Instead, the state’s decisions became the American citizen’s rightful business, a conception that destroyed the time-honored relationship in which he was merely the subject of the state’s attentions and efforts. The image of himself as citizen was thus vastly different from that in other post-feudal societies of the time—and from that of most people of our time.
Besides a lack of revolutionary past, the Federal Republic is unique among the great powers in another way: it came to life without a drop of blood being shed in its birth. No German soldier can say, “I fought for democracy.” It was not given him by history to do so. West Germany is the creation not of arms, but work. The Japanese system, also practically America’s creation, is a quite different case, in that the monarchy and government were never destroyed as such; indeed, MacArthur took great pains to make its continuity with the past obvious to all.
The German break with Hitlerism, the last German-made system, had to be total and condign. And German society had to be started almost literally from a pile of bricks under which the shameful past was to be buried, put out of mind, deeply discredited.
If these observations are in fact operative, and I cannot imagine how they can be proved or disproved as such, then what Germans lack now is the consecration by blood of their democratic state. The torrent of German blood that has flowed in this era in the Hitler-launched wars was, in fact, to prevent any such state from coming into existence.
For me, this is what keeps sucking the life out of German protestations of a democratic faith and casts suspicion on the country’s reassurances that its economic power is no menace to the world. The fact is, West German civic practice has been as democratic as any other society’s for more than forty years and is less repressive and all-controlling than, for example, that of France, whose bureaucracy is positively strangulating by comparison.
I know Germans who are as certain as it is possible to be that democracy will hold; I know other Germans who do not believe that at all. The world, it seems to me, has no choice but to support the positive side of the split and to extend its hand to a democratic Germany. By giving it the recognition it deserves, German democracy can only be strengthened, but meeting it with endless suspicion may finally wither its hopes. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll shows a large majority of Americans in favor of reunification, a vote of confidence with which I agree. At the same time, no German should take umbrage at the reminder that his nation in a previous incarnation showed that it had aggressive impulses that brought death to forty million people. This memory should not vanish: it is part of democratic Germany’s defense against the temptation to gather around some new extreme nationalism in the future.
It does not really do any good to remind Germans of those horrendous statistics if the purpose is simply to gratify an impulse to punish. But it is necessary never to forget what nationalistic blood lust can come to, so that it will never happen again.
Likewise, German resentment at such reminders has to be understood. No one can live in a perpetual state of repentance without resentment. In the scale and profundity of its degradation Nazism has no equal in modern time, but each country has had some level of experience with contrition, some taste of it, as a repayment for oppression of other people. What if every nation guilty of persecution were to own up? Are we really prepared to believe in their remorse? And while penitence in the persecutors may be a moral necessity for those who survived victimization, it will not bring back the dead. So is it not infinitely more important that the descendants of persecutors demonstrate something more than contrition, namely political responsibility?
What do I care if a Nazi says he’s sorry? I want to know what the constitution and educational system of Germany are doing to defend democracy under possibly difficult future circumstances. That is important to me and to my children. It is equally important that democracy live not only in institutions but in the German heart. But in all candor how are we ever to know that it does, except as crises are faced in a democratic spirit?
The world has a right—its World War II dead have earned it the right—to reproach and criticize and make demands of Germans if and when they seem to revert to bad habits. For a long time to come, the Germans are going to have to face the legacy of their last attempt to dominate other nations.
But there is another Germany—the Germany of high aspirations. It does truly exist, and it must be welcomed wholeheartedly in the hope that one day its permanent dominion over the country will be unquestioned by any fair-minded person. In short, the time has come to look the worst in the eye but to hope for the best.
A German journalist in her mid-forties, typical of many of her generation despite an upper-class Black Forest origin, has struggled with her country’s past all her life and by turns is in despair and hopeful. “The problem,” she says, “or part of it, is that the world is still thinking of Germany as it was in the Nazi time or shortly after. But a lot has happened in Germany in the last forty years!” As her voice rises, I am struck by an odd resemblance to the attitude of the Berlin woman. They both seem to doubt that they are registering; it is as if events were wild horses flying past with no one really pondering how to tame them. “For example,” she goes on, “the impact of the 1968 French students’ rebellion. It overturned Germany’s educational system and for the first time made it possible for German workers to go to universities, the way it happens in America. Until then, we had a very narrow elite system. In fact, ours is now far more democratic than the French or the English, and we are now paying people to go to university, eight hundred marks a month if their parents together earn less than fifteen hundred a month. University education is free. This has had good and bad results—a lowering of standards, actually—but socially it has broken the class system.”
