Return to Respectability
Barzini, Luigi
Luigi Barzini RETURN TO RESPECTABILITY Protean Germany's search for a better model. returned to Germany after the war where I diligently interviewed the That many Germans were still human...
...He watched over our two baby girls (they fortunately enjoyed good health...
...Adenauer managed to transform the malleable Germans into his image, after his likeness...
...We gave him an omelette, a glass or two of wine, and some fruit every time he came...
...Many Germans from his region and farther south traditionally thought their countrymen beyond the Elbe still belonged to wild unpredictable tribes and had to be kept at a distance...
...When you visited one of the old-fashioned little villas you were struck by the 1900 decor, the oil portraits of grandfather and grandmother, he in his uniform with imperial decorations and she in her ball dress, by the fringed draperies and curtains, the potted plants, the fretwork furniture in the living room or the heavy dining room furniture of elaborately carved walnut...
...This alarmed all history-conscious Europeans a little...
...To be sure a great number of Germans, like Konrad Adenauer and millions of others, had been secretly democratic all the time...
...There were more pressing things...
...But he pointed out it was not a simple question of indoctrination and the enforcement of treaties...
...I was supposed to be under constant police control as an anti-Fascist condemned to confino...
...To compare, as all of us journalists did in those years, Berlin undex the Weimar Republic, Berlin under the Nazis, with Bonn, in an attempt to measure the change in the German soul and way of life after the defeat, was deceptive and dishonest...
...Nassau (God bless him wherever he is) had no illusions...
...The Hapsburg-Lorraine grarld dukes of Tuscany were so Tuscan they could be used as sociological specimens in textbooks...
...This was not surprising...
...Many have now discovered the value of democratic ideas at their own heavy cost...
...Morally, however, he was the archetype of a West German, the inhabitants of the Rhineland-Palatinate, born within the borders of the old Roman Empire, beyond which the grapes, Roman civilization, and Roman law did not take root...
...An Italian friend of mine, who was fighting in the underground and visited us once in a while during the night to get supplies and news, used to say, "I would hate to be shot by a firing squad composed of men who had my same ideas...
...Konrad Adenauer, whom I saw the following day, asked me what Francois-Poncet had said...
...In fact the northernmost vineyards in Europe are to be found in Rhondorf, Adenauer's own village...
...It was only a residue of past feudal ways of thinking, going back to the times when it was considered an unfortunate but forgivable error to kill a peasant or a private, and a serious crime to kill a gentleman and an officer, especially if he belonged to a conquering army...
...His old and wrinkled face reminded you of an ancient turtle or a Japanese mask...
...You will not be accused later of having had contacts with a German soldier...
...The salute was probably invented at the beginning of the century by the forgotten director of a silent movie version of Quo Vadis or Fabiola...
...He saw one great danger...
...Particularly the severe strains and delusions of the last decades impaired the image of the United States...
...They certainly cannot get along by themselves...
...This is one of the two reasons why the chancellor bore the separation from East Germany with great fortitude...
...He offered us his services...
...Italians cut their hair short and flat on top a la Umberto I until 1900 and wore mustaches like Victor Emmanuel III later...
...He himself did not look like a German...
...He was certain that once Germany was rid of Hitler and the party, the Hohenzollern would come back and there would be once again a kaiser in Berlin...
...Most of the town (it was fairly intact then, without skyscrapers and modern ministerial buildings) appeared to have been designed by the artists who made nineteenth-century German Christmas cards, Adventskalender, or valentines, adorned with rococo decorations festooned with flowers, birds, and paper lace...
...The great forests, the wild moors, the barbaric romantic landscapes are in contrast to the tidy, man-made, civilized landscapes of Roman Germany...
...The Germans call it Deutschtum...
...Like many other hurried observers I did not penetrate below the surface and investigated only the most evident aspects of postwar Adenauer Germany...
...The model was the neat, sedate, industrious, and confident America of a few years before, Truman's and Eisenhower's America, a solid and somewhat predictable country...
...Frenchmen wore whiskers a la Napoleon III and their women Eugenie's crinolines until 1870...
...foreign policy seemed at times more undecided, ineffectual, and contradictory, particularly under Jimmy Carter...
...The depressive climate notoriously lowered their blood pressure...
...The later model for all things evidently was (after Dr...
...Was not Nazism (among other things) a thoroughly perfected and efficient copy of disorganized and ramshackle fascism, down to the Roman salute...
...He was old enough to remember and had had the time and leisure to analyze all the mistakes made by the framers of the Weimar constitution in 1919...
...In the East the Germans obediently adopted and definitely improved on the Soviet model...
...A few weeks before, a German count had invited American officers to go shooting on his lands...
