Nothing I ever learned in Berlin surprised me more than the recognition that most Germans once put their own misery front and center. For decades after the war ended, Germans were obsessed with the suffering they’d endured, not the suffering they’d caused. Hadn’t they lost sons and husbands, fathers and brothers on the field? Hadn’t most of the men who survived been taken prisoner, as often as not to Siberia? Hadn’t the women and children spent night after night shivering in cellars from cold and from fear of the bombs that burned or blew their cities to bits? Hadn’t they lost a quarter of the territory that belonged to Germany for centuries? Wasn’t the winter after the war so bitter that the great trees that lined city streets were sacrificed to keep civilians from freezing to death? Hadn’t they survived on dandelion greens and potato peels? Nor was all they endured during the war enough: now they were being beaten with what would later be called a moral club. Did they really have to hear that the cause for which they’d fought and suffered was not only senseless but positively criminal?
Younger Germans couldn’t entirely overlook the discrepancy between their parents’ view of the matter and the views of the rest of the world. It’s what led thousands born after the war to pass themselves off as Danish or Dutch when they traveled abroad. They knew what reactions the truth would provoke. There were cold shoulders, glasses slammed on a counter, even occasional spit. This was as true for young West Germans visiting Paris as it was for young East Germans visiting Poland, and they sought repair in different forms. But their parents had told them that the world’s reaction was a case of victor’s justice, if their parents told them anything at all. Most often they did not.
What the U.S. Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” may be absent in many a nation, but postwar Germany felt particularly entitled to do without it. Hadn’t the rest of the world been wrong before? Only twenty years separated the end of one war from the beginning of another, and the memory of the Versailles Treaty was still fresh. Germans did no more at the beginning of that war than participate in the imperial power struggles few Europeans found problematic at the time. At the end of World War I, the carnage was so shocking that the victors looked for someone to blame and someone to punish: not only did Germany lose quite a bit of territory, it was saddled with a bill for war reparations that left its economy dysfunctional.
West German children of the war generation told me often enough that their parents opposed their own nascent attempts at atoning for the Nazi period, but they never conveyed the collective whine that was the emotional power behind their parents’ opposition: Haven’t we paid enough already? I needed decades to learn how deep those emotions had been.
The German war generation paid quite a lot. First and foremost, seven million lives. This was significantly less than the twenty-seven million killed by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union alone, but seven million was more than a tenth of the total German population, and hardly a family was spared. At least a million of the dead were civilians, though no one knows the exact number killed in the Allied air raids begun in retaliation for London and Coventry. If you lived in one of the cities they targeted, you were likely to lose your home and everything in it as well. When it was all over, like thousands of others, you combed through the rubble, grateful for an old photo, a child’s doll, or a locket, anything that might anchor a memory of your past. There was very little to eat, and the winter of ’46 was the coldest in living memory.
Another number: one-quarter of German territory was permanently surrendered. This meant that one-quarter of the population lost whatever they couldn’t carry when they fled west, fearing the Red Army might do to them what the Wehrmacht had done to Russian civilians. For the most part it did not, but that couldn’t be predicted, so millions of refugees swept westward, overwhelming compatriots who were likely as not to be bombed out themselves. This was hardest, of course, on the refugees, but not easy on their new neighbors, for the refugees were a daily reminder of Germany’s total defeat. For comparison, imagine that China conquered the West Coast of the United States and everyone west of Wyoming went east to seek shelter.
I’ve sometimes wondered whose resentment was greater—the men’s or the women’s. The men had lived through misery, especially if they were on the Eastern Front. Their aspirations had been honed in the language of glory, and they returned as louse-infested losers. Talk of master race and machismo had conditioned their youth; now they’d been fucked in the ass, as many who had served on the Western Front put it. It was humiliating enough to be emasculated on the Western Front by the Americans, but unthinkable to acknowledge that they were subjugated in the east by the Slavs they’d always heard were scum. As men, they were so devastated that it’s not hard to understand how sorry they felt for themselves.
It was the women, however, who kept the home fires burning. During the war, when front leave was just long enough to produce another baby for the Führer, they were the ones who managed the rations and dragged the mattress to the cellar when the air-raid sirens sounded night after night. After the war, if they were lucky, their men were merely missing, but often they waited years to find out. Meanwhile, the work of carting off the ruins of their homes remained when they weren’t scrambling for firewood or food. Their children remember a tight-lipped grimness that filled every room. Even memories that ought to be pleasant were rimmed with shadow. “The whole city was our sandbox,” recalls the writer Daniela Dahn. Sometimes they even found an old helmet to dig with, there in the ruins. “Being loser and perpetrator was a doubly hard burden,” says the author Alexandra Senfft. Therapists in postwar Germany were exceedingly rare; the Nazis had branded psychoanalysis as a Jewish science, and analysts who were lucky emigrated to America or Britain. Meanwhile, the sins of the fathers continue to traumatize: many Germans of the first postwar generation refused to have children because of their own childhoods. The men said the very concept of paternal authority was contaminated. The women simply experienced family life as depression. For the first generation born after 1940, procreation could be a heroic act.
Men and women captured by their own traumas were blind to any others. Returning from exile in London, the Viennese writer Hilde Spiel was greeted with envy: Lucky you got to spend the war abroad! Though her father had converted from Judaism to Catholicism and cherished his Iron Cross, Spiel would have shared the fate of her grandmother, who perished in Theresienstadt, had she not left her native land. For their former neighbors, however, one thing mattered most: the returning émigrés had spent the war away from the terror that reigned in places like Vienna and Frankfurt—terror created both by the Nazi regime and the Allied attacks on it. After the bombings came hunger and cold. Surely the émigrés should feel grateful—or anyway lucky?
Spiel’s experience was not unique. Non-Jewish returning refugees, who could have stayed in Nazi Germany had they not chosen to leave for political reasons, were branded as traitors. Marlene Dietrich’s love songs to her native Berlin are legion, but she preferred to sing for Allied troops rather than accept Goebbels’s sumptuous offer to leave Hollywood in 1936. When she returned to Berlin in 1960, she was greeted with picket signs denouncing her betrayal of the Fatherland; rotten eggs were thrown during a concert in Düsseldorf. Dietrich retired to Paris, never to return. The most famous non-Jewish returning refugee was Willy Brandt, and nothing illustrates the chasm that separates early postwar German views of the war from the views of other nations than the way Brandt was treated in his homeland. Willy Brandt’s kneeling before the memorial to the Warsaw ghetto moved the world. We were thrilled to see the man who had belonged to the resistance atone for crimes of his nation, cracking open a door to the thought that the sins of the fathers need not contaminate the sons forever. But when he knelt in 1970, most of the West German public were as distressed by it as the rest of the world was delighted. The gesture suggested not just humility but humiliation. Kneeling was read as capitulation, and, even worse, capitulation to the Poles, whom years of remorseless propaganda had taught them to consider as Untermenschen. And why did Brandt feel the need for an apology tour at all? Less than a decade earlier, West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had campaigned against Brandt with the slogan “What was Herr Brandt doing for twelve years abroad? We know what we were doing in Germany.” Foreigners can barely grasp that the very thing that made him a Good German in the eyes of the world—Brandt’s 1933 flight to Norway—could have been a political liability in the eyes of his compatriots. Times have changed. Germans today are ashamed of the slogan, which now appears on the glass front of the little Willy Brandt museum on the great boulevard Unter den Linden. To find out the slogan’s source, however, you have to dig quite a lot. The Christian Democratic Union has yet to work off the past of Adenauer, who remains revered as the founding chancellor of the Federal Republic.
The postwar West German sense of victimhood ran so deep that it is almost invisible today. Berlin was thrilled to welcome Neil MacGregor as the founding director of the museum created in a replica of the former imperial palace, not least for his work on German history. Yet when MacGregor’s 2015 BBC radio series on Germany turns to examine the women who cleared away the rubble left by Allied bombers, he concludes, “Unlike Londoners, they could hardly think of themselves as victims.” In fact, that’s exactly what they did. The rubble women—Trümmerfrauen—saw themselves as significantly worse victims than their London counterparts. Not only was there more rubble to clear in Berlin and Hamburg than in London and Bristol, but however backbreaking the work might have been in England, the task of clearing rubble was lightened by the knowledge that they’d won a righteous war. No such consolation brightened the work of the German women, who stood in long lines passing buckets of brick that had once been their homes. It took me years of reading, listening, and open eyes to get it: the majority of Germans put their own misery über alles.
If the pain of defeat and the absence of remorse went so deep that foreigners have trouble grasping it, Germans find it hard to grasp that foreigners don’t. Growing up with family photos of fallen heroes in jackboots, they find it self-evident. The sting of defeat penetrated childhood so thoroughly that they found it hard to separate from childhood itself; now that they’re grown, shame prevents them from mentioning it much. The shame is all the greater with the realization that their parents, in the best case, were not only party to war crimes, but considered themselves to be victims of them. Even the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s brilliant study The Culture of Defeat only takes on the aftermath of World War I, which he compares with the Confederate defeat of 1865.1 For a German writer born in 1941, comparing the experience of defeat in 1945 with anyone else’s would cross moral red lines. Todorov’s rule urging Germans to focus on the singularity of the Holocaust prevents decent Germans from comparing those who created it to anyone else.
Yet the evidence is there, though you won’t find it in histories like Schivelbusch’s or MacGregor’s. One surprising place to look is early postwar German philosophy. The most famous is the case of Martin Heidegger. The man who some find the most important philosopher of the twentieth century not only joined the Nazi Party but also agreed to take the top post at the University of Freiburg. Philosophers and historians still argue about the importance of those facts. In his inaugural lecture he gave a rousing defense of the new spirit created by the Nazi revolution that drove his own assistants into unemployment or exile. (His comments about that are confined to complaints about the extra work created for him by the edict banning Jews from universities.) It’s true that his tenure as rector was too short and his work too abstract to provide concrete ideological support for Nazi ideology. Heidegger’s students, and their students, have argued that Heidegger’s concern was not the petty details of politics, but the deeper questions about the nature of Being that took him back to the pre-Socratics. In fact, the recently published letters to his brother, who did not share the philosopher’s enthusiasm for the new regime, reveal that Martin followed the day-to-day turn of political events very closely. His private notebooks were even more damning, particularly since Heidegger, always obsessed with his legacy, left exact instructions in his testament about the order in which they were to be published. It’s stunning to imagine the man in his Black Forest cabin decades after the war’s end, preparing for the 2014 publication of passages about “World Jewry” that are more ponderous than Goebbels’s tirades, but hardly different in substance.
