which Adenauer objected to as early as 1949) deal only with physical brutality; there is no penalty for having misled and lied to young minds. The old boys are still around, and the young assistant professors, if they hope to advance, must be very tactful with them. German professors are hierarchical figures. It is not surprising that, up to 1957, modern German history, as taught in high schools, stopped at the end of the First World War. Now the Nazi era is rushed over lightly in the last year of high school, and a knowledge of the Nazi period is not required for a university degree; it is an optional subject. German educational methods and a lot of German educators seem to me worse than useless in preparing citizens for life in a free society.
German universities are the size of small towns: ten to twenty-two thousand students. All the young complain of the loneliness of these institutions. The universities are factories for learning by heart; it is no part of their job to provide more than teaching. Dormitories are scarce and for the lucky few. Though the students, for human and economical reasons, would love to live in dormitories, the German government is opposed to housing students as we do. Students are considered radical, and it is perilous to concentrate them together. This is an ironical joke; 60 percent of the students at Munich University voted for the ruling reactionary Bavarian party, while the Socialist Students Club has exactly forty members out of a student population of 22,000. Furthermore, the only students who always live together in houses are members of the Korps (the dueling societies) and their allied fraternities, the Burschenschaften (nondueling societies). Roughly, these groups may be compared to American fraternities, as membership is by invitation and the houses are not supported by the state or university but by the “elders,” former members. Thirty percent of all German students belong to the Korps and the Burschenschaften and are the largest homogeneous group in the universities; these fraternities are also strongholds of traditionalism and nationalism and have been throughout their history. The German government makes a small financial contribution to any student organization which undertakes political education. Government money is given to the Korps and the Burschenschaften, which are completely right wing, but no money is given to the tiny left-wing Socialist German Students League. Even more than in America, German governmental circles find it convenient to confuse socialism with Communism. From observation, I would say that the only people in Germany who believe wholeheartedly in the democratic process as a form of government are socialists.
The students, lost in these giant universities, and in their separate homes or solitary lodgings, join groups: some for fun (jazz, photography), some for politics (Young Christian Democrats, Young Socialists), some for study or argument (English literature, current events), some for sports. In every university they also have compulsory student government called ASTA: “compulsory” because all students must pay dues. ASTA manages the student restaurants, gets out a newspaper, arranges meetings, and discusses student problems with the academic authorities, but less than half the students vote in their own elections or bother with ASTA in any way. ASTA is immensely organized and bureaucratic. I mentioned this, seeing the mountains of mimeographed paper and the charts and the proliferating departments and officers in the headquarters of Berlin University's ASTA. “After all, we are German,” said the young president, a charmer wearing a Russian-style astrakhan cap, large specs, and clearly endowed with a saving skepticism. Then there is a president of all German students, elected by the ASTA presidents of each German university. This gives you a hint of the organization-man aspect
of German life.
I attended various seminars and lectures and found them more than depressing. Here is an example: a session of the Advanced English Seminar at Frankfurt University. One hundred and thirty students sat in tiers in a fine modern lecture room while their instructor talked to them about the works of John Steinbeck. The course was an analysis of the “characterization, structure, plot and language” of Tortilla Flat, The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Of Mice and Men. This two-hour session was taken up with a discussion of the difference between “plot” and “story.” Eager students raised their hands and, speaking excellent English, babbled on about this matter, which seemed pointless to me, both as a writer and reader. No one mentioned the meaning of Steinbeck's novels. No one was concerned with Steinbeck's picture of the human condition, with understanding and sharing experience. No one commented on the furious moral indignation which drove Steinbeck to write his earlier books. At the end of the term, the students would know the names of all Steinbeck's characters and every detail of his plots and stories better than Steinbeck does, and that is all. The instructor looked like an American, with bow tie, crew cut, horn-rims; he behaved like an actor playing the part of a young American teacher. After class I asked him where he had learned to speak American. “I learned in Germany,” he said. “All I needed was the accent. So I went to the University of Chicago for a year and I got it.”
It was not my impression that the majority of students resented this intellectual sterility and doubted the value of their education. In any case, they cannot afford to dissent; a university degree is not a status symbol in Germany; it is essential to middle-class getting ahead. A postgraduate degree, which allows the lifelong title of Doctor, is better still. Observe that the Chancellor of Germany is called Doctor, and so is the manager of the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin. Young Germans want to get ahead. Power, nowadays, is wealth. A pretentious and patriotic young woman, rising fast in a Frankfurt publishing house, put it neatly: “We must work hard, for ourselves and for Germany.” The university degree is a big step up on the ladder of success. In the universities, only 5 percent of the students come from working-class homes: perhaps the working class is fortunate not to have its young shaped for so long in such old, tight, unhealthy molds.
The cities were all different in atmosphere. Hamburg, the most different of all, is a port, and the outside world is somewhere near. The government of Hamburg is socialist, and so is the government of the province; perhaps because of this Hamburg is the home of that Time-like weekly, Der Spiegel, which for long has been the only effective opposition in Germany. It is odd that a weekly magazine, patterned on the gadfly side of Time, should take over the role of a political opposition.
