From the beginning, the American Occupation was an operating model of nondemocracy and a demonstration of high-pressure salesmanship. But where were the buyers? None of my ten friends had ever taken advantage of the resources of the Kronenberg Amerika-Haus except Herr Hildebrandt, the only one of the ten who didn’t need to be won to democracy. Besides the children who attended the ever repeated free movies of the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, the Amerika-Haus patrons were, in the main, pro-Americans from ’way back and students writing papers on American subjects assigned them by their hurriedly Americanized instructors. Prior to the onslaught of McCarthyism in 1952, the Amerika-Häuser still stocked American books of all sorts, all of them, unfortunately, in English. They were no more read by my friends—or burned—than the anti-Nazi New York Times had been when it was available in the fashionable hotels of Nazi Berlin.
What the Germans needed was to see what democracy was, not to hear it touted. But in my year in Kronenberg there was not one controversial public discussion or debate under American sponsorship or control. In East Germany, a few miles away, the Communists were beating the drum for Communism; in Kronenberg the Americans were blowing the trumpet for Americanism; and in both places, not so long since, the Nazis had been burning the torch for Nazism. But the Germans had—in their own polite phrase—had a noseful of beating, blowing, and burning.
The Germans were, after 1945, in a position to begin to judge Nazism, whose blessings and curses they had now experienced, if only they could begin to have the experience of another way. But they would first have to see another way in operation before their eyes and be attracted to its practice. They would certainly fumble it at first—or second—but who hasn’t? They might misunderstand it and even misuse it. But how else would they ever discover what it was? When my little boy cuts the tail off the cat and I say, “When will you learn how to be a good boy?” he replies, “I already know—you’ve told me a thousand million times.”
Freedom is risky business; when I let my little boy cross the street alone for the first time, I am letting him risk his life, but unless I do he will grow up unable to cross the street alone. For the American Occupation to have chosen freedom for the post-Nazi Germans would have been dangerous; even my anti-Nazi friends, so thoroughly German were they, were opposed to freedom of speech, press, and assembly for the “neo-Nazis.” But it was the fear of freedom, with all its dangers, that got the Germans into trouble in the first place. When the Americans decided that they could not “afford” freedom for the Germans, they were deciding that Hitler was right.
Free inquiry on a free platform is the only practice that distinguishes a free from a slave society; and, if the post-Nazi Germans needed force, they needed it for the one purpose it had never been used for in Germany, namely, to keep the platform free. What they needed was the town meeting, the cracker barrel—to see, to hear, and at last to join the war on the totalitarianism in their own hearts. What they needed was not the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls but the Sunday afternoon forum in Bughouse Square and the thunderous cry of American authority: “Let ’im talk, let ’im talk.”
My friend Willy Hofmeister, the old policeman, was amazed, and kept adverting to his amazement, that Mein Kampf had not been banned in America during the war. What the Germans needed, so sorely that without it no effort, no expenditure, no army would ever help them, was to learn how to talk and talk back. In the Amerika-Häuser and on all the other American-controlled platforms they heard lectures on Goethe’s Debt to Edgar A. Guest and learned the old, old German lesson of listening to their betters tell them what was good and what was great and what was good and great for them.
What they needed, and went on needing during the whole of the American Occupation, was the peculiarly American genius for contentious and continuous talk in a framework not of law but of spirit. Everything else they needed they had genius enough, and more, to produce for themselves.
Why should America have undertaken, in 1945, to export freedom, above all to a people who had habitually squandered their own and eaten up other people’s? The question may or may not have had merit, but it was too late, in 1945, to ask it. The American Occupation had added something new to the history of occupations: idealism. It had undertaken to do something more than punish, collect, and control: it had undertaken to civilize the Germans.
The two tottering old civilizations of Europe, France and England, showed small appetite for what they may have thought an impossible ambition, and they dragged their heels at every turn. But there were two new civilizations on the German scene, the United States and the Soviet Union. They, with their conflicting views of civilization, were ardent with regard to their respective areas of control, and, if either of them had not wanted to be, the other’s ardor would have forced it.