At least as chilling as the anti-Semitic passages are the antimodern ones. Infamously, Heidegger wrote that there was no fundamental difference between the killing machines of the death camps and the growth of mechanized agriculture. The notebooks go even further: modernity, which he sometimes thought began with Socrates, is the source of all our woes. Anti-Semitism and antimodernism often go together, as the image of the wandering, rootless cosmopolitan Jew shows. The difference is that straightforward anti-Semitism is (mostly) condemned in the United States and Germany, while antimodernism runs stronger than ever. Will progressive intellectuals continue to talk of reading Heidegger against Heidegger when they read the Black Notebooks passage declaring that the Allies’ refusal to allow him to return to teaching was “a greater brutality than any of Hitler’s”?2 The monstrous narcissism thus unveiled was too much even for Günter Figal, the longtime head of the Heidegger Society, who gave up his chairmanship when the ninety-eighth notebook was published in 2014.
Unlike Heidegger, the influential legal philosopher Carl Schmitt didn’t even apply to the Allies for permission to teach. Probably suspecting he wouldn’t receive it anyway, Schmitt refused to undergo the denazification process he and his friends called “terror.” He spent the rest of his long life holding forth in small circles against “preachers of repentance like Jaspers.” Schmitt’s rants against the “criminalizers in Nuremberg” and the “constructors of crimes against humanity and genocide” were founded on his critique of the concept of universal value as liberal hype. “The crimes against humanity are committed by the Germans. The crimes for humanity are committed against the Germans. That is the entire difference.” “Anyone who uses the word ‘humanity,’” he famously wrote, “wants to deceive.” The deceit, thought Schmitt, is a matter of cloaking partisan preferences in terms that disguise the truth: moral concepts are irrelevant in politics, where the only categories that matter are friend and foe. Liberal democrats who seek neutral frameworks to settle competing claims by way of justice rather than power are hypocrites or fools, for any framework claiming neutrality represents nothing but the triumph of a stronger over a weaker faction. It’s an old claim that goes back to pre-Socratic sophists, though someone feels the need to revive it every generation or so. Progressive thinkers who think they can take up Schmitt’s critique of the more hypocritical aspects of liberal democracy without swallowing the rest are due for a shock.
Jürgen Habermas called Schmitt pathological: his inability to recognize the gap between his own grievances and the suffering his party inflicted on millions is breathtaking, and it can hardly be called a failure of understanding.3 Likewise, Heidegger’s conviction that nothing Hitler did was as brutal as the Allies’ refusal to allow him to infect German youth with his murky antimodernism almost beggars belief. By the time he wrote that sentence, the dead had been counted. What kind of a mind weighs withholding permission to teach at a university against the murder of millions? For the sake of argument, however, let’s suppose that the only two wartime German philosophers still read widely today were anomalies whose failures of judgment were as colossal as their fame. What about the rest of their compatriots?
Like many other conservative Germans who saw the Nazis as the bulwark that would save Europe from bolshevizing Russians on one side and soulless Anglo-Americans on the other, the philosopher Karl Jaspers was not initially opposed to the Nazis. Forced to retire from the university in 1937, forbidden to publish in 1938, and enduring considerable hardship after resisting Nazi pressure to divorce his Jewish wife, Jaspers later broke with earlier colleagues like Heidegger and insisted on German guilt. With the possible exception of those whose political opposition led to imprisonment, Jaspers held every German, including himself, morally responsible for doing too little to stop the Nazis’ rise. His famous essay The Question of German Guilt makes for curious reading today. Its arguments seem so obvious, you will wonder why anyone bothered to make them, until you reflect on his audience. The essay was originally part of a series of lectures delivered in 1946 to young men whose minds had been so thoroughly deformed by Nazi ideology they were unable to recognize truths that seem trivial today. As philosophy, Jaspers’s arguments seem directed at straw men. As history, they remind us that those men were as real as flesh and blood can be. Through Jaspers’s painstaking efforts to prove what now seems banal, we can see just how much postwar Germans had to learn. He explained to his students that not all suffering is created equal:
Most everyone suffered, but it’s completely different whether one suffered and lost in battle at the front, at home, or in a concentration camp; whether one suffered as a victim of the Gestapo or was one of those who used the regime, albeit in fear. Almost everyone lost close friends and family, but whether he lost them through battle, bombs or mass murder has very different consequences.4
Contemporary readers will hold these truths to be so evident they will wonder how anyone could fail to see them. How could an entire nation so reverse fortune and failure, cause and effect?
Jaspers’s essay tried to answer that question by anticipating his audience’s reaction. Defeat was the basic experience, resentment the most common emotion, leaving little room for guilt, shame, or even regret—except for the lands and lives Germany lost in the war. The memory of Versailles hung heavy over Nuremberg. Was it victors’ justice—the winner’s attempt to disguise base revenge against the loser by cloaking that revenge in moral rhetoric? Jaspers attacked this widespread view by distinguishing between the two world wars: while Germans were unfairly blamed for the first, we must accept guilt for the second. Jaspers used the first-person plural throughout. He believed the first clumsy attempts to force acknowledgment of guilt were no help. Shortly after the war’s end, posters went up all over the British and American zones. Under a photograph of corpses at Bergen-Belsen was printed the sentence: THIS IS YOUR FAULT. The German word for fault is the same as the word for guilt, something notoriously hard to impose from outside. Jaspers described the reaction most Germans had upon seeing the posters: “There something rebelled: Who is accusing me? No signature, no name of an authority—the poster came from empty space. It is only human that someone accused, whether fairly or not, will seek to defend himself.”5
Tactics were somewhat savvier in the Russian zone, though Jaspers didn’t discuss them. Berlin was still largely a collection of rubble when the Soviet authorities organized the first theater production in 1945. Nathan the Wise, Gotthold Lessing’s classic Enlightenment drama urging equal rights for Jews, Christians, and Muslims was meant to remind the audience of better voices from their own tradition. As the returning émigré philosopher Theodor Adorno later argued, the most important part of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung affects the unconscious. The Frankfurt School emphasized the importance of psychoanalysis, and if raking through the past was going to heal anything, individually or nationally, it had to come from within. Reproaches from others are only likely to create resistance. “Whatever happens as propaganda remains ambivalent,” Adorno insisted. That’s just how we’re built: attack us from the outside, we’ll be quick to defend our ground.
What were the defenses? How was responsibility deflected? Jaspers ran through all the excuses and demolished them one by one. State terror made resistance impossible, unless you were ready to die. Inside German borders, Jaspers countered, concentration camps were full of political prisoners who resisted. In 1944, more than four thousand were arrested every month. The fact that concentration camps inside Germany operated until the war’s end showed there was internal opposition to the Nazis, and though it wasn’t very effective, it wasn’t often fatal. Germany’s geographical cards were worse than those of other nations. It’s easy to develop open and liberal political cultures when you live on an island that hasn’t been invaded since 1066. Geography isn’t destiny; just look at the Romans. Every state in the world recognized Hitler’s government. They streamed into Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, and many expressed admiration for the new regime. Indeed they did. Winston Churchill, for example, wrote in 1937, “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”6 As a general truth, Jaspers acknowledged that others were no better. The particular historical truth, however, was that the others actually were better those past twelve years.
Jaspers went on to make a less obvious and more interesting point: it would be a relief if the others were fundamentally better than his compatriots. Were the victors nothing but selfless world rulers, there would be no moral confusion, and the reeducation of Germany would be certain and assured. Moreover, if the Germans were uniquely awash in original sin, who could blame them for acting it out? As Jaspers’s student Hannah Arendt put it: where everyone is guilty, no one is. Decades later, German sales figures for Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which emphasized the continuity of anti-Semitism in German history, provoked suspicion that the book was experienced as exoneration. If everyone in the nation was anti-Semitic to the marrow, how could anyone be blamed for failing to act against the Nazis? But even though Jaspers and his wife, fearful she would be deported, lived through the end of the war with cyanide pills in their pockets, he wrote, “At no time was German anti-Semitism a popular response (Volksaktion). The population did not join the German pogroms, there was no spontaneous cruelty. The masses were simply silent, and withdrew.”7
Yet even those who may be willing to acknowledge responsibility for their silence worry that too much atonement can sap a nation’s strength. Without commitment to shared national traditions, what holds a people together? What allows them to keep their heads high enough to raise their children with a measure of pride? Jaspers’s answer was struggling and tentative; he began a dialogue that continues to this day. For some, German tradition is poisoned, if not absolutely fatally, by those twelve unfathomable years. They work to fathom, or at least to expose them. Year after year, sons and daughters of that history publish painstaking studies on the complicities of the wartime foreign service, or the ways that leading lights of literary theory were influenced by an SS past they quietly concealed. Others clamor: Enough is enough.
Jaspers was unhappy with his compatriots’ response to what he called his “little book”; few, he wrote, had read it, and even fewer were open to it. He was countered with the claim that Bolshevik terror was worse than Nazi terror, and criticized for undertaking a “campaign” against Germany. One visitor to the original lectures reported that students laughed and scraped the floor with their feet when Jaspers spoke of democracy in connection with the spiritual renewal of Germany.8 Few were prepared to follow even his insistence that the victims of war should be distinguished. In 1952, what was planned as a memorial day commemorating the victims of fascism was turned into a National Day of Mourning—Volkstrauertag—that drew no distinctions between all those who had suffered in the war. Even in Germany, philosophers have limited influence.
Real data about what broad swaths of the country were thinking, and not thinking, was provided five years later by another philosopher, who constructed an extraordinary experiment. In 1933, ten years after the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was founded, its members were forced to flee, not only because most of them came from (secular) Jewish families but because their work was informed by both Marx and Freud, either one of whom was enough to make them anathema to the Nazis. One member of the institute, Walter Benjamin, later took his own life when escape over the Pyrenees looked hopeless. The rest reached America and survived there until the University of Frankfurt, unlike most West German universities, called Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno back. In a 1948 trip to explore whether to return to the land of the murderers, Horkheimer wrote that the mass of Germans seemed even more evil than during the Third Reich.9 That fact, he continued, did not discourage him from taking up a job from which he’d been fired when the Nazis dismissed Jewish professors from the universities. On the contrary, he felt compelled to support those Germans who had genuinely resisted the Nazis, however few they had been. And the chance to play a role in reeducating a new generation was hard to turn down. Besides, Horkheimer and Adorno were curious. Whatever were their former compatriots thinking? Thus arose the Group Experiment, in which eighteen hundred people—farmers and doctors, housewives and high school students, officers and secretaries—were encouraged to speak about German guilt. Forming small groups in which people talked to each other was meant to create an atmosphere like that of strangers on a train, who might speak more naturally and openly than they would with a single interviewer.
