In the summer of 1985, I was offered an astonishing opportunity by the famous German magazine Stern. I was asked to take a leisurely tour of Germany (all expenses paid), keep my eyes and ears open, and then write an essay on my impressions. The same opportunity was offered to ten or so other writers, including Anthony Burgess and Alberto Moravia. We did not meet, made our tours at different times, and, of course, wrote about entirely different aspects of German culture. My essay appeared in Stern in October 1985. This is the first appearance of the essay in its original English.
The great German physicist Werner Heisenberg remarked that nature does not reveal itself as it is but only through the questions we put to it. If this is true of our encounters with nature, surely it is even more true of our encounters with a nation. And truer still when the person asking questions of the German nation is a foreigner who, as a child, trembled at the mere sound of the German language, who was nurtured to feel about Germany as Luther did of the papacy: that it is an abomination in the sight of the Lord. But not an unqualified abomination. As hard as it tried, my education could not conceal that Germany had produced the world’s most beautiful music, its most rigorous science, some of its deepest philosophy, and its tenderest and most penetrating literature. Thus, even as the Nazis were organizing their answer to the Jewish Question, there vaguely formed in my child-mind what I came to call the Question of German Schizophrenia. On the one hand, about half of the heritage of Western humanism and learning is of German origin. On the other, there is an ancient, mystical German impulse to barbarism that has cost world civilization dearly and that found its most recent and hideous expression in Auschwitz, the madmen who invented it, and the people who nourished them. Is this not a form of cultural schizophrenia? Could this be what the great Goethe meant when he said, “I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which are so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality”? Has anyone remarked on the fact that the three men who gave Germany its national voice in language and religion (Luther), in music (Wagner), and in philosophy (Nietzsche) were close to being clinically schizophrenic? Is there any other culture with so many geniuses whose humane creativity was clouded over by weird and dark impulses? (I include here Frederick the Great, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Marx, among others.) Is it merely an accident of history that Germany is now split into two halves, or is this a precise and inevitable metaphor of German consciousness?
Of course, when I was a child, I did not have the words to put my German Question clearly. But now it is different. I came to Germany prepared. My hope was to make Germany reveal itself (or to make it reveal myself) by such questions as the following: Is German cultural schizophrenia my personal delusion? If not, is it a feature of the German character? If it is, how does it show itself in everyday life? Does it make Germans an uncommonly dangerous people? Or uncommonly creative? Or both?
Well, it is easy enough to ask such questions. But to know where and how to find the answers is another matter. As it turned out (and so often does when one undertakes a journey of discovery), I did not exactly find the answers to the questions I began with but, instead, found an answer of extreme importance to a question absent from my agenda.
My odyssey began in Munich, took me to Frankfurt, and, with several stops in between, ended in Hamburg. In Munich, I witnessed an extraordinary moment which, I thought, clearly exemplified the kind of character discontinuity I was looking for. I had the good fortune to participate in a conference of educators and businessmen who were concerned with the impact of technology on German culture. Before the speeches began, the participants exchanged amiable greetings in the hallway. There were animated conversations, much good humor, stimulating queries; in short, one saw intelligent people expressing their enthusiasm for their subject and for one another. And then they assembled for the speeches, of which there were eight, each a half-hour long. As the participants crossed the threshold of the auditorium where the speeches were to be given, their demeanor was radically transformed. They seemed to leave their personalities in the hallway as one might leave one’s coat and hat. Of course, to some extent this is inevitable whenever individuals become a group. But something was different here. The faces of the audience became impassive and their bodies rigid, and that is the condition in which they remained as the speakers talked on. No time was allotted for questions, and one felt that, in any case, none would be asked. No one left the auditorium for any reason. Is it possible, I wondered, that Germans can exercise such control over their bladders that no one needs to use the bathroom in four hours? Or can exercise such control over their patience that boredom does not drive them out of the room? Does no one want a cigarette or need to make a telephone call? Does no one feel it necessary to express displeasure or disagreement with a scowl or a sneer? To an American, the scene was astonishing, all the more so because no one else seemed aware of anything unusual. Is this the legendary German obedience and reverence for formality of which one has always heard so much? Had I come face to face with the essence of German character, and so soon?
