For
the Germans of the Federal Republic[2], the problem of integrating the memory of the Nazi era
within collective self-perception remains an open and recurrently acute issue. Since the
early 1980s, a series of public debates has taken place, which seems to
indicate a significant transformation of German historical consciousness
regarding Nazism. Two contradictory tendencies have emerged in this process of
transformation, neither of which seems to indicate what the dominant representation
of the Nazi era will be in Germany, once this epoch shifts entirely from the
domain of individual to that of collective memory.
On the one hand, a 'yearning for normality' is
perceptible at all levels of West German society, especially within the younger
generation; there is a wish to draw a "Schlußstrich, "a 'final line' over
the constant recollection of Nazism. On the other hand, the past has returned
more intensely than ever during the recent debates, and the very tendency
implied by the ‘yearning for normality' to deny its absolute specificity has
created, within some limited but influential circles, a new awareness of its
uniqueness. Thus, the Bitburg ceremony in 1985 was supposed to
be the expression of some kind of general reconciliation with history. In fact,
it was to unleash passionate statements from all sides of the Federal Republic
about the significance of the Nazi past for present German identity; statements
which had a `trigger action' for all subsequent debates. Then came the Fassbinder affair,
which turned into another major controversy about present and past. A
controversy about the building of historical museums in Berlin and Bonn and of
a war memorial for the dead of the Second World War, also in Bonn, took place
at the same time. Finally, the "Historikerstreit "crystallized most of
the current trends of opinion, mainly on an academic level.
A recurrent theme in all these controversies is
the need for a new national identity in West Germany. It is shared by all
political tendencies, as the search started on the left, in the late seventies,
and was then taken over by the conservative-liberal wing, after theWende (turning
point) of 1982. For such a new
identity, the reworking of the significance for German history as a whole of what
was accepted until now to be the major event of the Nazi era, i.e. the extermination of the Jews, is essential, because,
since the end of the war, Auschwitz has
become a reference not only for State criminality, but for evil as such in all
western societies. Indeed, many Germans seem to be caught in an intractable
predicament: the Nazi past is too massive to be forgotten, and too repellent to
be integrated into the normal narrative of memory.
*
Memory - be it that of the
individual or that of the group - is the construction of a coherent and significant representation of past
events. If, for one reason or another, such a construction is impossible, the
conscience of the memorizing subject or group will try to find strategies
permitting nevertheless the idea of a continuity, be it a twisted one; because,
without such a continuity, i.e. without
links between the present and the past, no history, and, consequently, no
identity is possible.
The
concept of strategy is a military term. It denotes a situation of antagonism
and can be defined as the sum of tactics unifying the behavior of one or more
people in the striving for victory. By employing the term ‘memory strategies’,
we indicate that there is a conflict between the person who remembers and the
thing (or the set of things) to be remembered, and that this conflict can be
resolved in several ways, implying gains and losses. These gains and losses
have a direct impact on the character of memory itself and an indirect one on
the entire identity of the remembering subject or group.
There are, of course, all kinds of memory strategies,
ranging from amnesia to embellishment, or the falsification, of the past. In
this article, we shall try to describe some of them by analyzing several
autobiographical sketches written by German radical intellectuals.
*
'Deutsche,
Linke, Juden' (Germans, Leftists, Jews), was the special
issue to which the Berlin left-wing journal "Ästhetik
und Kommunikation" devoted
its edition of June 1983.[3] This publication, and the controversy it
generated, as one of the main contributions of German radicals to the general
discussion of these years about the impact of the Nazi past on present day
life. The Berlin quarterly was highly regarded in these years even by its
political adversaries, and this in spite of its small circulation. It was
directed by a team without a chief editor, thus realizing, even fifteen years
after the 1968 student movement, the
radicals' imperatives of cooperation and collectivization. None of the members
of the editorial staff could be considered as the spokesman of the journal, but "Ästhetik und Kommunikation" as
a whole was known to be a major organ of German radicalism. In 1983, one year after the political swing to
the right, radicalism, as the whole German left-wing, was in crisis and looking
for new models of identification.