Though the participants represented a large variety of occupations and education, their language and historical references suggest fairly high capacities for reflection. They just didn’t use them. None expressed a desire to return to the good old days of the Third Reich. Perhaps they were wary of doing so in front of the experimenters facilitating the discussions, but whatever memories they had of peace, prosperity, and pride in the ’30s were battered by what followed. Stalingrad at the front and bombed-out cities at home produced shock and shame that were amply clear in 1950. The shame, however, had no moral component. Nearly every participant in the Group Experiment denied any suggestion of guilt.
One former soldier went so far as to deny that Germany had started the war. It was America, he said, that sent Germany to Russia so that Germany would bear the brunt of fighting communism at its source.10 Even those who didn’t go that far insisted that the world should be grateful for the German attack on Bolshevism, which would have overtaken not just Europe but America too had the Wehrmacht not exhausted the Red Army.11 Germany’s fight against Bolshevism was the reason for the war, and had the West only allied with Germany, there’d be no problems in Korea today and no worries about a third world war tomorrow.12 Others suggested that the causes of war began earlier: as a cultured nation, we too wanted more land in the nineteenth century, but the other colonial powers did not want another rival.13
Pointing to other nations’ sins, with a special focus on America, was a favored defense against recognizing their own. Why didn’t America take in more Jewish refugees?14 Several brought up lynching, arguing that American treatment of black people was worse than German treatment of Jews. After all, blacks were always treated as second-class citizens, whereas Jews had not been until the Nuremberg Laws. And lynching, which is driven by hate, is worse than mass murder taking place in an orderly fashion. Besides, lynching is mob violence that takes place in public, whereas Nazi mass murder was hidden away in secret camps in Poland.15 Moreover, if the Nazis were so bad, why did all the foreign diplomats—who surely had more information about what went on behind the scenes than we ordinary folk—act as if they were normal? Before the war, the French ambassador went hunting with Himmler. If they knew they were dealing with murderers, why did they sit down at their tables?16 It was the bombing of German civilians, which most participants had experienced directly, that came up most often: anyone guilty of that has no right to accuse others of war crimes.17
Adorno and his researchers often comment on the contradictions in their subjects’ responses. How many knots can the psyche tie itself into to defend itself against moral truth? Quite a number of subjects declared themselves free of anti-Semitism, though many of them followed their declarations with anti-Semitic remarks. Along with memories of kind Jewish doctors or favorite Jewish schoolmates, the participants expressed other positions. Kosher butchers torture animals.18 Jews prefer cheating to honest labor; just look at how many are working on the black market.19 German Jews were all right, since they weren’t really Jewish anymore; it was those weird-looking Ostjuden who couldn’t speak proper German that caused all the trouble.20 Alternatively, Hitler was wrong to kill the Jews, but it’s a good thing he got them out of prominent positions, because they were running the country, and they weren’t real Germans at all.
The most extraordinary instances of moral myopia were expressed in the subjects’ descriptions of postwar German-Jewish relations. After 1945, said one participant, we wanted good relations with the Jews, and we reached out our hand—but they didn’t take it, so now we owe them nothing.21 Others said the problem with the Allied Occupation was that it was infected with bitter émigrés who wanted revenge.22 One subject raged about his time in an American POW camp, which he said was run by Jews who were “horrible people.” His example of the horror? “They cut our rations to a minimum and made us look at photographs from Buchenwald, where the dead, who allegedly came from concentration camps, were exhumed. No one wanted to look, but if they saw you close your eyes they’d shove you in the back to make sure you were awake. That was definitely not democratic.”23
Only a single participant in the Group Experiment expressed the kind of moral reflection you might expect. She was an older Catholic woman, one of the few subjects to use religious language. “I take my being bombed out as atonement for the great guilt we incurred toward the innocent. The Americans are right that we murdered more Jews than they murder Negroes in a year. That is the truth. I was bombed out three times. I haven’t done enough wrong in my life to justify that, but I would not ask God ‘What have you done to me?’ There was so much guilt to atone for that a part of the nation must atone for it on earth. Even if our children must atone for it again.”24
Adorno and his team of researchers commented on most of the interviews. They were trying to understand how a whole people managed to defend itself against feelings of guilt, and they often used psychoanalytic concepts: this subject displayed clinical paranoia; that one revealed the infantile assumption that the occupying Americans were obliged to feed the German population and to work to gain its sympathies.25 They do not seek to analyze why one woman responded to moral catastrophe in the right way, with a knowledge of sin and a sense of guilt that demanded expiation, cost what it may for herself and her children. No guile, no defense, no twisted logic.
Are we better at analyzing evil than goodness? Or is goodness, finally, impossible to analyze: it’s just something simple?
Bettina Stangneth is one philosopher who is not impressed with German efforts to work off the past. Born in 1966, Stangneth would be a phenomenon anywhere. She was raised in a home without books in a village in northern West Germany. No one there could imagine why she wanted to earn a Ph.D. There wasn’t much political conversation in her family, but she does remember the phrase you don’t say that in school repeated rather often.
“One didn’t dare say what one’s father had been doing during the Nazi period. Almost everyone lied during their denazification hearings, but there was a lot of drinking in those days, and people would say things when drunk. And then tell the children don’t repeat that. There was no consciousness of wrongdoing, just the sense that we are the losers and the victors are in charge now.”
Stangneth can’t quite explain how her childhood longing to understand sparked the voracious reading that began at sixteen by “falling hopelessly in love” with Goethe and continued with a dissertation on Kant’s concept of radical evil. Somehow it led her to become one of the most erudite, eloquent, and original philosophers writing today. I suspect it is not only a sparse academic job market but her fierce and self-assured independence that made a university position unlikely. The international success of her masterly Eichmann Before Jerusalem made a professorship unnecessary, and she now lives in Hamburg without one. Occasionally she accepts invitations to lecture, wearing flowing swaths of Thai silk. But she spends most of her time thinking about the questions that do not let her go.
Eichmann Before Jerusalem, published in 2011, is a brilliant and impassioned dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s classic Eichmann in Jerusalem. No work of twentieth-century philosophy continues to arouse so much passionate ire.26 Yet unlike other critiques, Stangneth’s had no interest in speculating about Arendt’s alleged Jewish self-hatred or blaming of victims. Through a breathtaking analysis of sources Arendt could not access, Stangneth simply showed that Eichmann’s attempt to play a dull-witted bureaucrat at his trial was a calculated effort to save his skin. This claim is not entirely new. Stangneth proved it, in part, by focusing not on Eichmann himself, but on the people who surrounded and aided him. For his act in Jerusalem should have worked, as it did for many of his comrades. No Nazi since Nuremberg had received more than a few years’ prison term, and even those light sentences were often commuted. Thus, wrote Stangneth, Eichmann’s calculations were entirely rational. How he really felt about the crimes for which he was eventually executed was revealed in a series of documents, created in the 1950s in Argentina, which Stangneth painstakingly studied.
The bulk of these are transcriptions of tapes made in the home of Willem Sassen, a Dutch SS officer who organized meetings with Eichmann every weekend for most of 1957. Eichmann annotated and edited every transcript by hand. The meetings were attended by Nazis who had fled to Perón’s Argentina to escape prosecution and remained committed to most every aspect of Nazi ideology. Chafing in Buenos Aires, they followed German politics closely, and everything they saw raised their hopes of ending exile and returning to power. They knew how many of their former colleagues held high positions in the chancellor’s office, the foreign service, the army, and the courts of the Federal Republic. They also knew how the early Allied efforts at denazification were scorned by the general West German public and quietly abandoned altogether by the Western Allies as the Cold War unfolded. The climate for a rebirth of Nazism, give or take a revision or two, was auspicious. All that stood in the way, they thought, was what they called the Holocaust Lie. Nazis to the core, they considered Jews eternal enemies, and since most of them fought at the front, they knew Jews were killed there. But that was war, after all. Hadn’t countless civilians been killed by Allied bombers from Hamburg to Dresden? The claim that six million Jews were the victims of calculated mass murder was another order entirely, and these men were sure that the claim was a piece of enemy propaganda designed to extort money from the Germans. Who could better counteract that propaganda than the man now living as the manager of a rabbit farm in an unimpressive house in the suburbs who was once the adviser for Jewish affairs? Surely Ricardo Klement, Eichmann’s alias in Argentina, could further their cause by providing a detailed reckoning of just how many Jews had been murdered.
Eichmann’s testimony in Buenos Aires sorely disappointed his listeners, for in addition to confirming the early estimate of six million, the only regret he expressed was about his failure to murder all eleven million Jews of Europe, as had been originally planned. The most fervent hope he expressed was that “millions of Muslims, to whom I have a strong inner connection since I met the grand mufti of Jerusalem” would finish the task.27 His confessions were too much for many of his fellow Nazis. The logic of their beliefs should have led them to Eichmann’s conclusions: the virulent anti-Semitism, unbearable attempts at humor, sentimental nationalism, and paranoid conviction that an all-powerful world Jewry was out to destroy them might have made the total elimination of the Jewish people seem a rational course of action. But even fanatical SS officers like Sassen found Eichmann’s description of the mechanical murder of children hard to stomach. There is no evidence that Eichmann’s testimony caused the group’s members any deep changes of mind or heart, but they had to abandon their hopes of returning to power by refuting the Holocaust Lie after Eichmann exposed it as truth.
The most striking feature of Eichmann Before Jerusalem is not the revelation of Eichmann’s efforts to set out and defend, with disturbingly acute classical references, the philosophical worldview whose conclusion was genocide. That worldview was shared by most of his comrades. As Walter Gruss, head of the Nazis’ Racial and Political Office, put it in 1939: “There can be no possible agreement with international intellectual systems because they are not true and not honest, but simply based on an incredible lie, namely the lie of the equality of human beings.”28 The drive to world domination, they believed, is simply a law of nature. Having neither a state nor an army, the Jews sought domination with intellectual weapons, most prominently the doctrine of internationalism, beginning with the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, continuing through Freemasonry and the French Revolution, and culminating most dangerously in Marxism. The information that Eichmann brandished such views will be of interest to those still concerned with his biography, or his exact place in the hierarchy of the machine whose levers he moved to set gas chambers in motion—though it does not undermine Arendt’s general claim that most of the genocide was enabled by thoughtlessness.
