Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  The wrong way to look at Springer is to judge him by British standards. Set against the ethics of the Sun, the economics of The Times or the political ambitions of the late Lord Beaver-brook, Axel Springer and his papers seem – if not innocuous – almost restrained, almost ‘wet.’ But this was West Germany. This was a fragile state traumatised by the Nazi past, seeking to restore the good name of the nation and to escape a conservative tradition which had helped to put Hitler in the saddle, in which a gulf of silence and horror separated parents from children.

  The Springer Press was burdened with the legacy of Chancellor Adenauer. It preached reunification within the 1937 frontiers and within NATO – which made reunification impossible – and to this day uses quotation marks to refer to the ‘German Democratic Republic,’ after years of calling it ‘the Soviet Zone.’ Those who questioned the Adenauer blind-alley approach were often dismissed as Communist dupes.

  Bild-Zeitung, in a land of thin skins, adopted a line of demagogic, often mendacious abuse. Willy Brandt was reminded at election times that he was illegitimate, and had returned to Germany in Allied uniform. Student leaders were traduced as agents of East German Communism; when Bild advised its readers to take the law into their own hands and one of them shot Rudi Dutschke, many Germans felt that Axel Springer might as well have pulled the trigger himself.

  When I was living in Bonn, a Bild readers’ campaign against an article by my wife brought a deluge of hysterical hate mail, and I was physically threatened by a Springer reporter. For me, this was just a gutter Press in action. But this sort of thing rang a quite different bell with idealistic young Germans. Venomous personal bullying had been a speciality of the Nazi Press. They said, wrongly but understandably: ‘Here we go again….’

  But now, looking back on it all, it seems to me that the deepest wound inflicted by the Springer Press was cultural. It wasn’t just the political slant or the methods of those papers which roused such fury. It was an underlying assumption. Bild challenged head-on the traditional right of the German intellectuals to act as the nation’s conscience, to prod and stimulate the masses with new ideas. Bild, in its ‘Americanised’ way, said something like this: ‘Ordinary people care only for cars, sport, sex and the box, and why not? What you eggheads call their prejudices are the will of the majority – and we are its voice, not you.’

  The right to consume, to be passive and not to think – this was unheard of as a German manifesto. The Left wore badges saying ‘Bild Macht Dumm’ – Bild makes you stupid. Novelists like Grass and Boll lacerated the Springer Press with their wit and eloquence. But there was enough truth in Springer’s claim to hurt them. Ulrike Meinhof, who was a good columnist before she took to the gun, wrote: ‘His newspapers have more influence on German workers than their trade unions.’

  Out of this grew a whole theory. The student Left of the 1960s concluded not just that the German workers didn’t want revolution but that the working class as such had been castrated as a political force. If there was to be revolution, it could begin only in the universities themselves. It was a theory which owed as much to Axel Springer as to the books of Herbert Marcuse. It was a theory whose collapse left West Germany with some democratic reforms, but also with the disillusion of Ulrike Meinhof and her friends, who escaped down the sterile path of terrorism.

  Konrad Adenauer, near his death, told Springer to remember three things: never trust the Communist, atheist East; be a good friend to Israel and the Jews; always be careful with the precarious balance of the German people. It was the third commandment that Axel Springer broke.

  [1985

  The Cost of Bitburg

  Take your seats for this week’s meditation: the fortieth anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany. When I lived in Berlin, I had my own special seat for such May commemorations. It was a view undisturbed by parades or statesmen, seen from under a tree growing in the roofless palace which had once been the Museum of Prehistory.

  It was a most peaceful place. The Berlin Wall blocked off its main entrance, and the Saxon voices of East German border guards occasionally broke the silence. There were no neighbours; the site of the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, next door, had become a dirty field. Only lovers and American intelligence patrols ever visited the great ruin. Underfoot, fragments of pottery from Schliemann’s Troy crunched – the archaeology of a museum – and formed an accidental rock-garden for minor plants.