...The time had perhaps come for Germany gradually to abandon the comforting security of the past decades, the idea that to imitate the United States, take care of the economy, leave most decisions to the Americans' wisdom and the protection of the West to their nuclear weapons was enough to secure tranquillity...
...Its foreign policy was never as far-seeing, enlightened, and coherent, its elites as competent and imaginative, its economy as free from flaws...
...Nassau used to say, "but he was infinitely better than our present fiihrer...
...And it turned out to be a happy inspiration...
...One of the American officers, taken by mistake for some animal or other as he was crawling behind a bush, was killed, and the count was arrested and tried...
...I could not help thinking (for instance) of the ease and thoroughness with which in the eighteenth-century German princelings had adopted French tastes...
...Or the ease and thoroughness with which Germans had all apparently become Prussians almost overnight after 1871...
...I asked...
...He had started the war as a captain, he told us, but, because of some unguarded remarks he had made, had been tried, demoted, and sent as a medical orderly, to a very dangerous place where the authorities hoped he would die any day...
...Who knows...
...They were scared (as Bismarck was) to see their country acquire once more an indisputable hegemony over the Continent and the responsibility for its future...
...industries still dominated all competition...
...Pied-montese families today still unthinkingly give their children their grandparents' names, those of long dead princes and kings of the House of Savoy: Charles Albert, Humbert, Emmanuel Philibert, or Amadeus...
...But this time everybody in Europe had to reex-amine all contemporary problems from scratch...
...He forgets to tell us how we can win it, ha ha . . ." His political ideas were those of an elderly gentleman...
...The physical difference between the two Ger-manys is sometimes perceptible, especially to a Southerner's eye...
...When asked if he had voted for himself, he said proudly, "Yes, of course I did...
...His lawyer offered two defenses: (a) the count did not know the victim was an American...
...It was bombed day and night, during the day by the Americans and during the night by the British...
...It alarmed the Germans most of all...
...Then he noticed a Scotch terrier bitch of ours which had given birth to three pups...
...Inevitably, I had to become acquainted with many Germans...
...It was capable, time and again when necessary, at critical moments, to produce from the sleeve of history elites of homines novi— noble, committed, and competent leaders, occasionally even one great man, a great or nearly great President...
...What I wanted to know was what everybody wanted to know, what was the real nature of these people...
...returned to Germany after the war where I diligently interviewed the That many Germans were still human beings, civilized Europeans and Christians in spite of everything, was evident in Italy only toward the end of the war...
...It was Rollo...
...We knew that many Germans in uniform secretly shared Dr...
...They go much beyond...
...Nobody really knows if the Romans saluted each other and the emperor by raising their right arms...
...He explained, "I come to you after dark not to compromise you...
...the town was reduced to gaping holes and masses of dusty ruins...
...It is therefore not surprising that Dr...
...Later, in fact, some cracks began to show even from a distance...
...Or the ease and thoroughness with which Munich was filled with scholarly copies of Florentine, Venetian, and other Italian Renaissance buildings in the last century...
...He avoided them all...
...And of course, vice versa, foreign princes who have not one drop of their subjects' blood in their veins somehow acquire national traits to the point of becoming national caricatures, more typical of their country than any native...
...He had received the order to blow up our house as it was presumably used at night by Allied bombers as a target on their flight to their objectives...
...His influence as a founding father was fundamental...
...He inspired its fundamental laws, its guiding philosophy, and, as I said, the manners and beliefs of its citizens...
...Great Britain adopted Queen Victoria and Albert's style of life and moral virtues...
...Suppose," he told me, "the Germans come to an agreement with the Russians...
...He smiled, petted the black mother, lifted one of the tiny dogs in his arms, and finally proposed he would forget the whole thing, our evacuation and the blowing up of the house, in exchange for a male puppy...
...He spoke good English...
...Printed by permission from the forthcoming book The Europeans by Luigi Barzini to be published by Simon & Schuster...
...John McCloy, the American high commissioner, was full of hope and doubts...
...To begin with, Wilhelm was a gentleman, after all, a grandson of Queen Victoria...
...They were born obedient...
...The United States surely was at that time, immediately after the war, the most advanced country in practically all fields that mattered...
...One, the seat of the mighty, mystical, loquacious, imprudent, unpredictable kaiser and of the demented, diabolical Hitler, murderer of millions...
...He introduced himself, Doktor Nassau, a medical doctor from Copyright © 1983 by Luigi Barzini...
...Adenauer snorted...
...We talked about the war...
...how much more efficient and deadly was the German imperial fleet in 1914 than the British fleet it was built to rival and destroy but did not...
...Maybe a deeper knowledge would have blurred my impressions...
...He knew what his country had done...
...Many more are willing to learn...
