All the Germans were not born yesterday. But some of them were; and youth is the time of ideals. When the West German Security Commissioner announced the details of remilitarization—including peacetime conscription—the London Observers correspondent reported, on the basis of public opinion polls, that “the percentage of support for a German defense contribution dropped below 15, and the percentage of outspoken opposition, about 40 to 50 for the population in general, reached nearly 75 for the age groups directly concerned”—that is, for the young people. Student polls taken in three universities in Germany—without official sanction or supervision—showed opposition so nearly unanimous that the scientific basis of the polling went unchallenged. Youth is the time of ideals, and in the German generation that had known only war’s horrors and none of its glories the pre-1948 American Occupation had planted an ideal that was brand-new in Germany.
The American “exchange programs” for German students, professors, journalists, and public officials had been screened from the start, to bring only pro-American Germans to America. Now—after 1948—the candidates were asked what they thought of the remilitarization of their country. “I’m against it,” one of the high-school seniors who was accepted for the program told me, “but I said I was for it. You know, 90 per cent of our graduating class at the Realgymnasium signed a petition against remilitarization a month before my examination for the program. My name was on the petition, but I assumed that the American officials in our town had not sent it to the American examiners in Frankfurt, and I was right.”
“Why,” I said, “did you guess that the petition had never been sent to Frankfurt?”
“Because everybody tells his superior what his superior wants to hear, and the superior in Frankfurt does not want to hear about opposition to remilitarization. Look, Professor, we are used to this in Germany.”
The young people’s resistance to remilitarization was led by German churchmen, Protestant and Catholic, especially in the anti-Nazi Confessional Church, the “church within the Church” which is the most vigorous and numerous branch of German Protestantism. In mid-1950, when Pastor Mochalski, Secretary of the Confessional Church Council, established the Darmstadt Action Groups against remilitarization, the movement spread from the Darmstadt Institute of Technology to the Universities of Frankfurt, Mainz, Heidelberg, Tübingen, and Freiburg. Americans who were “warned” by the United States Consul in Frankfurt to keep away from this “Communist-dominated outfit” and who asked to see the evidence were told, “That’s impossible. The evidence is classified.”
Notices of meetings of the Niemöller-Heinemann-Wessel group of Protestants and Catholics opposing militarization were torn down by culprits unknown. But in Kronenberg, late in 1952, huge posters appeared on the kiosks showing a hairy red hand, tattooed with the hammer and sickle, seizing the thin white arm of a woman, over the caption “Deine Frau, Herr Ohne Mich!” “Your Wife, Mr. ‘I-Won’t-Fight-in-the-Next-War’!” The source of the posters being unknown, they would ordinarily have been confiscated by the police. But they weren’t. “We are used to this, too,” said my friend, the exchange student. “It may be that this poster was left over in Dr. Goebbels’ storeroom.”
Cynicism, the deepest cynicism, in Germany, among a people who, rather than believe in nothing, will turn to the most fantastic of faiths; cynicism among the young people, and youth is the time for ideals. Not that their elders were any less cynical, but, then, age is the time for disenchantment. “I suppose,” said my friend Klingelhöfer, the cabinetmaker, “that the Occupation law ‘for the de-Nazification and demilitarization of Germany’ is repealed, now that we are to be remilitarized. Are we to be re-Nazified, too?”
Were they? A transition had set in among the Germans, a transition from the view that the American Way was, perhaps, better than their own to the view that the American Way was very good, indeed, but no better than theirs. The German press, controlled as it was by the Occupation, expressed itself by the amount of space it gave news, and it gave an extraordinary amount of space to the development of “McCarthyism” in the United States and especially to the incursion of book-burning into the libraries of the Amerika-Häuser. The bolder newspapers expressed themselves editorially, the anti-Communist Münchner Merkur nominating Senator McCarthy for honorary membership in the Communist Party and the anti-Communist Weser-Kurier saying that Goebbels would have appreciated the Wisconsin Senator. “We in Germany,” said the anti-Communist Mannheimer Morgen, “are fed up with what we had last time, when a whole party of McCarthys tried to control our thinking.”
Some Germans were born yesterday; not all of them.