German intellectuals and the Gulf War

...This is not a simple pacifism but the inverted nationalism of an eternally penitent nation...

...The Gulf War debate—despite important differences in tone and argument—was the first to occur in a post–cold war atmosphere and did not fit into a predictable left-right script...

...And Rudolf Augstein, influential editor of Der Spiegel, charged that it was hypocrisy to demand a military role from Germans since "that is precisely what was thoroughly driven out of them in the forty-five postwar years...

...In Dresden I encountered a demonstration only a few feet from a hydrocephalic Lenin monument and a short walk from the ruins of the Anglo-American bombardment of February 1945...

...Habermas attributed the vehemence of the German debate to the government's failure to defend its position...

...The danger, as Habermas recognized, is that many Germans could easily find solace in a postunification left-wing "normalcy," which (unlike the conservative normalization of renewed military pride) sacrifices principles like national sovereignty and human rights to apocalyptic anxieties...

...The self-satisfied West German left emerged from the triumph of 1968 and established itself in a world organized by the East-West division...

...The question was to what extent there was sufficient rationale to apply "binding principles of international law and achieve them through conventional methods of war...

...During the debacle of World War I, many Germans repudiated the imperialist aims of the politicians and embraced a spiritual relationship to politics, which Thomas Mann, in his Considerations of an Unpolitical Man, called "in good German fashion, a non-relationship...

...Yet, the overanxious equation of war with nuclear or even planetary suicide and the repetitive invocation of the emotion-laden word "stricken" (betroffen) bespoke a claim to moral superiority—as if, as was often asserted, Germans were endowed with a higher level of moral self-reflection...

...The German peace movement greeted the war with a negative euphoria recalling the massive marches against the stationing of U.S...

...In the midst of that war, high-minded appeals to a cultural nation were also a protest against the conservative Bismarckian "state without culture," against Western democracy and materialism, against war profiteering and parade-ground nationalism...

...We Are a People" became "We Are a People Against the War," and "Germany United" became "Germany United Against the War...

...A reduced role in the conflict predicated on the "memory of the barbaric war which Germany began" might, he argued, be legitimate if it was coupled with an insistence on Germany's moral responsibility toward Israel...

...Similarly, Willy Brandt shrugged off the English-language press, "Germany can't be everyone's darling...

...The renascent peace movement seemed also to bring about a reconciliation between the former East German protest movements of November 1989 and their West German Green and antimissile counterparts...

...With the collapse of the Soviet Imperium and the rise of the human rights movements, that intelligentsia stepped into a historical showplace where all the concepts—nation, religion, democracy, market— that were previously either taboo or inserted in a rigid left-right schema were not rethought but politically remobilized...

...I would be unequivocally decisive on only one point: we should not hesitate in help for Israel...

...With the wall gone, a show of unity against the U.S.-sponsored war could wipe away the West German movement's embarrassing history of omission and indifference toward Eastern European and GDR (East German) protests against Soviet hegemony...

...The novelist Peter Schneider warned that only German "self-righteousness" might be the ultimate winner...

...and like Hitler, he was incapable of calculated self-interest...

...But the peace movement's insistence that the Gulf War was the first assault of a triumphant U.S...

...intervention...

...At least Glotz's prescription had the advantage of not advocating nonparticipation while writing military checks and sanctioning the arms trade...

...This reached tragicomic proportions with a Green party visit to Israel on February 19...

...Karl Heinz Bohrer, the acerbic editor of Germany's prestigious intellectual review Merkur, saw the collusion of the governing elite and the peace movement as further evidence that even unified Germans are unwilling to abandon their innocent provincialism for the hazards of a modern nationstate...

...Germany's "conscience-stricken provincialism" was defended by Peter Glotz, a leading Social Democratic intellectual, who in turn accused prowar writers and journalists like Bohrer, Enzensberger, and the filmmaker Hans Jtirgen Syberberg of a new "elite-nationalism...

...It was not Germany's reluctance to contribute military forces to the coalition (deployment of troops outside of NATO territory is prohibited by the Basic Law) that accounts for the vehemence of the controversy...

...Drawing a sharp parallel between Saddam Hussein and Hitler, Hans Magnus Enzensberger also argued that the Gulf War could be defended as an anti-fascist undertaking...

...Earlier, at an emotional Party Congress in Frankfurt, Micha Brumlik resigned from the Greens after a vote opposing the sale of Patriots to Israel (it was then reversed...