Stangneth’s research revealed an atmosphere in which views like Eichmann’s seemed entirely plausible. Well into the ’60s, West German commitments to democratic order were precarious, and the possibility of a return to a sanitized Nazism could not be ruled out. Courts and universities were staffed with former Nazis, and not simply, as was claimed, because there was no one left with sufficient skill to replace them. “All they had to do was to invite the emigrants to return, instead of systemically making that difficult,” said Stangneth. “Adenauer’s willingness to hire former Nazis sent a message to the millions waiting uncertainly in the new Federal Republic: there’s room for you here too. All you need to do is behave in an orderly fashion and we won’t look closely at your past.” The Adenauer government knew of Eichmann’s whereabouts as early as 1952, but a trial was not in the German government’s interest; his defense could reveal how many of his comrades were filling powerful positions in the new era. Nor was that government alone in its desire to avoid unpleasant revelations. The Vatican put it most clearly: “The leading Nazis of World War II should no longer be prosecuted; now they belong to the active side of the defense of Western civilization against communism, and today it is more necessary than ever to gather together all anticommunist forces.”29 The statement was written in 1960, as Vatican diplomats demanded Eichmann’s return to Argentina. And as Stangneth told me, “Anticommunism is the only aspect of Nazi heritage you can still practice without anyone objecting.”
A decade spent studying those for whom the Nazi cause was not yet lost has made Stangneth particularly vigilant for the traces they left in contemporary Germany. “Perhaps it’s because I have an exceptionally good sense of hearing,” she said. “In a literal sense. Even as a child I was always overhearing things I wasn’t meant to hear.” She’s not convinced that Germans have faced the worst fact about the Nazi period: not the ignorant masses, but the educated elites were the driving forces behind the regime. Of the fifteen officials present at the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was settled, eight had Ph.D.s. “After the war the Nazis were pictured as bloodthirsty aliens, preferably with knives between their teeth. None of the professors wanted to acknowledge that they’d accommodated themselves to the system, and done very nicely thereby.” Because of this, Stangneth believes we have yet to acknowledge the connections between Nazi thinking and contemporary thought. She has researched the continuity between the books taught at Nazi universities and those that are currently assigned.30 Nor does she think this continuity is confined to Germany. “People voted for Hitler as they voted for Putin and Trump, because they didn’t want to give up their own privileges. This isn’t a matter of ignorance. They understand exactly the price of enlightenment: that the equality of humankind means the equality of humankind, and not only after I’ve secured my own comfort. I too must obey moral laws.” Like me, she is appalled at the ways in which progressive-minded German philosophers continued the attack on the Enlightenment that Nazi thinkers began—“the fact that victims of the regime like Adorno and Horkheimer barely escaped Germany in order to spread Nazi anti-Enlightenment thought through the world is too awful to put into words.” There is, she continued, only one single weapon against racism and chauvinism, and that is the critique of reason that shows us our own capacities for understanding along with the recognition of reason’s limits. “People abandoned this most powerful weapon because they let themselves be told that it was the problem. The Nazis knew exactly that the best way to disarm someone is to persuade them to lay down their own weapons by convincing them they are useless.”
While I share her philosophical convictions, I cannot share all her conclusions about continuities between Nazi and contemporary German practices, much as I admire her relentless commitment to watchfulness. Among my German friends, watchfulness is a matter of good taste. Even when reflecting on a single crime, would we trust a man who took pride in the depth of his remorse, the extent of his good behavior in prison, the exemplary nature of his rehabilitation? Good taste prevents good Germans from anything that could possibly be construed as boasting about repentance.
“I don’t understand why Germans were accepted into the world community,” she continued, “except for the fact that the judgment at Nuremberg was also a lesson for the future: we will punish the criminals, but not the people as a whole. We don’t do race war; that’s a German form of craziness. They should have hanged the whole lot at Nuremberg, but the Allies wanted to show that they could make distinctions between degrees of guilt. It was a peace offering to the German people. We weren’t exactly offered an outstretched hand, but it was an open door. Whether the German people have earned that gift is not yet clear. At Nuremberg, Goering said that people would be building monuments to him fifty or sixty years after the trial. We turned Robin Hood into a hero, a man who smashed in travelers’ skulls in order to rob them. Who knows how we’ll see Hitler a hundred years from now? Germans have a great talent for interpretation, and we know how to throw sand in people’s eyes.”
Relativism, she insisted, is not a post-structuralist invention. If you believe there is no truth but the truth of the victor, you can build frameworks to interpret things in just the terms that will appeal to the victors. “That’s how it was done, East and West. We’ve always understood how to give foreigners the feeling that they can explain us to ourselves in a way that leads to the conclusion: man, you’re terrific.”
“That’s my biggest fear in writing this book,” I told her.
“You should be afraid. You don’t want to be embraced to death. And the Germans who will embrace you are people you don’t want at all. The sort who secretly want all this atonement to stop. They’re not even particularly secret about it—”
“Bettina,” I interjected. “May I remind you how things are in other countries?”
“You’re asking about my country. If the soup is too salty, it’s too salty. Doesn’t matter if you can’t get better soup anywhere else.”
I reminded her of the days after the Charleston massacre, which moved many Southern states to take down the Confederate flags the murderer had brandished. “Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist, wrote articles urging people to keep the flag flying, and fly it proud. That would be impossible to do with a swastika in this country.”
“Of course it would be impossible,” she answered. “It would be awful if nothing had changed. We catapulted ourselves out of the world community, and we were rightly put on probation for years.”
“I think you’ve passed probation.”
“I don’t.”
If Stangneth’s conclusion is common enough among non-Jewish Germans who have studied postwar German history, many Jewish Germans see it differently. Like Cilly Kugelmann, recently retired as program director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, who lives in a neighborhood that once was a center for educated German Jews; Albert Einstein lived around the corner. Nowadays in Schöneberg, there’s a memorial to Jewish absence: two artists created an installation listing laws passed against Jews, statute by statute, hanging from the high lampposts that line the streets.
Kugelmann was born in 1947 in Frankfurt to parents who were newly liberated from Auschwitz, where their first child was murdered. Though her father testified at the Auschwitz trial, he never spoke about Auschwitz to her. “Parents have a right not to tell their children how degraded they were,” she said. “Parents want to protect their children—not to show themselves as broken people who weren’t able to do so.” She grew up in what she describes as the ghettoized world of Frankfurt’s survivors, who were too broken, or exhausted, to face the prospect of moving elsewhere. Like most of their children, she moved to Israel on finishing high school; like most of them, she returned to Frankfurt after a few years. There she cofounded the journal Babylon, the first postwar Jewish intellectual journal in Germany, which sparked many to imagine a revival of Jewish culture in a place once committed to rooting it out. “There were four of us,” she said ruefully when I told her how the journal had created excitement in mid-’80s Berlin. Now, she pointed out, there are so many Israelis in Berlin that it may be the place where a young generation of sophisticated secular Israelis can create a new type of Hebrew society. (“Maybe they’ll even become Jewish,” said her lifelong friend Micha Brumlik.) Kugelmann became program director of the new Jewish Museum, which was built with federal funding, Daniel Libeskind’s architectural design, and a great deal of fanfare meant to herald a new era in German-Jewish history. “People who visit rarely have a particular interest in the history of Jews in Germany,” she told me. “They want to see Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.”
Kugelmann’s background might have predestined her to become the sort of mournful soul that often peoples institutions designed to remember a culture, unable to see any sorrow but their own. Instead she filled her role with grace, nerve, and wit. The celebration she prepared for the museum’s tenth anniversary centered around a three-day symposium entitled “Visions of Belonging: Jews, Turks, and other Germans” in which Muslim intellectuals outnumbered Jewish ones, and both groups discussed how to deal with the dramatic changes occurring as Germany reconceives itself as a nation where 20 percent of the population has immigrant roots.
The anticipation surrounding the museum’s opening a decade earlier had been enormous. The capital had only recently moved from Bonn to Berlin, and the fact that the Jewish Museum’s grand opening was the most sought-after invitation in the new Republic was heralded as a sign that Germany had turned a corner. In the weeks leading up to it, I was asked about the dress code by several German women who thought I, as a Jew, must know. It says “fancy dress” on the invitation, but how fancy can I get? How much décolleté? Is glitter appropriate? Accustomed to associate Jewish with tragedy, the ladies were unsure. In the end we all dressed with style and sparkle, Chancellor Schröder opened the ceremonies, and nobody remembered what food was served, for the private opening with the coveted invitations took place on the evening of September 10, 2001. The public opening that had been scheduled for the next day was quickly canceled. “We knew immediately that the world had changed,” said Kugelmann.
Still, her focus is on the change in Germany, which she believes is deep and vital. The 2000 law that separated the right to German citizenship from the possession of German blood was fundamental. The renaissance of Jewish culture in Germany is fundamental. “Germany is one of the safest countries for Jews in the world,” she said. “And that’s thanks to decades of public working-off-the-past. A politician who said something anti-Semitic in public would lose his job. That doesn’t mean there’s no anti-Semitism or racism left; we still have to be vigilant.” But that, she insisted, is an international problem. What matters is the arc that Germany has traced.
More typical of the next generation is Polina Aronson, a sociologist who was born in St. Petersburg in 1980. The majority of Jews now living in Germany come from the former Soviet Union. Both the size of that majority and the nature of its Jewishness are still debated. According to Jewish law, which recognizes only those born to Jewish mothers, about half would be counted. According to Jewish custom, which assumes some knowledge of tradition, even fewer would qualify. But they were Jewish enough to have their Soviet passports stamped on the line where ethnic identity was listed, which was enough to assure them an exit permit before the Soviet Union collapsed, or a visa to Germany thereafter.
“People often ascribed Jewish identities to me,” she said, “both positive and negative. From being smart to being canny. We all know how that goes; you don’t have to name it.”
“No. But you look Jewish,” I said. “If I saw a photo of you, I’d bet you were a young professional in a suburban Ohio synagogue.”
“Of course. But this is something you will never hear in German.”
“Of course not.”
Polina describes herself as a child of the glasnost era. Her grandfather left the shtetl early to become a communist; he worked as a printer. Until she read his diaries, she could not understand her own love for Berlin: “its bleak architecture, its sour humor, its dialect, flat and broad like the Prussian landscape.” For her grandfather, as for her parents, the distinction between Germans and Nazis was clear. Two grandparents survived the siege of Leningrad, which took the lives of some 750,000 others, and survived the battlefields as well: her grandfather as a soldier in the Red Army, her grandmother as a doctor in the field. But they were raised in the tradition of the Communist International, in which Germans had played such a role that it never occurred to them to lump Karl Liebknecht with Heinrich Himmler.
Before she came to Berlin, Polina told me, she had “zero knowledge of Jewish culture.” Changing diapers in the baby corner of her local gym, she was addressed by another mother, who’d heard her speaking Russian to her daughter. As it turned out, their babies were not only born weeks apart, they were also named Adam and Eva. The two mothers became fast friends, and Marianna, a television anchorwoman who was raised in a Russian community in Brooklyn, introduced Polina to basic elements of Jewish tradition.
