Two-Faced Germany
Lukacs, John
Of course, his Jefferson has about as much to do with the real Founding Father as his Marx does with the actual father of Communism. "Jeffersonianism" means simply freedom of thought to...
...Moderation in everything," said the English wag, "including moderation...
...As if bureaucracy and inefficiency were the real dangers...
...This may or may not be all to the good...
...In 1932 about half of the Germans voters chose Nazis or Communists...
...And in 1948, even before he formally broke with the USSR, he wrote: " I know that if the Communists came to power, I'd soon find myself eating cold kasha in a concentration camp in Kansas gubernya...
...but neither the Russians nor the Americans were yet sure what would happen to the German state and nation...
...The Bonn constitution and the Federal Republic of Western Germany were soundly democratic, anchored safely to the West...
...in 1932 the Communist vote in the United States was 0.25 percent...
...I didn't...
...This preceded and followed Brandt's Ostpolitik...
...The sentiment underlying the declarations of In the twenties, as in the seventies and eighties, German statesmanship proposed again and again that the place of the German nation was between West and East...
...But when Allemann was writing "Weimar" was still a term that evoked mixed associations in Germany...
...That miasmatic time of inflation, decadence, agitation, perversion, feverishness, cynicism, self-pity, and despair: Were those the marks of a Golden Age...
...The economic doldrums does not alter this...
...Train to Leipzig...
...Still, his libertarianism has more often been a check on his Marxism...
...In his old age, Stone has finally become a "national institution" with an institutional affiliation: Distinguished Scholar in Residence at American University, where he is busy criticizing Socrates for calling himself" 'the gadfly' of Athens [even though] it seems his sting was not much in evidence when Athens needed it most [during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants...
...But nobody's called him that for a long time...
...The intellectual best-seller of this season is the Englishman Paul Johnson's history of the twentieth century, entitled Modern Times...
...But as long as he enjoys the protection of the First Amendment, safe in his native land with its unique history and society, Stone can indulge in the fantasy of a " s y n t h e s i s . . . of Marx and Jefferson" (the "greatest task of our time"), without having to break the vow he made as a young reporter to be "independent," "not to join in those stale surrenders which are called the practical realities of the world...
...It was only after the Cold War had begun that the division of Germany and of Berlin crystallized in a permanent way...
...In the evening the Greens and the pacifists staged their demonstrations...
...Trains were going through, pulling in, sliding out every two minutes...
...In "International Relations," that worldwide fraud, an ambitious German academic now may earn his doctorate in "fields" such as Security Problems (Sicherheitspolitik, Sicherheitskunde), Systems Analysis, Operational Research...
...It is peculiarly American . . . . The only absolute v a l u e . . , is freedom of the mind...
...on another level it had not...
...Another sign showed the composition of the trains with the halting positions of their coaches...
...In the 1920s the Americanization of Germany (again, especially in Berlin) was promoted by the then German Left...
...In 1884 the European world was ruled by Bismarck, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Wagner, Spencer, Manet--planetary years away from 1824, from the world of Metternich, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Byron, Rossini, Ingres...
...Thirtynine years after Waterloo Europe had been convulsed by three waves of revolutions...
...Kirkpatrick, he praised Generals Patton and MacArthur: Why ! did the Amencans not follow them and threaten the Reds with atom bombs in 1945, why did they not push to the east and march into Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw before the Russians...
...Voting responsibly...
...In Italy the neo-Fascist party gets nearly ten percent of the vote, and there is reason to believe that a much larger portion of the population harbors sentiments favorable to the Fascist past...
...First--in order as well as in importance--there is, as yet, no intelligent or mature conservatism emerging in Germany...
...The Weimar writers, artists, theorists, philosophers, from the worst to the best, from Herbert Marcuse to Alfred Doblin, from Georg Lukacs to Walter Benjamin, from George Grosz to Kurt Tucholsky have become respectable again...
