On Loss: The Condition of Germany
Grass, Günter
Toward the end of last summer we went to a Danish island, as we have done for years now, looking to put some space between us and our "troublesome fatherland," yet mindful of how quickly and...
...No, we were not fixated on unity...
...It will scare off investors...
...What makes sensitive people so insensitive...
...Toward the end of last summer we went to a Danish island, as we have done for years now, looking to put some space between us and our "troublesome fatherland," yet mindful of how quickly and completely such small distance, a mere hop, skip, and jump, can be canceled out, especially in August, the traditional month for crises...
...Yet to this SPRING • 1993 • 185 The Condition of Germany day they refuse to admit that their misleading signals and the avoidance of a timely debate over the Constitution were mistakes that carry grave consequences...
...It began with the loss of my homeland...
...That is why my Danish notes now impel me to speak of myself, of Germany and myself...
...The Roma and the Sinti are the quintessential victims...
...Brandt and his wife, Rut, felt comfortable engaging in free-wheeling discussion with intellectuals...
...Even the harsh tone civil servants customarily employed toward citizens, based on mutual assumptions about governmental authority, had to yield in the face of the admonition "Be nice to one another...
...Who, if not Regine Hildebrandt, would be the ideal successor to President Richard von Weizsacker...
...I would guess that the same loss has been experienced by Jiirgen Habermas and Walter Jens, Christoph Hein and Friedrich Schorlemmer, as well as by all those who, with Wolfgang Ullmann and the "Alliance for a Democratically Structured Federation of German Countries," tried in vain to carry out the obligation expressed in the last article of the Basic Law...
...The Danes take their high degree of civilized behavior for granted...
...On the Danish island I found an outlet for my rage...
...Let me remind them today of the renewed barbarity for which their railroad imagery gave Germans the go-ahead...
...The Olympic Games were taking place in Bosnia...
...Ambivalence, duality, what one might call the Hamlet syndrome, is part of us, * On November 17 the Social Democrats voted at a special meeting to accept changes in the constitutional provisions on asylum: applicants from countries considered free of political persecution would be sent home...
...The president of the Bundestag has had to play the role of producer...
...Starting with Konrad Adenauer's 1961 diatribe, intended to insult and injure the former emigrë, Willy Brandt was treated as a stranger in Germany, and he remained a stranger until his death...
...no state memorial service could conceal that fact...
...People were civil to each other...
...nothing primally Polish was regained—I did not need the crutch of nationalism to understand myself as a German...
...Leading journalists supported the hasty annexation and dismissed article 146 as meaningless...
...They have become regular targets of violence...
...I was accustomed to stirring up controversy with my written and spoken words...
...I could not keep my writing paper from filling up with the accumulated bitterness of two years of unity...
...They can help us, by providing an irritant to our rigid order...
...In the early seventies it seemed reasonable to hope that we could at least fill this crack, if not obliterate it...
...Translated from the German by KRISHNA WINSTON q * Martin Bangemann, Helmut Haussmann, and Jurgen Möllemann successively resigned as minister of economics because of scandals...
...The economic giant as political dwarf—which explains why boasts like "We're somebody again" and similar posturing immediately brought placating rejoinders that everything was relative and that we should remembers to be humble...
...By signaling the end of civilized behavior toward these people, they encouraged acts of violence and murder by right-wing radical groups then forming...
...Let them come and stay, if they wish...
...No, precisely because Lenz and I had both accepted the loss of our homeland, our presence implied recognition of Poland's western border...
...It is certainly correct to say that the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany seemed to have become civilized, on their own initiative and ahead of their political parties and special-interest groups...
...Last August, however, the sky was as good as empty—only gulls...
...Apropos going overboard: how can one begin to measure the selfrighteousness that finds expression in these actions...
...blackberries were plentiful, after all, and we had fresh fish every day...
...Even North and South Germans remain strangers to each other, separated by the Main...
...The civilized principle that used to obtain — "innocent until proven guilty" —has been reversed: now mere suspicion is considered evidence of guilt...
...It was the beginning of August...
...One of these fossils is speaking to you now...
...But as we bundled the flounder heads in newspaper, from between their crossed eyes peeked yesterday's headlines...
...The GDR, by definition avowedly anti-fascist, found itself deprived of a chance to gloat...
...My speech had touched a raw nerve...
...Then there was the radical liberalism of the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, which set it so clearly apart from the stodgy conservatism of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, even though their business sections took much the same tack...
...Once again we seem to have gone overboard...
...Her directness is refreshing...
...They share the responsibility for the national catastrophe that unification has become...
...The vote was taken, then essentially scuttled by businessas-usual in Bonn...
...There was Gustav Heinemann, too...
...Not that the sovereignty of the individual provinces has been abrogated...
