by Ian Buruma
Only once during the trial did the game plan threaten to go wrong. During chief prosecutor Keenan’s cross-examination of Tojo Hideki, the general agreed that there was “no Japanese subject who would dare act against the emperor’s will.” This was not at all in the scenario so carefully prepared by MacArthur. And Keenan was forced to prevail upon another defendant in the trial, Marquis Kido, keeper of the privy seal and the emperor’s closest adviser during much of the war, to try to get Tojo to correct his statement. Tojo, ever a loyal subject, did so a week later. He said that “because of the advice given by the High Command the emperor consented, though reluctantly, to the war.” His “love and desire for peace remained the same right up to the very moment when hostilities commenced, and even during the war his feelings remained the same.”
The point here is not that most Japanese would have liked to see the emperor hang, or even stand trial. But the question of the emperor’s guilt was of far more than just historical interest. For the imperial institution had been used until the end of the war to quash free speech and political accountability. Without examining his part in the war, the “system of irresponsibilities” could not be properly exposed, which made it likely that, in one form or another, it would continue.
Early critics of the imperial institution realized this. In 1946, the left-wing filmmaker Kamei Fumio made a film entitled The Japanese Tragedy, which was highly critical of the emperor’s wartime role. At first the American censors could see nothing wrong with this collage of newsreels, photographs, and newspaper reports. But after a private screening, the Prime Minister, Yoshida Shigeru, complained to General Charles Willoughby, head of the Military Intelligence Section, that the film was subversive. Willoughby agreed and the movie was banned. In 1984, Kamei attended a screening of The Japanese Tragedy with the film historian Hirano Kyoko. She was told that it was around the time this film was banned that the Japanese people stopped actively discussing the war responsibility of Emperor Hirohito. This suited more people than just the Japanese and American authorities. As long as the emperor lived, Japanese would have trouble being honest about the past. For he had been formally responsible for everything, and by holding him responsible for nothing, everybody was absolved, except, of course, for a number of military and civilian scapegoats, Officers and Outlaws, who fell “victim to victors’ justice.”
TEXTBOOK RESISTANCE
GERMANY
IN American Hijiki, Nosaka Akiyuki describes what it was like to be a Japanese schoolboy in 1945. During the war it was useless learning English. “Yes” and “no” were the only words you needed to know, the history teacher said. “Yes or no?” is what General Yamashita shouted at General Percival in 1941, when he demanded the unconditional surrender of the British in Singapore. But now that the war was over, it was time to learn how to say “thank you” and “excuse me.”
General Percival, the history teacher used to say, was the archetypical white man: tall, but weak in the knees. When it came to a fight, any Japanese could best the white man, for the Japanese had strong thighs. This was because the white man was soft and sat in chairs, whereas the Japanese exercised their muscles by sitting on the floor. But when the war was over, the history—suddenly renamed “social studies”—teacher said: “ ‘Took at the Americans. Their average height is five feet, ten inches. For us, it’s only five feet three. This difference of seven inches figures in everything, and I believe that’s why we lost the War. A basic difference in physical strength is invariably manifested in national strength.’ ” The boys were not quite sure why the teacher had made this point, “but he was so good at it you never knew how seriously to take him. Maybe this was just his way of covering up the embarrassment he felt at suddenly having to preach Democratic Japan after Holy Japan from textbooks filled with the censors’ black blottings.”
As a result, nobody believed a word teachers said anymore. One day it was the divine race fighting the Anglo-American demons to the last man, woman, and child, the next it was thank you, excuse me, and demokurashi.
I thought of Nosaka’s novella when I set off to meet two history teachers at a high school on the outskirts of East Berlin. It was only two years after the antifascist republic of workers, soldiers, and farmers, bound in fraternal solidarity to the U.S.S.R., had been joined with the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany, allied to the U.S.A. History, as the underpinning of so much politics, had to be stood on its head. How did teachers explain this? How did any of their pupils still believe them?
Mrs. Lein and Mrs. Nass looked to be in their forties. Mrs. Nass, the headmistress, had been in the Communist Party. Mrs. Lein had not, which is why she could never have become headmistress. Both women had intelligent no-nonsense faces, hair pulled back sensibly from their pale foreheads. Both wore sensible, no-nonsense clothes: sturdy shoes, thick sweaters. The school building suffered the effects of long neglect. The dung-colored walls showed watery cracks. We met in a cold room that smelled of cabbage.
I told them about Nosaka’s story. They shrugged and looked at one another. Mrs. Nass, as the senior teacher, spoke first. In 1945, she said, there had been no such problems in their part of Germany. Ninety percent of the teachers in the Soviet zone had been fired. And those who stayed after 1949 were sure to have been antifascists. As for 1990, there had been relatively few problems at their school, for—and here they both nodded vigorously—it had been quite a democratic school.
Of course, she went on, one could not mention certain aspects of history. The massacre of Polish officers in Katyn was a topic that was best avoided, as was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. “We didn’t know about these things,” said Mrs. Nass. “We said nothing that was incorrect, you must realize. We just skipped certain subjects.”
