by Peter Watson
Karlheinz Stockhausen created another furor when, at a press conference in Hamburg on September 16, 2001, he described the events of 9/11 as “the greatest possible work of art which ever existed,” an action that “accomplished things beyond music…for ten years people practice incessantly and absolutely fanatically for one concert and then they die. That is the greatest work of art one can imagine in the whole cosmos.”100 Subsequently Stockhausen’s concerts were canceled and there were calls for him to be placed in an asylum. But as Klaus Scherpe has pointed out, in German literary history there are many fictions of a cataclysmic America, even of New York being destroyed as a symbol of modernization (in the work of Max Dauthendey, Bernhard Kellermann, Gerhart Hauptmann).
Habermas, who himself received the German Booksellers Peace Prize in October 2001, barely a month after the 9/11 attacks, saw parallels between religious fundamentalism and Nazism. He thought we should not attribute either to “others,” or to “barbarians,” but should recognize that both were the “fruits” (my word, not his) of modernity, that both represented the dark side of the Enlightenment. This is a bleak way for the Germans to achieve “normality,” to recognize that others may have joined them in regard to the commission of atrocities, and not everyone is likely to accept such reasoning anyway. But Habermas was surely right in pleading for “a permanent deconstruction of essential and dogmatic beliefs.”101
Finally, two other surveys suggest that a different kind of Germany is at last emerging, that a new phase in its postwar history is now under way. A. Dirk Moses’s study was referred to in the Introduction, when it was explained how he has offered a “generational” model for understanding how Germans have coped—or failed to cope—with the legacy of National Socialism. For Moses, the “Forty-Fivers,” the people who were born in the late 1920s and were on the verge of adulthood in 1945, had been socialized by National Socialism, knew almost nothing of Germany before that time, and did not feel in any way responsible for the atrocities because they were too young. Nonetheless they formed a “silent majority,” at least until 1968, helping Germany on its road to becoming a Federal Democracy and to achieving a stability which, they judged, involved shielding their parents, who were responsible for the atrocities. This is why, as the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich argued in their study Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (The Inability to Mourn; 1967), this generation of Germans was frozen in “psychic immobilism” as regards the past. Moses divided the Forty-Fivers into “non–German-Germans” and “German-Germans,” the former wanting to hurry Germany into becoming a Western democracy on the American/British/French model, and the latter wanting to retain much of the traditional flavor of the pre-1933 Germany. This division, Moses said, formed a kind of “culture war” in Germany throughout the post–World War II period, further delaying its “long road west.” The generation of 1968 certainly attacked the Forty-Fivers, German-German and non–German-German alike, and this too formed part of the culture wars. But even Moses found, at the end of his study—and this is an important point—that the “fourth generation of Germans after the Holocaust” had at last begun to place trust in the country’s institutions, that the memories of the atrocities “are of increasingly less existential significance for the youth of the twenty-first century,” and the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe “less a stigma or stigmata than a lucrative tourist attraction, an object of in-difference, or a de facto playground for children.” A parallel point was made by Max Hastings about the study by the Potsdam Institute of Military History, German Wartime Society 1939–1945, published only in July 2008 (and referred to in the Introduction), when he observed that its young scholars, all born well after the war, have been able at last to face—and tell—the unvarnished truth, “that almost every German was aware” of what happened to the Jews and moreover believed that they “deserved their fate.” As Hastings also said, this study was a tribute to a new generation of Germans ready to pass judgment on their parents with a rigor few others could manage.
If Moses and Hastings are right, and this fourth generation is ready and able to look about itself without “psychic immobilism,” may that have something—everything—to do with the fact that the whole truth about wartime Germany has at last been admitted?
