The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  Yet out of defeat and ruin a new school of literature (and cinema) did arise. It is known in Germany as Trümmerliteratur (literature of the ruins). Japanese writers who came of age among the ruins called themselves the yakeato seidai (burnt-out generation). Much literature of the late forties and fifties was darkened by nihilism and despair. Japanese novelists who had been in the army described the behavior of men in extreme conditions. Cannibalism was a common theme. In his novel Fires on the Plain, Ooka Shohei remembered his time in the Philippines, near the end of the war, when starved Japanese soldiers, trapped in the mountains of Luzon, ended up devouring enemies (natives were “black pigs,” Americans were “white pigs”) as well as each other. Then there were the stories of soldiers coming home to find their wives with other men, and stories about decent women becoming prostitutes, and respectable men scrounging in the black markets.

  Humiliation and resentment of the foreign occupation became a popular—and indeed permissible—subject only after the occupation was over. One of the most commercially successful examples in Germany was Der Fragenbogen (The Questionnaire) by Ernst von Salomon, published in 1951. Salomon was a rather sinister figure who had been involved in the assassination of Walther Rathenau, Germany’s Jewish Foreign Minister, in 1922. In Der Fragenbogen (the title refers to the questionnaires which Germans had to fill out to show whether they had been Nazis) Salomon describes the Americans as crass, stupid, and virtually as brutal as the Germans had been. “Stupidity,” says the main protagonist, “is the most understandable thing in the world. What depresses me is not our defeat, but the fact that our victors made it meaningless.”

  There was much of this kind of thing in Japan too, perhaps even more than in Germany, since the occupation censors had been so active in suppressing feudalism and anti-American sentiments. In the 1950s there were a number of films about the injustice of war crimes trials and the horror of being torched by American bombs. A new literary genre appeared, describing the effects of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And movie audiences had a pornographic fascination for the seamy side of American military bases: the crime, the prostitution, the raping of innocent Japanese women. If the mushroom cloud and the imperial radio speech are the clichés of defeat, the scene of an American soldier (usually black) raping a Japanese girl (always young, always innocent), usually in a pristine rice field (innocent, pastoral Japan), is a stock image in postwar movies about the occupation.

  For most people in Germany and Japan, those first years after the war were a time of pure misery. And yet, what is remarkable about much of the literature of the period, or more precisely, of the literature about that time, since much of it was written later, is the deep strain of romanticism, even nostalgia. This colors personal memories of people who grew up just after the war as well. The Japanese playwright Kara Juro, for example, remembered playing in bomb craters near the Sumida River in Tokyo: “You could see the horizon on every side. The skies were so bright that everything looked unnaturally sharp. It was wonderful to play in the ruins. It was like the landscape of dreams.”

  The novelist and essayist Sakaguchi Ango was already in his forties when the war ended. He had been just a few years too old to be drafted into the army. After the war he became famous for his essays on the bombings and their aftermath. Some call his writing nihilistic. I am not sure this is the right word. In any case, he expressed perfectly the spirit of a defeated nation in ruins. Yet his tone was that of a disenchanted romantic, if one can imagine such a thing. In his famous essay “On Degradation,” he described the bombing raids on Tokyo as a grand spectacle, a kind of lethal fireworks display. He enjoyed the “weird beauty of people resigned to their fate.” He liked watching young girls moving about the burnt landscape, smiling in the midst of catastrophe.

  The immediate postwar period, however, was one of complete depravity. The smiling girlish faces—the “love among the ruins”—were lost: “The youths who had not perished like blossoms for their emperor were black marketeers now.” But the depravity is more real and precious to him than the romance of war, which was nothing but a deliberate illusion fostered by political propaganda: the beauty of sacrifice, emperor worship, military valor, a race descended from the gods, and so on. These illusions had to be dashed to make the Japanese human again: “Oh, Japanese people, oh, Japan, I want you all to be depraved. Japan and the Japanese must become degraded! As long as the emperor system persists, as long as such historical devices remain part of the idea of nationhood, they will be manipulated, and we won’t be able to develop our lives as human beings in this country.”

