The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  With the music still playing, the lights came on. I looked around, and saw that my daughter and I were the only ones left in the theater.

  One of the most beautiful metaphors of history is Walter Benjamin’s description of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. The Angelus Novus is the angel of history; he has a human face, but the wings and feet of a bird: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.”

  The idea of progress, as well as British bombs, turned Dresden into a city of ruins and monstrosities. Walking through the hideous streets of central Dresden, seeing the few bits and pieces of the old city, like fragments of a beautiful antique jar, produced in me precisely the irrational feeling of guilt by association that I have argued against in the cases of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The reason had little to do with the respective death tolls (roughly 30,000 in Dresden), for mass killing is shocking, whatever the actual numbers. (As Christopher Isherwood said to the man who pointed out that more Jews were murdered than homosexuals: “What are you, in real estate?”) And the feeling of special regret was not particularly noble. For what is so shocking about the bombing of Dresden is that it smashed in one night the accumulated beauty of centuries. Dresden, like Prague or Venice, was one of the architectural wonders of the world. Its destruction was an act of perversity, like putting an ax to a Chippendale chair, or knifing a Michelangelo, or burning a priceless library. It was all the more perverse since there was no compelling strategic reason for it. Which is not to say that the bombing of ugly slums is any less ghastly, in human terms, than the destruction of Dresden’s baroque heart. It’s just that being in the new, empty hole of Dresden, where there once was a heart, is to be constantly aware of what was lost.

  Parts of the old city could have been saved after the war. Enough was left of some of the palaces and churches to make restoration feasible, as in Nuremberg or Munich. But the first Communist leader of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, decided that the past had to be eradicated. “Dresden, More Beautiful Than Ever” (“Dresden, schöner als je”) was his slogan, and for the second time the city fell victim to perversity: art historians were forced to draw up plans for the final destruction of Dresden’s remains, and party hacks took commissions to design the frightful city that was to be the showcase of socialism. The Sophienkirche, opposite the eighteenth-century Zwinger Palace, was the finest Gothic church in Dresden. It was torn down and a squat concrete bunker, housing a workers’ canteen, was built in its place. This was Ulbricht’s idea of progress.

  But not all the rubble was cleared. The Zwinger Palace was restored in the 1960s, as were one or two other ruins, and the remains of the eighteenth-century Frauenkirche were left as they were, because neither Ulbricht nor anybody else could agree on what to build in its place. Thus the sad pile of stones became a warning place, a memorial (to cite the official plaque) “to the tens of thousands of dead, and an inspiration to the living in their struggle against imperialist barbarism and for the peace and happiness of man.”

  I asked the new curator of the municipal museum, Matthias Griebel, what exactly was meant by imperialist barbarism. Griebel answered: “They meant every imperialist war: Israel in the Sinai, America in Vietnam, everything but socialist wars.”

  Griebel, whose shaven head and luxuriant whiskers made him resemble a great German eagle, was one of the small number of people who had tried to keep historical consciousness alive in Dresden, by organizing lectures and informal exhibitions. At first the Communist government opposed this kind of thing, for Dresden’s “feudal” past belonged in the dustbin of history. It was only in the 1980s, when Communist dogma had utterly lost its popular appeal, that the regime tried to bolster its credentials by claiming a historical legitimacy: from Thomas Münzer, the peasant rebel, to Frederick of Prussia. Even Karl May, the nineteenth-century romantic, whose novels about Old Shatterhand, the German hero of the Wild West, were read avidly by Hitler and Einstein alike, was declared to be one of us. His house, “Villa Shatterhand,” can be visited just down the Elbe, northwest of Dresden.

  A few miles up the Elbe, on the other side of town, is Pirna, a crumbling but quaint little town with fine nineteenth-century villas and the odd bit of late Gothic architecture. I went there in search of a historical site which is not mentioned in any guidebook of the Dresden region. There was an old hospital there, once used for mental patients. I knew it was still there for I had seen photographs of it. And Griebel confirmed its existence. The mental hospital was not insignificant, for it was there that doctors first experimented on their patients with the murderous gas known as Zyklon B. More than 10,000 people died at the Sonnenstein Euthanasia Institute.

  I had some trouble locating the place. An old lady cheerfully sent me up a hill, but then I got lost. “What did you say it was?” The former Euthanasia Institute. “When was this?” The Hitler period. “Sorry, I wouldn’t know about that.”

  But I found it in the end. In a pleasant park next to Sonnenstein Castle were several turn-of-the-century buildings. I entered a villa with yellow walls which had a sign that said: “Sauna facilities for sick and old people.” A young woman asked me what I wanted. I told her. She winced and said: “No, it wasn’t here. We only deal with patients for specialized treatment here. You want the other building over there where they used to have a turbine factory.”

  The “building over there” had a rusted wire fence around it. It looked sinister enough to have been a Euthanasia Institute. And there was a plaque which commemorated one Albert Barthel, “our party comrade, murdered by the Nazis in 1942.”

