European Document/More History
Shlaes, Amity
EUROPEAN DOCUMENT MORE HISTORY W est German conservatives were thinking big as they moved through the last weeks before the general election on January 25. Their last large-scale campaign rally...
...It took a pack of security guards and five minutes before Amity Shlaes is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/Europe...
...Even Chancellor Kohl's own performance sometimes verged on the shameful...
...On the political level, the Kohl government has failed to match the sophistication and sincerity of the academic discussion...
...President von WeizacIcer's speech`Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection' was so impressive that nearly a million Germans requested copies within three months after he'd delivered it...
...The crowds mingled in a cheery fog of beer and pea soup and milled admiringly past baby-blue stands honoring the national economic achievement...
...And this is why the German conservatives, however clumsy or uncouth, deserve support...
...Thus the Kohl government is fighting what to Americans would seem to be a nation of intellectuals circa 1968...
...This began as early as 1983, when conservative luminary Bruno Heck wrote that "the [student] rebellion of 1968 destroyed more values than the Third Reich did...
...the overheated hall recovered its complacent mood...
...In a now-famous interview with Newsweek magazine last fall, he felt comfortable likening Mikhail Gorbachev's propaganda skills to those of Joseph Goebbels...
...during the sixties and seventies packed an unusually effective punch...
...The result is growing resistance from a variety of fronts, among them the opposition Social Democrats, the flourishing ecologist Green party, and some historians, who charge that the government is irretrievably damaging national memory by trivializing the National Socialist crime for rightist political purposes...
...In a nation where the common verb "to lead" (fiihren) still retains a strongly negative connotation, the "anti-authoritarian" movement that swept Europe and the U.S...
...But lately the Christian Democrats' message about "getting over the past" has taken on an unattractively brassy tone...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987...
...T he first signs of the battle came with the arrival of new comparisons of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, a parallel which has been taboo in West Germany since the 1960s...
...It was when powerhouse conservative Franz Josef Strauss, prime minister of Bavaria, wandered onto the subject of national pride and the years 1933-1945 that trouble came...
...Another historian, Andreas Hillgruber, presented the same argument in a more oblique form when he published a book with the explosive (in Germany) title, Two Kinds of Destruction: The Destruction of the Third Reich and the End of European Jewry...
...The most successful of the projects was a mollifying, Santayana-ish speech about remembering the past by President Richard von Weizsficker on May 8,1985...
...So the job hasfallen on Adenauer's self-proclaimed heir, the somewhat bumbling but well-meaning Helmut Kohl...
...Nolte argued that the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis was to some extent built on the model of Stalin's murders in the Gulag...
...To turn attention away from the present split, it helps to recall a time when Germany was one nation...
...the authority of the Federal Republic, they claimed, was "fascist...
...Konrad Adenauer, the national father, was too busy supervising the clearing of rubble and worrying about the Soviets in Berlin to set a strong line on the Nazi past...
...Then student protestors of the 1960s and 1970s used it to spice up their attacks on incumbent governments...
...At Dortmund, Kohl did it again, suggesting in a speech to party members that there were concentration camps in East Germany...
...Fifty-five thousand citizens from Berlin to Aachen to Lake Constance rode 355 buses and fifteen chartered trains through Sunday-morning sleet to attend...
...In the end, they settled for a multi-stadium complex in Dortmund known as the "Deutschland Halle...
...Most of the problems come from his indecision over whom he'd prefer to court, Washington or Moscow...
...a confident Germany is imperative for a strong Western Alliance...
...The answer is yes...
...The campaign mostly focused on the series of 40-year anniversaries marking the end of World War II...
...In the early postwar years, the twelve-year "1000 Year Reich" was taboo...
...CDU politicians, and, more particularly, members of the CDU's southern sister party, the Christian Social Union, have occasionally issued statements about German history that can't be called anything but lies, grotesque and downright...
...In several articles in Die Zeit, Germany's answer to the New York Review of Books, he charged that the conservatives were advocating a national Entsorgung, an "unburdening," of the National Socialist past...
...The consequence was that Hitler imitated what he feared...
...Germany is more than those times," he intoned...
...Oppenheimer's essay has also been reprinted in a new collection, Bitburg and Beyond...
...They stamped their feet on wood floors when Helmut Kohl and other cabinet members from the ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union, arrived, and cheered their round-headed leader with low, solid rumbles of "Hel-Moot, Hel-Moot...
...One early participant in the discussion was Franz M. Oppenheimer, whose article on the question of German guilt, "Treacherous Signposts: The Perils of Misreading Germany's Past," which first appeared in the November 1985 American Spectator, was reprinted last May by the prestigious conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.' Oppenheimer noted that "the stench and gore of the Gulag, the deaths of slave laborers during the construction of the Siberian pipeline, are not permitted to intrude into discussions . . ." Historian Ernst Nolte then picked up the fight...
...Today, as the number of Germans who can speak about the period from adult experience diminishes, establishing an acceptable official line becomes important...
...His essay, "The Past That Will Not Pass Away," appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in June, around the time the conservatives won a state election that started them rolling toward national victory...
...Does responsibility fall to the next generation, and the generation after that...
...The response to such equation was outrage—to some extent correctly so...
...Germans, he argues, need no longer feel guilty about the trains that rolled to the camps...