  To Ango, then, as to other writers, the ruins offered hope. At last the Japanese, without “the fake kimono” of traditions and ideals, were reduced to basic human needs; at last they could feel real love, real pain; at last they would be honest. There was no room, among the ruins, for hypocrisy.

  It is a common intellectual conceit: the virtue of poverty, the purity of the dispossessed. It was a conceit which, in those early days, was given extra zest by the brief revival of socialist hopes. A few people of the left, including some Communists, were the only ones to have survived the war untainted by the Japanese imperialist adventure. For several years in the 1940s, the American occupation authorities encouraged them to play an active part in Japanese politics. Left-wing parties were founded or revived, trade unions organized. Perhaps, at last, a truly democratic (socialist, of course) Japan would arise from the ruins of war, shaped by the solidarity of an impoverished people.

  The writer Wolf Dietrich Schnurre remembered in 1963 how similar hopes in Germany had, in his opinion, actually raised the German people to a higher moral plane: “There was a swell of real, burning hope in ruined Germany. Then, the survivors still had an ear for the silent supplications of the dead. Then, the fresh wind of peace was still blowing through the burnt-out houses. People still had faith. They still saw a neutral, united Germany. The vision of a new Europe was not yet torn to pieces by nationalist rivalry. Freedom was still within our grasp, and antimilitarism and the desire to live were still one.”

  This was not quite the mood that Stephen Spender found in Germany. But the language is typical of the leftist nostalgia for those years. The novelist Heinrich Böll was about ten years younger than Ango. Like Ooka Shohei, he was a returned soldier. Like Schnurre, he saw a real chance for human salvation in the German rubble. He was an active member of a literary circle called Gruppe 47, which also included Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. What this informal group had in common was a leftist orientation, a liking for Hemingway’s sparse reportorial style, and a dislike for romantic escapism. In an article entitled “I Belong to Trümmerliteratur,” written in 1952, Böll identified himself with “black marketeers and with their victims, with refugees and all others who have lost a roof over their heads, and above all, of course, with the generation to which we belonged, and which found itself in a strange and memorable situation: the generation that came home.”

  Like Ango, Böll saw something ennobling in a people stripped of all possessions. He too had a romantic view of the returning soldier, to the point of bringing in Homer as a model for Trümmerliteratur: “The name of Homer is unimpeachable in the entire civilized Western world: Homer is the founding father of European epic literature, but his stories are of the Trojan War, of the destruction of Troy and the homecoming of Ulysses. Literature of war, ruins, and coming home—we have no reason to be ashamed of this description.”

  Now, there may have been an element here of saving pride. Ulysses was perhaps not an entirely fit comparison with Hitler’s soldiers. But it was typical of the anxiousness of a German writer to be part of the “civilized Western world.” Certainly, in retrospect, those first years were not a time of despair. That came later, for Böll and others who thought like him. Böll was able to be precise about the end of the Zusammenbruch and the beginning of bourgeois hypocrisy and moral amnesia. It came on June 20, 1948, the day of the currency reform, the day that
Ludwig Erhard, picked by the Americans as Economics Director in the U.S.-British occupation zone, gave birth to the Deutsche Mark. The DM, from then on, would be the new symbol of West German national pride; it also excluded the Easterners living in the Soviet zone. Erhard’s motto was “Prosperity for All” (“Wohlstand für Alle”). For many who believed in a brand-new world where the human spirit would conquer selfishness and greed, it was the end of a romance.

  Böll (in 1960): “Consumers. We are a nation of consumers. Neckties and conformism, shirts and nonconformism, there are consumers for everything. The only important thing is that everything—shirts or conformism—is for sale.”

  The “inability to mourn,” the German disassociation from the piles of corpses strewn all over Central and Eastern Europe, so that the Third Reich, as the Mitscherlichs put it, “faded like a dream,” made it easier to identify with the Americans, the victors, the West. If Böll and the Mitscherlichs are to be believed, there was a strong tendency to turn away from reality from the very beginning of the Zusammenbruch. The process of willed forgetfulness culminated in the manic effort of reconstruction, in the great rush to prosperity.