...He read long excerpts from documents, citing reams of isolationist statements in 1939, 1940, 1941, from Lindbergh, Herbert Hoover, the Chief of Naval Operations...
...We must keep in mind that, Germany's Western integration and Americanization notwithstanding, the destiny of the Germanys was not synchronized with the rest of Europe, not even after 1945...
...Possibly...
...The Prinz Eugen to Vienna...
...even their historians are unwilling to give him much credit...
...Toward a united Europe...
...There they are...
...its source was the duty of service, of human purpose behind the mechanism...
...That Berlin-cosmopolitan paste melted away to near nothing when Hitler threw it in his skillet and the fat began to fry...
...its map (and the map of the United States) had been drastically remade...
...and since in Germany it was the decade that preceded Hitler and the Third Reich, why shouldn't they have some kind of nostalgia for it...
...The twenties in Berlin...
...As respectability darkens my door," he announced in the early seventies, "it's sort of comforting to know someone still thinks I'm a dangerous man...
...This respect for Prussia is an element to be placed next, or above, the nostalgia for Weimar, within that complex three-dimensional puzzle of the present and future of German sentiments and German destiny...
...others have done so...
...How strange this is: It is now the supposedly "pragmatic" Americans who have come to think in terms of Communism, while it is the supposedly "abstract" Germans who think in terms of Russia...
...Milton and Jefferson are my heroes," he has said...
...Now Germany has become homogeneous and tom of Decline...
...After all, it was in that sickening atmosphere of defeat and self-pity and Weimar that Spengler was an intellectual best-seller...
...I am not only thinking of the political map of Europe and Germany[ I am thinking, too, of the ways in which people live and of the ideas that rule them...
...he even defended Cedric Belfrage, editor of the Communist National Guardian, who was deported in 1955...
...His comic characterization of that possibility suggests how remote he regards it as being...
...Their very phraseology has reflected this...
...There are a few disturbing things about this new German Right...
...After Stalin, during the late fifties, the contacts between the eastern and the western half of Europe began to grow...
...But there are, for the first time, signs that the Americanization of Germany, too, may have run its course...
...Thirty-nine years ago an era in world history had come to an end...
...The indicator rang: The numbers dropped down with the time and the name of the next train...
...and when in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 21 Germany something becomes respectable, it is chewed over, swallowed, ruminated, again and again...
...I went to Hamburg which was devastated by bombs and a firestorm forty years ago, hardly less than Hiroshima and indeed worse than Nagasaki...
...The buffet was at least fifty years old but spotless, except for the rack of sex magazines bordering it...
...in Germany it did not...
...2 That usage has disappeared completely...
...Their confrontation grew out of their division of Europe, within which took place the division of Germany, within which took place the division of Berlin...
...The contacts between West and East Germany have been gradually increasing...
...In the 1950s Adenauer and the West Germans referred contemptuously to East Germany as die Sowjetzone, the Soviet Zone...
...In 1945 Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain...
...All within fifteen minutes...
...Yet the Germans do not like Churchill...
...I need not describe their symptoms...
...West and East German carriages on that one...
...Unlikely...
...Politically, I suppose I am what everybody right or left calls a troublemaker," Stone wrote in the early fifties...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 I decided not to stand it any longer...
...In its living standards, in its entertainments, in its revival of German traditions East Germany is slowly pulling closer to the West...
...The Second World War was over...
...It is there in the post-modern German buildings which represent a complete reversion to "Modernismus": from Bauhaus to Bauhaus...
...Well, the West has declined a little longer than Spengler prophesied: but Germany is healthier than in his lifetime...
...Sixty years ago he described and prophesied the proper German symbiosis of anticapitalism and militarism: Preussenturn und Sozialisrnus (1923), Prussianness and Socialism...
...Train to Amsterdam...
...The opposite is true...
...Train from Frankfurt...
