De Klerk still has Mandela’s confidence, it seems, but the miasma remains dense and impenetrable where some of his government’s lower officials are concerned. Last July Mandela’s people had gotten information that an Inkatha (Buthelezi’s political organization) attack on a township was being planned and had notified the police and higher officials. The attack came off, thirty were murdered, and the police did nothing to prevent it. “I immediately went to see de Klerk. . . . Why were they allowed to enter the township when we told you beforehand that this attack was coming? . . . Mr. de Klerk is a very smart man, a strong leader. He was unable to give me an answer.” However, on the day of Mandela’s visit to the scene of the slaughter de Klerk personally sent four helicopters and five hundred police to protect him. And besides, “When you discuss with Mr. de Klerk he seems to have a genuine sense of shock, unlike others.”
And finally, “They have either lost control over certain elements of their security forces or those elements are doing precisely what the government wants. . . . They want to negotiate with a weakened ANC. . . . You are not dealing with tribal people from the countryside but people who are sophisticated in the use of weapons, who know how to move very swiftly with military precision. . . . There are efforts now to start the Renamo movement in South Africa.” (Renamo was the Rhodesian-organized mercenary outfit that murdered thousands in Mozambique.)
I turned to a discussion of his prison time. He and his comrades had originally been assured by a prison officer that they’d be out in five years because the world was so outraged by their life sentences. But five years came and went. Winnie could visit only twice a year; his children were growing up with no father. Here his face showed pain at his inability to protect his family—the helplessness desecrated his chiefly role.
Government harassment of Winnie was driving her out of one job after another until “there were certain moments when I wondered whether I had taken the correct decision of getting committed to the struggle. But at the end of these hesitations with myself I would feel that I had taken the right decision. . . . The certainty of our final victory was always there. Of course I sometimes became very angry when I thought about the persecution of my wife and that I could not give her the support she needed. I felt powerless. And also my children were hounded out of one school after another.”
His vulnerability was plain here, but over it his hardness flared. This was as close as he was able to come to acknowledging what must have been the loss of hope for release before he died; instead he preferred to find something positive to emphasize. When the world began to forget him and all black movements were suppressed, the government restated that a life sentence meant life, “but in the English universities they came all-out to oppose these harsh measures. . . . People tend to forget the contribution that was made by the National Union of South African Students, which was a white organization.”
This was not an opportune, upbeat recollection but his ultimate vision of a nonracial South Africa. I am convinced it is more than a tactic to recognize the absolute future need for whites who have advanced education and business prowess. It was striking how he never seemed to categorize people by race or even class, and that he spontaneously tended to cite good men even among the enemy.
“That came from my prison experience. It gets very cold on Robben Island and we had no underwear. Some warders went strictly by regulations—you were allowed two blankets. But another warder would slip you an extra one. I made some good friends among the warders; some of them visit me now.”
In fact, toward the end of his imprisonment he ran “Mandela University” on Robben Island, and white warders were among his pupils. But there wasn’t time to talk about this. We’d scheduled two sessions and at the last minute had to settle for one because he had to rush off to deal with the murders going on all over the place and the government’s inability—or unwillingness—to keep order.
On the way back to Johannesburg that night, Gill Marcus pressed the driver on no account to stop at red lights and to drive as fast as possible through the darkness.
The Parable of the Stripper
1994
The Yugoslav catastrophe raises, for me, an especially terrible and comical memory. In the 1960s I presided over the congress of International PEN that was held in Bled, a beautiful resort town built around a crystal-clear lake high in the lovely mountains of Slovenia. Bled had been the watering hole for generations of Europeans, a fairy-tale place. And it was already more than a decade since Tito had broken with Moscow.
Marxist intellectuals in Yugoslavia were remarkably open in their criticisms of the economy and politics of the country. That the system needed deep changes was taken for granted, and new concepts were being floated that would free individual initiative while retaining the social gains of the communist system. Worker ownership of factories was being tried, and identical consumer products, such as radios, were given different names in order to spur competition between factories, in the hope of raising quality and lowering prices. Yugoslavia was prodding the limits of socialism; and to come there from the dictatorships of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, not to mention Russia, was to experience the shock of fresh air. In the Sixties Yugoslavia the place seemed filled with enormous energy. These were the proudest, friendliest people I had met in Europe, and the most frank and open.
There was one taboo, unmentioned but obvious: the ethnic nationalism that Tito had ruthlessly suppressed. I knew, of course, that Slovenians, Bosnians, Serbs, Croatians, Montenegrins and other nationalities made up the Yugoslav delegation to the PEN congress, but to me they all looked alike and conversed in a mutually understood language, so their differences might be no more flammable than those separating the Welsh and the English, or maybe even Texans and Minnesotans. And when I asked an individual, out of curiosity, if he was Croatian or Slovenian or whatever, and the question caused a slight uneasiness, it seemed minimal enough to be dismissed as more or less irrelevant in this rapidly modernizing country.