...Critics abroad pointed out that the government's reluctance did not extend to preventing German firms from delivering weapons to Iraq even after the UN embargo or German engineers from improving Iraqi missile accuracy systems and advising the military research center in Mosul...

...rhetoric...

...One of the most admirable qualities of the German 462 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad generation of 1968 is that its most articulate spokespersons have learned to tolerate the ambiguities of political choice...

...Did, in an odd twist, the traditional "good" German posture of antimilitarism and nonparticipation in global intervention, secured by the Basic Law, turn into license for hazardous innocence...

...Dear pacifistically inclined reader, dear peace movement reader, let us from the very beginning not misunderstand each other...

...At that time the reassertion of Germany's "special path" in European history was confined to the Green party and the "extraparliamentary" margins of society...

...The Gulf War was a parting of the ways with his former friends in the peace movement: Like you, I drive a car, heat with oil, eat well, and hurtle along into the ecological catastrophe...

...For Glotz the present danger is neither Kohl's "Europeanist" course nor the peace movement but the desire articulated by Bohrer and many others to be free of the "Dresden-Hiroshima Complex" —a threat that comes not from the conservative right but from the liberal center...

...Even if the war was ultimately justified, the peace movement's antipathy to great power politics and its insistence on the obsolescence of war was valid...

...For this reason, Habermas still hoped to salvage something from both sides...

...One placard read: "Oh Lord, Throw Down Some Brains from Heaven...

...Was Saddam Hussein the authentic "heir" of Adolf Hitler, as Enzensberger claimed...

...Appeals to "peace without when or if" suggested to Biermann not only the Munich appeasement but also the unholy alliance of right and left in 1938-39 when communists and fascists joined together to sanction the takeover of Poland and Czechoslovakia...

...Would I prefer Germans applauding the destruction of Baghdad...

...The peace movement turned out to be the government's alter ego...

...When the war began there was not the slightest doubt anywhere on the political spectrum, from the ecological-fundamentalist wing of the Greens to the higher echelons of the CDU (Christian Democrats), that Germany should opt out of the conflict militarily and play a subordinate role financially...

...But this new political intelligentsia has begun to attack the Western European right-left seating order...

...There were antiwar demonstrations throughout Europe and the United States...

...Genscherism, some critics said, stood not for patient and intelligent diplomacy, but for international "malingering...

...The left-wing Tageszeitung (TAZ), for example, did not take an antiwar position, leading at one point to a "human chain" of protesters between the offices of the right-wing Springer press (Bild Zeitung) and the TAZ to dramatize the latter's sellout to "really existing neoliberalism...

...Recalling the old French peace slogan of 1938, "Mourir pour Danzig...

...Typical of the hyperbole the StrObele episode produced was Broder's assertion that "at work in considerable part of the peace movement was the strong desire for Saddam Hussein to seize the historical opportunity and finish the job that the Nazis couldn't complete...

...I hope that this war completely and thoroughly destroys the weapons arsenal bought from West and East to annihilate Israel...

...like Hitler, his mass support fed on the "unlimited love and readiness for sacrifice of his followers...

...President Richard Von Weizsacker reminded those abroad who only a few months earlier had been wringing their hands over resurgent German power that they could not now be upset over Germany's constitutional limits on military action...

...Forck, the main speaker at a giant peace rally in Bonn on January 26, demanded an end to U.S...

...The Gulf debate was striking for the fact that many of Germany's best known left-wing intellectuals, like Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Wolf B iermann, Jurgen Habermas, and Peter Schneider, along with prominent veterans of the 1968 generation, among them Jews like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Micha Brumlik, supported the war and publicly criticized the peace movement...

...After all, he said, "the victorious powers" had demanded that article, and rightly so, since peace was "a special German responsibility afforded us by our experience...

...New World Order" against a demonized third-world nation repeats a longstanding modus operandi of identification with the Arab "victims of the victims...

...He was also the first to see the debate as a clash between two distinct emotional responses to Germany's Nazi history: "Almost instinctively, the break with the fascist past expresses itself in two reactions: no more anti-Semitism and injury to the rights of citizens, and no more nationalism and war...

...If it was once true, as Lafontaine put it, "that driving the Barracks spirit from the Germans was a primordial question of European security," the "constitutional pacifism" that Germany acquired from that exorcism reminds us that nationalism does not always turn up in a military costume...

...Since Germans in this century "were entwined in two terrible wars," almost "eliminated another—the Jewish— people from the face of the earth," and themselves experienced the "catastrophic consequences of the plague of nationalism," they should, Glotz asserted, be permitted to follow an "antitraditional politics...