One Friday evening I was invited to celebrate Shabbat with their families. The door opened to the sweet smell of fresh challah. Polina was baking with the older children, while their fathers, both non-Jewish Germans, tried to keep the younger boys and their Lego pieces in some sort of order. Initially, the two families considered sending the children to a local Jewish kindergarten.
“We thought it would be a Brooklyn-style kindergarten where they make bagels,” said Polina. “Instead, there were Russian women wearing wigs, and little boys with kippot and tzitzit. I had no idea what tzitzit were.” She laughed. Marianna had to explain the tassled undergarments worn by Orthodox men.
Polina enjoyed “the beautiful messiness of their lives” but decided to send her daughter to a secular kindergarten instead. Since kindergarten spots are rare goods in Berlin, Marianna and her husband, Mark, gave the Orthodox kindergarten a try, but they quit because of the dinosaurs.
“Dinosaurs?”
There was a parents’ meeting at which one mother complained that the children were subjected to a book with pictures of dinosaurs. The Torah says nothing about dinosaurs, and the Jewish calendar reckons the world was created in 3761 before the Common Era, whereas dinosaurs, allegedly, are … Mariana and Mark took their son out of kindergarten when they realized they were the only parents who didn’t object to dinosaurs.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“Mostly young families from the former Soviet Union, but some of them come from England as well. Word has spread that Berlin is a good place to be Orthodox.”
Polina likes the ritual of Friday night dinners, though her Saturdays are full; she brings her children to the other side of town, where they attend Russian classes, “an even more important part of their identity.” She hasn’t learned all the prayers, so sometimes she just bakes challah, lights the candles, and says “Shabbat Shalom.” “For me, it’s a big middle finger in the face of Adolf Hitler and company. They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat. I can’t say more.”
“Have you ever run into anti-Semitism here?”
“Never,” Polina said. She has lived in Berlin since 2004. “I ran into other things. I couldn’t tell a Jewish joke for a long time, and there are so many fantastic Jewish jokes.” She told me one I didn’t know, and I had to agree: there’s a certain kind of self-abnegating Jewish humor that frightens good Germans, who find it offensive. And it could be offensive, if told by a German. For Polina, it’s part of the free-flowing Jewish identity she remembers from her grandparents’ home in St. Petersburg.
If she misses dark Jewish humor in Germany, she is warmed by the kindness expressed in the offers of help toward the refugees, which she feels is particularly German. “It’s just something very genuine: the readiness to distinguish between good and bad and act on it.” She believes this is a result of German historical reflection.
When the refugees came, Polina too volunteered her help. She began by cooking at a festival organized to raise support for the new arrivals, which is how she came to offer her spare room to Mustapha, a twenty-five-year-old computer engineer from Aleppo. He’d found a job washing industrial refrigerators, but he was sleeping in a park; his sleeping bag had been lost in the Mediterranean, along with his other possessions. When her husband was traveling on business, she acknowledged a moment of fear: she had, after all, opened her home to a total stranger. “What if he’s shopping in a drugstore for cactus fertilizer to make a bomb?” But she thought of the ways her family had been helped by strangers before and after the war, how they had given help in turn. She thought of the Russian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, who wrote that the instinctive thirst to help our fellow humans—often contrary to all reason—can overcome the wildest hatred.31 So Mustapha lived in her spare room until he found a place of his own.
“How did he react to your being Jewish?”
“He was happy to wear a kippah one Shabbat, but we didn’t really talk about it. He has other things to worry about; his family is still in Aleppo. We did get into an argument about hummus recipes. He wanted to make it with yogurt.”
I asked Polina what other countries can learn from the Germans.
“Relentless self-questioning,” she answered immediately. “Even when we may not be satisfied with the answers.” Self-reflection, she continued, shows respect both for history itself and for the people who lived through it.
Bettina Stangneth remains skeptical. “I’m outraged that since we’ve become aware of the Muslims, we’ve suddenly discovered Christian-Judeo tradition as the foundation of German culture. We use a group that wouldn’t exist today, had it been up to us, to undermine a new enemy that can’t defend itself. That’s part of our great talent for reinterpretation.” She warns against the tones she sometimes hears on television—that guilt business has to end sometime—for she fears that a silent majority is just waiting for the right moment to take off the cloak of repentance. “Instead of being grateful for the second chance the Allies gave us, many Germans still feel they’re the victim of a great injustice. That’s why they love historians like Timothy Snyder, who come from abroad to exonerate them.”
Stangneth’s views are supported by the message of her work on Eichmann. Arendt’s mistake, she argued, didn’t result from her failure to attend the whole trial; no observer did. Nor is it surprising that she was hoodwinked by the demeanor of “a nobody”—in the words of Avner Less, Eichmann’s chief investigator. Stangneth came to know him well, and wrote a book about him too, for everyone who saw Eichmann was hoodwinked by what Arendt would later call his banality. Arendt, Stangneth argued, simply could not grasp the idea that thinking people could consciously do evil, or fail to repent when confronted with the extent of their crimes. Philosophers come by this attitude honestly. The idea that no one willingly and knowingly does evil goes all the way back to Socrates. “We’ve understood that people who grew up in psychologically deforming circumstances will do damage,” Stangneth said. “But all that we’ve understood doesn’t explain what happened: the conscious anti-Enlightenment sentiment from people who were not psychologically damaged, who were in a position to reflect, and nevertheless decided for the worst.” Thinking people too may keep turning on the wheel of their own suffering—even when that suffering can only be seen, by outsiders, as just punishment for abominable crimes.
Stangneth reminded me that many of Heidegger’s notebooks are still unpublished. “Anyone who still could write in ’47 that the Allies were more brutal than the Nazis will hardly say something better in ’61. If you’re that pig-headed, you’re bound to get worse over time. The notebooks that have been published were written before he saw Arendt again. Do we want to know what he wrote about her in his black notebook after the war? Of course we want to know, but can we bear it?”
The inclination to set one’s own suffering über alles isn’t particularly German, nor is it particularly new. Voltaire’s Candide includes a marvelous old woman, missing an eye and half a buttock, who accompanies Cunégonde on her travels. Setting sail for the New World, she proposes a little entertainment: “Just for fun, why not get each passenger to tell you the story of his life, and if there is one single one of them who hasn’t often cursed the day he was born and hasn’t often said to himself that he was the most unfortunate man alive, you can throw me into the sea head first.”32 Competitive victimhood may be as close to a universal law of human nature as we’re ever going to get; it is surely an old and universal sport. Postwar Germany was no less inclined to participate in it than the defeated American South. Though the South’s defeat is older, you can hear the same litany: the loss of their bravest sons, the destruction of their homes, the poverty and hunger that followed—combined with resentment at occupying forces they regarded as generally loutish, who had the gall to insist their suffering was deserved. If Germany could come to shift its focus from the suffering it experienced to the suffering it created, what’s to prevent any other nation from doing the same?
Out of that suffering some will weave a theodicy. All that pain cannot be without meaning. The weavers need not be those who remember the suffering directly. Often it’s the suffering of their ancestors, more imagined than experienced, that drives the search for a framework with which to understand it. The myth of the Lost Cause was created by Southerners idealizing a childhood most could barely remember. And counted from start to finish, the Third Reich lasted only twelve years. Since the good times were over after Stalingrad, there was barely a decade in which memories of new roads and Volkswagens, free vacations on the Baltic, and torches in twilight parades could be mythologized. Germans and Southerners both viewed themselves as guardians of old codes of honor against the mercantile materialism of their enemies, but the number of Germans who truly long for the old days is very small. There’s a group of people who call themselves Reichsbürger—citizens of the empire—and refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Federal Republic, which they view as a construction of the Allies. (As it was, in fact, for almost fifty years. Good thing, too.) Their numbers are small enough—about thirteen thousand—to be kept on the watch list of the German equivalent of the FBI. Anti-immigrant sentiment has made a new right-wing party stronger, but even a conservative German president recently acknowledged that “Islam belongs to Germany.”
I am under no illusion: much of Germany is unhappy about the refugees. The so-called welcome culture that took in a million of them is often the subject of sarcasm and fear, both from those who are educated and privileged and those who are not. The citizens who gave the AfD party 12 percent of the national vote in 2017 were not all poor people from the East, though those are the ones who got the media’s attention. Had I not met them in a street or a salon, I would have encountered them in print. An article about the refugee question was to be published by the leading newsweekly Der Spiegel, and as so often in Germany, they wanted to know what philosophers thought. Asked for a comment, I replied that at a time when people drown every day in the Mediterranean, I was less interested in philosophical discussion about the definition of helpfulness than in practical questions. There are empty villages from Poland to Portugal. Why not give refugees a chance to rebuild them? The viciousness of readers’ reactions was chilling. Didn’t I know the majority of migrants are African, who have no experience overcoming difficulties through hard work? How could I expect them to develop abandoned villages? And speaking of abandoned: the young people have abandoned those villages, but older people remain. How can I propose to let their world be overrun by dominating African hordes?
The author of this email went on to suggest that it was scandalous that the director of an institute named after Einstein should think so poorly. He was clearly unaware that Einstein was a refugee himself, who spent considerable amounts of energy and money helping less privileged refugees escape the Third Reich.
So I know how many sides there are to this story. Racism has hardly disappeared in Germany, as comments like that only begin to show. The only thing of which I am certain is that Germany’s treatment of the refugees has been far better than that of most of its neighbors—ask anyone in Poland or France or Great Britain—and that the German response to the refugees was born as a response to its own history. Even more important is that the initial response came from the ground up. Angela Merkel received both credit and blame for the decision to absorb a million refugees. I won’t make light of what became, for a time, a brave political stand, but the chancellor waited twelve long days before taking it. In those last days of August 2015 something extraordinary took place. Disgusted by a right-wing attack on a refugee shelter, thousands of Germans came out to welcome refugees by the trainload. Sometimes this meant literally standing on station platforms, waving signs of greeting; more often it was a matter of collecting food, clothes, and bedding for the shelters. Thousands more signed up to offer German lessons or play soccer or music with the refugees. The wave of support was truly popular, engulfing hip young artists and staid, settled shopkeepers alike; nearly everyone I met in Berlin wanted to do something. When asked why, some said they just couldn’t stand the thought of the Mediterranean becoming a graveyard. For most, historical references were front and center. Their grandparents had been refugees when East Prussia became Poland after the war; their grandparents had created refugees when they supported the Nazi Party that forced the luckier victims to flee from their homes. Even those who didn’t mention their own grandparents felt bound by a bequest from the past. The attack on a refugee shelter in Heidenau was a pogrom against the Other, the consequences of which every German has been taught to remember. And despite the backlash that gave political power to the AfD, quieter efforts to help refugees integrate continue three years after the official wave of welcome. Among my neighbors, an upper-crust journalist and a young woman financing her studies with cleaning jobs both donate time every week to teach their language to Syrians. Among my acquaintances, a young family and an aging scientist have refugees living in their spare rooms. In his 2019 history of refugees in Germany, Jan Plamper could conclude, “While there is still too much racism in Germany, at the end of the day this is a story of success and progress.”33
Do the sins of the fathers contaminate the children? And if so, for how long?