Slim, elegantly dressed and a stubbornly heavy smoker, she is unable to come psychologically to rest. “This generation cannot be confused with the stupid, lumpen people who flocked to Hitler,” she said. “Moreover, there is an immense amount of travel by this generation. They are not the parochial, isolated mass that Hitler poisoned so easily with antiforeign propaganda. This is not in any sense the pre-Hitler German people.”
Then, hardly a moment later: “The problem with the German, the one great weakness of his character, is his worship of loyalty. Loyality! Loyalty! It’s the supreme virtue, the chain around his heart. . . .” And she is quite suddenly angry, and, for a few minutes, blue and uncertain and perhaps fearful.
In short, the uneasiness about national character is subjective, difficult to catch in the nets of rationality, but it may turn out to be more decisive than any other.
The anxiety shown by the journalist and my wife’s Berlin friend transcends political viewpoints, I believe. Nor is it purely a product of the catastrophic last war and the Holocaust. I know some liberal Germans, a couple of radicals and some very conservative business types, and from all of them I have felt a similar emanation of uncertainty as to what, in effect, the German is—and consequently what kind of society fits him, expresses his so contradictory nature. And this is what I think the perplexity comes down to.
The Federal Republic is not a nation like others, born of self-determining revolution. Paradoxically, perhaps, West Germany is the first great society born of peace; if it is to achieve a deep sense of identity it will have to be real, not slyly apologetic, an identity reflecting the evil past and the present resurrection together.
If Germany remains implicitly on trial for a long time to come, release must come through good works and a demonstrated devotion to democratic ideals and practice. The past cannot be changed, but the future of democracy is in the nation’s hands. Perhaps Germany can one day even stand as an example to other new societies of how to win a place in the world by work and the intelligent use of science rather than arms.
There is now a generation that cannot remember the war or Nazism, and in fact finds it difficult to understand them,
especially what to it is the incredible degree of Nazi regimentation to which Germans submitted. Maybe it is time for Germans to take a look at how and why their society began, not for the sake of cosmetizing an image, but to make themselves more real in their own eyes. If I may quote Incident at Vichy, when the Jewish psychoanalyst confronts the self-blaming Austrian prince, “It’s not your guilt I want, it’s your responsibility.” That is to say, to relinquish denial and take to heart the donations of history to one’s character and the character of one’s people, the most painful but rewarding job a people can undertake.
The Sin of Power
1978
It is always necessary to ask how old a writer is who is reporting his impressions of a social phenomenon. Like the varying depth of a lens, the mind bends the light passing through it quite differently according to its age. When I first experienced Prague in the late Sixties, the Russians had only just entered with their armies; writers (almost all of them self-proclaimed Marxists if not Party members) were still unsure of their fate under the new occupation, and when some thirty or forty of them gathered in the office of Listy to “interview” me, I could smell the apprehension among them. And indeed, many would soon be fleeing abroad, some would be jailed, and others would never again be permitted to publish in their native language. Incredibly, that was almost a decade ago.
But since the first major blow to the equanimity of my mind was the victory of Nazism, first in Germany and later in the rest of Europe, the images I have of repression are inevitably cast in fascist forms. In those times the communist was always the tortured victim, and the Red Army stood as the hope of man, the deliverer. So to put it quite simply, although correctly, I think, the occupation of Czechoslovakia was the physical proof that Marxism was but one more self-delusionary attempt to avoid facing the real nature of power, the primitive corruption by power of those who possess it. In a word, Marxism has turned out to be a form of sentimentalism toward human nature, and this has its funny side. After all, it was initially a probe into the most painful wounds of the capitalist presumptions, it was scientific and analytical. What the Russians have done in Czechoslovakia is, in effect, to prove in a Western cultural environment that what they have called socialism simply cannot tolerate even the most nominal independent scrutiny, let alone an opposition. The critical intelligence itself is not to be borne and in the birthplace of Kafka and of the absurd in its subtlest expression absurdity emanates from the Russian occupation like some sort of gas which makes one both laugh and cry. Shortly after returning home from my first visit to Prague mentioned above, I happened to meet a Soviet political scientist at a high-level conference where he was a participant representing his country and I was invited to speak at one session to present my views of the impediments to better cultural relations between the two nations. Still depressed by my Czech experience, I naturally brought up the invasion of the country as a likely cause for American distrust of the Soviets, as well as the United States aggression in Vietnam from the same détente viewpoint.
That had been in the morning; in the evening at a party for all the conference participants, half of them Americans, I found myself facing this above-mentioned Soviet whose anger was unconcealed. “It is amazing,” he said, “that you—especially you as a Jew, should attack our action in Czechoslovakia.”