  Tucked under a broken tile, I once found a heap of old newspapers. There was a copy of the upmarket weekly Das Reich, with a leader by Reichsminister Dr Goebbels entitled ‘War as the Measure of Human Worth.’ And a tatter from a 1945 Morgenpost, referring to ‘unser geniale Feldherr, Adolf Hitler’ – our genius of a warlord….

  The tree rustled its spring leaves where the cupola had once been. Germany did not merely lose that war, one tall tree ago, but lost it with a cataclysmic finality that has no precedent.

  Today, as President Reagan gets through his bad moments at the Bitburg war cemetery, many Germans will be wondering whether ‘reconciliation’ and ‘atonement’ have turned out to be just one more lost effort. ‘They are going to squash Bitburg into 18 seconds,’ blabbered a Presidential aide. Bigger mistakes have been made in even less time.

  Afterwards, I suspect, it will be put around in Washington that the President really displayed courage – ‘showed balls’ – by going through with this and standing up to the Jewish lobby in the United States. But it is imagination, not courage, that he lacks.

  There are, in fact, words which can be spoken in a cemetery which includes the graves of the Waffen-SS, and they are words about the elemental savagery latent in all nations and the temptation for all governments to harness it. But heads of government avoid this sort of talk at war memorials. I can think of only one statesman who would have known what to say at Bitburg – Willy Brandt.

  The human damage – never mind the political damage -from this uproar is double. Enough has been written about the desolation and anger of those whose kin suffered under the SS, the Jews above all. But a deep and unkind hurt is done to German men and women, now old, whose young men lie in the war cemeteries and who now see them all slandered as murdering Nazis by foreign television teams scuttling among the graves. And the parents of the Waffen-SS dead: they did not deserve this. If Princess Michael did not recruit her father into Himmler’s Black Order, no more did they pin the death’s-head badge on their sons.

  Lack of imagination again. In America, and in this country too, there is an enormous defect of imagination about the Third Reich and about its relevance to modern Germany. It’s a defect with some honourable, decent roots in societies which have never known occupation, dictatorship or modern revolution. The French, in contrast, did not feel that their entire understanding of the human race was collapsing when they entered Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Their historical experience, like that of Russians, Poles, even Italians, to some extent protected them. But the Americans and the British, for all the wartime propaganda about Nazi atrocities, went morally naked into Buchenwald and Belsen.

  There is a distinct generation of young British officers for whom the shock of witnessing Belsen was a crippling event. Their world simply had not allowed for this. Some became bitterly anti-German. Some (and I have known a few) became mentally unstable. In a new book about the German collapse (‘In the Ruins of the Reich,’ Allen & Unwin £9.95) Douglas Botting quotes a British captain who entered the place shortly after its liberation. ‘I was very near a nervous breakdown. I was paralysed by the whole thing. To me it was completely beyond tears – unless you feel you can cry when humanity dies. To my way of thinking it was humanity itself which had died this inglorious death of degradation and filth….’

  Those who have assumed the world was round and find that it is square can either work to make sense of their discovery or – feeling it too great a threat – explode it into fantasy. Our whole gigantic Nazi fiction industry (and I have even seen a comic about Tre
blinka) is really a violent effort of collective repression.

  The British captain told Mr Botting that Tm sure it could even have happened here, in England.’ And this, precisely, is the perception which is being repressed. Nobody, seeing the garish garbage that is the average war movie, could imagine such things taking place in Cambridge, Eng., or Cambridge, Mass. When they did take place at My Lai, Vietnam, most Americans were at first incredulous.

  Repression, all the same, has its function in the lands of the Protestant ethic. By inflating the Nazi past into unrecognisable nonsense, the Americans especially have managed to preserve their optimism and construct a close working relationship with West Germany which will survive, not entirely unspattered, the Bitburg stupidity.