Judging from old GDR schoolbooks, this was not strictly true. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, which enabled Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to carve up Poland, was mentioned, but it was given a particular explanation. I looked it up in the history textbook given to me by Mrs. Lein herself. There it was, on page 145: “The nonaggression pact between the U.S.S.R. and Germany: … The plans to solve the inner contradiction of the imperialist system at the expense of the Soviet Union had failed. The U.S.S.R. thwarted the aim of building a mighty anti-Soviet coalition and set the limits to German aggression in Eastern Europe. The pact assured the Soviet Union two years of peace, during which it could build up its defenses.” The Soviet invasion of Poland was not intended to rob Polish land, but “to protect the lives and freedom of the peoples of the Ukraine and Byelorussia from the fascists.”
The young readers of this text were asked to address two questions, printed in the margins: “What was the meaning of the German-Soviet nonaggression pact?” and “Why is it still disparaged today by imperialist ideologues?” It had been the task of Mrs. Lein and Mrs. Nass to teach the politically correct answers.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Nass, “we have to tell the children that we simply didn’t know some of the things we teach them nowadays. They accept this. They understand. Even before, they knew we didn’t believe everything we had to tell them. This is Berlin, we all watched Western television. We all knew that. We just didn’t talk about it.” I thought of all the people in East Germany watching Holocaust, without being able to discuss it, because they were not supposed to have seen it in the first place.
“There was no question of guilt here,” said Mrs. Lein. “I had to tell my pupils to behave themselves discreetly on school trips to Poland and C.S.S.R. [Czechoslovakia]. I had to explain that to those people we were still the ones who started the war. You see, all this business about fraternal solidarity was rubbish. They still hated us. But my pupils found this hard to understand. They just didn’t know. One of them went around Warsaw wearing Bermuda shorts in the German colors. He was beaten up.”
What about now? I asked. Were the pupils receptive to a different interpretation of history now? Both women rolled their eyes.
“They’ve become very p
assive,” said Mrs. Lein. “They never ask us any questions anymore,” said Mrs. Nass. “They are not critical. They just watch videos.” Yes, said Mrs. Lein, “and the older children, they just shrug their shoulders and wonder why they should bother about anything. ‘What’s it all for?’ they say.”
And the new school textbooks from the West. What did Mrs. Lein and Mrs. Nass think of those?
“Well,” said Mrs. Nass, “they look better, but the contents, well …”
“Not at all good,” said Mrs. Lein. “Very superficial.”
I asked them to be more specific.
“There is not enough analysis about the war, why it happened, and so on. There is a lot of stuff about the Jews—but it’s all about superficial events, no framework, no background …”
I wondered what background they expected. Did they miss the Marxist explanations about monopoly capital being at the root of Hitler’s fascism?
“Oh,” said both women at once, “but we still believe that. People who profit from it wage wars. That is obvious. We still teach our pupils that. But you know what the problem is: our pupils are very sensitive to the distinctions between old GDR sources and new FRG ones. The problem is, we have to leave it up to them to make up their minds.”
The main thrust of East German histories of World War II can be summarized in two short passages, both from Mrs. Lein’s textbook. One refers to the 1935 Communist Party conference in Brussels: “Because the Hitler regime was a dictatorship consisting of the most reactionary and aggressive elements of the grand bourgeoisie, it was objectively in contradiction with the interests of the majority of all classes. The struggle against the Hitler dictatorship therefore had to have an antifascist, democratic order as its aim. All democratic and peace-loving forces had an interest in such a goal. The program for this wide alliance was proposed by the German Communist Party.”
The second refers to the first postwar German Communist Party program: “Even as the armies of the anti-Hitler coalition approached the German borders from east and west, the Communists in the resistance, in the concentration camps, or in exile were preparing for the foundation of a democratic, peace-loving Germany, as soon as the fascist regime was toppled.”
How could the pupils of Mrs. Lein and Mrs. Nass have felt guilty? They had been born in this democratic, peace-loving Germany. They were the children of the resistance. Their elders had struggled against the Hitler regime (never Germany, or even Nazi Germany; the good Germany had continued to exist, underground, in exile, among Communists). The story of the Third Reich is not presented as a tragic aberration in the long and troubled flow of German history. Nor is it presented as a logical outcome of the darker strains of German idealism: indeed, some of the most chauvinistic German idealists, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the author of Addresses to the German Nation, or Friedrich Jahn, the father of German calisthenics, were revered figures in the Democratic Republic. Instead, it is shown as a story of continuity, following the unbroken laws of history. The “Hitler regime” was simply the last and most violent stage of bourgeois capitalism. As an East Berlin comedian once observed: the past belongs to the West, the future belongs to us.
The selection of illustrations in GDR textbooks supports this thesis. There are portraits of Communist resistance heroes, such as Erich Honecker, who ruled the GDR for almost two decades, and Heinz Kapelle, who cried out: “Long live the Communist Party!” before his execution in 1941. There is a photograph of Soya Kosmodemyanskaya, the Russian partisan, who shouted: “Comrades, carry on the struggle without fear!” before she was hanged near Moscow. And there are pictures of Hitler himself, surrounded by captains of industry, to show what the resistance was up against. There are few pictures of the war itself, except for one or two photographs of Soviet soldiers fighting on the eastern front. There are some pictures of concentration camps: almost all taken in Buchenwald, where many Communists were incarcerated. But one picture shows a Soviet soldier shaking hands with a concentration camp inmate in striped camp garb. This could not have been at Buchenwald, since the Americans got there first.