...it was then that his prophecies of Untergang (the proper translation of the title of his famous book is not merely the Decline but the Sinking of the West) were eagerly read and swallowed whole...
...The Wall went up in Berlin in August 1961, shutting the last window between East and West Germany at the very time when elsewhere holes had begun to appear in the Iron Curtain...
...He was deadly serious, fresh back from having clone his research in the Hoover Institution or in the National Archives, it matters not which...
...You say that Hitler was an aberration, the Third Reich was an ugly and shameful episode, you want to expunge it from German history...
...This is all to the good...
...His thesis was that the West German state and nation were largely immune to the sickness that had destroyed the Weimar Republic and helped to bring Hitler to power...
...The Dammtor is the second Hamburg railroad station, a mile or so from Hauptbahnhof...
...Toward a reunited Germany...
...There is, however, a difference...
...John Lukacs TWO-FACED GERMANY Having it both ways is an old German tradition...
...As in the United States, the Left has become senile, its ideas comatose...
...The contempt and the disdain that the West Germans had for the East Germans began to dissipate...
...So they were in 1924...
...During the McCarthy era, he was proud he "had not confined [himself] like a respectable liberal to mistaken identity cases...
...In the United States, the economic catastrophe notwithstanding, the trust of the people in the political system lived on...
...and that division was not total even during the worst of the Stalin years when the rest of the Soviet portion of Europe was closed off from the West, hermetically...
...It is there in the grim-scientific "sachlich" preoccupation with sex...
...There, as in the United States, the best money that a diploma can buy comes from a Harvard MBA...
...Now they have accepted the official East German designation of the German Democratic Republic, the Deutsche Dernokratische Republik, the DDR, pronounced Day-Day-Are in German...
...Yet in the twenties, as in the seventies and the eighties, German statesmanship proposed again and again (and sometimes successfully) that the place of the German nation was between West and East, that there was room and reason for a German Ostpolitik, that Westpolitik was not enough...
...Jeffersonianism" means simply freedom of thought to Stone...
...About twenty-five years ago the Swiss journalist F.R...
...Germany was conquered...
...In a way--but only in a way--he was correct: correct, rather than right...
...As I traveled through Germany I was looking for an the Greens (a sentiment that many Germans are beginning to share) is anti-Americanism even more than leftism--an inchoate, at times discriminating, more often stupid and cliche-ridden anti-Americanism--but there it is...
...After World War II the intellectual climate in Germany was conservative, not radical...
...Germany is the most Americanized country in Europe, surely politically so...
...the ruling ideas are Evolution, Progress, Technology, Sex Education, Female Emancipation, Atomic Science, Modernization...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 23...
...You Germans cannot have it both ways...
...During the last years of the Third Reich, during the conservative reaction after the war, and during most of the Adenauer era the Germans hoped that their salvation would come from a separate peace with the United States, and from the closest possible association with the West as against the East...
...Sometimes this moderation is nearly extreme...
...But once they change their m i n d s . . . On one level Germany reverted to the twenties...
...Octopus came from...
...Train to Altona...
...The role of the press as 'Fourth Estate' we owe to Jefferson...
...It has something to do with the United States, where the entire shoddy Kulturrevolution of the 1960s was nothing but a fake repetition of the ideas of the twenties, from the trotting out of old intellectual crocks to the extreme projections of cynicism, from radical chic to the fascination with ugliness and disorder and primitiveness and perversion, the stock-intrade of Brecht and Weill, and the tingletangle of Cabaret...
...This was true then, and on the level of politics it is still largely true today...
...I went up to the platform...
...Then you regret that the United States, under Roosevelt, helped to destroy the Third Reich...
...The short paragraph about the twenties says: "The Golden Age of Berlin...
...There is not much in this to worry about at this moment...
...Now it is in Germany, the Germany of the humanistics and of the classical Gymnasium, that a respectable degree in the humanities no longer leads to a respectable job in the civil service or in the corporate world...