  To ask the dismayed Germans to understand the uses of ‘repressive fiction’ would be to over-tax them. Their defect of imagination is elsewhere. All nations are self-admiration societies, and cannot be expected to see themselves as collectively criminal – let alone for 40 years. The East Germans and Austrians have adopted easy psychological escapes: the Nazi horrors happened in another country, in capitalist Germany or in Austria forcibly annexed to the Reich … not here.

  The West Germans, whose society has actually changed far more profoundly than theirs, can’t play these convenient games. Instead, their cartoon self-image is the ‘German Michel,’ a trembling shrimp of humanity who wears a nightcap and feels outwitted by everyone. Michel expects foreigners to find him ugly or stupid. But the idea that somebody might fear him or see him as a threat is utterly beyond his grasp.

  In the end, Bitburg does not matter that much. Reconciliation is a fact, achieved mostly by sheer forgetfulness but also – to a small and precious degree – by combining memory and imagination.

  Herbert Sulzbach is 91. He has given most of his life to helping the British and the Germans towards friendship, but in 1914 he was an artillery lieutenant in the Kaiser’s army. A few months ago, the five survivors of the Ipswich branch of the Old Contemptibles – those who fought in 1914 – held what they knew must be their last parade. They decided to ask a German, Herbert Sulzbach, as their final guest of honour, and they found that he had been in action against their own battalion just 70 years before.

  What do we celebrate on Wednesday, VE Day? Hitler’s defeat, and Europe’s liberation, and things like Ipswich. But if we are really trying to remember honestly, this day is about something more basic and marvellous than any of those, about the simple fact which the Russian and American soldiers yelled out as they spun drunkenly to balalaika music at Torgau on the Elbe. ‘Voyna kapun- The goddam war is over!’

  [1985

  The ‘Bildung’ of Barbie

  Certainly he remembered Klaus Barbie, said the old baron when I telephoned him. He had robbed the family of its jewels back in 1946, assisted by two other SS officers on the run. But the baron’s sister knew more. Just you wait in your hotel room, he continued jovially, and I will fix a meeting with her and call you right back. What was the number of your room? Na schon… be patient and wait there for my call.

  So I sat and waited. Half an hour later, there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and suddenly the small room was overcrowded with two bulky men, one in a fawn trenchcoat, the other in a black leather jerkin. Badges flicked out: Kriminalpoliza. Who was I? What was my interest in Klaus Barbie and the jewel robbery? How long had I been in the city? I began to laugh; the man in the leather jacket allowed himself a smile, with a twinkle of gold tooth. A room search was briefly debated, then thought not necessary. The man in the raincoat looked frustrated. I was, it seemed, no more than what I claimed to be: a British writer researching for a book about Klaus Barbie, the SS and Sicherheitsdienst officer who had been the most famous torturer in the Lyons Gestapo and then an agent of American intelligence in post-war Germany.

  Why had the baron called them, I asked. More interesting, why had they instantly responded to his call? To this, they offered no clear answer. They prepared to leave. The man with the gold tooth murmured pleasantly something about old men, about difficult times, about people of a certain generation who had strange things in their memory or on their conscience….

  Brooding on this, I went to the public prosecutor’s office. A polite lawyer apologized: there were no files left about a robbery committed so long ago; everything had been destroyed; it was routine. But the police would probably have at least an entry confirming that a trial had taken place. Not at the main police headquarters, but at a little office in the Goethestrasse. I could mention his name. A short ride by streetcar took me there. The electric locks on the door seemed elaborate, but after a few moments, there was a buzz and the door yielded inward.

  The man who let me in smiled broadly; this time I could see the whole of his gold tooth. He had exchanged the jerkin, for a handsome three-piece suit in Prince-of-Wales check. He and his chief had made some preparations for me; the nonexistent Barbie file was on his desk. I was not allowed to read it -’the new laws protecting the privacy, of the individual, you understand’ – but my hosts riffled about its pages and fed me suggestive bits. There was a sense of compensation for a little misunderstanding. I left, comprehending even less of what was going on in this town. ‘Oh, those two!’ said a surprised German friend at lunch afterward. ‘What on earth did they want with you? They are Department K14, what we used to call the political police.’