The
title of the special issue, `Germans, Leftists, Jews', is somewhat
misleading
because Jews, as far as their own specific fate is concerned, play
virtually no
role in the different articles. The real subject is the relationship of
German
leftists to the Nazi past, German guilt and responsibility, the
generational
conflict and the above mentioned search of the left for national
identification. The particular significance of the Berlin journal
resides in
the fact that, for the first time, German Leftists doubted publicly the
very
foundations of their ideology - the
concepts of fascism and racism - as a possible key for understanding
Nazism. The
controversy which the special issue generated hints at the importance
of the
matter: never before in its history had "Ästhetik und Kommunikation
"been acknowledged to such a degree by the mass media, the
press and a wider public. Not only that, the numerous readers'
responses gave
material for two more issues of the journal. There was instant reaction
in the
whole German press and even a television debate between Eberhard
Knödler-Bunte, one of the journal's editors, and Henryk Broder and
Cilly Kugelmann representing the Frankfurt ‘Jewish
Group’. As the editors remarked: "“Never "in the past fourteen
years has an issue of Ästhetik "und Kommunikation "been so bitterly
criticized, not "even "during
the factional disputes in the aftermath of the student revolt.”
The June number of the Berlin quarterly consists of four
autobiographical
essays by German intellectuals, two articles on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, mostly in regard to Dietrich Wetzel's book "Die
""Verlängerung von Geschichte: Deutsche, Juden und der
Palästinakonflikt,""[4]"""and
two interviews with prominent Jewish emigré women social scientists now
living
in Great Britain, Maria Jahoda and Eva Reichmann. Our
analysis will be limited to the German contributions, which have a
coherence" "in
themselves and were at the center" "of
the controversy. All of them are radically subjective and break a sort
of
taboo. The feelings toward the Nazi past, and, especially, towards the
heritage
of the Holocaust and towards Jews and Judaism today, that are
described in these" "sketches, prove to be far more complex and
ambivalent
than the main articles of their authors' ideology would allow one to
imagine.
The difficulty of the subject, as
well as that of the personal approach adopted by the authors, was
realized" "by the editorial board as soon as the theme had been
chosen. One staff member objected: “There are actually many more
important things to talk about than just Jews!”, and immediately they
found
themselves “quarreling bitterly until late into the night.”[5] The
editorial preface describes the evening as follows:
“We
read everything about the subject that could be found on the bookshelves and we
mobilized fragments of recollections that were buried in our biographies.
During these moments of helplessness in our working group, despite impulses
which had not been worked through, we had come much closer to each other than
ever before. In the course of the discussions we understood that we were
talking about the traumata our parents had bequeathed to us and which we had
only covered with our new left concepts. Nothing had yet been clarified,
neither our relationship to German History nor our own contradictions.”[6]
Even during their elaboration, the
articles published by "Ästhetik
und Kommunikation "caused
strong reactions among the friends and the families of the authors. One of them
had to utilize a pseudonym in order not to endanger the recent dialogue he had
managed to establish with his father. Friendships were broken up because of this or that sentence. The editors
continue:
“These
difficulties are part of the subject, but today they seem to become easier to
discuss with our parents as well as amongst ourselves. (. . .) We
have become aware of the fact that many things have not yet been dealt with and
continue to exist as a blind stain or as a scar. If we don't want this History
to continue "ad infinitum "by itself or to be treated in our place by German Jewish
intellectuals, we have to learn to speak about it publicly.”[7]
Thus
the starting point and common denominator of all the articles is the
"silence "which surrounded the Holocaust in Germany during the fifties
and the sixties. This silence was, of course, initiated by the
generation of
its immediate contemporaries, but the question now asked by the authors
of "Ästhetik
und Kommunikation ""is "a
serious one: had they not, although they were certainly the most
politically
self-conscious generation of Germans since 1945, extended it at least
in this domain? Silence often alludes to something
one has not come to terms with, and their own silence, the fact that,
to their
own surprise, they did not possess a discourse that dealt with the
event "in
its specificity, "made them understand that, in a way, they were
deprived of
its comprehension. For the very first time, German leftists had come to
look
upon the Holocaust as living history, and not as a closed chapter of
the
European fascist past. They suddenly perceived that the unsolved
problems of
the past obstructed the way to the present. However their reaction to
this
discovery was ambivalent. On the one hand they felt that they lacked
something
essential, and in this respect, their response was self-conscious; on
the other
hand, why did they argue that they did not want to leave to ‘German
Jewish
intellectuals’ the privilege to talk about the past? This remark can be
understood only through the background of the historical situation at
the
beginning of the eighties, when the radicals' positions towards Jews
and
Judaism once again changed.
