German Positivity II – Gunter Grass: ‘The Gravest Generation’

NY Times Op-Ed: “The Gravest Generation,” by Gunter Grass, May 7, 2005.

When I first saw this piece sitting smack dab in the middle of the Saturday Op-Ed page, I was struck by two contradictory feelings: amusement at the clever “wortspiel” by Grass (or his excellent translator at UPS Translations), and dismay at how LOOONG it looked … so I kind of ignored it until the weekend was over …

When I finally read it, though, I was thrilled to see not just how deep and insightful it was – hardly surprising, since Grass was one of the few Germans in the immediate post-Wall euphoria who correctly warned about the economic and social problems that were likely to arise by the “absorption” (some called it “anschluss” or annexation) of East Germany into West Germany –

but also how quickly and easily it moved along, so that a long piece like this just flew by …

As a result, I hope anyone who missed it – which is probably just about everyone, given the pre-Mother’s Day preparation madness to which I was a participant / observer – will have a chance to check it out …

Again, why bury the piece on Saturday ??? It’s so excellent, and deserves attention …

Herewith some excerpts from this well-written and valuable examination of the impact of the Nazi-zeit from the perspective of the 21st century …

While Grass lived in then West Berlin – at least when I tried to track him down in the winter of 1990 – this is datelined Lubeck, which, of course, is the home of perhaps the seminal 20th century German writer, Thomas Mann … (bold emphasis mine):

When May 8 comes round again and is celebrated in complacent official speeches as liberation day, this can only be in hindsight, especially as we Germans did little if anything for our liberation. In the initial postwar years our lives were determined by hunger and cold, the misery of refugees, the displaced and bombed-out. In all four zones occupied by the wartime allies – Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States – the only way to manage the ever increasing crush of the more than 12 million Germans who had fled from, or been driven out of, East and West Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and the Sudetenland, was to force them into our own cramped living rooms.

Whenever the question is posed, “What can we Germans be proud of?”, the first thing we should mention is this essential achievement – even though it was forced on us. We had hardly become used to freedom when compulsion had to be applied. As a result, in both German states, huge long-term camps for refugees and displaced persons were avoided. The risk of building up feelings of hate was thereby diverted, as was the desire for revenge engendered by years of camp life, which, as today’s world shows, can result in terrorism and counterterrorism.

Something, btw, that Palestinians and their Arab "supporters" might think about …

Even then there were spokesmen for the rhetoric of liberation. So many self-appointed anti-fascists suddenly set the tone, so much so that one was entitled to ask: how had Hitler been able to make headway against such strong resistance? Dirty linen was quickly washed clean, with people being absolved of all responsibility. Counterfeiters were busy coining new expressions and putting them into circulation. “Unconditional surrender” was changed to “collapse.” Although in business, law and in the rapidly re-emerging schools and universities, even the diplomatic service, many former National Socialists maintained their hereditary wealth, stayed in office, continued to hold onto their university chairs and eventually continued their careers in politics, it was claimed that we were starting from “zero hour” or square one.

A particularly infamous distortion of facts can be seen even today in speeches and publications, with the crimes perpetrated by Germans described as “misdeeds perpetrated in the name of the German people.” In addition, language was used in two different ways to herald the future division of the country. In the Soviet-occupied zone, the Red Army had liberated Germany from the fascist terror all by itself; in the Western occupied zones, the honor of having freed not only Germany but the whole of Europe from Nazi domination was shared exclusively by the Americans, the British and the French.

In the cold war that quickly followed, German states that had existed since 1949 consistently fell to one or other power bloc, whereupon the governments of both national entities sought to present themselves as model pupils of their respective dominating powers. Forty years later, during the glasnost period, it was in fact the Soviet Union that broke up the Democratic Republic, which had by that point become a burden.

A crucial point here, one that we made in Poltical Economy Lecture 17,  that the Cold War was “won” NOT by the United States, and the Star Wars fantasies of Ronald Reagan,

but, rather, by Mikhail Gorbachev, on behalf of ALL the people of the world, when he responded to the stirrings of liberation in Eastern Europe not with military repression, but with political and human understanding –

something that is all too often missed / denied / forgotten by the yahoos in the US who will use ANYTHING to justify the insane levels of military / “security” spending to which we have become all too accepting.

Fifteen years after signing the treaty on unification, we can no longer conceal that despite the financial achievements, German unity has essentially been a failure. Petty calculation prevented the government of the time from submitting to the citizens of both states a new constitution relevant to the endeavors of Germany as a whole. It is therefore hardly surprising that people in the former East Germany should regard themselves as second-class Germans.

The jobless rate is twice as high as in the former West Germany. West German arrogance had no respect for people with East German résumés. The mass migration, feared from the beginning, is happening now, daily. Whole areas of the country, its cities and its villages, are being emptied. …

The hope of full employment has evaporated.

Older employees, who still had years of work left in them, are pushed into early retirement. Young people are denied the skills for entering the world of work. Even worse, with complaints that an aging population is a threat and simultaneous demands, repeated parrot-fashion, to do more for young people and education, the Federal Republic – still a rich country – is permitting, to a shameful extent, the growth of what is called “child poverty.”

All this is now accepted as if divinely ordained, accompanied at most by the customary national grumbles. Worse, those who point to this state of affairs and to the people forced into social oblivion are at best ridiculed by slick young journalists as “social romantics,” but usually vilified as “do-gooders.” Questions about the reasons for the growing gap between rich and poor are dismissed as “the politics of envy.” The desire for justice is ridiculed as utopian. The concept of “solidarity” is relegated to the dictionary’s list of foreign words.

THOUGH we initially did not know what to do with our freedom when we were given it 60 years ago, we gradually made use of this gift. We learned democracy and in doing so proved star pupils, because after all we were incontrovertibly German. With the benefit of hindsight, what was crammed into us through lectures was enough to get us a reasonable end-of-term report. We learned the interplay between government and opposition, whereupon long periods of government ultimately proved arid. The much lauded and reviled generation of ’68 produced a different kind of political leaders and ultimately also tolerance. We had to acknowledge that our burdens could not be cast aside, they are passed by parents to children and that our German past, however much we travel and export, comes back to haunt us. Neo-Nazis repeatedly brought us into disrepute. Even so, we felt that democracy was here to stay. …

With so much toil and profit-chasing, however, the past was in danger of being forgotten. Only in the 60s did we meet the second challenge, when writers and then the student protest movement began to ask questions about everything that the war generation would sooner forget. The protest movement strove for revolution but was paid off with reform; without it, we would still be living in the claustrophobic fog of the postwar years under Adenauer. …

When the German Reich unconditionally surrendered 60 years ago, a system of power and terror was thereby defeated. This system, which had caused fear throughout Europe for 12 years, still casts its shadow today. We Germans have repeatedly faced up to this inherited shame and have been forced to do so if we hesitated. The memory of the suffering that we caused others and ourselves has been kept alive through the generations. Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere – I’m thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers – we have not shaken off the burden of our past. It will remain part of our history as a challenge.

We can only hope we will be able to cope with today’s risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world’s last remaining ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces. Those who treat their donated freedom as a stock market profit have failed to understand what May 8 teaches us every year.

Obviously, Grass has quite a different view of “democracy” than, say, President Bush …

Perhaps one day, Bush will invite Grass to discuss the matter with him … but then again, perhaps not …