...After its disappointing showing, the government may have more trouble getting through legislation that will *********************** SWEATSHIRT, LONG SLEEVED, COMFORTABLE, THICK 50/50 $14.00 ADULT T-SHIRT, SHORT SLEEVED, 50/50 $ 8.00 CHILD T-SHIRT $ 6.00 GOLF SHIRT, COLLAR, 4( BANDED SLEEVES $16.00 4( JACKET, LINED, NYLON $18.00 CAP, 3 COLOR WITH SDI LOGO $ 6.00 4( COFFEE MUG, CERAMIC EACH $ 5.00 SET OF 6 MUGS $25.00 *********************** 31 put history to rest...
...He won't be able to lobby the two-thirds majority needed for that amendment, but he may be able to continue to block immigration procedurally...
...The chancellor's adviser on the modern history reforms, Michael Stiirmer, offered some words that are on the right track: "In a land without history, he who fills memory, defines the concepts, and interprets the past, wins the future...
...The comforting silhouette of Richard von Weizsücker has improved the German image significantly...
...Kohl's decision to take the reluctant Ronald Reagan to honor German war dead at Bitburg...
...Even before January's election, plans were under way to go beyond ceremony and make these policies concrete...
...From the American point of view, the price he paid for these remarks isn't particularly high—East German leader Erich Honecker, for example "canceled" a visit he'd already postponed for years...
...Hitler, Nolte felt, was frightened by the Stalinist regime: "You have to imagine," he quotes Hitler as having said of the instruments of Russian torture, "what happens to an officer who gets put in their rat cage...
...If I were a German, I would scream," says the Israeli ambassador to Bonn, Yitzak Ben Ari, of the recent rightward rhetoric...
...A young man shrieked some2 thing incomprehensible from the middle of the floor at the leader...
...At first glance the conservatives'by Amity Shlaes steps don't seem unduly controversial...
...It may also overreact and even render West Germany less democratic...
...T he attitude conservatives claim to undo is a tenacious one...
...The Bavarian Strauss, for example, has said he wants a constitutional amendment to make it harder to enter Germany...
...Encounters in American, German and Jewish History, edited by Ilya Levkov (Shapolsky Publishing, Inc., 56 East 11th St., New York, NY 10003...
...But more often, the party's responses have been unreconstructedly reactionary...
...The result is that for years German children from first grade to uniTy Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty Ty versity have been taught two lessons: Moscow isn't as bad as America thinks, and National Socialism was a consequence of capitalism...
...His reasoned argument is fortified by personal conviction —although not Jewish himself, for example, he has given his daughters the Jewish names of Judith and Rebekka...
...Much of the new 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 mood is attributed to Erlangen historian Michael StUrmer, an adviser to Kohl who is said to have convinced the chancellor of the importance of the new task...
...The same ambassador had applauded the earlier speech by President von Weizsacker...
...Strauss's direction...
...One of the German left-wing's biggest guns, philosopher Jurgen Habermas, 'Mr...
...As heir to the distinguished Frankfurt school, founded earlier this century by philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, as well as the intellectual symbol for many of the protests of the 1960s, the white-haired Habermas commands widespread respect among West German intellectuals...
...The governing coalition's victory in this January's election was weaker than expected—small, extreme, rightist parties made important gains in some states...
...Time is short, however, partly because of pressures within the CDU...
...Most in danger is Germany's liberal immigration and refugee law, laid into place when the Allies and Germans wrote the postwar constitution...
...the most egregious of them, in Western eyes at least, was Mr...
...Once the museums are up, the school books written, and the speeches made, Germans can to some extent turn to other, less politicized concerns...
...and the public was still smarting too much to listen in any case...
...Such historical confidence is also a handy tool in the prestidigitation the Kohl government is frequently forced to perform regarding the German reunification question...
...In his last administration Kohl embarked on an interesting and somewhat undirected campaign to relieve this truncated nation's national consciousness...
...Back in Germany, though, he had second Sthoughts and let his press spokesman attack Newsweek for misrepresenting him, even though Kohl's staff okayed the interview transcript before publication...
...Overcoming [that rebellion] is thus more important than overcoming Hitler once again...
...The government will allocate funding towards a pair of national museums, and it hopes to develop prouder views of the German past throughout German cultural life, from grammar schools to history books...
...The national newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, quoted a CDU official as saying that "Kohl has turned from a European to a German...
...Later Alfred Dregger, CDU party whip in the Bundestag, announced that what ended in 1945 "had already begun in 1914," and heaped blame on other European countries in a version of the stab-in-the-back tirade so dusty it could have been lifted from a Weimar salon...
...Helmut Kohl's government has problems handling this country's history...
...Sit down fon a beer with a German sociology student nowadays, and he'll tell you how the American arms industry started World War II...
...But after criticism from the East, he qualified his statement to the press...
...They need to build a strong national identity to survive in Europe...
...29.95, $17.95 paper...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987took up the case...
...Their last large-scale campaign rally was so giant they had difficulty finding a structure in this narrow republic roomy enough to accommodate it...
...But within detente-conscious Germany, such vacillation and its results have only discredited the chancellor...
...The mission, in Strauss's words, is to end the period where Germans live "continually under the shadow of the Third Reich...
...Such relativism, used to political ends, was dangerous, even in a nation where the grandchildren of the criminals were now to lead the nation...
...It may well be that German conservatives are grappling with history today because they neglected it earlier...
...he hurled what looked like a handkerchief in Mr...
...But even von Weizsacker could be somewhat threatened: to be reelected in 1989, he needs votes from the right side of his party, too...
Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