From
several points of view, the history of the relationship of German radicalism to
Judaism is a tragic one. To a large extent it has been determined from the
outside and has finally resulted in the failure of the New Left to seize its
historical chance of becoming a moral authority in respect to the problem of
German debt in History. The positions of the Leftists should often be seen as
mere reactions to the political climate prevailing in West-Germany during the first decades after the war, which can be
summarized as follows. Until the Six Day War, the official attitude in the
German Federal Republic towards the fate of the Jews was characterized by
public philosemitism and
a cool relationship with Israel. It was dominated by a discourse attempting to
“expiate” the faults of the past by financial reparations. During the 1960s, the student movement started to criticize
the hypocrisy of an attitude which believed that one could pay for silence and
a good conscience. The students started to reject the blackout of history that
characterized the underside of the official "Wiedergutmachung.""[8]""
"Yet,
in a dialectical movement that never escapes its own logic, and the
dynamics of
which will become clearer with the analysis of the articles mentioned
above,
they themselves did not succeed in breaking the silence and facing the
event,
but only in eluding it through abstract theories regarding fascism and
racism.
With the 1967 Arab-Israeli war the situation became even more complex
due to the
fact that the German conservatives embraced Israeli military success
and
identified with it, thus causing the radicals to see Israel as the
imperialist
aggressor and the Palestinians as the heroic victims. An unconscious
stratagem
aiming at alleviating an inherited feeling of guilt made them call the
Palestinians the ‘Jews’, an expression which was to generate a long
series of
comparisons culminating eventually in the Nazi methods of the Israelis
in the
occupied territories' and the like. These verbal excesses, and the
obvious lack
of historical insight they implied, provoked the protest and the
estrangement
of some radical Jewish intellectuals, who belonged to the student
movement
veterans. The debate that arose from the broadcast of the television
drama
`Holocaust' in January 1979 led eventually
to the formation of a ‘Jewish group’ of intellectuals who publicly
defended
their points of view, converging neither with those of the right, which
they
did not belong to ideologically, nor with those of the left, as far as
the Israeli-Arab conflict, antisemitism, the Holocaust etc. were
concerned. When, in 1979, Broder and Lang's collection
of essays "Fremd im eigenen ""Land""[9]"" "and,
one year later, Lea Fleischmann's "Dies ""ist
nicht mein ""Land""[10]"" "appeared,
many German leftists discovered with stupefaction that they had apparently
ignored some essential components of their friends' identities. Both Broder and Fleischmann emigrated
to Israel while openly condemning their former political co-fighters for
insensitivity to the fate of the Jews, a charge that Lea Fleischmann summed
up in the old German dictum: "`Der
Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm.'""[11]"" "The
tension this accusation created, and the dissensions it
caused among German radicals, grew even stronger during the Lebanon war when
one faction attacked the Israeli policy so violently as a new `Holocaust', that
some of the Left wing intellectuals felt embarrassed. In 1983, the collection
of essays "Die ""Verlängerung von Geschichte'"[12] (the
extension of history) demonstrated how useless the traditional Left wing
concepts were in understanding the implications and whereabouts of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
It also criticized vividly the often vulgar antisemitic propaganda
of pro-Palestinian positions adopted by German radicals. This book became
the main reference of the authors of "Ästhetik und Kommunikation "who needed, as they admitted, “help from outside”[13]. What did they need help for? To answer this question,
we shall now examine the autobiographical sketches a little more closely.
*
A quick glance at the titles of the articles is in itself
illuminating: “Interim report. In Search of an Uninhibited Approach”; “Affected
By What? By the Jewish Trauma? By Our Parents' Traumata?”; “Making a Rough
Copy”; “Extension of the Silence”.[14] All these titles reveal the awareness of an
inhibition. Such silence surrounds the subject that it seems to imply a
mysterious “impurity”- a concept to which we shall return. The authors feel
much more “affected” by this impediment to a natural approach to history than
by the facts that caused it, as we are soon going to see.