  The rush, to some extent the amnesia, and definitely the identification with the West, was helped further along by the Cold War. West Germany now found itself on the same side as the Western allies. Their common enemy was the “Asiatic” Soviet empire. Fewer questions needed to be asked. As in the Foreign Legion, what was past, was past. Indeed, to some people the Cold War simply confirmed what they had known all along: Germany always had been on the right side, if only our American friends had realized it earlier. The Cold War came as the final blow for those who had hoped for a pacifist, socialist Germany.

  The Mitscherlichs’ psychoanalysis of their nation in The Inability to Mourn was sweeping—can one really psychoanalyze an entire nation? A little bit of amnesia, some identification with the West, and much energy channeled into economic recovery were perhaps not such bad things. We know what happened when Germany had been humiliated and squeezed roughly three decades before. “Prosperity for All” was probably the best that could have happened to the Germans of the Federal Republic. It took the seed of resentment (and thus future extremism) out of defeat. And the integration of West Germany into a Western alliance was a good thing too. Yet the disgust felt by Böll and others for a people getting fat (“flabby” is the usual term, denoting sloth and decadence) and forgetting about its murderous past was understandable. It cannot have been an edifying spectacle.

  The man to hate in Staudte’s film The Murderers Are Among Us is Brückner, factory owner, family man, and former army officer. Brückner ordered the shooting of more than a hundred Polish men, women, and children on Christmas Day 1942. Dr. Mertens, the embittered veteran dodging the rats in Berlin, was under his command. Mertens tried to stop the killing. He now wants to confront flabby Brückner with his past, and shoot him. He finds him in his factory, celebrating Christmas with his workers. He is just giving a festive speech, celebrating “a Germany we all love, a Germany which will never perish, a Germany where justice will triumph.” Dr. Mertens remembers that other Christmas, in 1942, when Brückner was leading his men in a chorus of “Silent Night,” even as Polish families were shot in the snow. Dr. Mertens follows Brückner to his house and reminds him of the people whose deaths he had ordered.

  “But it was war,” says Brückner, his complacency turning to panic. “Different conditions … It is peace now … Christmas … peaceful Christmas …”

  Dr. Mertens is about to shoot Brückner, but is stopped at the last minute by his lover, Susanne.

  S.: “You don’t have the right to judge!”

  DR. M.: “But we must press charges. In the name of millions of innocent people.”

  BRÜCKNER: “What do you want from me? I am innocent! I am innocent! I am innocent!” (The sound of his voice echoes as the faces of his victims fade in and out of view.)

  This film was made before Erhard’s currency reform was even heard of. But it was prescient. The Brückners were the price Germany had to pay for the revival of its fortunes. Indeed, they were often instrumental in it. They were the apparatchik who functioned in any system, the small, efficient fish who voted for Christian conservatives in the West and became Communists in the East. Staudte was clearly troubled by this, as were many Germans, but he offered no easy answers. Perhaps it was better this way: flabby democrats do less harm than vengeful old Nazis. (Dutiful Communists snooping on their neighbors are a different matter.) Some critics, such as Wolf Dietrich Schnurre, thought that Staudte’s film was much too weak. It should have ended in a proper war crimes trial, he wrote in 1946, to show just what was to be done about the murderers among us.

  Schnurre did not get his wish in real life either. Few Brückners were punished for their deeds, particularly those who had served Hitler well as doctors, lawyers, scientists, or bureaucrats. The early efforts of the occupation forces to “denazify” Germany petered out in the late 1940s, when the beginning of the Cold War set other priorities. This left at least one generation of German writers and artists with the conclusion that the forgetful, prosperous, capitalist Federal Republic of Germany was in many more or less hidden ways a continuation of Hitler’s Reich. This perfectly suited the propagandists of the GDR, who would produce from time to time lists of names of former Nazis who were prospering in the West. These lists were often surprisingly accurate.