  To research the past of a particular Nazi in West Germany is constantly to encounter the sense that you are missing some point. Plenty of German students and journalists undertake such research, but always instrumentally: to topple some political opponent with a revelation about his past, to prove that today’s capitalist is yesterday’s fascist, to use the testimony of the repressors to discover more about the resistance of those who were repressed. The simple question: ‘What shaped this person so that he could do these things?’ is not held to be interesting. This can easily be misunderstood; a suspicious foreigner can read evidence of pro-Nazi machinations into what are no more than the curiosities produced by German bureaucracy and history.

  Officer Gold-Tooth covers political subversion, and when that job started under the Allied occupation over thirty years ago, it dealt primarily with fugitive Nazis supposed to be plotting against the British and American forces. The prosecutors in another town, I discovered, had known for twenty years exactly where Klaus Barbie was living in South America and under what name; they never bothered to pass the information on simply because their instructions were to deal with Barbie’s movements on German territory. In the late Forties, prominent ex-Nazis and SS veterans with evil records often banded together secretly with all the apparatus of code-words and forged papers, but their object was less to revive the Hitlerian Reich than to keep out of jail and acquire enough cartons of Camels on the black market to trade for the cans of Spam and bags of coal they required to stay alive.

  I did most of my work in Trier, the city on Germany’s western border where Barbie was brought up. As I grew to know the place a little, so the enterprise came to seem like some Asian shadow-play: it was quite easy to get local historians to recount the drama of the town’s history under the Third Reich, but a severe breach of the convention to demand that the surviving actors appear in person. One early Sunday morning, walking in the market square and listening to the rumbling and groaning of Catholic church bells, I thought of three old men, none of whom I was able to meet, now awake and shuffling in slippers to prepare their coffee: Albert Urmes, who was once the Nazi propaganda director in Trier; Willy Torgau the Communist, who spent most of the Hitler years in prisons and headed the denazification tribunal when the French army arrived in 1945; and Erich Süsskind. After years of bullying and discrimination, Süsskind and his wife and their small son were deported to Auschwitz in the winter of 1943. At the selection on the ramp, he asked his son if he wanted to stay with him or his mother. The boy went with his mother, which proved to be the way to the gas chamber.

  Erich Süsskin
d survived. When he was liberated in 1945, he weighed some seventy pounds. Not only his wife and son, he found, but his parents, his four brothers and sisters with their families, and almost the entire family of his wife had been exterminated. But Erich Süsskind, unassuming and alone, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, went home to Trier and reopened the little cobbler’s shop that had been taken from him eight years before. There were almost 800 Jews in Trier when Hitler came to power. Today, there are perhaps thirty. Süsskind does not talk much about the past. But he is loved in the city for one laconic sentence uttered on his return: ‘Die Trierer waren es dock nicht! – It wasn’t the people of Trier who did it.’

  Trier is a polite, conservative city. The fact that its two most famous sons appear to be Karl Marx and Klaus Barbie is accepted with distaste but without protest. Neither fascism nor communism has gained much authentic support in this ancient Roman capital on the upper Mosel river, close to the frontiers of Luxembourg and France, regularly wrecked and plundered by foreign armies on their way to the Rhine valley down one of Europe’s most inviting invasion routes. Trier is a frontier city, sharply patriotic by tradition, whose dominant politics have always been Catholic and conservative. This year’s official celebrations of the centenary of Marx’s birth, in the pretty little mansion on the Brückenstrasse, which once housed a French governor in Napoleon’s time and then, after 1933, the editorial offices of the Nationalblatt, were a pallid affair. At another ceremony held in the high school where both Marx and Barbie were taught, the dignitary invited to unveil a plaque observed comfortingly that the school could not be held responsible for having educated the author of Das Kapital (‘Why did you bother to come?’ shouted irritated boys at the back of the hall).