The new German joke was: “How do the Germans feel about the situation?”—“Well, how does a bone feel between two dogs?” Pressure, once more, new pressure on top of all the old pressures unrelieved by war, destruction, and defeat. The Nazi rallying cry had been, “Germany, awaken!” Now the Americans and the Russians were crying the same cry. In time the Germans would yield to the new pressures. It would certainly be easier to re-re-educate Germans to militarism than to re-educate them away from it. “I wish,” said a German pastor, “that we Germans didn’t believe so easily.”
The consequences of the pressure, of being needed, wanted, for war again, of being wooed wherever they went, they who so recently had been the world’s untouchables, can only be guessed at; but they can be guessed at. “The German tragedy,” said Reinhold Schneider, one of Germany’s great living men of letters, “is as deep as ever. It is that nothing can be regarded as having a life of its own. Everything—whether music, or art, or religion, or literature—is judged almost exclusively on its conceivable political bearing. The most tortured and far-fetched conclusions are drawn from productions that were only created out of the urge to create or, if they had a goal, to enhance the outreach of the human spirit. Of course I am aware of the social responsibility of the artist, but to go over to the Marxist thesis, as the West seems to be doing, that everything is only an incident to a great political, and ultimately economic, movement is to sell out something that will impoverish the world, certainly to sell out that early hope that something new in the human plastic might emerge out of Germany’s pain.”
That was one way of putting it, but there were not many putting it that way. There were more who saw remilitarization as the only way to sovereignty; these were the nationalists. There were more who saw it as the way to professional activity; these were the ex-officers. There were more who saw it as the way to a job; these were the unemployed. And there were some ten million “expellees” (nobody had ever bothered to count them) forced into post-Nazi Germany from the liberated countries by the victors who decided at Potsdam that Hitler was right, after all: there was such a thing as a “German race,” and its members, classified at Potsdam as “German ethnics,” would have to live in Germany. The “expellees” were an immense and ever growing force for war against Russia as their only hope of getting back home.
Growing, too, among the Germans, was the most intense pressure of all, the pressure to reunite their country, infinitely more intense than the pressure to regain the lost colonies in the twenties. West (and East) Germans had no relatives in German West Africa, but they all had relatives in East (and West) Germany. A new Hitlerism, if it arose in West Germany, would need only one plank in its platform: reunification. In 1953 the West Germans re-elected a Chancellor who told them, à l’Américaine, “We talk a lot about unification. Let us talk of liberation.” But, when any speaker in Germany, West or East, used the word Einheit, unity, no matter how he used it, he was interrupted by wild, Sports-Palast–like cheering.
Unfortunately, Einheit was an old Nazi term, too. Still more unfortunately, Einheit, along with Friede, peace, was the slogan the hated Communists had painted on walls and billboards all over East Germany—on walls and billboards facing the West. The Germans, East and West, wanted the Americans out of Germany—five minutes after the Russians were out. But the Russians, who lost 17,000,000 people in the last war, would not get out, and neither would the Americans, who did not want to lose 17,000,000 people in the next one. The Occupation—West as well as East—was a matter of might. Might was something the Germans could understand without being re-educated or reoriented.
The Germans in the East did not appear to believe that they would get both Einheit and Friede from the Russians. The Americans did not speak of Einheit and Friede to the Germans in the West. They spoke of Verteidigung, defense, and offered it free. Well, the Germans wanted defense, too, above all against “Bolshevism.” But defense was the offer made them by their own government in 1914 and in 1939, and in 1914 and in 1939 defense meant war. The Germans did not want war. They did not want peace at any price, but they did not want war at the price of death, and that was the price, when they were allowed to think about it, that they thought they would have to pay.
The German dilemma was, perhaps, most acute in Germany, but it wasn’t really a German dilemma; it was the dilemma of Europe. If defense meant death, one had to consider defense very seriously. But the Germans could see the dilemma most acutely, because they could see that the Americans and the Russians were agreed that, if they had to fight each other, they would both prefer to do it in Germany. The Germans could see that, wherever the third World War ended, it would begin where they were, and their broken stones would be reduced to dust.
In the re-election of the conservative coalition of Adenauer in 1953, the central issue was the economy. Almost half the Bonn budget was going for social services; one-fifth of the population was directly supported by the State on pensions or doles. Still, the day after V-E Day, five-fifths were unsupported by anybody, and in 1953 the Germans were not in the mood to shoot even a thin Santa Claus. In the fall elections of 1954 the mood had changed—or, rather, the focus. Everywhere, even in Catholic Bavaria, Adenauer lost support and lost it radically. What had happened? What had happened was that the “European Defense Community,” with its facade of an international army, had collapsed, and the Adenauer Government, under the most intense pressure from the United States, was trying to deliver a German Army, complete with a German General Staff, under the new “London Agreement.”
The phoenix was dragging its talons. Professor Hans Morgenthau, of the University of Chicago, returned from a visit to his native land in the summer of 1954 and reported that he had raised the question of German rearmament “with scores of all kinds of people. I found only one man who came out in favor of it, and he is closely identified with the Adenauer Government.” He added that “all four living ex-chancellors of Germany, representing the most diverse colors of the political spectrum from the extreme right of Papen to the extreme left of Wirth, have declared their opposition to the Western orientation of the Bonn regime.” In the winter of 1954–55 the West German “Security Commissioner” was having the greatest difficulty in persuading young men to register voluntarily for the when-and-if “defense force.” At a mass meeting in Cologne, the magazine U.S. News & World Report said that the Security Commissioner “found more conscientious objectors than anything else. A check in key areas of West Germany indicates that the attitude of the young men at Cologne is typical of much of the country. Hardly anyone signs up. Anti-militarism suddenly has become one of the most popular political issues.”
“Conscientious objectors” to volunteering are not, of course, conscientious objectors to conscription. “Actually,” U.S. News & World Report concluded, “nobody in West Germany seriously doubts any more that the country will have an army by one means or another. But it is becoming apparent that the German soldiers of the future will be very different from the German troops who went to war in 1870, 1914, and 1939.” “Fight?” said one of those anonymous officials with whom I spoke in Berlin. “Of course the Germans will fight. But they will fight a tired war, the way the French fought in 1940.”
The Germans want, not at all oddly, to live. They would like to live well, but in any case they would like to live, well or badly. Their attitude may be unheroic; they ought, perhaps, to prefer dying on their feet to living on their knees. But they don’t; and, unlike us, who have had neither experience, they have had both. What we, who have never been slaves, call slavery, they, who have always been what we call slaves, find less abhorrent than death. They hate Communism—under that name—but they do not love what we call liberty enough to die for it. If they did, they would have died for it against Hitler.
Americans who saw the love of liberty in the East-West refugee traffic and the East German riots needed to remind themselves that these same East Germans lived under totalitarian slavery for twelve years, 1933–45, and loved it. They did not even call it slavery. Those of them who hated it (and there were, of course, many) could have emigrated in much better style than those who are now arriving from the East, but emigration during those twelve years, except for those whom the totalitarian dictatorship drove away, was almost nil.