PASTOR, PROFESSOR, POPE
On April 19, 2005, Joseph Alois Ratzinger was elected pope, at the age of seventy-eight, in succession to John Paul II. Born in 1927 in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, Ratzinger is the ninth German pope, but the first since the Dutch-German Adrian VI (1522–23). His father was a police officer, but both Joseph and his brother Georg knew they wanted to enter the church from a very early age. In 1939 Joseph enrolled in the seminary at Traunstein and, at more or less the same time, became a member of the Hitler Youth, as all fourteen-year-old boys were required to do.102 Ratzinger’s family, however, was opposed to Hitler, the more so when, in 1941, one of Joseph’s cousins, also fourteen, who had Down syndrome, was murdered by the Nazis as part of their eugenics program. In 1943, Joseph was drafted into the anti-aircraft corps though poor health kept him from active service. In 1945, as the war was ending, he deserted his post and returned home just as American troops established their local headquarters in the Ratzinger family house. He was interned for a few months as a POW and, on release, re-entered the seminary, again with his brother.
They were ordained in 1951 and then began Joseph’s glittering academic career, which saw him become a professor first at Freising College, then at the University of Bonn, then at Tübingen, where he was a colleague of Hans Küng’s and locked horns with other leading theologians such as Edward Schillebeeckx and Karl Rahner.103 During the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) he served as theological consultant to Josef Frings, a reform-minded cardinal of Cologne, afterward, in 1969, helping to found the distinguished theological journal Communio (now published in seventeen languages). In 1977 he was made archbishop (and cardinal) of Munich and Freising and four years later Pope John Paul II made him Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office, the historical Inquisition.
Ratzinger has published many books and, although a conservative and traditionalist on many matters, has not been afraid to engage in full debate with contemporary philosophers, social critics, and academics, both religious and secular. His works abound with references to classical Greek thought, to Nietzsche and Heidegger and, for example, to the more recent works of Jean Lyotard, Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre (research professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University, Indiana), Nicholas Boyle (professor of German Literary and Intellectual History at Cambridge, whose distinguished two-volume biography of Goethe and his age was discussed in Chapter 4), and Jürgen Habermas, with whom Ratzinger coauthored Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung (The Dialectics of Secularisation) in 2007.
Ratzinger’s theological and philosophical priorities are recognizably in the German tradition, showing a concern with the theological implications of what Kant, Dilthey, Max Weber, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have offered—that is, a grappling with what we can know, the dangers of making partial points of view absolute guides, and above all the dangers of what Weber called “instrumental reason,” scientific reasoning used to control the world rather than to enjoy it.104 A close student of Augustine as well as of Thomas Aquinas, Ratzinger was also much exercised by the events of 1968, which for him, as for others, marked the real arrival of postmodern society and relativism, with its ideas of culture as a “carnival,” where all worldviews have equal validity.105
For Ratzinger, the central event in modern history was the Enlightenment and this, he says, occurred—and could only have occurred—in a Christian environment like Europe. The development of reason, which the Enlightenment philosophes made so much of, is itself an aspect of revelation and so the world can never be enjoyed to the full so long as we maintain a division between faith and reason—this division being our central predicament. Ratzinger believes that the mystery of the Trinity is th
ere to help us grasp the reality of the modern—but also ancient—trinity: the links between beauty, goodness, and truth. These links, he says, show us that there are eternal and timeless values, and the way God lets us know that this is true is through the phenomenon of hope, a gift. Nietzsche said that hope was the last joke that God played on mankind, but Ratzinger insists that hope is one of those “memories of God” that is etched within all of us.