Atrocities and genocide are less in evidence in these texts than the heroism of Soviet liberators and Communist rebels. The children of the GDR were not asked to atone for or reflect on the crimes committed by their parents or grandparents. Auschwitz was not meant to be part of their identity. They were taught to identify with heroes.
As Mrs. Lein and Mrs. Nass were saying, West German schoolbooks show a rather different picture of the past. It is a picture that must have been shocking to those who “just didn’t know.” Textbooks in the Federal Republic contain few photographs of resistance heroes, but many of the Holocaust. Virtually every book carries the famous photograph of SS officers on the railway ramp at Birkenau, standing tall in their polished boots, as they choose their victims for immediate killing. Nazi documents are quoted in detail. We find the disciplinary rules of a typical concentration camp, and the racial laws of 1935, and speeches by Goebbels or Göring, as well as the bureaucratic pedantry of Heydrich’s report on the Kristallnacht of 1938.
Bernd Wetzka, the high school teacher who brought his class to the Schwammberger trial, told me that about sixty hours of Nazi history per year was the recommended norm in West German schools. Wetzka teaches history in a tiny Swabian town, with cobbled streets, a medieval castle, and rows of seventeenth-century houses. He directed me to the Jewish cemetery to see the graves of two brothers. One died in France, as a German officer in the Great War. The other, younger brother died twenty-five years later in Theresienstadt, the “model” concentration camp.
I had tea with Wetzka and his girlfriend, a German teacher. She was in her early thirties, about ten years younger than he. They both said their pupils showed a great deal of interest in the Nazi period. More than in the history of the GDR? “Absolutely,” said Wetzka, “for we don’t really feel that the GDR—the Stasi and all that—was part of our own history, while the Third Reich certainly was.”
Wetzka’s parents were conventional people. That is to say, they had been small-time Nazis. His father served in the Waffen SS on the eastern front, and his mother was a keen Hitler Maiden. His father still kept his Iron Cross with the swastika attached. So Wetzka found it hard to talk to his parents about the past. Nor did his teachers tell him much. Those who had been children during the war felt no need to talk. The ones who had been adults didn’t want to. There was one teacher, though, an older man with a war wound, whom Wetzka particularly disliked. His manner was harsh and authoritarian. But when the children asked him about the Third Reich one day, he suddenly broke down and cried. “We were all guilty,” he said. “We saw the slogans on the walls saying death to the Jews, and we stood by and did nothing. We were all guilty.”
Schoolbooks in the Federal Republic are not written by scholars selected by the central government, as was the case in the GDR. The books differ from state to state. Publishers submit their texts for approval to the state governments, who appoint committees of schoolteachers (recommended by parents and pupils) to vet them. In principle, the books are vetted on constitutional, not on ideological grounds. They are passed as long as they accord with the constitution and the laws on education.
One of the laws on education stipulates that educational materials “should not hinder students in making up their own minds.” Judging from a typical history textbook for high school students in Bavaria, this is taken seriously. The questions asked in every chapter are not so much tests of political correctness as incentives for pupils to think for themselves. There is, for example, a quotation from the jurist Carl Schmitt, written in 1933, in which he defines the legal status of the Nazi Party. The party, he argued, was neither a private organization nor the state itself; it stood alone, and could not be subject to the scrutiny of law courts. This is followed by a speech, in 1937, by the chief of an SS academy, who tells his pupils that they are to be the aristocracy of a new type of Hellenistic city-state, accountable only to Hitler’s will. After
reading these quotations, the students are asked to “discuss the problem of how an individual is to behave in a state based on false norms.”
The effectiveness of such class discussions depends a great deal on the teachers. Wetzka was not entirely sure how to approach the Third Reich, how to give it meaning, beyond teaching the facts. His girlfriend favored the postmodern approach. She would ask her pupils to read Hitler’s speeches and then deconstruct them, to analyze how his audiences had been manipulated. Wetzka, being a generation older, struggled with the Sonderweg theory, the idea that German history had progressed on a unique, fatally flawed track. He found it “hard to say whether Nazism was typically German. Maybe it is better to teach children how quickly things can go wrong when a particular group is despised by the majority.”
Perhaps this is what the two teachers in East Berlin meant by the lack of a “framework.” In fact, however, there is a framework in West German textbooks, which is different from Communist state propaganda and yet in one important respect not unlike the old East German books. A handbook for Gymnasium teachers in Baden-Württemberg explains what is to be achieved by teaching children about the “National Socialist dictatorship”: “The pupils should learn about Hitler’s foreign policy, and how the dictatorship was established. They should also find out about the inhumanity of the Nazi system of persecution and mass murder. By coming to grips with the totalitarian character of the ‘Third Reich,’ the pupils must recognize how the liberal-democratic order of our state guarantees our basic rights.” The handbook highly recommends visits to concentration camps.