...I have forgotten the officer's...
...But as always, the meticulous German imitations of the USA, like most German imitations of foreign models in the past, went much beyond the originals...
...This is because of, for one thing, the perennial German compulsion to surpass their teachers...
...Or the ease and thoroughness with which the Hamburgers imitated the English...
...He was definitely a European, a German European, a Catholic, a drinker of fine wines (and dry martinis), a cultivator of prize roses, and a man of his times...
...Everything that could be was washed, shined, varnished, polished, rubbed, gleaming...
...they came dressed as Americans do in shabby old clothes and not in the chic new hunting outfits the Europeans prefer...
...However, he excluded the possibility of his country's coming to an agreement with the Russians within the near future...
...he said with some pride...
...The little port was being used to unload German supplies for Cassino...
...Could they be trusted...
...Other parts of town, the old ones, were designed by the artists who made steel engravings of squares with fountains and old buildings and carriages for tourists to take home as souvenirs...
...Were they ineluctably condemned to make wars...
...It knew it was right...
...The Bourbon kings of Naples, of French and Austrian blood, spoke their people's dialect and had the natives' quick and irreverent wit...
...They spoke French, wrote French, ate French, danced French, built imitation rococo French chateaus all over the country, all curlicues and contorted statuary, some actually designed by French architects...
...But it was never as good as the Germans and many foreigners imagined or wanted to imagine it...
...He had a little mustache, wore a wing collar and a polka-dotted bow tie like Adolphe Menjou...
...He ordered us to get out immediately while his men prepared the mines...
...He chose its friends and allies...
...What was it...
...This America, of course, was not entirely imaginary...
...Surely it was never as tidy, clean, law-abiding, disciplined, well-administered, docile, punctual, rigorous, and prosperous a country as its German copy...
...Adenauer lived across the river from Bonn and chose Bonn as a convenient temporary capital, convenient for him) could be interpreted as the symbol of the new start...
...Sometimes old German prejudices cropped up, McCloy said...
...its institutions and principles being the best could not be improved much and were perfectly adaptable to changing times and to foreign countries anywhere...
...Could they become free men, conduct themselves responsibly as members of the Western community...
...Paris...
...In the West the model had necessarily to be the United States as it appeared to the defeated, humiliated, and hungry Germans at the time of the occupation and the reconstruction...
...One had always been an ugly, bustling, cosmopolitan capital, fermenting with new ideas, the other a sleepy garden city on the river, built for scholars and retired apoplectic old people...
...Somehow the elites did not seem as capable, the ideas as valid for all seasons, the armed forces as invincible, the Presidents always as admirable as some of their famous predecessors...
...Can they become democratic...
...There are many heartwarming signs," McCloy answered...
...The two cities, of course, had been there all the time, two opposite and irreconcilable aspects of Protean Germany, as mutable as the sea...
...The choice of the older model was inevitable...
...There was nothing Nibelungian about him...
...One cannot help remembering how Prussian military thinkers analyzed Napoleon's victorious but somewhat unchanging and unimaginative maneuvers on the battlefield, discovered his secrets, and bettered them in the end...
...East Germany is the only eastern "People's Democracy" that has managed to solve a few of the impossible problems of a bureaucratic economy that works nowhere else...
...I repeated his words...
...In the entrance hall you usually found felt pads on which you were asked to place your feet and not to walk but slide (as a long-distance skier does), so that you did not mark the well-waxed floors but increased their sheen...
...Nevertheless, the very choice of Bonn (a fortuitous choice, to be sure, as many fatal choices are in his* tory, the consequence of the fortuitous decision of some obscure American officer to nominate once again Adenauer as mayor of Cologne, and later the fortuitous decision of some obscure British officer to dismiss him as too old and politically incompetent, which gave him time to organize a brand-new party...
...This was, of course, not quite true...
...They did it in 1939...
...One day, a naval officer with an arrogant supercilious manner visited us...
...somewhere near Hamburg...
...The generals could lead it to victory in great wars and, after the last world war, were capable of firmly facing the Soviet threat...
...And he chuckled...
...Most high officials in Vienna looked like Franz Joseph, with a shaven chin and sidewhiskers joining their mustache in a graceful curve...
...Andre Francois-Poncet, the French high commissioner, was pensive and preoccupied...
...Wilhelm might have been a bad and tactless emperor and made many horrible mistakes," Dr...
...and he told me this story...
...Defeat is a great teacher...
...The German regime was then called kanzlerdemo-kratie by clever journalists, a democracy completely dominated by the chancellor...
...They were definite improvements— the United States as it would have liked to be and managed to be only sporadically, with difficulty, only here and there...
...He did all this with an ease and thoroughness that were baffling to an Italian...