The answer, as it turned out, was “No.” I did not realize it then, but that afternoon in an auditorium in Munich was the last time the question of German character seemed relevant. As I moved through Germany talking to everyone who would talk to me, including TMOS (The Man On the Street), the question of “character” began to recede. At the end, it had disappeared altogether, to be replaced by a question about the German “situation.” Gradually, I began to take my “schizophrenia” metaphor more seriously, for in clinical terms a split personality is not a matter of a character deficiency but a response to one’s inability to resolve an intolerably paradoxical situation. I soon realized that if I were to find evidence of cultural schizophrenia, I would have to find it in situation, not character.
The day following the Munich conference, I began to see that more clearly. I visited (if that is the word) Dachau, where an aunt and uncle of mine had perished. While there, I was struck by the thought that, in itself, the Dachau Memorial is an example of an intolerable paradox. It tries to speak of the unspeakable, and what results is a sickly inhuman wail. I heard a guide tell a group of foreign high-school students that Germans knew nothing of what had happened in Dachau. He insisted that his parents had learned of the camp from a Manchester Guardian newspaper clipping sent to them after the war by relatives in England. I was stunned by his absurd delusion of innocence. But what did I expect him to say? That everyone knew? That Germany was, in fact, populated by a legion of lunatics? I wondered what I might say were I in his place. I wondered, too, what sort of memorial I would have designed had I been a “good” German and had been asked to do so. Somehow, I felt it would not be this. The place is good-looking, neat, clean, and far from terrifying. A quiet stream runs through part of it. The barracks are gone. The death buildings are approached through a cool and verdant arbor. This is all hideously wrong, I thought. But why? What did I expect? Bones in the courtyard? Electronically produced screams from well-placed stereo speakers? It is hard to say, and the question still haunts me. I left Dachau feeling only that here is history hiding from itself. It is a situation that has no solution.
Later that day, I had lunch with three young Germans, one of whom was a woman in her late twenties. I mentioned that I had been to Dachau, which prompted the young woman to embark on a sincere lament over man’s inhumanity to man. She spoke of the oppression of the Irish by the English, and the ways in which American colonists conquered the Indians. She also cited the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, and when it became clear that her course was fixed on taking me all the way back to Genghis Khan, I interrupted. I told her that my sensitivity to man’s inhumanity to man needed no improvement. But she seemed intent on finishing her discourse, which she did ten minutes later by remarking that starvation and despair will always produce horrors. I answered: “What happened in Dachau requires a different explanation from the other examples you give.” There was a pause, after which she began to cry; softly at first, then more energetically. I filled the room with apologies. “This was not the time or place for such a challenge,” I said. “Besides, you were born in 1959. What does Dachau have to do with you?” “You underestimate us,” she replied. “It has everything to do with us. And you were right to say what you did. We Germans do not look our past in the eye. It will make us crazy someday.”
Two days later, I was informed by an editor of a computer magazine about the writings of Alexander Mitschelich, of which I had known nothing. She advised that I read him carefully on the subject of “grief work,” and I have done so. He argues that a culture, like a person, must endure a period of grief when there is a tragic loss. Failure to do so may lead to disorientation, self-hate, or even violence. My weeping friend meant to say that Germany has not yet done its grief work, and her elaborate review of man’s inhumanities was a typical strategy of avoidance.
Mitschelich’s name came up several times in my German travels, especially in conversations with professors, psychiatrists, sociologists, and journalists. But two other names were spoken (or implied) more often, much more often. As it turned out, together they provided me with a clearer understanding of the German situation, and why it is this situation and not the German character that is both fascinating and extremely dangerous.
The two names I am referring to are names of ideas. One of them is “America,” and the other might be called “an unusable past.” Although they were expressed in various ways during my conversations with intellectuals, these two ideas presented themselves in the clearest possible form on a street corner in Hamburg. A woman who represented herself as speaking for the Schiller Institute, and who was obviously a political propagandist, tried hard to convince me and others strolling in the street that West Germany must support “Star Wars” and other American military projects in order to “strengthen the West against the Russians, who are bent on European domination.” A youth of about fifteen years of age came by and joined the conversation. He identified himself as an émigré from Russia, presently studying in Paris. Though he had given up his Russian passport for a French one, he denounced the woman’s anti-Russian propaganda and offered some of his own. The Russians, he said, were not the problem. The Americans and their warlike imperialism were the true enemies of peace. I listened halfheartedly, which is the most one ought ever to do when confronted with ideologues. An important thought crossed my mind: I would be much better off partaking of some delicious Hamburg food than enduring this.