...Biermann claimed that "this alliance between authentic rightists and false leftists is with us again...

...Jiirgen Habermas, who in recent years has become Germany's liberal conscience, did not agree that the parallel between Saddam and Hitler "extended as far as Enzensberger's anthropological considerations...

...There is something both moving and yet unnerving about the very young invoking and perhaps exclusively identifying with the (German) victims of bombing...

...how little consensus there is—or should be—in an entirely new domestic and geopolitical situation...

...bombing "precisely because we are confronted with a crazy dictator willing to draw everything into the strudel of annihilation," adding, "If I do not reflect on this fact I am myself responsible for all of humanity that can perish in this catastrophe...

...missiles in the early 1980s, combined with the sense of imminent catastrophe that accompanied the Chernobyl disaster...

...Even before unification, Bohrer linked his postmodern aesthetics to an Anglo-American realpolitik in a series of controversial attacks on what he saw as the conservative provincialism of the Christian Democrats and the moralizing cultural politics of the Social Democrats...

...Only after the first Scud missile attacks on Tel Aviv did Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher arrive in Jerusalem with the promise of cash and Patriots...

...The ensuing scandal, which provoked protestations of "partisanship for Saddam Hussein" and "horror" among more responsible Greens (like Joschka Fischer, former environmental minister of Hessen), sent the delegation packing and forced Strtibele's resignation...

...If Germany and Japan were to abandon their so-called Pax Axis, the ultimate consequence would be that economic power would lead to military power and eventually to the emergence of a militarist German nationalism—with a nuclear capacity...

...Was the attack on Kuwait the replay of the bloodless Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia...

...That both were products of the same disastrous history made the choice all the more difficult...

...Saddam would have liquidated it, if not today, then tomorrow, with a GermanFrench-British atomic bomb...

...Was the "coercive disarmament" of Iraq the correct lesson to be drawn from the appeasement of the late 1930s, or was militant pacifism Germany's contribution to a world faced with nuclear or ecological catastrophe on the order of a global Auschwitz...

...It was the virtual consensus that surrounded the official stance, combined with massive and spontaneous nationwide peace demonstrations characterized by anti-American rhetoric and an indifference to the fate of Israel...

...The peace movement's revival provoked a surprising response from German intellectuals, who broke ranks with the neutralist majority...

...q FALL • 1991 • 463...

...How can Germans maintain their post-1945 commitment to the democratic West without sacrificing the memory of two world wars...

...This fact has been understood only by a small minority in this country...

...Some of the banners that spontaneously appeared after January 17 displayed unabashed enthusiasm for this belated reunification on the left...

...But Habermas cautioned that the war had to conform to, and, if possible, establish a universal standard for U.N...

...But the German protests quickly assumed the character of a nationwide "children's crusade" of high-school-age protesters, profoundly apocalyptic in mood, and dominated by anti-U.S...

...The Gulf debate, the Historikersteit of 1986 (see Dissent, Spring 1988), and the intense debates over the path to reunification have led Germany's left-wing intellectuals to realize how little value remains in the cliches of the post-1968 left...

...Like Hitler, Saddam Husseim was bent on "collective suicide...

...The result was a bitter confrontation between left-wing intellectuals for whom Germany's obligation to Israel was a singular moral imperative and a resurgent peace movement for whom any German complicity in war and militarism remained the most powerful postwar prohibition...

...As more than one shrewd observer noticed, the authentic German assumption of the burden of guilt and responsibility after 1945 was often at the expense of a tragic sense of politics in which good and evil cannot be entirely disentangled...

...Ajuxtaposition of Bohrer's ambiguous irony and Glotz's social democratic pieties goes to the real stakes in the Gulf querelle...

...Saddam Hussein "did not fight against another internal or external opponent—his enemy is the world...

...Yet it must be admitted that the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of reconciling the imperative to reject war with the imperative to protect Israel made it all too easy for the protagonists on both sides of the debate to jettison a sense of the moral and political uncertainties of the war itself...

...No matter how compelling the historical analogies, the war did not go according to any of the apocalyptic scenarios...

...The Gulf War debate may have signaled the breakup of the most politically cohesive left-wing culture in Europe...

...Almost from the outset a few peace movement supporters, for example, Petra Kelly and Till 460 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad Bastian, disavowed any anti-Israel sentiment, but there was a highly visible element that blamed Israel for the Iraqi attacks...

...You don't need to read on...

