Prologue

Germany …

A beautiful country, from the clean efficient factories in the north widely spaced around such cities rebuilt from the war as Dusseldorf with its famed exhibition hall and its Konigsallee all chrome and glass surrounding the lovely canal; and Koln with its impressive cathedral and its pleasant parks and fine restaurants and newly cobbled squares; all along the lovely Rhine with its neatly painted barges plowing their way downstream to Amsterdam and the Waddensee, past the Lorelei and the citadel-topped rocky crags and the quaint chalet-type houses at riverside; Heidelberg with its towering castle ruins on one side and its Philosopher’s Walk halfway up the hill on the other and the wide gleaming Neckar in between and the little shops and tiny bierstubes scattered about the University; and Munich with its wide avenues and stately buildings and the Englandischer Garten and the Bogenhausen with the swift Isar cutting through between; and to the south of the country, along the Austrian border, the wooded mountain slopes abundant with pine and beech and spruce; and all throughout the country the lakes and streams scattered about, sewing the rich land together with glistening blue threads.

A truly beautiful country …

And a people who are united though they deny it. They are united despite the wide variety of country and city, of sectional interests, of political differences, of diverse scenery or regional accent or intellectual level or financial achievement; united by a past they cannot escape. It is a unity beyond the work ethic for which they are so justly famous; it is the unity of guilt. It is a feeling of guilt so strong as to demonstrate itself at times in terror; a guilt so violently denied as to prove the truth of its existence. But it is not, as many believe, the guilt for the excesses of the Third Reich. It is the guilt of having lost a war and a winnable war at that.

Few Jews can enter Germany without feeling uncomfortable by the national aura of blameless guilt; they are the destroyed victor embarrassed before the guilt of the rich and powerful vanquished. But the lovely flowers in the beautiful gardens cannot overcome the stench of the death camps thirty years after; the newly laid mortar cannot hide the crumbling souls who still stare out with frightened eyes through the electrified fences that were torn down so long ago.

It is a great burden not feeling guilty in Germany.