Our German Problem (Or Mine) – A Memory

By Samuel Hux (July 2017)

Defeated German soldier, burning Reichstag.

 

One of my dearest friends was a German actor and Wehrmacht veteran who died in 2008 at 96 years. An immeasurable absence in my life.
 

But, I get ahead of myself.

 

In October 1977, German commandos rescued hijacked hostages in Mogadishu. I watched the televised reports of the venture in somewhat idyllic circumstances: in the local tavern of a small Spanish village whose name means, in the regional dialect, “a forgotten nook away from the world,” with an atmosphere so innocent that one had to remind oneself, sometimes, that some of the most serious matters are really serious.

 

“Fascist!” “Anarchist!” Then the appeal to me as a non-German, an American of respectable opinions—an appeal from both “sides.” The sides, so it happened, being those too young and those old-enough-to-have . . . you know . . . those too young to have served the Nazi regime in any fashion, and those old enough to have served in some fashion or other.

 

Memories can be so stark that they unsettle me enough to recognize that the then “too young” are now these many years later beyond middle age and the “old enough” are either approaching the end of life or, like my once dear friend, past it. Which fact, however, does not render the episode I am recalling irrelevant with the passage of time, not by one hell of a long shot.

 

True, I agreed, had the Star-Spangled Banner been played in similar circumstances after a similar American mission of risky mercy, one would have thought it only natural. What’s a national anthem for? Yes, I agreed, Deutschland über Alles (composed though it was by Haydn) has certain associations, especially after a foreign adventure. Yes, I see your point . . . and yours. 

 

A point of view:

 

 

 

That anthem!—my God!—how can we be so stupid and of such short memory?

 

I’m sick of the French and others telling us that we must never forget, but I think we should never allow ourselves to forget. I am not myself old enough to bear any guilt—but I feel it thrust upon me nonetheless. Perhaps because my father—I do not understand him!—is so insistent on not admitting any. It’s been over thirty years, he says. But we cannot permit ourselves to forget, to have the rest of the world always reminding us. I am tired of being ‘reminded,’ because although I wasn’t there, I remember.”

 

Another point of view:

 

“I was there. And I remember.

 

Should every publication of Nietzsche bear an explanation, somewhere prominent, on cover or title page, of what Übermensch does not mean?

 

Would it help our image if every law passed in our democratic assembly had a coda attached, something like: ‘This legislation is hereby pronounced in the sincere hope and hopeful certainty that never again will law be mocked as it was during the Third Reich, which, be it noted, we the legislators hereby pledge never to forget?’ 

 

And need I, anymore, upon meeting a non-German, find some way of casually mentioning that I served in the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht, mind you: I was drafted, don’t you see? I know my guilt: I should have refused to go. But . . . well, it’s beneath my dignity to have to remind the world (that so likes to remind me) that it is lucky its morality was not tested in similar manner.

 

 

But I am glad that my nation is trying to act ‘normally,’ is even willing to display an ancient, patriotic anthem—as other nations do. There isn’t an international anthem, as far as I know.”

 

Neither point of view was perfect. Why expect it?

 

The first was rather too forgiving of regimes where people “know where they stand” and rather too expectant of perfection. The second ignored, perhaps too much, the danger that lies in all emergency legislation, and rode its dignity a bit too much for some tastes. But not, I confess, too much for mine. And this was what surprised me.

 

The first I prefer to leave as a sort of collective voice. The second I cannot help but localize in one “speaker,” whom by accident I knew quite well, in spite of a fair difference in age and a world’s distance in experience. 

 

Jaspar, one of whose relatives I learned many years later had died for his involvement in the Stauffenberg conspiracy to kill Hitler, had not been, however, a Nazi. He was briefly arrested in his twenties as a young Social Democrat. In the Thirties, he acted in film and provincial theatre. When war came he was drafted and he went—without conviction. Briefly on the Russian front, he was saved by his profession: helped make army training films, acted in wartime baubles like The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen. In the natural course of things met Goebbels (“He had certain cultural pretensions”).

 

 

Did the world, does the world, really burden the younger Germans (now middle aged, those I recall) with the sins of the fathers?

 

But the world is, by and large, sympathetic, for it knows that the generational complications and misunderstandings that obtain to some degree everywhere have obtained in a different way among Germans. It is quite one thing for an American to think that his parents must have been decent enough and spirited when young . . . so how can they be so staid and shortsighted now? But quite another thing for a German to think that his father, mother, grandparents—elders, in any case—seem so self-centered now, while when young served, to whatever small degree, a state which set about systematically exterminating many millions of non-combatants. Their lot being such a taxing one, so generating of sympathy, what fault had I to find with them back in 1977?

 

Precisely that in their singular way of experiencing dissatisfaction and in their manner of expressing it, they tended to embody in a peculiar way what they condemned: a certain stock stage quality that Westerners have long envisioned when they use the word German in a critical sense. Rigidity. And a mental habit that I call Schmerphilosophie—Schmer not Schmerz, fat not pain.

 

There are recognizable truths in caricature, or it would not work. You may agree, disagree, or think me mad, if I write, “The Quotidian is unchanging in its Essence, but modified experientially by instant communication of the upheavals of the Time-Spirit.” But in any case you know that I am writing—in English—German. There is an often-noted tendency in German thought to concretize ideas, fatten them up, so that one seems to be talking of something as substantial as a stone. History! Zeitgeist! The Idea! Processes are turned into measurable things almost tangible. (No wonder Marx had so little trouble converting a Hegelian idealism into a materialism by “standing it on its feet.” It already had feet.)

 

Feelings as well as political processes are made into entities. Guilt is assumed to be a thing one may own, and own up to: Here, look at it. But no, guilt is a manner of living, another kind of process (or a Prozess, I’m tempted to say, a trial). The signs are a mood, a dark night of the soul, in which one may prefer silence because no words are adequate, and an external life, political and social, which is authentic evidence of a person having changed, learned.

 

Those younger Germans, the ones I knew back in 1977, were having something both ways—possessing and eating their strudel. On the one hand they were tired, they said, of being held accountable by the world—when they weren’t. On the other hand they were tired of voluntarily shouldering the guilt that was, by act, their fathers’—which they didn’t have to and in fact couldn’t. Not unless guilt, instead of being a manner of living by the accountable, is a Thing existing in the world to be shouldered by Someone. If one assumes it the latter, then I imagine the younger German saying, “The Destiny of my Generation is to shoulder the Schuld of the Past, commanded thus by the Zeitgeist”—or something like that.

 

A week after the events of which I’ve written, I drove from the village to a neighboring harbor town. On the way I gave a lift to two hitchhikers, German tourists, man and wife. When we arrived at the port, there occurred one of those moments which, although unexpected, one feels somehow had to happen, as if life were plotted by an ironist. “Was ist meine Schuld?” I thought the man asked. What is my guilt? I could only stare, and redden in embarrassment. I had made the mental calculation when they entered the car, you see, and he was clearly old enough . . . Finally, he opened his wallet and gestured toward it. No—I told him—I was coming this way anyway. My grammatically poor school-boy German had mostly vanished, and I had forgotten that Schuld means “debt” as well as “guilt,” and that schulden means “to be indebted.” Something like “Was schulde ich Ihnen?” he must have said. What do I owe you? So I suffered a couple of hours of the desperate feeling of having been here already without wanting to be before I got home and turned to my German dictionary.

 

Only God can finish that sentence.

 

 

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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.

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