  Yet this wasn’t it either. I walked into a room and saw several young people having their lunch. They turned out to be deacons who looked after retarded children. “The former Euthanasia Institute? No, no, thank God it wasn’t in this room. No, it was in the building next door.”

  I peered into the cellars of the building next door, a rather elegant French-style villa. There was no plaque anywhere. The grass grew wild and high around the bolted door. I listened to the birds sing in the rustling trees and I thought of the pile of teddy bears I had seen lying about in the hall of the house of deacons.

  Architecture, said Mr. Griebel, is time expressed in stone. The thing about Dresden is that the stones remind its citizens of times they would like to forget. The Third Reich is but a ghostly nightmare, but the dictatorship from Ulbricht to Honecker is still visible in every jerry-built housing project and concrete workers’ canteen. You cannot blame people for feeling a deep nostalgia for the old Dresden of palaces and spires. As Griebel said, “we live in the rump of a city, which we’d dearly love to restore.”

  I paid a last visit to the ruins of the Frauenkirche, to make a note of the memorial plaque. But I found that it had gone. Instead, there was a fence around the rubble. A man in a blue uniform was giving orders to some workmen. I climbed over the fence to get a closer look. The uniformed man, a stocky little figure, spotted me and rushed over in great strides, flushed with anger, and shouted in a thick Saxon accent that I had no business being there: it was streng verboten! How typically German, I thought, as every childhood prejudice flooded back in an instant. But I obeyed his orders and retreated across the fence, away from the man, who was still sputtering with rage. I took one more look at the workmen, who were piling stone upon stone. In a year or two, the Frauenkirche would be there again, fully restored in its old glory, as though nothing had happened at all.

  After the war, Oskar Matzerath and his friend Klepp start a jazz band. Their tour of West Germany takes them to Düsseldorf, or, to be
exact, the stretch of the Rhine between Düsseldorf and Kaiserswerth, where they play ragtime music on the riverbank. The time is 1949, one year after the currency reform which saw the birth of the Deutsche Mark. They are asked to play at an expensive, “high-class” nightclub called the Onion Cellar. It is done up in a fake old German style, with bull’s-eye windowpanes, and an enamel sign outside, hanging from wrought-iron gallows. When the club is full, the main entertainment begins. The guests are handed little chopping boards with paring knives and an onion. And what does the onion do? “It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad.”

  The Onion Cellar is, of course, an expensive and temporary cure for the “inability to mourn,” the moral and spiritual numbness that overcame the German people after the war. Many thoughtful Germans I have met are irritated by this phrase: inability to mourn. Mourn what? they ask. Mourn whom? You mourn loved ones you have lost. But, say my liberal German friends, how can you mourn for the victims you have murdered? Reflection, yes; apology, certainly; compensation, of course; but mourning, surely not. And so, in liberal, thoughtful circles (the circles expected to welcome nosy foreigners in their midst) there has been—still is—much reflection and apology. But the mourning of the German dead—the soldiers, and the civilians killed by Allied bombs, or by vengeful Polish, Czech, or Slovak neighbors, who drove them from their homes—such mourning was an embarrassing affair, left largely to right-wing nationalists and nostalgic survivors, pining for their lost homelands.

  In village squares and churchyards in the western half of Germany there are many memorials to the war dead of World War I. There are very few reminders of those who died in the second war, except in the rancid cellars of provincial beer halls, where foreigners are less than welcome. In fact, there appear to be more World War II memorials in the East, perhaps because guilt was never an issue in the Democratic Republic.

  Helmut Kohl tried to redress the balance, clumsily, tactlessly, by dragging Ronald Reagan to the cemetery in Bitburg. He was rightly condemned. But traveling through Germany, I often felt that too much apology could become a form of self-abasement. Mourning, after all, has its purpose. The ritual expression of grief and loss strengthens the sense of continuity and community. Yet it was precisely these things that thoughtful, liberal Germans were wary of: the national community, the Gemeinschaft, had been twisted into murderous racism, and cultural continuity had become a delicate matter in a nation whose history was smeared with blood.

  I also detected, during my year in Berlin, in 1991 and 1992, an interesting generational shift in German philosemitism. Guilt was at least a partial explanation for the Israeli calendars one saw on the walls of Germans who lived through the war. But what were those young German Gentiles doing in the new “Jewish” cafés that sprang up around the façade of the old synagogue in East Berlin? Why did some young Germans go so far as to adopt the Jewish family names of their grandfathers or great-uncles? Wasn’t there something odd about the way almost any Central European Jewish writer was showered with literary prizes? Residual or inherited feelings of guilt might have had something to do with this, but I believe there was something else at work: nostalgia for a culture that is lost to Germany, an attempt to identify with a past that was erased: in short, a gesture of mourning.

  Marlene Dietrich was not Jewish, but she belonged to the ruined world of Jewish Berlin. The mourners who filed past her grave, after her modest burial in Berlin, were almost all under forty. This stood in contrast to the small-minded refusal of the city authorities to give her an official funeral. Dietrich, whom some Germans never forgave for wearing an American uniform when German cities were bombed, represented another Germany, with which those young mourners wished to identify.