"Affected By What? is "really the very question that arises after a
first reading
of the articles. There is much emotion, some sincerity but, if one
takes into
account the fact that all the authors are intellectuals, there is very
little
historical knowledge and not much desire to be better informed. This is
particularly striking as soon as the authors talk about the Jews. Their
perception of them remains confused and disfigured by resentment
towards their
status of victims. Jews are acceptable as long as they are faceless -
the
abstract result of an absolute crime, but not as a living community
with their
own culture and history and with their complexities and contradictions.
As Eberhard Knödler-Bunte admits: “Jews did not appear in our history -
not
even as strangers or enemies.”[15] And, more precisely:
“At this time I was already 18 years old and politically
active. But our knowledge of Jews was incredibly poor. I had only heard that
Jews are circumcised and have strange laws concerning the eating of meat and
the respect of the Sabbath. Most of my information stemmed from the Bible lectures
of our religious instruction. My parents had told me only that a terrible sin
had been committed against the Jews, and the parson attributed this to the
treachery to our Lord Jesus. That was all one could get in a small town in Würtemberg during
the fifties and there was no good reason to ask more questions about Jews. But
one could feel an aura of secrecy and allusion surrounding the subject very
much in the same way as it surrounded the subject of sexuality. Maybe it was
because of this similarity of taboo that Jewish matters became, for me, an
exotic and sexually loaded secret.”[16]
When, by the end of the 1950s and
the beginning of the 1960s, the authors of "Ästhetik
und Kommunikation "acquired
as adolescents a more detailed knowledge of the Holocaust, this did not
motivate them to learn more about Jews. In a way, the discovery of Auschwitz did
not leave room for any kind of life. It was an "absolutum "consisting of total
destruction, including even the victims' memory, their very identity:
“I
cannot associate the hairs of Auschwitz and pictures of Jewish holidays.
Since that time, two Jewish Communities exist in my imagination: an Orthodox or
Liberal one, which was mainly a living, warm human community, and another,
consisting of nameless victims, and both are held together only by the perfect
murder of the Nazis.”[17]
Thus the distancing from their own
particular history has led many German radicals to distance themselves as well
from the concrete history of the victims. As Dan Diner put it: “Because the German
leftist no longer wanted to be a German in light of the pre-existing collective
history, the Jew was also to be relieved of his particular history and
identity.”[18] But it was not only Jewish history that was to be
eradicated: the abstraction and generalization of Left wing ideology was so
radical that it did not even admit the concrete experience of suffering, and
one of the main achievements of the Berlin publication consists of the fact
that its authors eventually became aware of the pitfalls of abstraction. Knödler-Bunte confesses:
“For
a long time I avoided concrete suffering. I did not go to visit concentration
camps, I saw no expositions about the destruction of the Jews, no films about
the deportations and the gassings. (... ) I wanted the Holocaust to remain abstract - an
absolute date for a morality which pardons nothing and which protects itself
against all temptations.”[19]
As a matter of fact, the
temptations were not missing. There was, in the whole postwar generation, a
strong desire to escape the Nazi heritage and not to cope with the history of
the Holocaust. Nevertheless the most sensitive felt that this was impossible,
that they were trapped in their own national identity which implied an
incomprehensible guilt. When they traveled abroad they were looked upon as
Germans and, sometimes, even made responsible for what had happened. They had
to explain what they could not explain to themselves and reacted with revulsion
and repudiation of their parents' generation on the one hand, and with resentment
towards the victims on the other. The image of the Jews was soiled by the
atrocities committed against them:
“There
was something uncanny, something terrifying about the feelings I associated
with the Jews. It was not due to them themselves, but to what had been done to
them and which one could no longer dissociate from them. They were the victims
and, as such, part of our bad conscience.”[20]
This bad conscience made them wish that the dead should
