'Einig Vaterland!':
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy EINIG VATERLAND!' OLD FEARS & NEW ONES-I We met accidentally in a drug store, an old friend and I, during those days when East and West Germans were...
...I taught and lived with refugees from the horror-Christian and Jewish both-and heard their stories...
...If I, an American relatively untouched, still harbor such feelings what must be the feelings of the Poles, the French, the Dutch, the Danes, all of whom suffered under occupation, or of the English who endured the blitz-or of the Russians who withstood horrible siege at great cost...
...The leaders there-the likes of Walesa and Havel-have a moral authority Western leaders have lost...
...It had begun to ebb, I realized, when I saw on television thousands of East Germans marching and chanting "Deutschlandl Deutschlandl" and carrying signs calling for "Einig Vaterlandl" The chant had echoes of the song that had frightened me as a child and frightened me again in young adulthood: "Deutschland, Deutschland, iiber alles, iiber alles in die Welt...
...I, too, felt like sharing in that celebration...
...I was a college student when I began to learn what Nazism was and about the first concentration camps...
...in his January 10 speech, on the anniversary of Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, "a sequence during which East Germany could develop democratic institutions and the two Germanys could expand economic and social interaction...
...I'm sure it was...
...It is a relief to have the renowned German writer Giinter Grass, speaking to other Germans, acknowledge such feelings as "our neighbors' justifiable fears rooted in their own experience...
...Giinter Grass argues that if West Germany is to subsume or annex a smaller East Germany, that country's hard-won new identity-its heroic struggle for freedom, its own brief history-would sink away...
...How each country, including ours, deals with the past-neither succumbing to exaggerated guilt nor angrily indulging in amnesia-will bear upon the psychological strength of the world now being built...
...It spoke of war...
...My memories of the Wall and the times I had gone through it were vivid...
...And some of them have to do with our own fall from moral grace in the decades just past...
...This is an event "unique in German history-a successful revolutionary movement...
...I remember the hard-faced guards...
...Let's get on a plane tomorrow and go...
...Italics mine...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy EINIG VATERLAND!' OLD FEARS & NEW ONES-I We met accidentally in a drug store, an old friend and I, during those days when East and West Germans were drinking champagne and dancing on the Wall...
...But, as I read his card, I realized that my own euphoria had faded...
...Last week I had a postcard from my friend...
...The weary sad patience of the women I had met from East Berlin...
...Like others in academia, I felt utterly betrayed by the country I had learned to respect as the home of Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller-so many others...
...Leaders in the East German freedom movement have warned against the seduction of the overwhelming materialism of the West...
...I was somewhat ashamed of this feeling...
...This should allow for the orderly sequence called for by Senator Claiborne Pell (D-R.I...
...He had gone to Berlin after all and had spent New Year's Eve celebrating on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate-"a great experience...
...To see that Wall surmounted, being hacked at and symbolically destroyed, to be there while that happened-I would have liked that...
...Because there can be no demand for a new version of a unified nation that in the course of barely seventy-five years, though under several managements, filled the history books, ours and theirs, with suffering, rubble, defeat, millions of refugees, millions of dead, and the burden of crimes that can never be undone...
...And our entry into World War II, followed by the loss in action of friends and neighbors...
...Their guns suddenly lifted when tourists came too near...
...he asked...
...After forty years could those of my generation not allow a new Germany to exist...
...What has happened in the rest of Eastern Europe is unique as well...
...It was, I thought, a pleasant fantasy...
...Grass warns his compatriots that total reunification would mean "despite all our protestations, even well-intentioned ones, we Germans would once again be feared" and that the mistrust of their neighbors would "quickly give rise to a renewed sense of isolation and with it the dangerous self-pitying mentality that sees itself as 'surrounded by enemies.'" This is the kind of acknowledgment of guilt and of reality which can allay the old fears...
...In the face of such a Europe we may then come to terms with the flaws in our own recent past-Vietnam, our murky ventures in Central and South America, racial hatred and poverty here at home...
...There are other arguments against total reunification that have nothing to do with our old fears...
...He continued: "Neither can we Germans...
...Historian Fritz Stern writes that acknowledgment of guilt and implicit or explicit apologies are necessary conditions for a new Europe (New York Times, January 14) and cites Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia's new president, for his magnanimous call for apology to the innocent Germans expelled from his country after World War II...
...The greatest party in the world is going on in Berlin...
...There are other fears than the old ones...
...Even believe in it...
...Then came the dark days when one country after another fell before Hitler's assaults...
...And to me the word "Vaterland" had connotations far different from the concept of "a mother country...
...I remember, too, the pathetic mementos and photos marking the deaths of those who had tried to escape from it...
...He said further what anyone of us would be reluctant to say-that total reunification must not happen because "no one of sound mind and memory can ever again permit such a concentration of power in the heart of Europe...
...What are we doing here...
...If we help them, a confederation of the two Germanys, drawing on the best in each, can eventually join a larger European confederation, open to all of Europe...
...There was the sheer ugly fact of it...
...The young man who took the risk of approaching me in a park one snowy day begging me to take a little gift to a girl he did not hope to see again...
...The emotions evoked then easily rise again...
...He points out that the struggle for freedom in the GDR is something new under the sun-the East Germans are razing the bastions of a hated system by nonviolent means...
...The pope warns Eastern Europe against blindly embracing all the values of our Western democracies, warning about the spread of "counter-values like egoism, hedonism, racism, and practiced materialism...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 3
