by Tony Judt
Certainly, the French desire for an independent nuclear deterrent offered a tempting precedent to West Germany, one that De Gaulle skillfully exploited in his efforts to wean Bonn away from its American friends. As De Gaulle phrased it, at the same January 14th 1963 press conference where he responded ‘Non!’ to British membership in the EEC, he ‘sympathized’ with West Germany’s aspirations to nuclear status. And the following week he translated that ‘sympathy’ into a Treaty of Franco-German friendship. But the Treaty, for all its accompanying fanfare, was hollow. Adenauer’s apparent switch of loyalties was disavowed by many in his own party; later that same year his colleagues conspired to bring about his removal from power and reaffirm their loyalty to NATO. As for De Gaulle, he of all people harbored no illusions about the Germans. Six months earlier, in Hamburg, the French President had told a wildly enthusiastic crowd ‘Es lebe die Deutschfranzösiche Freundschaft! Sie Sind ein grosses Volk!’ (‘Long live Franco-German friendship! You are a great people!’); but to an aide he commented, ‘If they really were still a great people, they wouldn’t be cheering me so.’
In any event, however cool their relations, no West German leader dared break with Washington for the sake of an illusory French alternative. Nonetheless, Adenauer’s foreign policy intrigues played to an underlying mood of resentment at Germany’s unavoidable subservience to the US. In retrospect we too readily assume that the post-war Federal Republic enthusiastically welcomed everything American; that the GIs spread across central and southern Germany in these years, with their military installations, bases, convoys, movies, music, food, clothes, chewing gum and cash were universally loved and adopted by the people whose freedom they were there to secure.
The reality was more complicated. Individual American (and British) soldiers were certainly liked, for the most part. But after the initial relief at having been ‘liberated’ (sic) by the West (and not the Red Army) had worn off, other feelings surfaced. The hard post-war years of the Allied occupation contrasted unfavorably with life under the Nazis. During the Cold War some blamed America for putting Germany at the center of ‘its’ conflict with the Soviet Union and exposing the country to risk. Many conservatives, particularly in the Catholic South, attributed the rise of Hitler to the ‘secularizing’ influence of the West and argued that Germany should steer a ‘middle way’ between the triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’. And West Germany’s growing prominence on the eastern edge of the Western alliance subliminally recalled Nazi Germany’s self-assigned role as Europe’s cultural bulwark facing down the Asiatic Soviet hordes.
Moreover the Americanising of West Germany—and the omnipresence of foreign occupiers—contrasted revealingly with the sanitized Germany of popular desires, nourished in the early fifties especially on a diet of nostalgic domestic films. These, the so-called ‘Heimat’ (‘homeland’) cinema, were typically set in the mountain landscapes of southern Germany and featured tales of love, loyalty and community, in period or regional costume. Shamelessly kitschy, these hugely popular entertainments were often close copies of Nazi-era films, sometimes with identical titles (e.g. Black Forest Maiden, of 1950, a re-make of a film with the same title from 1933): the work of directors like Hans Deppe, who had flourished under the Nazis, or else younger men like Rudolf Schündler who were trained by them.
The titles—Green Is the Heath (1951), Land of Smiles (1952), When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (1953), Victoria and Her Hussar (1954), The Faithful Hussar (1954), The Gay Village (1955), When the Alpine Roses Bloom (1955), Rosie from the Black Forest (1956) and dozens more in this vein—evoke a land and a people untroubled by bombs or refugees, ‘deep Germany’: wholesome, rural, uncontaminated, happy and blond. And their very timelessness carried comforting intimations of a country and people free not just of occupiers from East and West but clean, too, of guilt and undefiled by Germany’s recent past.
The Heimat films reflected the provinciality and conservatism of the early Federal Republic, a heartfelt desire to be left alone. This demobilization of Germans was perhaps facilitated by the disproportionate presence of women among the adult population. In the first post-war census of 1950, one-third of all West German households were headed by a divorced woman or a widow. Even after the surviving prisoners of war returned from the USSR in 1955 and 1956, the disproportions remained: in 1960 females in the Federal Republic outnumbered males in a proportion of 126:100. As in Britain or France, only more so, family and domestic concerns were uppermost in the public mind. In this world of women, many of them in full-time work and raising children alone98—with terrible private memories of the last months of war and the immediate post-war era—the rhetoric of nation, nationalism, rearmament, military glory or ideological confrontation held little appeal.
The adoption of substitute public goals to replace the discredited ambitions of the past was quite deliberate. As Konrad Adenauer explained to his cabinet on February 4th 1952, when outlining the Schuman Plan’s importance for his countrymen: ‘The people must be given a new ideology. It can only be a European one.’ West Germany was distinctive in that it alone stood to recover its sovereignty by joining international organizations; and the idea of Europe could itself substitute for the void opened up in German public life by the evisceration of German nationalism—as Schuman explicitly hoped that it would.