It’s a question that quietly underlies German discourse, from sociological tomes to tabloids, since the late 1960s. The fear has overshadowed so many German lives that it’s hard to find anyone who’s entirely free of it. This is psychology, not piety. It’s not easy to feel touched by what your great-grandfather did; chances are, you never knew him. It’s another story if his sins continue down another generation or so, and that is indeed the problem. None of us can entirely escape the residues of attitude transmitted from mother to daughter, father to son, unless we are bitterly scrupulous. Even then, those who make an effort to reject those attitudes are likely to retain their traces.
Alexandra Senfft was born in 1961 to a liberal family in Hamburg. Her father was a left-leaning lawyer; her mother suffered from deep depression that often left her unable to care for her children. Trying to understand her mother’s misery long after her early death, Alexandra wrote a poignant book called Silence Hurts. Her thesis: her mother’s mental illness stemmed from her own father’s execution when she was fourteen and the fact that the family never acknowledged his participation in the Holocaust. Hanns Ludin was the Third Reich’s envoy to Slovakia who signed the deportation orders for the Slovak Jews. “He must have had a feeling of guilt,” said a friend of Ludin’s years later—“the guilt that torments every honest Nazi, since he realized what had gone on behind his back as well as in his name … now that he realizes how often he closed his own eyes in order not to look too closely.”34 Alexandra’s mother, Erika, had been Hanns Ludin’s oldest and favorite child, and her memories of early life in occupied Bratislava were warm and happy—playing accordion and theater in the garden of the villa that was stolen from its Jewish owners in order to house the Nazi envoy, his family and servants; good, fresh food; horses to ride on; ski trips in the mountains. The family was evacuated back to Germany as the war drew to a close, but the head of the family handed himself over to the Americans. He was tried in Bratislava and sentenced to death for war crimes. One day in 1947 Erika learned that her father had been executed. It was shortly before Christmas; the packet she’d sent to the prison arrived too late for him to open. Alexandra’s grandmother raised their six children alone. She kept a house full of music and warmth, and though Alexandra never heard her say a good word about the Nazis, she also never said a bad word about her late husband. Alexandra’s search to understand began after her grandmother’s death. The book she produced made her the black sheep of the family. Feeling she had besmirched the glorious image of their mother, none of her aunts in the once close-knit family accept her position.
“But your book is so gentle, and generous,” I told her. “You are trying to understand your grandparents.”
“I have no sympathy for people who cling to Nazism. Anyone who is not in denial, who is not covering up their crimes, who is trying to understand how their family members got into that—we have a basis for a dialogue.”
Her books express that. The success of Silence Hurts may have led to ostracism from her extended family, but it led to something else as well. Letters from readers with similar stories made clear that not only the children of Nazis were struggling with their parents’ crimes; the grandchildren were deeply affected as well. She wrote another book, The Long Shadow of the Perpetrators, that moved through her own experience to include the stories of others.
Alexandra believes that many in her parents’ generation, whose own parents were Nazis, did a good job confronting the Nazi past intellectually and politically. But that was pure reason. What they couldn’t face was emotion. Nobody likes admitting mistakes. What does it take to admit that your parents were world-historically wrong?
Trapped in that circle, children of Nazis took many routes. Some, like Alexandra’s mother, self-destructed. Others cut themselves off from their families entirely and refused to start families of their own. And some, like Richard von Weizsäcker, went on to become president and make seminal speeches acknowledging Germany’s guilt—but always maintained that his own father was innocent. He only took the job as chief assistant to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to prevent other people from doing things that were worse. Weizsäcker was a young law student when he defended his father at Nuremberg. His defense was unsuccessful: his father received a sentence of five years in prison, though, like most Nazis, he was freed after less than a year. The president always regarded the judgment as “unfair and inhuman.”
“Weizsäcker’s speech really was a paradigm shift,” said Alexandra. “But he failed to face up to his own father’s guilt. He turned a perpetrator into a victim—making it easy for Germans to do the same.”
“How do you explain his defense of his father?”
“That’s just the classic ambivalence about confronting the victimizer in a person you love. It’s easy to talk about other people who were Nazis and not so easy to talk about your own people. To be sure, most Nazis refused to talk about the war within their families, but there are alternatives: you can read letters, look at the archives, go into groups or therapy.”
There are a number of groups in Germany in which children, and now grandchildren, of Nazis engage in dialogue with the children or grandchildren of those the Nazis tried to wipe out. They’re not unlike the groups led by the William Winter Institute in Mississippi, or those in which descendants of slave owners work to communicate with descendants of slaves. Alexandra has worked with several such German groups, beginning with one led by the late Israeli psychiatrist Dan Bar-On, who published several books documenting the work. “Dan’s approach was based on the idea that when people tell their stories, you can always find something that is yours too, and then they’re not strangers anymore. I’ve seen it happen with people who initially refused to look at each other.”
I had seen it happen in Mississippi too, but had never been to one of the German groups, and I asked Alexandra to get me invited. In Köln, Peter Pogany-Wendt greeted me warmly. He was born in 1954 in Budapest to parents who survived concentration camps and drew the lesson: better to hide. Wherever they wandered, they were reluctant to identify as Jewish, and for half his life Peter did not do so either. Now he is a psychiatrist who treats many people, particularly those who have lived with one or another trauma of exile. He has also been instrumental in organizing a group called the Working Group for Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust, in which Jews and Germans meet to talk about the pasts they are still working off. “Phenomenologically,” said Peter, “children of perpetrators and children of victims are very similar.” Björn Krondorfer, a German professor of religious studies at Northern Arizona University, is also director of the Martin-Springer Institute, which seeks “global engagement through Holocaust awareness.” Together Peter and Björn prepared a series of exercises for the weekend. They didn’t mind having an outsider in the group of twenty people—as long as I agreed to be a participant, not just an observer.
During one exercise Björn laid out a long strip of paper on the floor; on it were marked a series of dates in German and Jewish history. We were asked to walk through the line, placing ourselves at those points in history with which we identify most. Does 1939 feel more like the beginning of World War II or the date of the first ghettos in Poland? If 1953 is the date of the first treaty between Germany and Israel, do we feel closer to Adenauer or Ben-Gurion? And how are we going to talk about it?
I had agreed to participate, not simply observe, so I was bound to go along with the exercise, but I also felt compelled to speak honestly. I cannot really identify with either side. I am American, not German, and no one in my family was a Holocaust victim. “No one?” say several people, surprised. “Most American Jews had some family members who were affected by the Holocaust.” I do not. Hence I believe that identifying with them would trivialize victims’ experiences. I wasn’t even particularly interested in the Holocaust till I came to Germany at the age of twenty-eight. The rest of the group felt squarely identified with one side or the other, but they accepted my hesitation.
For Alexandra, such groups are important. “You need people around you who are also seeking the truth, because you face a lot of opposition from your own family and your environment for breaching loyalty. You need support from people who have had the same experience.” She views her own work as a bridge between emotional and cognitive wrestling with the past. “That’s the work you have to do if you have Nazi parents or grandparents. People who don’t do the work—who go into denial—pass their unprocessed feelings on to their children, leaving them disoriented. If you’re uneasy about foreigners, your children will feel that too. I discuss these questions clearly with my children, knowing there is still so much xenophobia in this society.”
“Don’t you think that has changed?”
“Yes and no. A lot of people have learned their lessons and have changed fundamentally, but I would say the majority of people have not. Values can change, and sometimes it’s a creeping process. Democracies are young, and you need to work at them.”
Like many others, Alexandra is very worried about the anti-EU, anti-immigrant party that has grown in the past two years. There is still a taboo against openly anti-Semitic statements, but anti-Muslim sentiment is deeply racist, and growing. “It’s okay to be against those Semites,” I said, and we both laughed. Darkly. Weakly. Alexandra predicts that anti-Muslim attitudes will open the gates to more anti-Semitism and racism. She and her husband occasionally speak of leaving the country if the AfD wins an election.
“But for now we’ve decided to stay, to fight for democracy and remind people about our history.”
“Being German in my generation,” says the prizewinning author Carolin Emcke, “means distrusting yourself.” She was born in 1967.
Exact birth dates are important in Germany. If you were born before 1910, your education was not soaked through with Nazi propaganda, and you probably knew enough Jews to inoculate you against the worst of it. If you were born after 1928, your education was in Nazi hands, but you were too young to be drafted into the Wehrmacht, though you might have been a Flakhelfer in the war’s last desperate days. In between, you were likely out of luck. Postwar dates matter just as much. If you were born after 1960, it’s unlikely that your father was in the army, though his school days would have been informed by it, as well as the memory of the bombs that fell in the course of what Goebbels called Total War. Born a little earlier, you are probably torn and frayed. I know no honest man or woman of that generation who wasn’t in some unreachable place broken. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to learn an awful truth about your parents, you can put yourself in German shoes. Whatever else they did or failed to do, your parents remain the people who gave you milk and wiped your ass and made sure you didn’t perish before the age of two, as you probably would have without them. Even finding out they were Nazis cannot change that.
They are called the ’68ers, the generation born in the ’40s that watched the Eichmann and the Auschwitz trials on television and had epiphanies: suddenly the grim-lipped brutal silence of their parents and teachers had a cause. “It mirrored the silence of the victims,” said Cilly Kugelmann. “But it had another ground. The victims were silent from shame; the perpetrators from guilt.” Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, German psychoanalysts whose book The Inability to Mourn was part of the awakening, put the nation on the couch. Germans of the war generation had to radically shift identity within twenty years. The heroes of the Wehrmacht had become the victims and losers of bombs and POW camps, a difficult enough transition; now they had to get used to being perpetrators. From hero to victim to perpetrator: How to wrap one’s head around that? The Mitscherlichs argued that one couldn’t, and the nation was consequently stuck. Unable to mourn the loss of their beloved Führer and the self-image he had given them, they could not mourn the deaths his regime had caused.
