The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  East German refugee students, who get scholarships and are favored sons, have emotional reasons for following the Christian Democrat party line. In West Berlin, the pink-cheeked president of the local chapter of Refugee Students from East Germany said that they didn't want an H-bomb war to reunify Germany. They realized this would be no use to them. But he foresaw a swap with Poland—give back East Poland and get back East Germany. He hadn't figured out why the Russians would part with their slice of Poland.

  He wanted Germany to be proud, “like America.” After the war, America (few speak of the Allies) held the Nürnberg Trials and created democracy here; “they treated the Germans like children.” I heard this often, in various terms from a variety of students. We should apparently have shot the war criminals but not embarrassed the Germans with recorded trials. As for democracy, we ought somehow to have imposed it and not have imposed it. There must be a German democracy, he said, made by Germans and honoring German ways, traditions, and customs. German democracy is the battle cry of the serious fascists. Only crackpots paint swastikas on synagogues or meet in noisy Nazi style.

  In Munich, the Prussian-born president of another student refugee organization said that “a young German looks behind and sees fifty years of mistakes and atrocities. Better forget it and become a European. But De Gaulle says it will be a Europe of nations, so I have to remain a German. This isn't Germany—the other part is gone. We must get it back to be whole.” He is pro-military, Prussian still. He wants the H-bomb given to NATO, where German officers hold high rank. He believes that the government should have emergency powers to dismiss parliament and rule by decree. “All our symbols were discredited by Hitler—our flag and our country. What is there for us to do? Most young people think of work and their own careers. The Hitler regime had a spiritual side; people were actively engaged. Now there is apathy. No one knows what democracy means; no one knows what Germany means.”

  It is safe to generalize here: the conservative, the traditionalist, the authoritarian young want Germany to be reunited and powerful. The socialists, the democratically minded want to accept the present frontiers for the sake of peace on earth. That leaves the usual bulk of the uncommitted, the young who care about living their own lives quietly. The Federal Republic is the only homeland they know; they are not “hurting for anything,” as American G.I.’s used to say. The unification of Germany is not a subject that torments them.

  Frankfurt is hideous, rebuilt, prosperous, and more bearable than Berlin. It is not pretending to be other than it is: business is better than usual, and a socialist regime is in power. I liked this city only because of a tiny seed, planted long ago by an inspired officer in the U.S. Military Government. This seed is called “Seminar für Politik,” and as far as I can see, it is the best legacy we left to Germany. The Germans copy all our materialism; here in a small clean building we left behind something of what we ought to mean. The seminar is free, in every way. Young people, most of whom earn their living by day, come here from six to eight o'clock in the evening and are encouraged, led, lured into thinking for themselves and asking the basic question of free men: Why? A woman who is wise, loving, and intellectually honest runs this school; she is a Catholic and a socialist, an interesting combination in Germany, where the government has been dominated by clerical reactionaries.

  After listening to the young and their young teacher argue, question, learn about Nietzsche and determinism, we went off to a café, where I tried to get at something that puzzles me: the role of German women. There were six girls and two boys who invited themselves; it was a mistake to let the boys join us. Even these girls reacted largely in the traditional German way; they secede before the male. I suggested to them that there was something very wrong about German women, who, in my opinion, are the Arab women of the West. Since they bring up the children and manage the home, they must fatally instill into their offspring their own unquestioning respect for authority, beginning with father and going on inexorably to a ruler. How can there be hope for the inquiring mind and the free spirit if the women are such abject intellectual and moral slaves? The girls did not get too far with this question, disappointingly. The boys suggested it was fine for women to study and work until they had children; after that, their place was in the home. But one boy, on leave from military service, finally said, “The worst thing for the young women is their old mothers"—their old mothers who forever teach blind obedience, handing on this sin from generation to generation.

  A bit of that evening's conversation is revealing and worth reporting; and it must be emphasized that these young people were as near to our sort of free-wheeling young as one can find in Germany.

  I asked, because I wanted to know, whether Germans had ever fought foreign or domestic tyrants for their own freedom. Or did they only fight non-Germans, on orders from above?

  The second boy, an open-faced shipping clerk, explained. “Germans think carefully before revolting. What is on this side, what is on that side? So they do not.”

  “Do they think carefully before following a dictator?”

  “But then they cannot protest for they would be killed.”

  “They're killed fighting others, too.”

  “There was 1848,” the clerk said hopefully. They all trot out 1848, hopefully. It is pitiful the way they cling to the most inept, inadequate, spineless, and brief revolution in Europe as their passport into democratic society. “And at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt, Martin Luther told them not. So they could not because the Catholic Church was against them.”

  “If you mean,” said the girl medical student, with large spectacles and dimples, “Can it happen again in Germany, obeying the bad orders, then the answer is Yes.”