...During the Gulf War, Bohrer —by no means a conventional nationalist— faulted politicians like the Social Democratic leader Oskar Lafontaine for their "stupendous lack of reality," and denounced Chancellor Helmut Kohl for his deficient sense of German "Staatsraison...

...However, at the end of February, Habermas was still skeptical that the conduct of the war "would stand up to such scrupulous investigation...

...It is this will to domination unto doom that makes him today's authentic "successor" of Hitler — "neither a German nor an Arab, but an anthropological fact...

...But this requires a consistent ban on arms exports, no military deployment apart from regional defense, no war financing, a peace corps (for the East), and large-scale investment in economic reconstruction and the ecological stabilization of this endangered world...

...But the outbreak of "peace nationalism" in 1991 was for many intellectuals proof that unification had relocated all of Germany's political parties in the peace camp...

...Biermann concluded that he was "happy" the United States had acted, even if out of base motives, since "otherwise Israel would have stood alone...

...The unexpected stance of Wolf Biermann, the singer/poet and former enfant terrible of the German Democratic Republic, exemplifies this new situation...

...In 1918, many Germans, exhausted and humiliated by the folly of national self-assertion, eschewed conventional politics and retreated to a "sphere that is undoubtedly superior to the state and to political life" where "all deeper morality belongs...

...Shortly after the bombing began, one speaker typically called for a unilateral end to hostilities by the United States and its allies in order to "prevent the even greater climactic catastrophe which threatens to implicate the entire world...

...These questions posed a choice between the two most traumatic memories in postwar Germany, placing at odds the imperative not to repeat the political quiescence that made possible the Nazi dictatorship and the Jewish genocide on the one hand, and the military expansionism that led to Germany's defeat and destruction on the other...

...As Klaus Hartung noted in his reply to Glotz: The years 1989 and 1990 left behind a rubblefield of convictions, worldviews, caricatures of the enemy, and paradigms of responsibility...

...But these days I chew on slogans at the demos in Germany and want to throw up big...

...On the day the Green delegation arrived, Hans-Christian StrObele, official party spokesman, declared in an interview in the Jerusalem Post (conducted by Henryk Broder, an outspoken critic of the peace movement's attitude toward Israel) that "the Iraqi missile attacks are the logical, almost compelling consequence of Israeli policies" and that Israel was at fault because of its past treatment of the Palestinians and the Arab states, including Iraq...

...Though less than wholehearted in his endorsement, Habermas too declared the allied military action in the Gulf to be "justified" (as opposed to "just...

...And Daniel Cohn-Bendit justified the war while condemning the hypocrisy of the intellectuals for ignoring Iraqi suffering as well as the hypocrisy of the peace movement for refusing to admit that sometimes despots cannot be checked by words alone...

...In the Blitzkrieg of analogies that the German debate unleashed, one that was forgotten was the analogy of 1918...

...Instead, we reacted to faits accomplis, with draft resistance and checks, with pacifism and arms deliveries, with bad conscience and ambivalent feelings...

...This confrontation between partisans of "no more war" and partisans of "no more fascism" turned on home-grown historical FALL • 1991 • 459 Reports from Abroad analogies...

...Coming in the aftermath of the national selfassertion of 1989-90, the Gulf War confronted Germans with a choice between nostalgia for that German "nonrelationship," the "unpolitical man [and woman]," and the sometimes necessary but nonetheless calculating Staatsraison of nation-states...

...One foot pushes the gas pedal, the other the brake...

...I am for this war in the Gulf...

...Only if the United States and its allies did not pursue their own selfish interests, if the war was conducted under the FALL • 1991 • 461 Reports from Abroad umbrella of the UN, and if its aims were limited to the liberation of Kuwait and the destruction of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons (not the elimination of Saddam Hussein) could it be morally defended...

...Adopting the habitus of the peace movement, the nation could become hostage to a Green Heideggerism, the morally superior "shepherd of Being" in a world abandoned to military-ecological catastrophe...

...In that spirit, Detlev Claussen reminded both sides that they had "demonstrated conscience and emotion," and that one could "consider the war necessary without being a swine, and reject it without being either immoral or unpolitical...

...Former East German protest leaders like Gottfried Forck, the Evangelical Bishop of BerlinBrandenburg, were prominent in the antiwar movement...

...Adecade ago many observers saw in the German antimissile campaign the specter of a neutralist, pacifist, and, above all, anti-Western Germany unhinged from the NATO alliance...

...Perhaps it is inevitable, as a friend remarked, that after forty years of having been told of their grandparents' guilt as well as their suffering, the children of today's Germany could do little else than demonstrate for peace...