And then I observed an intense, ruddy-faced, sixty-year-old man about to join the conversation. It was not hard to sense his anger rising as first the pro-American propaganda was expressed and then the pro-Russian. When his face was nearing the color of a fresh matjes herring, he burst in with what may be called the “pro-German” case. The Russians, he said, are worse than Hitler, but the Americans are not very much better. They are vulgar and grasping, and have no sense of history. The Russians want to take Germany over but the Americans in fact have done so. A pox on both their houses. When I asked him to say exactly what the pro-German position implied, he was vague and became confused. He could provide no vision of Germany’s future—not its political, cultural, or social future. What he called being “pro-German” was devoid of substance: his position was a name that referred to nothing. He began to sputter and wave his arms in a gesture of extreme frustration. And at this point, the question of the nature of Germany’s present situation became clear to me. Everything I had been told and had seen came into sharp focus. Is there German schizophrenia? Yes, I concluded. And I felt I understood why. But—let me be explicit on this point—I did not know anything about the historical roots of my German Question. My journey did not tell me much about why Germany has had two faces for four hundred years, why Goethe and Goebbels could be produced by the same people. This I did not understand, do not, and perhaps never will. But I grasped what the affliction is now, in West Germany, and why it is dangerous.
West Germany is, in fact, the newest country in the Western world. It began in 1946, two years, ironically, before the establishment of the State of Israel. But unlike Israel, West Germany is devoid of a usable past. It is not just a new country, but a historically barren one. Germany’s great cathedrals, universities, music, and literature are merely artifacts, objects fit for archeologists to study. They are of no use to modern-day Germans. For to use them, to refer to them, to revere them requires that one ask, What did they lead to? What spiritual inspiration did they give? What lessons did they teach? And the answers are devastating, for they led, in this century, to a twice-shattered culture that produced people who derived aesthetic pleasure from both Bach and Buchenwald. Germans know this better than anyone else. It is not, in the end, a question of hiding one’s past from oneself or even of failing to do one’s grief work. The Germans know their past—all of it—and have silently and reasonably concluded that it cannot be used as a guide to the future. Not now. Perhaps not for a century.
Thus, Germany is terrified of itself. Who would not be who cannot trust anything one has created? A journalist in Frankfurt told me that the most powerful carrier of the past, the German language itself, has become suspect. The word “Israeli” has replaced the word “Jew.” “Volkdom” and “Aryan,” even “Fatherland,” can no longer be spoken seriously. Not only is much of the style and vocabulary of the Third Reich too frightening to be used in serious public discourse, even the traditional style of German abstruse thought is considered suspect.
A teacher of teachers from the University of Giessen told me that traditional German “humanistic” education is in disfavor. And when I asked a sociologist to comment on this, he said, “After all, Goebbels had a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg. Where does that kind of education lead?”
At a sermon at St. Katherina’s Church in Frankfurt, I was astonished to hear a minister say that after Auschwitz, Christians were in no position to instruct Jews or indeed anyone else on how to interpret the Bible. Perhaps he was simply doing some grief work, but there was the distinct implication in his remarks that the religion that has sustained German culture for centuries is itself under suspicion.
A psychiatrist in Frankfurt told me that in his work with German patients the most common form of mental illness is “delusions of grandeur,” but, significantly, very few believe they are Hitler or Kaiser Wilhelm or Frederick the Great or, indeed, any German at all. What should one make of this? In France, insane asylums have no shortage of Napoleons; in Britain, Henry the Eighths and Churchills can be found ruling the realm of the mad; and in America, our insane specialize in Jesus Christ (who we Americans tend to believe spoke English fluently and would have been an American if given half the chance). Apparently even the crazy in Germany find the past unusable.
But it is not the unusability of its past alone that creates a schizophrenic situation in Germany. A pathological paradox needs two unsupportable conditions. And America provides the second. To put it plainly, having no past, Germany has tried to provide itself with a future by adopting America’s present. It is not important that West Germany was forced to do so after the war, that it was given no choice. Whatever the original conditions were, it is clear that Germany continues to be, and, out of desperation, wishes to be, conscious of itself only through the reflection of American culture.