  “But what is so wrong with us?” the clerk asked. “Ten years after the war, we were already best friends with England and America. But if we want to be more left and freer, America will not like it.”

  The university in Bonn is housed in a baroque palace, and the town is pretty, snug, and old between the hills and the Rhine. All travelers know the desperate feeling that one must quickly get out of a place, a country, and the irrational fear that one won't. Many people have this reaction to Germany; in Bonn, the capital of a great power, the sensation of being closed away became very strong. Yet Germans have an enviable free currency, and they journey in hordes all over Europe. Foreign newspapers arrive. Still the Germans, more than any other people I know, seem isolated in their country and in their Germanness. During Nazism, this was actually true; the claustrophobia persists.

  Everywhere in Germany I had been asking the young about Jews; how did German students feel now, how did their elders feel? Few of them knew any Jews (there are some 25,000 left in Germany); and the subject is delicate: it becomes at once an attack on their nation and their parents. As for the elders, none would admit to having ever approved the murderous Nazi anti-Semitism, and practically everyone claimed to have helped Jews to escape to Brazil. A professor in Berlin said that there was no racial feeling whatsoever in Germany; on the contrary, the Germans fell over backward to avoid all discrimination. He himself had just passed a Pakistani when he would have failed a German. “But I said to myself, oh well, he is going back to his own country.”

  Anti-Semitism has gone underground; it is an illegal emotion. Anything that is disliked can be safely called Communist; Jewish, as a term of abuse, is reserved for private conversation or letters to the newspapers. Yet if you pry too hard, you get sharp reactions from Germans. The treatment of Negroes in the United States is cited to prove that we are no better than they were. And once I was told an instructive story by a Berlin editor; a group of hand-picked, simon-pure, democratic young Germans were sent on a trip to the United States. On every Greyhound bus, in every train, they heard anti-Semitic talk. They returned scandalized. Such talk can be answered by pointing out that the United States is not an ideal democracy, but there are plenty of unsleeping people who will never give up trying to improve it.
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  I held a private seminar in my hotel room in Bonn—four young people who talked all day. They were the editor of the Christian Democrat student newspaper; a medical student, son of a Lutheran pastor who had been jailed by the Nazis; a girl member of the Liberal Club; and the girl secretary of the German-Israel club, which has branches in every university. The German combination of excessive factual knowledge and illogic was never more wondrously displayed, but they were nice young people, muddled in heart and mind.

  The medical student said, “If you protest against authority here they say you are a fool or a Communist. My parents don't like it that I am so mixed in politics in the university because they have bad experiences of politics.”

  This appears to be a universal rule: all the young are warned by their parents not to think or act politically—in short, to be sheep as their elders were, though of a different passive nature. “We were punished once,” the elders say.

  “We must discuss with Russia,” the medical student went on. “We cannot keep this cold war up forever. But we have a problem here. Any boy who is Catholic must vote for the Christian Democrat party because the priest tells him to. We cannot have a democracy if priests tell people how to vote.”

  This did not go down well with the editor, a member of that party. The argument meandered off into another one about birth control, which is against the law in Germany, the editor being in favor of forbidding birth-control information and the girl liberal protesting against this interference by the state in private life.

  Most interesting was their talk of anti-Semitism. The medical student was impressed by the girl secretary of the German-Israel club. “It is wonderful for a German to be doing this work,” he said, while the girl stiffened. He could not quite believe it though, and finally asked her if she had Jewish ancestors, which she did not; she is studying theology, to enter the Lutheran Church as a pastor. She said that she had noticed an increase in anti-Semitism among the older generation, though young people were pro-Israel or indifferent. However, a few weeks ago in the student restaurant, anti-Semitic tracts were distributed on all the tables; the culprits had not been found. She had visited Israel twice, before and after the Eichmann trial; she was studying Hebrew for her theology degree. “We reach out the hand of friendship to the young Israelis but there is difficulty that they take it. The Herut party, which is anti-German, called us Germans enemies of humanity. And also one Israeli has one mind; you talk to another and he has another mind. It is very difficult if there is no general way.”

  The editor had gone to Israel to report the Eichmann trial for his student magazine. He had “a very interesting discussion with an Israeli girl. She suggested that Germany had become a ghetto for Germans.”

  None of them knew how to take that, and they were startled by my laughter.

  The girl theologian said, “Ben Gurion told that he made the Eichmann trial to educate the young Israelis. They were different after it.”

  “You mean they learned to be pro-German?” the medical student asked.