remain dead. The discovery of the 'extension of history' is a recent one. It
belongs to the eighties, not to the sixties. In the sixties, the student
movement seemed, at first, to resolve all the problems. It provided the handy
concepts of fascism and racism, which allowed the leftists to dismiss the problems
of Nazism and antisemitism, and the keywords of capitalism, imperialism and
colonialism supplied a global explanatory framework for world history. With the
Six Day War, there was suddenly the possibility of considering the Jews no
longer as the victims, but as the persecutors, and this was an excellent outlet
for the paradoxical resentments the Berlin authors had felt, but not yet
formulated:
“The
Jews had been "revived" as Israelis, and now they made a vulgar
imperialistic policy that gave no possibility for identification, but also no starting-point for
guilt feelings. They made a policy that was their business, not mine.”[21]
The psychological mechanism
described here iswell known: after identification, rejection, both of them
on an emotional, not a rational level. What isnew in
these confessions isthe admission of anger which this situation had produced
within the ‘second generation’. Knödler-Bunte calls it ‘the anti-Jewish impulse’,
and gives a lengthy and selfindulgent description of his own aggressive
incitements:
“Had
the assimilated Jews in Germany not been part of the dominating class? (... ) Were
not the majority of German upper-class Jews on the side of the conservatives,
without whom Hitler would not have come to power? Had they not, as clerks,
industrialists, entrepreneurs, and cultural bourgeois, bitterly fought against
the opponents of Nazism? Why is there only sporadically an inner-Jewish criticism
of the policy of the Jewish associations during Nazism, who consciously
withheld information about the German concentration camps, and directed all
their efforts and all the money to the Zionist symbol of Israel and its
foundation, instead of caring for the emigration of Jews from the German
territories as long as there was still time? And what about the right wing Jews
who, with a great deal of money and still more might and influence,
unconditionally support the Israeli policy, no matter how barbaric it is?”[22]
And the questions which, as Jessica Benjamin and Anson Rabinbach state,
“betray the ignorance of the beer-hall rant, the uniformed rage of the
radical polemicist at the Jews. . .”, continue unimpeded, “a drainboard of "shibboleths "on
a variety of topics, clearly enunciating left wing anti-Semitism in its undiluted glory.”[23] They
culminate in the cliché of Jewish self-hatred that is supposed to bring
together perpetrators (or, more precisely, the sons of the perpetrators) and
victims. Also in the description of Knödler-Bunte's first real encounter with Jews and Jewish
culture in the United States the old antisemitic stereotypes abound:
“For
the first time I had an idea of what Jewish culture could be: heaps of black
clothed, bearded, Orthodox Jews who controlled the streetscape of the
goldsmith quarter after hours; the many different faces in the numerous Jewish
restaurants, which I examined half unconsciously for Jewish characteristics;
the little shops near Hester Street (. . .). A bit
later I became acquainted with the cultivated, bourgeois, liberal Jews. Most
left-wing intellectuals I met were of Jewish origin, had a job in one of the
universities and were present in scientific projects, magazines and publishing
houses. They were extremely cultivated (... ) and,
in a way, not very American. My admiration for them was mixed with some
jealousy. How easy it was for Jews from the American upper class to become
intellectually competent and to express themselves as radicals and leftwing scholars,
and how safely they were supported by their families and their social
environment! If I were an American from the working class who wants to succeed,
I thought, I would be quite angry to see how many posts were being occupied by
Jews, from Wall Street to the universities. For the first time I understood,
from my own reactions, what I had never been able to grasp during my studies of
fascism: that there is some real experience behind all antisemitism.”[24]
What is most striking in these statements, besides their
aggressiveness, istheir historical ignorance. One cannot avoid the
impression that more information would have facilitated the author in the task
of overcoming his 'anti-Jewish impulse' and of facing his historical
responsibilities from a rational rather than from an emotional point of view.