Only Christianity—Catholicism—can offer the right mix of faith and reason, says Ratzinger, for it alone is responsible for recognition of the perceived dichotomy, it alone has established the traditions—the intellectual traditions (Augustine, Aquinas) as well as the liturgical traditions—that will help us “encounter Jesus,” a central element in his thought.106
Christianity, for Ratzinger, is the master story; for him the postmodern world is quite at sea in asserting that master narratives are wrong in principle and often dangerous in practice, and he insists that the “evolutionary ethos” of the contemporary world means that our only choice is between Christianity and nihilism. His answer to the nihilists is that they must first realize that they “need to be given something.”107 And he uses here, both as evidence and analogy, marriage. We all feel we need love, but we have no control over erotic love—we have no control over who we fall in love with, we experience it as a bolt from the blue, and for Ratzinger it is a gift of God. Erotic love inevitably fades, however, and, with help from the church, the community of the church, the tradition of the church, erotic love is turned into something else. “The erotic dimension of love, which does not ask my permission to happen, is fulfilled only in the agapic dimension of gratuitous self-giving.”108 The phenomenon of agape, self-giving, for Ratzinger helps our ascent to the divine, invests us with a “spiritual chivalry.” “Thus today we often see in the faces of the young people a remarkable bitterness, a resignation…The deepest root of this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability of any great love.” As Roger Cohen has said, in a sense, Pope John Paul II overcame Europe’s physical division. “It could be that Pope Benedict XVI overcomes the continent’s historical wound.”109
42.
Café Deutschland: “A Germany Not Seen Before”
In 1967, two German psychoanalysts, Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich, published Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (The Inability to Mourn), an investigation into Germany’s collective long-term reaction to the collapse of the Third Reich and the subsequent horrific revelations about the Holocaust. They concluded, controversially, that Germany was still gripped by a “psychic immobilism.” It was frozen emotionally, having “deliberately forgotten” its excesses. The enormity of the collective crime, they argued, was such that, for the Germans to admit culpability, and their “narcissistic attachment” to Hitler and his ideology, would entail guilt and shame on a scale so overwhelming that “the self-esteem needed for continued living” would be simply unattainable. Instead, they concluded, Germans needed to view themselves as victims, especially those known as “Forty-fivers,” who achieved maturity “between fascism and democracy,” and had become known, in a book by Helmut Schelsky, as Die skeptische Generation (The Sceptical Generation).1 The Mitscherliches also insisted that the problem of psychic immobilism had persisted right through the 1950s and into the 1960s.2
Their study was important in itself (we explored in Chapter 41 how it fits in with other analyses of Germany’s post–World War II intellectual life). Those conclusions do, however, help inform us about the pattern of German literature since World War II, an art form that is, arguably, the most articulate aspect of Germany’s intellectual and moral life in the contemporary world.
We find that new elements we shall identify are underpinned by two traditional, all too familiar, concerns. To begin with, we may say that whereas the main body of English literature can best be described as “elegant entertainment” (Keith Bullivant’s phrase), modern German literature, as in the United States, has had a much closer relationship with contemporary political and social developments, it has been engagé in the best sense, or has tried to be. This raises once more the specter of Henry Sidgwick reaching for the term “prig” but, as we shall presently see, it hardly applies here. Second, we may say also that contemporary German literature is marked (bedeviled?) by that familiar clash, already encountered far more than once, between realism and “inwardness,” an insistence that Innerlichkeit is the true realm of literature, that it is the “intuitive wisdom” of the poet or novelist, as opposed to knowledge derived from rational thought processes, that really matters, and that everything else, especially realism, is trivial (Trivialliteratur in German).3
For some time after 1945, the sheer ubiquity of the physical rubble (Trümmer in German) imposed itself on the imagination of writers, although Trümmerliteratur, as it is called, did not produce much in the way of lasting achievement. Beyond this, is it a surprising thing to say that there was no immediate radical break in German literary life after 1945, no innovative explosion or brilliant caesura? One might have expected such a watershed until one remembers that the great books about World War I took years to appear (see Chapter 31). The delay after World War II was even greater. Careful literary reconstruction in the 1960s showed that even the achievements of the so-called Gruppe 47 (Group 47), founded in 1947 and supposed to be representative of young German writers, were much overrated.