Then one evening a group of four writers, one of them a Serb journalist friend called Bogdan, invited me out for a drink after dinner. Two of my companions were poets, a Croatian and a Montenegrin, and one a Slovenian professor. We walked down the road to the local nightclub that usually catered to tourists. The room was very large, like a ballroom. There were maybe fifty bare, plastic-covered tables, only a few of them occupied by stolid, square-headed Alpine types. The cold night air was not noticeably heated. The place had the feeling of a big Pittsburgh cafeteria between meals.
Then a three-piece band took places on a platform up front and began tootling American jazz standards, and a woman materialized and stood unsmilingly facing the audience. Small and compact, she wore a matching brown skirt and jacket and a shiny white rayon blouse. In a businesslike way, she began undressing, in what I was informed was to be a delightful striptease. The scattered audience of men and their chunky women silently gulped beer and sipped slivovitz as the dancer removed her suit jacket, her shoes, her blouse and her skirt, until she stood looking out upon us in her pink rayon slip and bra. It was all done rather antiseptically, as if preparing for a medical examination. Each garment was tidily laid out and patted down on the piano bench, there being no pianist.
Then she stepped out of her slip, and in her panties did a few routine steps in approximate time to the music. She had very good legs. Things were heating up. From somewhere she picked up a heavy blue terry cloth robe and, wrapped in it, she slipped off her bra and flashed one breast. My fellow writers broke off their dying conversation. I don’t know what got into me, but I asked a fatal question: “Can you tell from looking at her what her nationality is?”
My Serb friend Bogdan, depressed by his wife’s absence in Belgrade, since it had left him for an entire week to the mercies of his melancholy mistress, glanced across the room at the stripper, and gave his morose opinion: “I would say she could be Croatian.”
“Impossible!” the Croatian poet laughed. And with a sharpened eye and a surprising undertone of moral indignation, he added, “She could never be Croatian. Maybe Russian, or Slovenian, but not Croatian.”
“Slovenian!” The mocking shout came from the Slovenian literature professor, a tall, thin fellow with shoulder-length hair. “Never! She has absolutely nothing Slovenian about her. Look how dark she is! I would say from the South, maybe Montenegrin.”
The dark-skinned Montenegrin poet sitting beside me simply exploded in a challenging “Ha!” Just a few minutes earlier, he had been ethnically relaxed enough to tell a joke on his own people. Montenegrins are apparently famous for their admirably lethargic natures. One of them, said the poet, was walking down a street when he suddenly whipped out his revolver and, swiveling about, shot a snail on the sidewalk behind him. His energetic Serbian friend asked what the hell he had done that for. The Montenegrin explained, “He’s been following me all day!”
When it came to the stripper, however, humor had noticeably evaporated, as each of the men kept handing her over to somebody else. And in the middle of this warming discussion of ethnic types, I noticed that the dancer had left the platform in her thick terry cloth robe, with her clothes cradled neatly in her arms. She was just about to pass us when I stuck out my arm and stopped her. “May I ask where you come from?” With a wan, polite smile, she replied “Düsseldorf,” and continued on her way.
None of the writers allowed himself to laugh, though I thought one or two blushed at the irony of the situation. A bit tense, struggling awkwardly to reconstruct the earlier atmosphere of comradely warmth, we strolled through the dark Balkan night, the president and four distinguished delegates of the writers’ organization established after World War I by H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Henri Barbusse and other war-weary writers as an attempt to apply the universalist tradition of literature to the melting down of those geographical and psychological barriers of nationalism for whose perpetuation humanity has always spent its noblest courage, and its most ferocious savagery.
Uneasy About the Germans: After the Wall
1990
Do Germans accept responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era? Is their repentance such that they can be trusted never to repeat the past? When people worry about the unification of Germany, these are the usual questions. But for me there is a deeper mystery, and it concerns the idea of nationhood itself in the German mind.
Three attempts to create a successful state have been smashed to bits in the mere seventy-two years since Germany’s defeat in 1918. And although we are now in the presence of a great victory of a democratic system over a one-party dictatorship, it is not a democratic system of German invention. The nation about to be born is one that never before existed. And in apprehension over what this may mean, the Jews are by no means alone. The British are concerned and so are the French, not to speak of the Russians and numerous others whose lives were ruined by German aggression.
I have more than the usual contact with Germans and German-speaking people. My wife, Austrian by birth, spent the war years in Germany, and her family is involved in German industry; I have German journalist friends, as well as colleagues in the German theater and the film and publishing industries. If I were to announce that I am not too worried about unification and have confidence in the democratic commitments of the younger generation, my friends would doubtless be happy to hear it—and proceed to worry privately on their own.
No one can hope to predict what course any country will take. I believe that for Germans, including those who are eager for unification, the future of German democracy is as much of an enigma as it is for the rest of us. They simply don’t know. More precisely, they are almost sure it will turn out all right. But that’s a big almost.
Several weeks ago in West Berlin, one of my wife’s high school friends, a woman in her late sixties who never left Germany through the rise of Nazism, the war and reconstruction, had some conflicted, if not dark, things to say about the question. “In Germany it will always be the same,” she said. “We go up very high, but in the end we come down. We are winning and winning and winning, and then we lose. And when we are in trouble we turn to authority; orders and work make us happiest.”