...Now it is promoted by the German Right...
...I stood up: "You cannot have it both ways...
...rl'hey kept referring, too, to East Germany as "Middle Germany," Mitteldeutschland--suggesting at least that "East Germany" consisted, in reality, of those territories that the Germans had lost to Poland, and that still actually belonged to Deutschland...
...This goes beyond literature and theories...
...The 1920s were the last modern decade...
...One of the stupidest ideas of our times is that we live in a revolutionary age...
...in the heavy pancake make-up of the northern German women with their short hair, that cropped boyishness above their determined faces...
...in the halls of the universities hundreds of students watched the debate on television and listened to the droning speeches of the party politicians for hours...
...In Germany they were brought to a stop...
...Germany and Berlin were divided too...
...I had to take a train to Kiei...
...We are told that our lives are so difficult because we cannot find ourselves in these times when things change so fast, in these times of the frightful acceleration of history...
...There is an essence in this which is historical...
...But the city includes, too, acres and acres of solid villas, comfortable and cozy, their yellow lights behind their thick windows reflecting the warm fug of German bourgeois family life...
...This difference has disappeared...
...In 1984 the gods of The Copy-Book Headings are Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Picasso...
...Train from Munich...
...There was a German punk in a leather jacket scrawled over with obscenities, shaven bald except for a savage crest of painted hair that was more brutal than military...
...I heard a humorless youngish German professor talk about Sicberheitspolitik in terms indistinguishable from those of, say, Mrs...
...We live in a time of dreadful stagnation...
...In the meantime, he has continued to espouse a socialism that has become little more than the simple faith that he's caught the right historical train...
...Unlike (or perhaps not unlike) Mrs...
...closer to the East...
...Train to Kiel...
...Well, the twenties was the last modern decade...
...Another humorless young German professor read a paper at a Berlin symposium on American foreign policy before Pearl Harbor...
...At any rate, it means: away from Russia, and away from America...
...Another indicator softly rattled...
...We don't want to find it again...
...There are hardly any Communists in West Germany now...
...Allemann, an intelligent and perceptive observer of the German political scene, wrote a cogent little book, entitled Bonn Ist Nicht Weimar, Bonn Is Not Weimar...
...But he was lost in the milling North German crowd with their severe faces...
...Meanwhile West Germany is slowly pulling bourgeois as she has not been b e f o r e . . . I saw only one university poster reflecting German wit--a rare and therefore precious item--at its best: WlR HABEN DEN KRIEG VERLOREN, WlR WILLEN ES NICHT WlEDER FINDEN...
...There, before my eyes, the history of Germany, of the German nation, was going on...
...By the way, does Stone regard as "damaging" the fact that he himself remained in the United States during the McCarthy era and other periods when he was a ' 'pariah" ?) But it has also led him to exaggerate the significance of constitutionalism, as if it were independent of social structure, history, and politics...
...They were puny little affairs...
...There are th~-dansants in Baden-Baden and Bad Ems, the couples holding each other tight, the men in their heavy shoes, wide trousers, some of them wearing knickers...
...Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol are largely unknown in Germany...
...Dreadful as it is, the Wall is no more permanent than the Iron Curtain...
...Freedom of thought and speech, Stone has conceded, is "threatened by authoritarianism everywhere, on the Left as on the Right, by Communist as well as by Catholic...
...Until fifty years ago American higher education tried to emulate German university education: that's where the Ph.D...
...Two Superpowers remained in the world...
...but the movement among ambitious intellectuals toward the Right has begun...
...The German parliament voted in favor of the positioning of the new American missiles...
...The "youth" revolution spread from Berkeley to Marburg, and the cult of Weimar from Hollywood to the publishing houses of Madison Avenue and then to Frankfurt and Berlin...
...But keep in mind that there is a relationship, no matter how shabby or complex or subterranean, between Kultur and Politik, including even pop culture and the great movements in the history of nations...