...and the other the civilized retreat for the sagacious, patient, firm, and prudent old oberburgermeister of Cologne and people like him...
...All this, of course, was due to one puzzling quality, the people's adaptability, their blotting-paper capacity at all times to absorb and improve alien conceptions...
...German firms bought supermarkets in the United States and ran them better and more efficiently than the Americans themselves, who had invented them...
...the very antithesis of the Nazi ideals...
...Adenauer's resurrection of Wilhelmine Germany) the United States, the conquering superpower that had destroyed Nazism in 1945 (and most of Germany at the same time) with the might of its industries, the efficiency of its machines, the courage of its people, the intelligence of its leaders, and the infallibility of its political ideas...
...Adenauer was elected chancellor by a slim majority: one vote...
...Konrad Adenauer on the future of the country...
...It knew its armed forces were invincible because its weapons were the most advanced and also because it had always fought on the side of justice...
...The present king of Spain, whose Spanish ancestry is tenuous, looks and behaves like a hidalgo from way back...
...The dollar was the world's lodestar...
...To be sure Europeans (including Germans) have to stick with their great ally...
...He brought us medicines we needed...
...The American overwhelming success in peace and war is an impressive example...
...Evidently Adenauer, the Restorer, had somehow led his people back to his youth, more than a half-century before...
...The Republic was solidly founded on firm certainties, moral, political, and economic...
...These men were capable of leading their nation to prosperity in times of depression...
...My impressions were surely also influenced by the architecture...
...In an antiaircraft battery not far from us was a strange elderly soldier who paid us a visit one night after sundown...
...Its statesmen could protect, defend, reassure, and lead the free world with ease...
...English dandies left the last button of their waistcoats unbuttoned like Edward VII...
...Impossible," he said...
...I remember the dog's name...
...To save their pride and honor, the Germans could only admire and imitate the two superpowers that had reduced their country to rubble, destroyed the best fighting machine the world had known, led by the best generals tradition and training and rigorous selection could produce, manned by the best soldiers in history...
...The heaviest burden naturally fell on Germany's shoulders, once again the strongest nation in Europe...
...He visited us always at night...
...b) the count did not know the victim was an officer...
...Furthermore America was generous and magnanimous and humanitarian, securely guided by its ideals and virtues...
...There has always been a mysterious capacity of rulers in many centuries and countries to shape their people physically and morally...
...What is it...
...Nevertheless, in spite of rococo chateaus, Renaissance palazzi, American skyscrapers, or the rigidly extended right arms, there always was and is something perennially and unchangingly German...
...There were widespread doubts in western Europe (and in Germany above all) whether a more mature and wiser but weaker and more uncertain America, the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate America, or the more abrupt, belligerent, defiant, and impatient America of Reagan's Administration, might be willing or capable of protecting Europe—and first of all the Bundes-republik which is manning the ramparts—from Soviet aggression...
...Maybe, as McCloy said, some of them had been all the time, under the uniforms, what they now appeared to be, and did not have to adapt themselves so much as reveal themselves...
...I merely tried to meet as many people as I could from all walks of life, visit their houses, eat their food, listen to reminiscences and hopes...
...It was also symptomatic and possibly pregnant with future developments that the American model the Germans had idealized, imitated, and perfected and clung to was a little behind the times, yesterday's America, l Amerique de papa...
...It was a deeper and more complex problem...
...The second was that there was little he could do about it...
...What interested me above all was to explore the ease with which they had adapted themselves to be proper characters in the Adenauer show...
...In the few months before the liberation of Rome, I lived with my wife and two baby daughters in an isolated white house on the sea outside Porto Santo Stefano...
...But the situation was too confused for me to be really watched...
...They went beyond only once, in 1940...
...We all know that every time they come to an agreement with the Russians they arrive in Paris...
...But none of them could help obeying orders like automatons...
...They did it after the First World War at Rapallo...
...He created the new Federal Republic as a solid, durable, and practical machine...
...I Allied high commissioners and Dr...
...It was as if the little town on the Rhine had really been selected by a divine film director (or designed and built by his divine art director) as the perfect background for a tale full of nostalgia, yearning for the old-fashioned virtues, for tranquillity, amiability, security, gemutlichkeit, law and order, a life among books and flowers and children and dogs and good wines...
...But this, McCloy said, was not typical...
...German publishers launched mass circulation magazines for women in the American market, American imitations of German imitations of American prototypes...
...Nassau's doubts, if not his hopes, perhaps more than half of them, surely the sailors and the naval officers...
...The Allies could not in 1917 nor the United Nations in 1941...
...He said, "Doctor Goebbels explains to us why we cannot lose this war...
Vol. 16 • May 1983 • No. 5