Nevertheless one should not ignore that Knödler-Bunte shows
some insight in his own condition and his profound motivations:
“As I tried to formulate these preliminary questions,
which were to help me to explain the mass genocide of the Jews, I discovered in
myself the desire to create bonds between the perpetrators and the victims,
between my postwar generation and that of my parents, between German and Jewish
history. What moved me is the impotent but decisive desire to break out of this
entanglement of guilt without paying too much for it, and the knowledge that it
won't work.”[25]
Thus the inability to extricate
oneself from an unwanted, yet necessary dilemma is in the very center of the
radical discourse about German-Jewish relationships. The question ‘what
about ourselves?’ is the only one that really seems to matter, and it is to the
credit of the authors of "Ästhetik
und Kommunikation "to
have acknowledged this troubled starting point of the New Left. As we can see
from all the autobiographical essays, the principal reaction to the discovery
of a specifically German historical burden was, during the fifties, the
sixties, and the seventies, one of self-pity: the injustice is one done to
them, the postwar moralists. They were convinced of now being themselves in
turn the victims.
“ ‘As
innocents we had to assume the guilt, the guilt of those who often did not even
feel guilty ... to bear the consequences without being guilty, that was our
fate.’[26] ‘Already as a small child I understood that as a
German, you are on the wrong side ... as a German you can forget about
yourself.’[27] 'To be German was for me a stain, and long before I
became politically active I felt a mixture of shame and humiliated pride . . .”[28]
There is a strange lack of self-confidence in the
radicals' discourse. It is not only the entanglement of guilt which seems
unbearable to them, it is the idea that German history is so overwhelming, that
it crushed its offspring's personality, the free will and the freedom of the
individual.
“I cannot say I am fed up, I don't want to be a German any
more. I am German wherever I go, often even the Nazi, guilty of what has
happened. We are living in very, very hard times, identity is rare, you take
what you can get . . .”[29]
This complaint is quite typical of German radicals.
Already the student movement of the sixties was obsessed by the idea of
manipulation, which was a recurrently acute issue in their discourse. Everybody
was manipulated, by the press, by education, by all the reigning values of
capitalist society - the Leftists included. The radicals pointed out that
there were no means of escaping manipulation, and this was really a German
phenomenon. In the French student movement manipulation was one subject among
others, and certainly not the most important one. From a philosophical point of
view, it poses the problem of free will, from a psychological point of view, it
raises the question of identity. So why is it that identity is so rare?
There is some evidence that German
radicals feel not only burdened, but literally mutilated by their collective
history. Thus, Hoffmann-Axthelm cannot help wondering
“...
that in spite of the Moloch called German history, the NS, the
World War and Auschwitz, I look like a normal person, having eyes, hands and feet
like everybody else; these eyes, hands and feet being totally normal, not
mutilated, in spite of the camps constructed by the SS, which are full of the
hairs and the gold teeth of those who didn't exist any more after the NS, the
World War and Auschwitz had taken place . . .”[30]
Hoff mann-Axthelm is
so very surprised by his apparent normality because he knows that, inwardly, he
has been definitively maimed by German history, which has stolen from him his
childhood and determined his personality, and he is aware of the fact that the
morality of the New Left is of no help against this (pre)determination.
“Because even we, the radicals, the representatives of the
'alternative' Germany, are no different [from the generation of the parents, C.C.]. We,
too, stem from the speechlessness of surviving and continuing. Only at this
point I feel that the whole affair concerns me personally: when I notice that I
produce the same coldness as the others. Then I ask myself why, and examine the
sources of my humanity. And behold, instead of a warm cradle and an
overflowing, warming motherliness, there she is, German history, my father and
my mother, my cradle and my childhood dream. I realize that there is a hole, a
leak where all privacy escapes, and all true childhood…”[31]
The metaphors used by Hoffmann-Axthelm in
an almost obsessive way and, in turn, employed also by Knödler-Bunte, are
those of purity and impurity. The ‘German speechlessness’, which is the reverse
of a (badly) hidden secret, implies for these authors some indelible impurity.
Both build a kind of totalitarian myth upon the concept of German identity.