  The supposed lack of identity, of community feeling, was a cause of much soul-searching in the Federal Republic—the problem, it seemed, was that there was no more soul to search. Which is why some romantics, of both the right and the left, looked toward the eastern half of Germany as the repository of German identity. But, to me, it was the suspicion of historical mythmaking and national romanticism that made the Federal Republic intellectually bracing. I like the idea of “constitutional patriotism.” Maybe it isn’t enough. Perhaps more is needed to transform a once dangerous nation. But I found it hard to share the playwright Arthur Miller’s worries, expressed during Germany’s unification, that Germans lacked “very transcendent feelings toward the Federal Republic” and that “it does not seem to have imbued them with sublime sensations, even among those who regard it as a triumph of German civic consciousness risen from the ruins of war.” Surely, Germans have had enough sublime sensations during the last hundred years. Miller was anxious that Germans might not defend their democracy in a crisis, because “it came to life without one drop of blood being shed in its birth” and it was invented by foreigners.

  There will always be Germans (and their counterparts elsewhere) who would wish, in the words of a long-forgotten Nazi ideologue, to “select the stones from the ruins of German mythology, to serve, after cleaning and polishing, as the building blocks of a new German shrine [and] to build a new German Weltanschauung from the remains of fallen walls.” But I believe there have been enough German shrines already. Let the ruins be.

  Günter Grass was not the only one to worry about German unification. Most liberal anxieties on this score were the exact opposite of the worry that West Germany lacked a soul. Unification, many warned, would revive German nationalism; the brakes were off, the dangerous German people would start to shift their bulk. There was no immediate evidence of this, however. I was in Frankfurt on the night of unification, and apart from the odd firecracker popping off in the cold sky, I saw no sign of nationalist rejoicing. Comedians in a fashionable nightclub cracked feeble jokes about sacred Deutsche Marks and banana democracy. But most people stayed home, in front of the television, a night like any other. I had seen more popular enthusiasm when the German soccer team won the world cup the year before.

  Then came the neo-Nazis, the shaven-headed youths screaming “Sieg Heil!” and waving the old battle flags. They were nasty and brutal and murderous. In 1992 there were 4,587 attacks on foreigners. Seventeen people were killed. The year before, 7,780 racist attacks were reported in Britain, but the swastikas, the slogans, the Sieg Heil’s made historical comparisons in Germany irresistible. There was a hint of Schadenfreude in European press reports of racist German youth crimes. It was Us and Them again.

  I spent one day in Halle, a broken-down East German town, waiting to see a parade of neo-Nazis. It was November 9, the anniversary of the Kristallnacht, as well as of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The people of Halle were terrified. The police had blocked off every main street. An old man in the main square shouted at the mayor that it was just like Hitler’s time all over again. The owner of a café locked his door after letting me in and proudly showed his gun. And finally, there they were, the neo-Nazis, the young men with heads shaved on back and sides and the young women in white socks, with their long blond hair in plaits, the look of the Hitler Maidens. They were spoken to by a pudgy figure with a Viennese accent and by the British historian David Irving. The old trams of prewar design screeched on their rusty rails. Fat men in undershirts leaned from their windows and the abolished couplet of the Deutschlandlied (“From the Maas up to the Memel, from the Etsch up to the Belt, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles …”) filled the air. It was unpleasant and utterly ludicrous—violent children dressed up in their grandparents’ clothes, history repeating itself as Grand Guignol.

  But it wasn’t all theater. The behavior of the extremists—who, a year later, went on to burn down refugee hostels in West and East Germany, killing people, as the police stood helplessly by—proved that Germans were still capable of barbarous deeds. It was a revolting spectacle to see screaming German youths smash their boo
ts into the faces of helpless foreigners, as the neighbors cheered and jeered. But similar or worse events in the rest of Europe—not to speak of other continents—proved that nationality, race, and culture are inadequate explanations for barbarousness. People are dangerous everywhere, when leaders acquire unlimited power and followers are given license to bully others weaker than themselves. Unbridled power leads to barbarousness, in individuals and in mobs. Auschwitz and Nanking, despite the differences in scale and style, will always stand as proof of that. But such is not the situation in the German Federal Republic, or indeed in Japan, today. Human nature has not changed, but politics have. In both countries, the rascals can be voted out. Those who choose to ignore that, and look instead for national marks of Cain, have learned nothing from the past.

  The most successful German film in 1993 was Stalingrad, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier. It was two and a half hours of re-created horror, on the German side. At least 150,000 Germans died in the actual battle, which was a crime committed by Hitler against the Soviet people, but also against the Germans themselves. The film is mainly about German suffering, not atrocities committed against Jews and Slavs. It shows German soldiers dying of hunger, exposure, or Soviet fire. There are several ways of reading the eagerness of mostly young Germans to see Stalingrad. Historical curiosity might be one reason. A new German assertiveness could be another: we’ve had enough of Auschwitz, now let’s mourn our own. This is possible. But it might also be that a new generation of Germans is capable of reflection without guilt. This may be a minority. But I think it is a larger minority than the bald-headed thugs who cannot reflect at all.