For the intellectual and political elites, this diversion of energies proved effective. But for the woman in the street, the real substitute for the old politics was not the new ‘Europe’ but the business of surviving—and prospering. At the end of the war, according to the British Labour politician Hugh Dalton, Winston Churchill had expressed the wish that Germany might grow ‘fat but impotent’. And so it did, faster and to greater effect than Churchill could have dared to hope. The attention of West Germans in the two decades after Hitler’s defeat did not need to be diverted away from politics and towards producing and consuming: it moved wholeheartedly and single-mindedly in that direction.
Making, saving, getting and spending became not just the primary activity of most West Germans, but also the publicly affirmed and approved purpose of national life. Reflecting many years later on this curious collective transformation, and on the concentrated zeal with which the citizens of the Federal Republic went about their work, the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed that ‘one cannot understand the puzzling energy of the Germans if one resists the idea that they have turned their defects into virtues. They had, in a quite literal sense, lost their minds and that was the condition of their future success.’
Internationally condemned after Hitler’s fall for blindly obeying immoral orders, Germans thus turned the defect of their industrious obedience into a national virtue. The shattering impact of their country’s total defeat and subsequent occupation made West Germans amenable to the imposition of democracy in a way that few could have imagined a decade earlier. In place of the ‘devotion for its rulers’ that Heine had first observed in the German people a century before, Germans in the nineteen-fifties attracted international respect for their similarly wholehearted devotion to efficiency, detail, and quality in the manufacture of finished products.
By older Germans especially, this newfound devotion to building prosperity was unambiguously welcome. Well into the nineteen-sixties, many Germans over sixty years old—which included almost everyone in a position of authority—still thought that life had been better under the Kaiser. But in view of what had followed, the security and tranquility afforded them by the passive routines of daily life in the Federal Republic were more than acceptable as a substitute. Younger citizens, however, were more suspicious. The ‘skeptical generation’—men and women born in the last days of the Weimar Republic, and thus old enough to have experienced Nazism but young enough to bear no responsibility for its crimes—were particularly mistrustful of the newfound German order.
For men like the writer Günther Grass, or the social theorist Jürgen Habermas, both born in 1927, W
est Germany was a democracy without democrats. Its citizens had vaulted with shocking ease from Hitler to consumerism; they had salved their guilty memories by growing prosperous. In the German turn away from politics towards private accumulation, Grass and others saw a denial of civic responsibilities past and present. They ardently seconded the dissent from Bertold Brecht’s aphorism ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’ (‘Eating comes first, then morality’) expressed by Ernst Reuter, the mayor of West Berlin, in March 1947: ‘No sentence is more dangerous than “Eating comes first, then morality”. We are hungry and freezing because we permitted the erroneous doctrine which this sentence expresses.’
Habermas would later be closely identified with the search for Verfassungspatriotism (‘constitutional patriotism’), the only sort of national sentiment that he felt it appropriate—and prudent—to encourage in his countrymen. But as early as 1953 he came to public attention for an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung attacking Martin Heidegger for allowing his Heidelberg lectures to be republished with the original allusions to the ‘inner greatness’ of Nazism. At the time the incident was isolated—it aroused little international attention. But it put down a marker all the same, foreshadowing the bitter interrogations of a later decade.
In his 1978 film The Marriage of Maria Braun, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (born in 1945) acidly dissects the serial defects of the Federal Republic as they appeared to its youthful critics. The eponymous heroine picks up her life in the rubble of defeat, in a Germany where ‘all the men look shrunken’, and coolly puts the past behind her, announcing that ‘it’s a bad time for emotions’. Maria then devotes herself with unflinching single-mindedness to the national preoccupation with making money, at which she proves strikingly adept. Along the way the heroine, her initial vulnerability now encrusted with cynicism, exploits the resources, affections and credulity of men—including a (black) American soldier—while remaining ‘loyal’ to Hermann, her German soldier-husband incarcerated in the Soviet Union and whose wartime exploits are left studiously vague.
All Maria’s relations, achievements and comforts are measured in cash, culminating in a new, gadget-filled house into which she plans to welcome her restored husband. They are about to be reconciled in connubial bliss when they and their worldly goods are blown to pieces by an oversight: an open gas tap (sic) in their ultra-modern kitchen. Meanwhile the radio acclaims hysterically West Germany’s victory in the 1954 football World Cup. For Fassbinder and a coming generation of angrily dissenting West Germans, the newfound qualities of the new Germany in its new Europe—prosperity, compromise, political demobilization and a tacit agreement not to arouse the sleeping dogs of national memory—did not deflect attention from the old defects. They were the old defects, in a new guise.
IX
Lost Illusions
‘Indië verloren, rampspoed geboren.’ [If the Indies are lost, we’re done for’.]
Dutch saying, widely cited in 1940S
‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we
like it or not, this growth of [African] consciousness is a political fact’.
Harold Macmillan, speech at Cape Town, February 3rd 1960
‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role’.