There was really no such thing as Stunde Null, or a zero hour, as the phrase implied, and the untidy truth is that writers like Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn were still alive after 1945 and still rejecting the modernist movement as a “false straitjacket” imposed on man by the Enlightenment—false because “it took no account of human nature.” Those authors still focused on that “inner world” that we have chronicled throughout modern German history. This wasn’t the only factor militating against change, however. Many other writers who tried to work out their individual responses to the new circumstances in which they found themselves in the immediate aftermath of war, and who were often ex-soldiers and/or prisoners of war, were, among other things, hindered by the American obsession with establishing collective guilt. In some ways, this was another straitjacket.
As the Mitscherliches also showed, Germany—both Germanies—tried hard to “shrug off” their old identities and aligned themselves instead with the victors, the Soviet Union or America (as indeed did Japan). They both embarked on “a mindless labor” of reconstruction, which created in the West Konrad Adenauer’s “economic miracle” and, in the East, “the most successful economy of the Soviet bloc.”4
In these confused circumstances, three authors emerged who were not especially young (all being “Forty-fivers,” members of the skeptical generation), but who were the first to come to grips with the immediate German past in the postwar world.
First came a series of warnings and protests from Heinrich Böll (1917–85). Born in Cologne and wounded four times in the war, Böll felt the moral failures of the Nazi years very keenly (he resisted joining the Hitler Youth), and he devoted much energy to chronicling the chaos and brutality, the black market, the hunger, the homelessness. In Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa…(Traveller, if You Come to Spa; 1950), a fatally wounded schoolboy-soldier is taken to an emergency operating theater, which turns out to be the very school he had left only six months before. There, amid the rubble of destruction, he recognizes a Greek epigram scrawled on a blackboard in his own handwriting. It is not just his death we are being shown, but that of Bildung too.5
Böll’s main warning to his fellow Germans was that “affluence may bring forgetfulness.” In books that included Billard um halb zehn (Billiards at Half Past Nine; 1959), and Ansichten eines Clowns (Views of a Clown; 1963), he explored how the Adenauer doctrine of “business as usual” led to morally damaging clashes within families, with the younger generation set against the older. This conflict would be reinforced later on in the raft of Vaterromane, the so-called father novels of the late
1970s.
Böll’s work culminated in Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead; 1974), in which he attacked the Axel Springer press for advocating authoritarian tactics by the government security services against students and left-wingers who, they felt, were “preparing the way mentally” for the terrorists who so disfigured Germany in the 1970s.6 Certainly, Böll’s books do appear to dwell on the pathologies of capitalism, and for this reason his work was always very popular in Eastern Europe. Böll, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, gave sanctuary to Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he was expelled from the Soviet Union, and Steve Crawshaw says Katharina Blum and the film that was made of it were a turning point, after which the silence on talking about the past, and the fact that many ex-Nazis were still in positions of power, was at last overcome.* (This was already 1974, reinforcing the Mitscherliches’ argument.)
Günter Grass (b. 1927), the second of the triumvirate, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, is best known for Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum; 1959), part of what is sometimes called his Danzig Trilogy, completed by Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse; 1961), and Hundejahre (Dog Years; 1963), all dealing with the rise of Nazism in and around Danzig. On the surface, The Tin Drum follows the life of Oskar Matzerath, who decides at the age of three to stop growing and then proceeds to drift through life armed only with a tin drum. Nothing seems to touch him in any way, not even the most farcical and terrible absurdities of Hitler’s Reich, although he does end his days in a mental asylum, where he composes his memoirs.7 Underneath, however, the book is a satire on what Grass sees as the self-righteous (priggish) tradition of the Bildungsroman. The book achieves its effect stylistically by contrasting the childlike understanding revealed in the narrative with Grass’s super-sophisticated language, intended as a metaphor for Germany’s postwar predicament: technical virtuosity alongside an underformed morality. One scene describes a fashionable restaurant that only serves onions. People relish the onions so that, in the “tearless [twentieth] century” they may experience crying. This “underformed” morality would obsess Grass in the years that followed.8