There is nothing one can choose or leave behind, one can only accept it in its
entirety, “as a strength and as a guilt. In this task you can only fail, there
is no purity.”[32] With
its roots going far back into the Middle Ages, the German myth is one of
destruction. Hoffmann-Axthelm holds that the age-old longing for an Empire, which was
its first expression, necessarily implies absolute ruin. He does not give the
reasons for this fatality but it becomes clear from his essay, that in an
inexplicable inner dynamic, the desire for destruction continues to function
even when there are no more outward enemies. It is then directed against the
deep origins of the German myth, interpreted by the author as the yearning for
a better world which is, according to him, the very core of German national
identity. That is the reason why even the best are affected by destruction,
that no German can escape the entanglement of idealism and desire for complete
annihilation. Hoff mannAxthelm states that his own biography is characterized by pure
normality, that he has nothing to hide, not even concerning his parents, with
whom he did not have any clashes. In spite of that, he knows that there is
something ‘inexpressible’ within himself, and sometimes he is surprised to hear
the words “which leave the enclosure of [his] teeth”. In the same way as the antisemite in Fassbinder's controversial
play "Garbage, the City and Death, "he does not control his impulses, "it
thinks within him, "and he
is soiled by the impurity of his own thoughts. There is no choice possible in
German heritage, because its very core is ‘ineffable', avoids speech and
therefore reason.
“There
are no clean partitions between this Germany and that Germany - we
have just this murderous one. I cannot live in the Germany of Bach or Hölderlin, but
only in GDR or FRG. I cannot save Wagner and drop Hitler's Wagnerianism, and
I cannot read Nietzsche only with Guattari, without taking into account the
practices of the SS. But it would be perfectly ridiculous trying, because of
this, to expunge Richard Wagner from the history of music or from
one's life, to deny that he definitely causes something inexpressible to
vibrate within me (yes, perfectly right!), and be it the wrong thing, the
German thing, which caused the German speechlessness to become practical with
inexpressible horror.”[33]
The question whether it would not be more equitable to
read Nietzsche only with Guattari, and not with the Nazis'
misinterpretations, remains an open one. What is of interest here is the fact
that Hoff mann-Axthelm thinks this impossible, and the reason for this
impossibility is that he finds what he considers to be the ‘specifically German
impurity’, within himself, as part of his identity. His reaction to that
discovery, as well as that of Knödler-Bunte, is one of pride. They love the
troubled image reflected by the mirror as much as they abhor it. Thus Knödler-Bunte catches
himself at a feeling of ‘national insult’ as a response to the public criticism
of the younger German generation by Broder and Fleischmann. He
says to himself:
“You
yourself are part of this Germany that is torn into pieces, not as an exception
but as the standard of all the qualities which crystallized in history and not
only since 1933. Underlying my social critical conscience I felt an approval of
Germany as a culture, as a specific way of living and thinking, as the
configuration of sensations, moods, landscapes and people, where I learned to
say 'l'. I reacted with pride, not to the often evoked line of ancestors of
German culture, Goethe included, but to a natural belonging to a living space,
whose history is part of me, also as far as its fatal aspects are concerned.
This cannot be denied.”[34]
And as proof of what these fatal aspects within him look
like, he continues:
“This spontaneous readiness to defend Germany went
together with a massive anti-Jewish impulse. (... ) I
realize that the subject ‘Germans and Jews’ throws me back to general concepts
which I had believed I had overcome a long time ago.”[35]
These general concepts, these
uncontrolled impulses can be found in all four essays of "Ästhetik und
Kommunikation. "The most interesting question that arises from the
analysis of the autobiographical sketches is why there is this lack of
freedom
and of intellectual maturity. All the authors were about forty years
old when
writing their contributions for the journal, and one of them (Olav
Münzberg) almost fifty. Nevertheless, the
thoughts and emotions described there evoke much more adolescence than
an
adult's reflection about his evolution regarding a crucial problem of
identity.
This does not mean that they are entirely vain. The achievements of the
Berlin
publications are not to be underestimated. There is a clear awareness
among the
authors that their previous 'history-less' attitude is of no avail.
Ebel states
“... that the children of the victims and consequently the
children of the
perpetrators cannot free themselves from history. As the brutal negation of
history [brutale "Geschichtslosigkeit] "which is customary in the radical alternative circles is certainly
not the solution to the problem, the next step can only consist of admitting
our own prejudices. That is the reason for this article.”[36]
The admission of prejudice is certainly one step forward comprehension.
However one cannot avoid the impression that the authors of "Ästhetik
und Kommunikati""o""n "stopped half-way in their efforts to come to
grips with the past. This seems to be
due to the fact that their wish for understanding is paralleled by a
twofold
desire which creates a new obstacle to objective perception. First of
all
the authors clearly want to reconcile themselves with the generation of
their fathers.