Dean Acheson, speech at West Point, December 5th 1962
‘This is Imre Nagy, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian
People’s Republic, speaking. In the early hours of this morning, the Soviet
troops launched an attack against our capital city with the obvious
intention of overthrowing the lawful, democratic, Hungarian Government.
Our troops are fighting. The Government is in its place. I inform the
people of the country and world public opinion of this’.
Imre Nagy on Hungarian radio, 5.20 a.m. on November 4th 1956
‘It is a grave error to call upon foreign troops to teach one’s people
a lesson’.
Josip Broz Tito, November 11th 1956
At the close of the Second World War, the peoples of Western Europe—who were hard put to govern or even feed themselves—continued to rule much of the non-European world. This unseemly paradox, whose implications were not lost on indigenous elites in the European colonies, had perverse consequences. To many in Britain, France or the Netherlands, their countries’ colonies and imperial holdings in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas were balm for the suffering and humiliations of the war in Europe; they had demonstrated their material value in that war as vital national resources. Without access to the far-flung territory, supplies and men that came with colonies, the British and French especially would have been at an even greater disadvantage in their struggle with Germany and Japan than they already were.
This appeared particularly obvious to the British. To anyone raised (like the present author) in post-war Britain, ‘England’, ‘Britain’ and ‘British Empire’ were near-synonymous terms. Elementary school maps showed a world heavily daubed in imperial red; history textbooks paid close attention to the history of British conquests in India and Africa especially; cinema newsreels, radio news bulletins, newspapers, illustrated magazines, children’s stories, comics, sporting contests, biscuit tins, canned fruit labels, butcher shop windows: everything was a reminder of England’s pivotal presence at the historical and geographical heart of an international sea-borne empire. The names of colonial and dominion cities, rivers and political figures were as familiar as those of Great Britain itself.
The British had lost their ‘first’ empire in North America; its successor, if not exactly acquired in ‘a fit of absent-mindedness’, was anything but the product of design. It cost a lot to police, service and administer; and—like the French imperium in North Africa—it was most fervently appreciated and defended by a small settler class of farmers and ranchers, in places like Kenya or Rhodesia. The ‘white’ dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—and South Africa were independent; but their formal allegiance to the Crown, their affective ties to Britain, the food and raw materials they could supply and their armed forces were regarded as national assets in all but name. The material value of the rest of Britain’s Empire was less immediately obvious than its strategic uses: British holdings in East Africa—like the various British-controlled territories and ports in the Middle East and around the Arabian peninsula and the Indian Ocean—were esteemed above all as adjuncts to Britain’s main imperial asset: India, which at the time included what would later become Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as Sri Lanka and Burma.
All the European empires had been acquired sporadically, episodically and (with the exception of the land and sea routes servicing British India) with little sustained attention to logistic consistency or economic gain. The Spanish had already lost most of their empire, first to the British, later to demands for independence from their own settlers, most recently to the rising power of the United States—a source of lingering anti-American sentiment in Spain, then and now. What remained were mere enclaves in Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, to be abandoned by Franco (ever the realist) between 1956 and 1968.
But much of Africa and Asia was still in European hands: governed either directly from the imperial capitals, through a locally recruited governing caste of European-educated intellectuals, or else via indigenous rulers in subservient alliance with European masters. Politicians in post-war Europe who knew only such people were thus largely unaware of the rapid growth of nationalist sentiment among a coming generation of activists throughout the empires (except perhaps in India, but even there they long underestimated its scale and determination).
Thus neither the British, nor any of the other remaining European colonial powers, anticipated the imminent collapse of their holdings or influence overseas. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm has attested, the end of the European colonial empires seemed very far off in 1939 even to students at a seminar for young Communists from Bri
tain and her colonies. Six years later, the world was still divided between rulers and ruled, powerful and powerless, wealthy and poor, to an extent that seemed unlikely to be bridged in the near future. Even in 1960, well after the worldwide movement towards independence had gathered steam, 70 percent of the world’s gross output and 80 percent of the economic value added in manufacturing industry came from Western Europe and North America.
Tiny Portugal—smallest and poorest of the European colonial powers—extracted raw materials at highly favorable prices from its colonies in Angola and Mozambique; these also offered a captive market for Portuguese exports, otherwise internationally uncompetitive. Thus Mozambique grew cotton for the Portuguese commodity market rather than food for its people, a distortion that issued in sizeable profits and regular local famines. In these circumstances and despite unsuccessful revolts in the colonies and military coups at home, Portugese decolonization was postponed as long as possible.99
Even if the European states could manage without their empires, few at the time could conceive of the colonies themselves surviving alone, unsupported by foreign rule. Even liberals and socialists who favored autonomy and eventual independence for Europe’s overseas subjects expected it to be many years before such goals would be realized. It is salutary to be reminded that as recently as 1951 the British foreign secretary, Labour’s Herbert Morrison, regarded independence for African colonies as comparable to ‘giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shotgun.’