Normally quite alert to almost any reverberations of the Jewish presence in the political life of our time, I found myself in a state of unaccustomed and total confusion at this remark, and I asked the man to explain the connection. “But obviously,” he said (and his face had gone quite red and he was quite furious now), “we have gone in there to protect them from the West German fascists.”
I admit that I was struck dumb. Imagine!—The marching of all the Warsaw Pact armies in order to protect the few Jews left in Czechoslovakia! It is rare that one really comes face to face with such fantasy so profoundly believed by a person of intelligence. In the face of this kind of expression all culture seems to crack and collapse; there is no longer a frame of reference.
In fact, the closest thing to it that I could recall were my not infrequent arguments with intelligent supporters or apologists for our Vietnamese invasion. But at this point the analogy ends, for it was always possible during the Vietnam war for Americans opposed to it to make their views heard, and, indeed, it was the widespread opposition to the war which finally made it impossible for President Johnson to continue in office. It certainly was not a simple matter to oppose the war in any significant way, and the civilian casualties of protest were by no means few, and some—like the students at the Kent State University protest—paid with their lives. But what one might call the unofficial underground reality, the version of morals and national interest held by those not in power, was ultimately expressed and able to prevail sufficiently to alter high policy. Even so it was the longest war ever fought by Americans.
Any discussion of the American rationales regarding Vietnam must finally confront something which is uncongenial to both Marxist and anti-Marxist viewpoints, and it is the inevitable pressure, by those holding political power, to distort and falsify the structures of reality. The Marxist, by philosophical conviction, and the bourgeois American politician, by practical witness, both believe at bottom that reality is quite simply the arena into which determined men can enter and reshape just about every kind of relationship in it. The conception of an objective reality which is the summing up of all historical circumstances, as well as the idea of human beings as containers or vessels by which that historical experience defends itself and expresses itself through common sense and unconscious drives, are notions which at best are merely temporary nuisances, incidental obstructions to the wished-for remodeling of human nature and the improvements of society which power exists in order to set in place.
The sin of power is to not only distort reality but to convince people that the false is true, and that what is happening is only an invention of enemies. Obviously, the Soviets and their friends in Czechoslovakia are by no means the only ones guilty of this sin, but in other places, especially in the West, it is possible yet for witnesses to reality to come forth and testify to the truth. In Czechoslovakia the whole field is preempted by the power itself.
Thus a great many people outside, and among them a great many artists, have felt a deep connection with Czechoslovakia—but precisely because there has been a fear in the West over many generations that the simple right to reply to power is a tenuous thing and is always on the verge of being snipped like a nerve. I have, myself, sat at dinner with a Czech writer and his family in his own home and looked out and seen police sitting in their cars down below, in effect warning my friend that our “meeting” was being observed. I have seen reports in Czech newspapers that a certain writer had emigrated to the West and was no longer willing to live in his own country, when the very same man was sitting across a living room coffee table from me. And I have also been lied about in America by both private and public liars, by the press and the government, but a road—sometimes merely a narrow path—always remained open before my mind, the belief that I might sensibly attempt to influence people to see what was real and so at least to resist the victory of untruth.
I know what it is to be denied the right to travel outside my country, having been denied my passport for some five years by our Department of State. And I know a little about the inviting temptation to simply get out at any cost, to quit my country in disgust and disillusion, as no small number of people did in the McCarthy Fifties and as a long line of Czechs and Slovaks have in these recent years. I also know the empty feeling in the belly at the prospect of trying to learn another nation’s secret language, its gestures and body communications without which a writer is only half-seeing and half-hearing. More important, I know the conflict between recognizing the indifference of the people and finally conceding that the salt has indeed lost its savor and that the only sensible attitude toward any people is cynicism.
So that those who have chosen to remain as writers on their native soil despite remorseless pressure to emigrate are, perhaps no less than their oppressors, rather strange and anachronistic figures in this time. After all, it is by no means a heroic epoch now; we in the West as well as in the East understand perfectly well that the political and military spheres—where “heroics” were called for in the past, are now merely expressions of the unmerciful industrial-technological base. As for the very notion of patriotism, it falters before the perfectly obvious interdependence of the nations, as well as the universal prospect of mass obliteration by the atom bomb, the instrument which has doomed us, so to speak, to this lengthy peace between the great powers. That a group of intellectuals should persist in creating a national literature on their own ground is out of tune with our adaptational proficiency which has flowed from these developments. It is hard anymore to remember whether one is living in Rome or New York, London or Strasbourg, so homogenized has Western life become. The persistence of these people may be an inspiration to some but a nuisance to others, and not only inside the oppressing apparatus but in the West as well. For these so-called dissidents are apparently upholding values at a time when the first order of business would seem to be the accretion of capital for technological investment.
Collected Essays Page 57