I do not refer here to the American soldiers who are now as much a part of the German landscape as the Black Forest (and of the two, considering the extent of air pollution, are likely to remain longer). Or to the American air bases and cruise missiles. These are merely the artifacts of military alliance. I am referring to the living symbols of spiritual dependence, the massive intrusion of the American language and American films, fashions, food, music, style, iconography, design, credit cards, products, television, advertising. These have been swallowed whole as the antidote to a culture bereft of a trustworthy identity of its own. To paraphrase the legendary Viennese social critic Karl Kraus, this is the disease for which it claims to be the cure. For though it is intolerable for Germany to exist without guidelines from its own history, it is also intolerable for Germany to become Omaha, Nebraska. And the evidence for this is everywhere—if one listens with a “third ear.”
A young taxi driver in Munich who is praised for his knowledge of English remarks that he learned much of it listening to American rock bands. “You can’t do rock in the German language,” he says. “So it’s English or nothing.” Though it is clear he cannot do without rock, he seems resentful and confused.
A psychiatrist in Karlsruhe says that German psychiatry takes all of its categories of mental illness from American psychiatry. “What we do is mostly what they do,” he says. He adds that he does not know why this is so and insists that such a situation is unacceptable.
A publisher in Frankfurt complains that many American books are translated into German; few German books are translated into English. “We are more interested in what the Americans think than they are in what we think.” He adds: “Are they interested in what anybody thinks?”
In Munich, a journalist who has lived and worked for many years in Japan discourses on what he calls “the McDonald’s culture.” “The Japanese,” he says, “can assimilate America. They can buy an American hamburger, take it home, and adapt it to their own traditions. They are a practical, malleable people. We cannot do this. With us, it must be one thing or another. If it is not the German way, then it will be the American way. One way or the other.”
A waitress in Hamburg reports that she has never missed an episode of “Dynasty” (called “Denver” in Germany). But then adds, “It is trash.”
Even in a traditional Bavarian beer garden, one senses both the presence of America and a contempt for it. To be sure, the waitresses still carry three mugs in each hand and the pretzels are elephantine. Nonetheless, the conversations, the cigarettes, the clothing have a distinctly American flavor. The folks from Omaha would feel quite at home here. When I mention this to an elderly man, he remarks that it used to be different, and then says no more.
But there is something darker, more sinister than all of this about the McDonald’s culture and its fervid yet ambiguous reception in Germany. I heard it expressed, or thought I did, by intellectuals, and among the less articulate, it was alluded to in indirect, even indistinct ways. Not until I left Germany on a visit to Sweden did my third ear hear with clarity what had been whispered into it. In Sweden, I met a well-known editor, Arne Ruth, who, being unaware of my assignment in West Germany, nonetheless presented me with a copy of his book (written with Ingemar Karlsson). The book, which has been translated into German (but not English), is called Society as Theater: Aesthetics and Politics in the Third Reich. Its authors find the principal feature of the Third Reich to lie in a politics essentially without content; the Nazi regime, they contend, offers the ultimate example of politics as pure spectacle. The similarity between this thesis and my own in my last book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was uncanny. In it I argued that American public discourse has been changed by the electronic media from serious exposition into a form of entertainment, and I concurred in the view of Aldous Huxley that in the future people might well be controlled by inflicting pleasure on them rather than pain. I even quoted Ronald Reagan’s statement “Politics is show business.” I would have felt comfortable entitling my book Society as Theater.
This coincidence of themes allowed me to see deeper than ever into the German dilemma. As Germans flee from the first terror—a culture without a past—they recoil from the second—an American culture that offers them intimations and shadows of that which ruined them. I do not say that America today is in most respects like Germany in the 1930s, and I do not believe that America is capable of producing an Auschwitz. But the point is that the Germans do not know this. They sense that they have imported a culture with little intellectual coherence, uninterested in its own traditions, and preoccupied with the creation of spectacle. Even those who adore Ronald Reagan (and with few exceptions TMOS told me they do) know that he is incapable of conceiving and putting together five consecutive sentences of political substance and logical force. He is a good image for his country, Germans told me. He is not afraid of the Russians and hates Communists. He encourages optimism and confidence. He is an aesthetic delight. Whom does that remind you of? What does that remind you of? I am sure that Germans know the answers (even if Americans do not) and they are disgusted by them.
Does this situation make Germany dangerous? I should think it does. A culture that is frightened at looking back and contemptuous of the only future that seems to lie ahead must always be considered dangerous. As to when and where and to whom, I do not know. But this much can be said: there can be no laying the past to rest, no embarking on a creative future, no peace of mind as long as the twin nemeses of dread and loathing hover over Germany.