Because their parents could not mourn, acknowledge responsibility, or even speak about the war, the next generation was damned to express it. Some say the Federal Republic could not have been rebuilt without that silence; cleaning up the ruins was hard enough without having to reflect on how they got there. No wonder the expressions came out off-key, and often worse. Unable to identify with their parents, they rushed to identify with the victims, who could be, alternately, Jews, Palestinians, or the Vietcong. The Mitscherlichs called it an envy of innocence, and many spoke that envy out loud: how they wished their own parents had been on the other side of the barbed wire. Those who had children themselves often gave them Hebrew names. In the 1980s, you could shout “Jakob!” on most any Berlin playground and watch three little blond heads turn.
They sometimes lurched into righteous self-pity. Even those who weren’t much inclined to theory read Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin, but their reaction to living Jews was awkward at best. “Every time I see you, I think of Dachau,” said one to me as we sat in a rainy Biergarten in 1983. Sometimes they replaced the anti-Semitism of their parents with a philo-Semitism that felt no better, at least to this Jew. Sometimes they simply tweaked the anti-Semitism, whether or not they knew it; many were relieved and some even rejoiced when they learned that Israelis too could be cruel during an occupation.
Looking back on the German ’60s, some now say that the Nazis provided an excuse, and a violent twist, to a rebellion against the parents that would have happened anyway. “Suddenly they had arguments instead of hormones,” said Bettina Stangneth. And yet it was the generation that broke the silence, even if their slogans were, well, not unproblematic. Better to occupy empty houses than foreign countries was a particular favorite of the squatters who rushed to take over Berlin apartments that owners had abandoned after the war.
One result of the tumult the late ’60s unleashed was a flurry of official nods to the need to say something. When the noise died down, some of the noisemakers began the long march through the institutions, creating a spate of institutionalized atonement ceremonies. Often it feels like an inverse Jewish calendar, each year peppered with dates to be marked. Many of the ceremonies were so formulaic that there were days when I thought silence might be preferable, but as time went by, the efforts to break the silence became more reflective and sound.
No one in Germany has devoted more serious thought and time to working-off-the-past than Jan Philipp Reemtsma. He has also spent a considerable amount of his fortune in the process. “I grew up with war and death,” he once wrote. Born in 1952, Jan Philipp falls through many a standard crack. His father was badly wounded in the First World War, so he didn’t have to fight in the second. Nor was he a Nazi, just an opportunist who privately upheld his own code of honor. As soon as the war was over, he located his Jewish partner in New York and paid him the fair share of the business that had been officially Aryanized. “Some of my parents’ best friends really were Jews,” Jan Philipp told me. “We visited each other. Not to say there were no problems.” As a child, he’d asked his mother, “What exactly did Hitler have against the Jews?” His mother made no reply, but asked her Jewish friend what she should tell him. Her Jewish friend gave no advice, but answered that she was glad they were being forced to listen to such questions. Jan Philipp’s mother was indignant: What kind of a friend says that? Except for that occasion, Jan Philipp remembers no anti-Semitic comments in his home, aside from the time his mother told him not to marry a Jew. It would make life difficult for the children to know where they belong.
“I’m not sure that counts as anti-Semitic,” I answered. “My mother said the same thing about marrying a goy: it’s hard on the children.”
Jan Philipp and I had known each other for fifteen years when he surprised me by saying that many people think he is Jewish. They assume that’s the reason he does much of what he does. Once, he was accosted by an old classmate who had read an early essay he wrote. Among other things, the essay discussed the fate of the Marranos, Jews whom the Spanish Inquisition forcibly converted and then observed to see if they were secretly practicing Judaism. Was smoke coming out of the chimney on Shabbat? Jan Philipp wrote that he hoped the Marranos kept their traditions—while hating the Christian community that surrounded them. “Not to be able to do that would be succumbing to victim pathology,” he said. His erstwhile schoolmate saw things differently. Moving close, almost threatening, he asked, “Are you Jewish? If you weren’t Jewish, you wouldn’t write something like that.”
Jan Philipp has a fine, complex mind and a brilliant capacity for irony, but everything else about him says northern Europe, from his pale blond frame to his dignified efforts to unstiffen in the company of people he likes. He is the only German of my generation with whom I feel completely at ease joking about matters Jewish. With him I never have to fear any reaction that might come out philo- or anti-Semitic.
“And besides”—I laughed—“it’s not exactly a secret…”
“I know. My father had a virtual monopoly on cigarette production during the Third Reich. How exactly could I be Jewish?”
At a time when a smoke was the only comfort eighteen million men on the front had at hand, a cigarette manufacturer could make a fortune. Though he never joined the Nazi Party, the elder Reemtsma had good connections to Goering. Both had been pilots in the last war and could speak comrade-to-comrade in the next one. Goering exacted a price for his preferential treatment of the firm. “The Herr Reichsmarschall would like to have a Rembrandt. The Herr Reichsmarschall would be very pleased if Herr Reemtsma would donate five million for a new theater.” It was more blackmail on Goering’s part than bribery on Reemtsma’s, and with former Jewish colleagues returning from emigration to testify in his favor, the elder Reemtsma was acquitted of the corruption charges filed against him after the war.
Jan Philipp was only seven when his father died, too young to ask about the war years, but he opened his archives to independent historians who researched the family. He grew up in a home filled with the spirit of Calvinism; his father’s middle name was Fürchtegott, “Fear God.” Photos of his dead half brothers lined the hallway. Since all three died young—two of them on the front—Jan Philipp inherited the bulk of the war-profiteering fortune. He studied literature, philosophy, and sociology, and when he came of age, he sold his share in the cigarette firm. He has spent much of his life figuring out the honorable thing to do with the proceeds.
Some things are relatively easy to figure. He hired an art historian to examine whether any of his paintings had been stolen or bought at cut-rate prices from Jews seeking to flee. “I don’t want stolen art on my walls,” he said. “If I’d been particularly attached to something, I would have offered the heirs a fair price for it, but stolen art?” He frowned with disgust. Starting in the ’50s, the Federal Republic paid reparations to Jewish concentration camp survivors, but the question of compensating non-Jewish slave laborers was not settled until the twenty-first century. “There was a legend in the family that the firm didn’t use slave labor, but I hired a historian to find out. The research went all the way to the Crimea. Had the Nazis won the war, I would have grown up on a tobacco plantation in the Ukraine, surrounded by men in striped uniforms.” He showed the research to a cousin and suggested that they contribute more than the commission for compensation required. “We carry this name. And it’s not as if a contribution would leave anyone poor.” The cousins wanted no part of it. Jan Philipp gave to this cause as he’s given to many others: forgotten authors whose work he wants to preserve, or their widows, Jewish institutions in Israel and Germany. He founded and funded the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which studies violence and how to prevent it. He has written more than twenty books on subjects ranging from Nazi crimes to Muhammad Ali. Still, in Germany he is most famous for two things that took place in the ’90s. He was kidnapped, terrorized, and held until his wife was able to deliver the largest ransom ever paid in the nation, and he was set free, a changed man. The media circus surrounding the kidnapping was second only to that which surrounded the other event: the Wehrmacht Exhibit.
Envy may forgive either wealth or intelligence, but rarely both together. As one of the smartest as well as the richest men in Germany, Jan Philipp attracts a mixture of sycophancy and resentment. Good taste preserves him from complaining, but his is not an easy life. Since the kidnapping, private bodyguards accompany him when he makes a public appearance, sweeping the rooms before he enters. Until he retired from the institute he founded, every package sent there was scanned for explosives. The Wehrmacht Exhibit had been firebombed in Saarbrücken, after all.
Neither Jan Philipp nor his staff were prepared for the reaction the exhibit provoked. The Wehrmacht had been deliberately exempted from indictment at Nuremberg. This was partly meant, we saw, as a lesson for the future; the Allies wanted to suggest that racial war was a German problem, and unlike the Germans, they were not going to punish entire peoples. The German army was as heterogeneous as any other army; the only way to get out of service was to do something even worse than serving in it, such as working in a concentration camp. The judgment at Nuremberg indicted the SS, which could be joined only voluntarily, but not the Wehrmacht, for which millions were drafted. (Although it was well aware that the army committed war crimes, the tribunal maintained that this was a legal but not a moral declaration of innocence.) There was also a less enlightened motive for leaving the Wehrmacht out of the list of criminal organizations: most crimes of the Wehrmacht took place on the Eastern Front, and years of propaganda had contributed to the idea that Slavs were Untermenschen. At the least, a dead Pole was not as appalling as a dead Frenchman.
Although the Wehrmacht was not on trial at Nuremberg, in the intervening decades historians formed a consensus. The murders committed by the Wehrmacht were not the fault of a few bad apples; they were widespread, systematic, and crucial to the war effort. Nor did the murder of massive numbers of civilians take place in a normative void. There were laws of war, particularly concerning treatment of civilians and prisoners, and every officer knew it. Deliberate destruction of those norms was part of the avalanche of destruction that took place on the Eastern Front. Moreover, there was room for individual action. There were all kinds of ways to respond to orders, from outright resistance to refusal to obey to voluntarily causing more violence than commanded. Soldiers are not simply cogs in machines, even in the heat of war.
The exhibit sought to do no more than display those widely accepted truths by focusing on three cases of war crimes in Serbia, Poland, and Belorussia. The public reaction, however, revealed the depth of the gulf between professional historians and public memory. Many visitors came carrying small photos of their fathers or grandfathers to compare with the photographs in the exhibit. They were actively looking for truth about matters long avoided in their families—in some cases because the soldiers in question never returned from the war. Those whose relatives did not appear in the photos of ordinary men tormenting civilians expressed relief. Those who found the evidence they’d feared often expressed gratitude for the clarity that evidence brought: now they understood why Papa or Uncle Franz returned from the war a different man. Others protested vehemently against the dishonoring of their dead. Children and grandchildren of Wehrmacht veterans were not the only ones to attend the exhibit. Many veterans came themselves, and their reactions were equally divided. Some bitterly complained that the exhibit slandered their actions and those of their fallen comrades; others said quietly, “That’s just how it was.” As it became clear that the exhibit unleashed a torrent of private emotion, the organizers sought ways for visitors to express it, and the responses to the exhibit became themselves an object of study.
They revealed the variety of ways human beings deflect guilt. There’s the reference to force majeure—the Bolshevik menace, as well as the fear of punishment if orders were not followed. There’s the insistence on one’s own victimhood—the soldiers’ suffering on the Eastern Front, the bombing of their cities at home—as well as other nations’ war crimes. One critic argued that “the execution of hostages was also horrible for many soldiers commanded to do it. Allied bombers were spared such scenes; they caused a thousandfold miserable deaths in cellars they never had to see.” There was the appeal to the private decency of the soldiers now reviled as murderers, as well as the invocation of patriotism: the wish that Germany, like other normal nations, would honor those who defended their country.