  Probably the reason for the sensation of claustrophobia in Germany derives from just this: the incurable egocentricity of German thinking. Their inability to put themselves in the place of others, even briefly, is like being blind and deaf. It really is Deutschland über Alles; everything returns to them. There was a peculiar lack of curiosity among these young about other people outside Germany. And yet they talked to me with righteous indignation about bad treatment they had received in foreign countries: in a shop in Finland a woman had refused to serve one of them, in Denmark a waiter had been hostile, on and on. It was useless to explain that these countries had suffered abominably at the hands of Germans; these small slights were a trifling penalty for the history of their country. “But we did nothing,” they would cry. “We are innocent.” True, and yet, where is the imagination? This same line of reasoning applies to post-war Germany; what Germany endured during two years after the war was terrible. They never remind themselves of what others endured not only for two years after the war but during six and a half years of war. The very notion that a large part of the world has unhealed and unhealable wounds inflicted by Germany, and that there must be some punishment for crime, is an outrage to them. “What have we to pay?” asked a budding young politician, president of the Munich Students Christian Democrat League. “We are innocent.”

  All Germany looks rebuilt and spotless, but much of this no doubt comfortable new construction is ugly; Munich is restored and lovely. You do find yourself observing that the best architecture seems to derive from the genius of others: pseudo-Greek, pseudo-French; the overall effect is prosperity and charm. Most Germans are overweight and dressed against the cold; in Munich they are more affable than in the other German cities.

  Here I met a group of happy students, happy because they lived in a dormitory, boys and girls together, which they managed themselves. It was a tangible proof that the dormitory system is good; the students were not only pleased with their living conditions, but they had a chance to develop normal human relations and did not, as do almost all German students, solemnly call each other Herr and Fraulein, or treat each other with the caution that marked communal talk among other young people. These laughed freely, were frankly critical of their university and government, were not afraid to think and to speak, and had the habit of doing both. They are not taken in by the whitewashing of the past, but they are not interested in the past; the present concerns them. As one of them said, “The only safe, approved subject for discussion now, in Germany, is anti-Communism.” They said that any dissent, any hostility to the powers that be was immediately branded as Communism; a German form of McCarthyism is growing, if not already here. They fear this, as a limit on their ability to make a really free country and be responsible citizens. Some students had predicted, with despair, that a Salazar-type dictatorship would be the next step in German history. These Munich students did not believe Germany would have an official dictator but do believe that their state is moving more and more to the right, with less liberty for the individual and increased censorship of the mind. They pointed out that America is envied for its wealth and power, nothing more.

  Germany has certainly gobbled up the forms of our materialism, but our two most valuable articles of export—the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights—are unknown. Perhaps we no longer know much about them ourselves. In Bonn, the student editor had said, “The young need somebody to show the way. There is no one. We have no elders.” That is a genuine cry of distress. Few German elders are fit to answer it. The new generation needs a New Germany; they can hardly expect the older generation to build democracy for them. But have they themselves the imagination and guts required to do the job?

  Monkeys on the Roof

  LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL, July 1964

  The moral of this tale is: look before you leap. On the other hand, people miss a great deal by being sensible. If he'd been sensible, Columbus would certainly not have sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two. Astronauts would stay on the ground instead of whizzing off in space capsules. As for me, I would be waking to the music of the telephone, in the damp, dark air of London; whereas I am waked by Vervet monkeys romping over the roof as the sun rises out of the Indian Ocean in a gold sky.

  Disheartened by the cold, rainy English summer and by memories of too many cold winters, I rented a house, sight unseen, on the Kenya coast just north of Mombasa and just south of the Equator. That “sight unseen” is not as reckless as it sounds. I knew this beach, a long wide strip of flour-white sand fringed with royal palms, and I had visited a few houses in the neighborhood. These homes were comfortable and pretty, equipped with all modern conveniences; a charming suburb, I thought, which happens to be in Africa.

  For myself, I'd have liked something more authentically African, on the slopes of Kilimanjaro or the highlands around Mount Kenya, but Carmen and Milagro were coming with me, since we cannot be parted, and they would not take
readily to the untamed outdoors. The agent described this house as being on a slight rise above the Indian Ocean, a white bungalow surrounded by trees, covered in bougainvillea, with a swimming pool. It seemed almost too civilized, but Carmen and Milagro would love it, and as soon as I got them settled I could journey into the greater excitements of the interior. Carmen and Milagro are officially my cook and maid, but actually they are a cross between maiden aunts and middle-aged daughters. Unlike me, they hold a steady, factual, low-keyed view of reality.

  They were to travel out by ship while I flew to the United States and back in time to meet them when they docked at Mombasa. We parted at Tilbury in rain and joined again three weeks later under the fierce African sun. They were delighted to be here; and eager to get to our new home, where we could eat decently and lead a clean, well-regulated life. I explained that the outgoing tenant was still using our house, but never mind, we had plenty of shopping to do. The agent had informed me that I must provide crockery, cutlery, linen and kitchen utensils; all else that I required, he said, would be supplied.