  In a famous film, half fiction, half documentary, made by a number of German writers and filmmakers (including Böll) in 1977, the continuity was made explicit. The film, called Germany in Autumn (Deutschland in Herbst), was prompted by the official reaction to the murder by Red Army terrorists of Hans-Martin Schleyer, board member of Daimler-Benz (and, incidentally, a former SS officer). The country (or at least the country’s intelligentsia) was on the verge of hysteria. Many thought the end of West German democracy was at hand. Now the establishment, so it was thought, would show its true brown color. A recurring image in the film is of Schleyer’s funeral in Stuttgart, spliced together with General Rommel’s funeral in 1944. The Nazi banners at Rommel’s funeral are alternated with shots of the Mercedes-Benz flags fluttering outside the hall where Schleyer’s funeral service took place.

  Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the participants in this film. A year later he made The Marriage of Maria Braun. The first years after the war are shown as a kind of miserable idyll; the ruins still glow with human warmth. Maria is prepared to wait for her husband, Hermann, who is missing on the eastern front. This German soldier, by the way, is the only person to emerge from the story with decency and honor. After 1948, the background noise of the jackhammers rebuilding West German cities sounds like machine-gun fire, and Maria becomes ever richer, using and abusing everyone on her way up. The film starts with a portrait of the Führer. It ends with a series of portraits of postwar chancellors, shown in negative film, as though they literally continued in Adolf Hitler’s shadow.

  Visions of continuity returned in 1990 with the unification of Germany. Even the language was revived. Once again there was a Zero Hour, and a currency reform, when the former subjects of the Communist Party state were handed one Deutsche Mark for every Eastern one. And again there was an outcry among intellectuals about missed opportunities, material greed, and historical amnesia. When the wall was finally pried open in the winter of 1989, the East German writer Stefan Heym was not the only one to sneer at the “materialism” of people who wanted, for the first time in their lives, to enjoy, if only vicariously at first, the affluence of the West, which Heym, as a privileged writer had been enjoying all along. Have they really learned nothing, he wondered aloud, nothing at all, after forty years of socialist education? Günter Grass called the unification an “Anschluss,” and West German entrepreneurs were compared to the Stuka planes that dive-bombed Poland in 1939. Soon, said Heym, the slogan “One People” will become “One Reich, One People, One Führer.” To lifelong “antifascists” who had alway
s believed that the Federal Republic was the heir to Nazi Germany, unification seemed—so they said—almost like a restoration of 1933. The irony was that many Wessies saw their new Eastern compatriots as embarrassing reminders of the same unfortunate past.

  It explains, at any rate, why the unification of the two Germanys was considered a defeat by antifascists on both sides of the former border. While Günter Grass used “Auschwitz” as an argument against unification, the East German playwright Heiner Müller said in countless interviews that capitalism—“selection”—and the logic of technological and industrial progress led straight to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Perhaps inevitably, the symbols of memory had become tools of political polemics. Rarely was the word “Auschwitz” heard more often than during the time of unification, partly as an always salutary reminder that Germans must not forget, but partly as an expression of pique that the illusion of a better, antifascist, anticapitalist, idealistic Germany, born in the ruins of 1945, and continued catastrophically for forty years in the East, had now been dashed forever.

  Ludwig Erhard’s almost exact counterpart in Japan was Ikeda Hayato, Minister of Finance from 1949 and Prime Minister from 1960 to 1964. His version of Erhard’s “Prosperity for AH” was the Double Your Incomes policy, which promised to make the Japanese twice as rich in ten years. Japan had an average growth rate of 11 percent during the 1960s. Ikeda, advised by the Detroit banker Joseph Dodge, had already succeeded by then in undoing the inflationary policies of the New Dealers who arrived in Japan with “the stationing” of General MacArthur’s troops. He also had managed to deprive the Japanese trade unions of some of their considerable new powers. And he had helped to prepare the peace treaty with the United States and fifty other nations that was signed in San Francisco in 1951. These nations did not include China, which had suffered so badly from the Japanese war, or North Korea or the Soviet Union. For they were the new enemies once again, in a war that did wonders for the Japanese economy, as did the next Asian war, in Vietnam.