By accident I met three students in Hamburg who fascinated me; they seemed like symbolic characters in a morality play. Johann was studying medicine, Hans was studying political science, and Trudi was studying law. Johann was very good-looking, fair-haired, blue-eyed, dressed in an English duffle coat and speaking slightly cockney English. He was so gay, outspoken, and unlike a German that I could not decipher him until he explained that his mother was Jewish, had fled Germany after a short prison term in the early Hitler days, and he had therefore been brought up in England until the age of twelve. We agreed, he and I, as the days passed, that the very best thing that could happen to Germans would be an early transplanting into some less authoritarian country, so that they got their first ideas in an open climate. Hans was a giant, looking rather like a Teutonic boy Abe Lincoln. He was also an oddball; he could not endure his father for good personal reasons and extended this dislike to the entire older generation, which severed his connection with traditional Germany and with traditional obedience. Moreover, he had had an enlightened history teacher in high school, and had thus really studied the Nazi era, ending by going to Belsen with some thousands of other young Germans, who went, he thought, largely out of curiosity, though some made the journey as an act of mourning. Hans was deeply impressed by what he had studied and by Belsen itself; he had learned to be a liberal on his own and meant to become a journalist when he finished his studies “to tell people the truth so it can never happen again.”
Trudi, the law student, was a natural Hitler maiden.
We drank bad coffee in a cheap café in the red-light district. Horse steak was advertised on the wall, a jukebox played, the other customers occasionally erupted into drunken shouting. The boys and I found the place funny; Trudi thought it disgusting. The boys felt little esteem for the Adenauer government and all its works, and said so in detail. Trudi objected angrily; she did not consider it right to run down Germany, especially in front of a foreigner. Her reaction was typically German. I heard it often and could not understand it until a bright young journalist in Munich explained: Germans identify their government with their country; therefore any attack on the established political authority is unpatriotic. I believe this, and I think it weird and deadly. When Republicans used to foam at the mouth, if speaking of Franklin D. Roosevelt, neither they nor anybody else thought them traitors to America; they were recognized as Republicans.
Johann dismissed the girl's burst of nationalism by saying, “She's old-fashioned.” He concluded all our remarks on Germany: “In comparison with other democracies, Germany is still learning to crawl.”
Trudi fidgeted so much that we decided to move on. The boys suggested an espresso bar where we could get decent cappuccino coffee. Trudi did not want to go, saying, “I hate to see German girls catching those oily Italians.”
“Would it be all right if they were catching Germans?”
“That is different,” said she.
To humor her, we stopped at the only student café in Hamburg, but there was no room to sit, and most of the benches were crowded with dark-skinned students, Arabs, Orientals, Africans. Trudi wrinkled her nose and said, “You see, it is not a very nice place.”
West Berlin was a stunning surprise. I had not seen the city since the first winter after the war, when Berlin was a wilderness of jagged gray stone. From my reading, I imagined something like a fortified medieval town, cramped, crowded, stoical, hemmed in by the Wall. West Berlin has three airports and is a displeasingly spread-out city, ruinous in taxi fares. It is as garish as if the people had just struck oil, jammed with expensive cars and expensive shops, and the Berliners are not heroes of the front line: they love their hometown, make good money, like being newsworthy and important; and so they stay. There are material inducements as well: an automatic reduction of 5 percent in income tax, a “welcome gift” of $75 for moving to the city, a marriage grant of $750, repayable in ten years, with 25 percent off for every child born in Berlin. And young men in Berlin are exempt from military conscription. These are all perfectly sound reasons for living in West Berlin, and it is high time we stopped being sentimental about the place. For political reasons it may be expedient or vital to keep free Berlin ticking busily, but to act as if it were the stronghold of our faith and the new Jerusalem is absolute rot. We should also stop calling it, in our idiotic slogan, “the showroom of the West.” The West, whatever it is, is a lot better than this over-dramatized city.
Germans should not be so outraged by the Wall; they built similar walls everywhere in Europe not too long ago. It is a concentration-camp wall with thugs in guard towers ready to shoot their own people as they used to shoot others. The bus hostess, who was either declaiming on the brutality of the Communist East Germans or selling us postcards and colorslides, neglected to point out that for nearly seventeen years East Germans could escape quite easily to West Germany, and did so in millions. They had to come without portable possessions, but they did not arrive in a foreign land where they were unwanted and lonely. They emerged from the West Berlin underground into the arms of their compatriots and within a short time were better off, materially, than they had ever been before. West Germany needs so many workers that it imports labor; refugees from East Germany get special consideration. They are not refugees, in the t
ragic meaning of that word; they are German citizens at home in another part of their country.
You see plenty of uniforms about the place: Russian soldiers in East Berlin, American soldiers in West Berlin; French and English troops are inconspicuous. We think the East Germans are puppets of Russia. They think the West Germans are puppets of America. What if the two German regimes are puppet masters themselves, and shrewdly run their own separate shows, profiting from the cold war and from two opposed gigantic sugar daddies?
Those West German young who do not regard Germany as the center of the universe take a pretty detached view of the Wall and East Germany. They don't see how Germany can be reunited without war, and they do not want war. There has been one splendid change of heart in Germany. The great majority of the younger generation abhors militarism, armies, and uniforms. A pretentious young woman in Frankfurt amazed me by saying, “Losing the war means losing East Germany and East Berlin. It is terrible. This is something our elders did without asking us. But we must accept. And make here fine.” It would have been a nobler sentiment if she had said “starting the war,” but one should be grateful for small favors, such as a recognition of cause and effect. A young sociologist at Frankfurt University who had studied in America on a Fulbright grant was blessed with the clearest mind I met. He was just and penetrating about America and used the same eyes on his own country. “Ulbricht and Adenauer are the ones who prevent a solution. They need this quarrel to stay in power. We must recognize East Germany and the Polish frontier; you'll have to guarantee West Berlin. Eighteen years is long enough for a dangerous tug-of-war.”
The View from the Ground Page 28