The popular protests were mirrored by the media, which eventually found a Polish historian researching crimes committed by the Soviet Union during the partition of Poland. Though the claims that the exhibit had falsified photos were laid to rest, the historian found several that were improperly identified. In particular, one photo showed Polish citizens who were murdered by the Soviet Army; the incoming Nazis had blamed the Jews for the murder in order to incite a local pogrom. The historian alleged that the corpses were represented as if they were murdered Jews rather than Poles. Shortly before the exhibit was set to travel to New York, Jan Philipp decided to close it until an independent commission of international historians could review the entire exhibit to ensure that every claim stood up to scrutiny.
After confirming that no historical exhibit has ever been so thoroughly scrutinized, the commission’s report bemoaned the fact that historians pay too little attention to the difficulties of reliably identifying photographs. Nevertheless, in the sort of painful detail that once made Germany the birthplace of those who sought to make history an exact science, the commission argued that
Photo 69/1 shows how a man in a light coat threatens a Red Army soldier cowering on the ground. The photo also shows coffins marked with crosses, and corpses covered with cloth. The objection that several of the soldiers in the picture were holding handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths to protect against the stench of the decaying corpses at their feet is not proof. The gesture need not mean that the smell of putrefaction comes from the corpses that are visible in the photo. It could just as well come from the corpses that have been exhumed on another side of the courtyard which is not visible in the photo.35
And so on. In painful detail.
After a year’s worth of research, the commission concluded that fewer than twenty of 1,433 photos shown in the exhibit should be removed because the crimes they depicted were likely committed by Finns, Hungarians, or the Soviet secret police. The commission also proposed a few changes that would make the exhibit clearer. Above all, however, they concluded that the major claims of the exhibit were true: with three million dead Soviet prisoners of war, countless reprisals against the civilian population—one hundred hostages shot for every Wehrmacht soldier killed, fifty for every one wounded, and the murder of Belorussian peasants shot searching for food—the war on the Eastern Front was a war against the entire population. The revised exhibit was twice as large, and it opened in 2001 to unmistakable acclaim. A few hundred neo-Nazis demonstrated against it, but this time the judgment of the media was clear. The second exhibit proved beyond doubt that the Wehrmacht as a whole was a criminal organization, whatever individual soldiers may have decided or done. “The Wehrmacht exhibit was the first time that memories of the war and memories of the Holocaust were fused,” said Aleida Assmann, the author of seminal works on German memory culture.
Jan Philipp himself continued to be attacked—though rarely to his face—as a nest fouler, someone who washes dirty laundry in public. Race traitor is not an acceptable term of abuse in Germany, but that’s what they mean. His own infinitely complicated relationship to the Wehrmacht may be revealed by something he barely mentioned in public. During the thirty-three days he spent chained in a cellar, not knowing if he’d survive the kidnapping, he realized that he did not want his dead body to be left in a wood. He would rather it be placed somewhere where visitors could come, if they chose. Perhaps lay a flower. Or simply pause and think. The realization led him to find out more about a half brother he’d never known, Uwe Reemtsma, an officer who took part in the occupation of Denmark and the invasion of the Ukraine. He was shot on a street in Dubno while attacking the Soviet army barracks, and he died the same night, just twenty years old. The Organization for the Care of German War Graves recently found his grave in Ukraine. On hearing this, Jan Philipp had his bones brought back to Hamburg to lie with the rest of the family.
I asked him about the remnants of Lost Cause ideology in Germany.
“There were no veterans’ clubs, as there were in Austria. Vienna was the first place where the Wehrmacht exhibit was really attacked. In Germany, veterans might talk at their local pubs, but they were never organized. Perhaps they feared the Allies would not have accepted it, but after Nuremberg it was clear what sort of gang was sitting in the dock. Brecht’s Arturo Ui described it pretty well.”
At the time, however, people who were later reckoned to the progressive forces in Germany saw Nuremberg as a case of victors’ justice. In 1947, Gustav Heinemann, who would later be president of Germany, argued that the trials had the opposite effect of what was intended: “Instead of isolating those who had been responsible for the Third Reich, a new German solidarity was created against the Allies which can only be adequately termed as ‘renazification.’” Even Marion Countess Dönhoff, the much-admired founder of Die Zeit, was, Jan Philipp told me, “an unbelievably dishonest person. She always flirted with the claim that she’d been close to Stauffenberg’s resistance, and at the same time said she’d never heard of Auschwitz. How does someone maintain both?” Still, he argued, the Nuremberg Trials had a subcutaneous effect on the population. “At the very least, nobody ever came close to fulfilling Goering’s prophecy: in fifty years you’ll be building monuments to us.”
There were plenty of other subcutaneous influences, though few reached the surface. Group 47 was a group of young writers who came together in 1947 with the goal of renewing German literature after the war. It included such well-known figures as Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Handke, Paul Celan, and many others. “A very difficult story,” said Jan Philipp, whose doctoral degree is in literature. “Celan had terrible experiences there. Plenty of them were hostile to the émigrés and proud of having been Wehrmacht soldiers. Not all of them, but the majority.”
Then there was Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung, a book Alexander Mitscherlich wrote about the crimes of Nazi doctors after he observed their trials in 1946. The German Medical Association bought all twenty-five thousand copies of the book and destroyed them in the hopes of preventing information about the medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners from reaching a wide audience. “Mitscherlich said: there were too many,” Jan Philipp told me. “There are not as many perverse sadists in the population as there were doctors without scruples.” Though the book was revised and republished years later, Mitscherlich never again held a position at a medical school, though he later became a professor of psychology and philosophy at Frankfurt.
One by one, however, most every facet of the Nazi regime was investigated, usually by the professional heirs of those who concealed their own or their colleagues’ transgressions. After the doctors, the judges. The banks, the Foreign Office, the Max Planck Institute. Now that it has become ordinary, or anyway expected, I’ve heard young historians complain about the opportunism of some of their colleagues. In a tight academic job market, the offer of a three-year contract to investigate anything, be it old Nazis or butterflies, is hard to refuse. Nor are the motives behind opening up a new facet for investigation always admirable. “The question of stolen art was on the table in ’45,” Jan Philipp explained. “There were certainly enough lawyers who tried to get stolen art restored to the emigrants, but there was no legal basis for doing so. It was only after the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany wanted to retrieve its stolen art in Russia that anyone began to address the problem of art stolen from the emigrants.”
I asked him what mistakes were made in the working-off process that took so many decades. He paused for a long moment. “I don’t think it could have happened earlier,” he said. “Look at Adorno’s Group Experiment. He concluded that they were psychologically overwhelmed. Between the bombs and the losses in the families, they were so focused on the horror as a whole, they could no longer distinguish between guilt and misery. Fortunately, the occupation was long.” He also believes that postwar prosperity played a role. “Not because I believe that unemployment led to Hitler. We all know how many wealthy people supported him. But the relatively quick prosperity after the war meant that no one could complain that the Allies left us beggars. Without that cushion, the working off would have come even later. It came late enough.”
Still, it came, and it stayed, and the results seem to be solid. According to all the indices of all the pollsters, Germans are less open to radical-right views than citizens of England or France. “I cannot say it happened because of one single factor,” Jan Philipp added. “I can only say that several things came together, as they usually do in life. There is rarely one cause for anything.”
This is true. He declined to name one experience that led him to devote so much of his life to working off the German past. He was too young to watch the Eichmann trial or be part of the ’68 rebellions. “Something is missing if you haven’t seen Auschwitz,” he allowed. “There are things you cannot prepare for, no matter how much you’ve read about them. The enormous cabinets full of packed suitcases; people brought soap and shoe polish, thinking they would have a use for them. You can’t prepare yourself for the moment you see that. The other thing that shocked me was the barbed wire, which is not particularly massive. When you’re inside, you can’t get out, but from the outside you could push it over with a tractor. It never occurred to them that anyone would try. That’s the first impression: the self-assuredness of those people. As I stood before the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign, I had a moment of realization—as if a part of me had never entirely believed it at all.”
Yet he has spent most of his life working to understand it—without being crushed by it. His masterpiece, Trust and Violence, begins with the question he thinks is specious: How could perfectly ordinary people become so violent as the Nazis? The question is wrong, he wrote, because it happens all the time. Ordinary people create violence because there aren’t enough sadists to go around. The better question is this one: How can we trust modernity when it led to Auschwitz?
Jan Philipp believes that our ability to ask that question is itself a sign of progress, for only in modernity is violence regarded as something abnormal. Through the Thirty Years’ War the culture was drunk with violence, often understood as entertainment. The Romans created the Coliseum, their largest standing monument, as a place to watch murder the way we watch football. Christianity created Hell, where violence was eternal. Our assumption that violence should be contained, our hope that it should be eliminated are entirely new. That assumption and that hope have been the basis for reducing violent practices, from human sacrifice to torture. And our capacity for self-criticism in light of our failures to reduce them further is itself a sign of the very progress in modernity that is called into question. We still have violence, and abuses of power, but the fact that we can call the perpetrators to reckoning is a great achievement of world history.
In fact, Trust and Violence argued, it is trust, not violence, that is the basis of society. This is true even in dictatorial regimes. No tyrant can depend on violence entirely, for he’ll have to sleep after thirty-six hours, at the latest—and he’ll have to trust someone in order to do so. We cannot not trust. And with that trust we can, as a society, refuse to accept violence. “When the first refugee asylum was attacked, everyone worried that the violence would continue. But there were large demonstrations of people who said we do not accept this. That made a difference.”
The attack on that asylum was not the last one, but there have not been as many as was feared. You may say even one is too many, but Jan Philipp takes a wider perspective: “Most of the soldiers went along with the My Lai massacre. They’d all heard the same propaganda: the village is riddled with Vietcong, women and children included. Some of them went crazy shooting them down—but one threatened to shoot his comrades if they did not stop. It took a long time, but later he was decorated for it.”
Jan Philipp Reemtsma walks a very fine line. He knows how often postwar Germans have pointed to other nations’ violence in order to excuse their own. Nothing could be further from his intention. Intentions aside, the years he has spent confronting German crimes allows him to explore the international history of violence without violating Todorov’s principle. He could not possibly say We made moral decisions where others did not. Yet Trust and Violence ends with a question about self-assurance: Who are you to tell us anything about morals? Jan Philipp believes there’s just one answer: I am not one of the murderers.36 It’s an answer that resonates with the most important passage of Eichmann in Jerusalem:
During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question—how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all the countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.… For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.37