It was on the East-West border of divided Germany that these two new civilizations met, each of them committed to world revolution, both of them so long isolated that they were only now, in their confrontation, compelled to consider their commitments. The Declaration of Independence did not say that all Englishmen—or their overseas colonists—were created equal. It said that all men were created equal, and with certain inalienable rights. The Communist Manifesto, too, proclaimed the equal rights of all men but, denying creation, deprived the rights of their inalienability. Down the middle of Germany the quarrel, avoidable, perhaps, if the two revolutions had not found root in the two repositories of world power at the moment, was joined in 1945.
Now, what makes civilizing so hard is that, even if the primitives recognize their own condition as primitive (which I don’t know that they do), they do not always recognize that of the civilized as superior. The Germans, for example, had thought themselves, and not other people, superior. And, in addition, the impeccability of the civilizing intention is always clouded by suspicion and the suspicion fortified by events of recent memory. Being beaten is not the best immediate preliminary to being civilized or reeducated or reoriented. The post-Nazi Germans were bound to have difficulty, for a while, in believing that those who had beaten them so bloody and burned their country down had done so for their own good or were interested in their own good now. The nature of the case was against us, even in genuine peacetime conditions, which, certainly after 1948, no longer obtained.
Still, as the American Occupation learned that what was done in ten centuries cannot be undone in ten days, some small progress might have been made in time. As the sting of punishment, collection, and control was relieved, receptivity to the American world revolutionary effort might grow in Germany, and the effort itself, if only it were not abandoned in a new isolationist temper in America, might become more imaginative. By 1948 there were signs of hope. No West German would have said, outside an official statement, that his government was free, much less democratic; but words like “freedom” and “democracy” were everywhere heard, especially among the rising generation.
The public schools were full of free books, free movies, and free lectures in praise of freedom and free enterprise, in praise, above all, of peace. And the pupils were memorizing the blessings of democracy as assiduously as their older brothers had memorized the blessings of National Socialism. More significantly, the private elementary and secondary schools, from which public school reform had always emerged, were alive again in the land.
Of the universities, “it is difficult to predict … but a start has been made,” said James M. Read, very cautiously, when he resigned as education chief of the United States High Commission in 1951. The intellectual sheep and goats were still separated at the age of ten or eleven, but, if a higher education was still beyond the children of three-fourths of the people, the West German universities, most of whose students were working their way through, no longer had to plead guilty to the Communist charge that, where the East German universities put a premium on poverty as a condition for admission, those in the West excluded the workingman’s son altogether. A chair of political science or social research appeared here and there, and there were, in five or six universities in the American and English (and even, at Tübingen, in the French) zones of occupation, government-supported or at least government-tolerated efforts to introduce a program of general education on the fringe of the specialized curriculum.
No American would have said in 1948, outside an official report, that a transformation had been wrought, or even wedged, in the German national character except on one point, and that was militarism. “The war-making power of Germany should be eliminated,” General Eisenhower of SHEAF told Henry Morgenthau and Harry Dexter White in 1944, and everybody present and absent agreed with him. In 1945 the Americans interrogated some 13,000,000 individual Germans—and indicted some 3,500,000 of them—under a statute “for the de-Nazification and demilitarization of Germany.” In his 1946 speech in Stuttgart, United States Secretary of State Byrnes reaffirmed the Potsdam principle that Germany should be permanently demilitarized and added: “It is not in the interest of the German people or in the interest of world peace that Germany should become a pawn or partner in a military struggle for power between the East and West”; and in 1949 the new Bonn Government pledged “its earnest determination to maintain the demilitarization of the Federal territory and to endeavor by all means in its power to prevent the recreation of armed forces of any kind.”
Everywhere the German turned, he was told that American idealism had come to liberate him forever from the curse of militarism, from its money cost, its cost in life, and its cost in reducing his character to barracks-room servility. And, with a readiness that should, perhaps, have been disturbing, he seemed to believe what he was told.
It is hard to exaggerate the impression which this American ideal made upon the Germans—an impression supported, of course, by their own experience of the second Thirty Years’ War of 1914–45. “The German people display no eagerness for military service,” High Commissioner McCloy was able to report. “The distaste for military service as such [is] something new in German life.” Then, suddenly, in 1948, with the cold war warming up in Berlin, the American ideal was reversed.