She is using a cane these days, after a fall on the ice. She has a broad-beamed peasant air, thinning hennaed hair, ruddy cheeks. A survivor of a battered generation, she seems to refer to her own observations rather than to things she has read. “We must go slowly with unification,” she said. “It is all darkness in front of us.” And if the future is murky to West Germans, she wondered: “What is in the minds of the East Germans? We don’t know. For us it was bad enough. We had twelve years of dictatorship, but after that we have had nearly fifty years of democracy. They have had nothing but dictatorship since 1933. To become democratic, is it enough to want a good job and a car and to hate the left?”
She has come to visit, despite her injury, because in her circle it is hard to find an open-minded conversation. “I fear it is all very artificial,” she said. “It is the same old story, in one sense. We are not like the French, the British, the Americans. We never created our own democracy, or even our own regime, like the Russians; ours was handed to us by the Allies, and we are handing it to the DDR people. But we had a memory of democracy before Hitler. Even their fathers have no such memory now. Who will influence whom—we over them or they over us?”
She talks about the Republicans, a far-right extremist party that won ninety thousand votes in the last West Berlin election after only a few months of existence. “People say they are nonsensical, a tiny minority,” she said. “I remember the other tiny nonsensical minority and how fast it took over. And mind you, we are prosperous now. What happens if we run into hard times and unemployment?”
That conversation could be repeated as many times as you like in Germany. But it is entirely possible that two-thirds of the Germans—those under 50, who can barely recollect Nazism—have only the remotest connection with the woman’s sentiments and underlying worry. So hostile are they to any government intrusion in their lives that some of them made it nearly impossible to conduct a national census a few years ago because the questions being asked seemed to threaten them with regimentation from on high. Questions had to be altered, and some census takers were even accompanied by inspectors to make sure more personal questions than those prescribed were not asked.
Nevertheless, the Berlin woman’s apprehensions do leave a nagging suspicion. Does the Federal Republic of Germany arouse lofty democratic feelings in its citizens’ minds, or is it a system that is simply a matter of historical convenience invented by foreigners? To be sure, this system has helped the nation to prosper as never before, but the issue is how deep the commitment is to its democratic precepts, how sacred they are, and if they will hold in hard times.
I have often sensed something factitious about German society in the minds of Germans, regardless of viewpoint. Discounting the zephyrs—or clouds—of guilt and resentment that obscure conversations with foreigners, especially Jewish liberals like me, it seems that the very reality of the German state is still not quite settled in their minds. I have never, for example, felt that Germans have very transcendent feelings toward the Federal Republic; 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.
Nothing, at least in my experience, approaches the French emotions toward their republic, the British toward their confusing monarchy, the Swiss toward their multilingual democracy, or Americans’ feelings toward their country (which at least once every quarter century is pronounced imminently dead from depression, war, racial conflict or corruption, and therefore requires the loudest avowals of patriotic fervor on the face of the earth).
In a word, the German ship, in the German mind, increasingly powerful and promising though it may be, seems to float s
lightly above the surface without displacing water. Again, I may get this impression because of the tendency of Germans to apologize for themselves implicitly, which in some is a form of secret boasting, given the incredible success of the German economy.
The Berlin woman’s sense of the system as having been conferred on Germans rather than created by them—a routine enough idea in Germany—nevertheless expresses the insubstantiality or, as she put it, the artificiality of the society that is now being merely multiplied by unification. It has sometimes seemed to me in Germany that there is a feeling of walking on Astroturf rather than natural sod. Or maybe it is simply a feeling that the other shoe has not yet dropped.
But when one recalls the polities they did unquestionably create on their own—Frederick the Great’s Prussia, Bismarck’s state and Hitler’s—they were all dictatorial or at least heavily authoritarian and in their time remarkably successful. This is also what my wife’s Berlin friend was trying to say to me, namely that as a German she does not quite trust her compatriots’ civic instinct when it comes to constructing a free society. And I wonder whether, unspoken, this is the source of the distrust a great many people feel in and out of West Germany, especially now that its territory is to be reunited with the East.
Of course, for the foreigner, Germany’s civic failure is most perfectly expressed by the Holocaust and military aggressions of Hitler. But I have wondered whether, foreigners and their accusing attitudes on these counts apart, a different and less obvious historical experience is not more active in creating an uneasiness in them, an experience uniquely German.
It has often been said that Germans alone among the major peoples have never won a revolution. Instead, Germany’s intense inner integration of social services, economy and culture was conceived and handed down by kings, princes and great chancellors like Count Bismarck (who though elected was kingly and sternly paternalistic), then a ferocious dictator and, since 1945, by her wartime victors. It is as though George Washington had accepted the widespread demand that he be crowned king, and proceeded to carve out a new society with little or no contribution or interference by elected legislatures. America might well have emerged with a fine well-ordered society in which the rules were very clear and life deeply organized from cradle to grave.
Collected Essays Page 56