...patrician houses with a heavy elegance that is traditional and perhaps therefore especially impressive...
...During the last twenty years the nostalgia for Weimar has become a staple of the German intellectual and cultural diet...
...Reporting accurately, and without bias...
...Spengler would have seen it as a SympThere is, as yet, no intelligent or mature conservatism emerging in Germany...
...This efficiency was vital, not deadening...
...In the winter evening they glowed with the interior promise of stability and probity...
...In Berlin I sensed this presence of the East, in that worldly city on that sandy plain, this mixture of revulsion and fascination that the Germans have for Russia and the European East, together with the emulation mixed with apprehension that they have for America and the Far West...
...The results of the voting were a foregone conclusion, but 'It would be interesting to research the origins of this resurgent nostalgia for Weimar...
...The Germans are a people who are slow in changing their minds...
...The city commuter trains, the S-Bahn, were running on the same tracks as the suburban locals and the direct trains and the expresses and the inter-city trains and the trans-Europe night trains...
...There are hardly intelligent kind of Green of the Right, a kind of ideology that would appeal to my mind and heart...
...Ten years after its construction the Germans began to recognize and to take some pleasure from the phrase that Germany consisted of Two States but of One Nation...
...It was Churchill--and not Roosevelt or Stimson or Eisenhower or Patton or MacArthur--who understood the danger of the Russian presence in the middle of Europe and in the middle of Germany earlier than others, and who wanted to do something about it...
...His purpose was to show that the American internationalists and Roosevelt were full of tricks, and that the isolationists have been proved right: Before Pearl Harbor America was not threatened by Germany, there was no Clear and Present Danger...
...It is now Deutschtum und Amerikanismus, Germanness and Americanism, with the corporate bureaucratization of life, including intellectual life...
...John Lukacs's most recent book is Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (Doubleday...
...I didn't find any...
...Day-Day-Are...
...In thirty-nine years the essentials ot this condition have not changed...
...The pamphlet of my hotel in Berlin sums up the history of the city...
...What Allemann wrote twenty-five years ago is still largely true on the political level: Bonn is not Weimar...
...But it went, and it goes, deeper than that...
...I haven't read this book yet but the title is surely wrong...
...The Federal Republic is solidly democratic, liberal, Americanized, moderate...
...There were a few smart women, clutching their fur coats...
...It is, he has fervently proclaimed many times, "an essential fact about the modern world" that "socialism is coming everywhere...
...For the first time in forty, perhaps fifty, years the admiration for things Prussian has risen again: for Prussian culture, Prussian order, Prussian self-discipline, Prussian probity...
...Like what...
...There are other similarities...
...In any event, this Germany has proved Spengler wrong...
...Out of her ashes a new and sparkling city has arisen...
...East German coaches...
...In 1937, he praised "the establishment of a constitution [in the USSR] which moves, at least formally, toward the adoption of democratic practices . . . . There is only one party, but the introduction of the secret ballot offers workers and peasants a weapon against bureaucratic and inefficient officials and their policies...
...any Nazis...
...Thirty-nine years after the First World War another world war had come and gone, and the world had changed beyond recognition...
...Train from Berlin...
...Need any more be said...
...The audience was silent...
...This includes the poisonous glitter of an entire quarter dedicated by the city fathers to organized sexual excess...
...We lost the war...
...There was a profound difference between the United States and the Germany of Depression...
...On a gray morning I went to Hamburg Dammtor station, following a curved walkway that goes through the hallways of what was until recently a luxurious hotel on the Esplanade but now is an office building...
...The Mont-Blanc to Geneva...
...Kirkpatrick or Caspar Weinberger...
...But does anyone these days...
...For Stone, this has always entailed an absolutist position on the First Amendment...
...There was no nostalgia for the Weimar period, not even among intellectuals...
...In his old age, Socrates was given hemlock by the democratic citizens of Athens...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