This was a general German trend in the eighties which can be observed
just as
much in public positions adopted by representatives of the Federal
Republic as
in historiography or literature. One does not try any more to establish
a total distanciation from Nazism but on the contrary to create bonds
between
the past and the present, to save what is acceptable,
in order to develop a representation of German history where the Third
Reich can be
reinserted without destroying the whole image. Up to now, the radicals
have
not decisively contributed to this collective construction of memory.
As they
acknowledged themselves, their approach to public life has been
completely ahistorical, concentrating
mainly on social and ecological problems. The result ofthis
attitude is a certain provincialism characteristic of German Leftists,
and
which cannot be found in the corresponding political circles ofother
European countries. However, with their entrance into the political
scene at
the end ofthe seventies and beginning ofthe
eighties, the radicals acquired a new awareness of the ideological
deadlock
where they were stuck. They looked for a way out and found it, in
correspondence to
the general climate prevailing in this decade, not in internationalism,
but in
a new left-wing nationalism. This
tendency can already be seen in the articles of "Ästhetik und
Kommunikation, "which were published at a turning point of the
radicals'
approach to Germany past and future, to history and national identity.
Thus,
Hoffmann-Axthelm's closing words pave the way for an evolution which
was to
become a common denominator for the whole West German left wing during
the
years to come:
“What
I wanted to write about is the problem German intellectuals have with
their own
history. I wanted to write about the fact that I cannot simply be an
internationalistic intellectual, but always only a German intellectual,
who
carries this indismissable historical burden
and accepts it as the subject of his work. The aversion for this work
is always
there. If I did not love this country, it would not be a problem.... I
approve
... anybody's decision to leave this country, this is really the best
thing to
do. But even if I approve it, it hurts me. I would so much like to live
in a
country one does not have to leave in order to feel well. I cannot
leave and I do not want to leave,
this is still my country.”[37]
Considering the special issue of "Ästhetik und Kommunikation "several
years later, we can say in conclusion that it reflects a crucial moment
in the
evolution of German radicalism. More than half a decade after its
publication,
this document reveals the intractable predicament the leftists were
facing
during the eighties: the sudden and late discovery of history had
bequeathed to
them a past with which they could not cope. As we have explained,
German radicalism
had evolved on a rather abstract basis. During the sixties, the
concepts of
fascism and racism had provided a conceptual framework to the leftists
which
could satisfy them as long as the problem of Nazism was treated in
reference to
world revolution. With the passing of time, this perspective became
more and
more remote, till it vanished altogether. The ideological void left by
the
progressive breakdown of the revolutionary idea created among the
radicals a
new awareness of the past. They discovered their own ‘negation of
history’,
after having criticized that of their fathers. And they discovered the
Jews as living human beings, as a cultural
community with its own past and present linked to European history by
all kinds
of bonds, but also independent from it. For this discovery they were
not prepared. One of the pitfalls of
abstraction is that it keeps people caught in a network of stereotypes
which
tend to be replaced by others as soon as they are worn out. This is
what
happened to the radicals' perception of Nazism. The ‘anti-Jewish
impulse’ of
the authors of "Ästhetik
und Kommunikation "followed
directly their representation of the ‘faceless victims.’
Nevertheless, a self-conscious reaction resulted
eventually from the work of memory undertaken by the Berlin authors in their
autobiographical sketches. The acknowledgement of prejudice was a first step
towards the elaboration of a more differentiated perception of the past. What
new historical image would emerge from that was not yet to be seen from the
articles of the journal. But one thing seemed certain: radicalism as such was
not apt to provide an answer to the pending questions. The new left wing
nationalism to which a number of former radicals adhered during the eighties
was a negation of important radical premises. It did not open the way to a more
balanced vision of Nazism. The remaining alternative grouplets which
demonstrated recently against the unification of Germany expressed at least the
feeling that something is wrong with this general wish to draw a ‘final line’
over the whole complex of the post-war era. But they do not offer an
alternative, and their feeble voices are drowned by a movement of much wider
importance.