...But when federalism as a corrective fails, another loss must be added to the previous list...
...They actually made it worse, through indifference...
...The question must be asked: is there any political force currently in a position to fill this intentionally created gap and offer resistance to right-wing terror...
...The media are in on the act...
...my usual refuge, a manuscript, with its network of narrative escape routes, was blocked by a landslide...
...182 • DISSENT The Condition of Germany consensus, which seemed to justify our ideological claim to a "social market economy...
...After a while you just stop listening...
...Then the bankrupt GDR, with its entire inventory, animate and inanimate, was annexed by the Federal Republic's large chains and energy syndicates, banks and insurance companies...
...Torch them...
...even our common language fails to produce understanding...
...Certainly...
...And other losses: Whatever became of the diversity of public opinion...
...This annexation, cutely dubbed "united fatherland," did away with self-deception once and for all, uncovered the whole pan-German swindle, and—no sooner than we had achieved sovereignty—gave a powerful boost to our tendency to go overboard...
...The coffin and the honorary pallbearers — Boll's sons, Lev Kopelev, Gunter Wallraff, and I—were led by a gypsy band to the gravesite...
...rather it was certain politicians whose verbal pyrotechnics ignited the subject of immigration and made the desperation of refugees and asylum-seekers a permanent campaign issue...
...It guarantees not only the more disturbing but also the more stimulating differences, and safeguards, with the zeal of a cottage gardener 186 • DISSENT The Condition of Germany maintaining his fences, our cultural riches, which can always count on those government subsidies that support everything from amateur theaters to archaeological sites...
...As a further example of going overboard let me mention the centralized nightmare known as the Treuhandanstalt, the agency charged with privatizing holdings in the former GDR...
...the Third Way has been closed off...
...Because they are different, or worse still: different from different...
...This was the democratic left that had spoken out against communism, with clear arguments and free of blind hate...
...We owed them that, not renewed disenfranchisement...
...No deputy in the European parliament or in the Bundestag consistently represents their cause, calls attention to their desperate situation...
...but that merit was to be determined under the provisions of the 1951 Geneva Convention on political persecution...
...Our Basic Law wants it this way...
...Supposedly the glut of information is to blame for the general apathy...
...According to this interpretation, being German would mean being split, in every aspect of our existence and consciousness...
...The apparition vanished, the rightist camp fell apart...
...The Federal Republic of Germany and its Constitution, the Basic Law, have been handed over to a demolition firm that claims to be engaged in conservation and preservation...
...When the Olympic fireworks died away, for a while Sarajevo occupied center stage uncontested...
...A younger writer, always ready to pack up and go, would probably—or so I speculated—be able to cover both places, seizing control of the narrative situation with gripping words: snipers and female fencers, steroid scandals and blockaderunners, shortened national anthems and the seventeenth futile ceasefire, fireworks here, fireworks there...
...the skinheads bawl...
...This agency has well-nigh unlimited power to decide people's fates...
...German guilt for wartime atrocities, for the genocide perpetrated on Jews and gypsies, for the murder of millions of prisoners of war and forced laborers, for the crime of euthanasia, and for the suffering we inflicted as occupying power on our neighbors, especially the Polish people—all this led to the loss of my homeland...
...A few weeks later, on February 2, 1990 at a congress in Tutzing on "New Answers to the German Question," I defended the proposition that "anyone thinking about Germany these days and looking for an answer to the German Question must include Auschwitz in his thoughts . "** I also warned against creating German unity * "Equalizing the Burden," in Gunter Grass, Two States, One Nation...
...Meanwhile the policy of unity without unification is being pushed forward, bringing renewed division, this time based on socioeconomic inequality...
...Even in those days people were saying, "Go back where you came from...
...Also of the things I am happy to be rid of...
...we simply could not tune it out...
...The dry summer had parched the meadow, closing the spacious airstrip to take-offs and landings...
...While preparing for this address last summer I made one note—Germans always go overboard!— that calls for amplification here, in the form of explanation or contradiction...
...They would be a gain, after so much loss...
...Why all this blubbering...
...Wensinger (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990...
...Nothing compelled us to create these monsters...
...For this we are ridiculed by our neighbors, who cultivate other, less dangerous, forms of bad manners...
...This policy, and the steady stream of 180 • DISSENT The Condition of Germany attacks on the asylum provisions in the Constitution, can be seen as more or less veiled preformulations of the slogan that is now unifying Germany: "Foreigners get out...
...Most of my books invoke the vanished city of Danzig, with its nearby hills and flatlands, with the dull pounding of the Baltic...
...Stop pushing the gypsies out onto that old, well-trodden path...
...Wild geese by the thousands make a stopover there, practicing take-offs and landings...
...bawl the skinheads, and provide Herr Seiters with a specific pretext for his deportation policy...
...I would like to ask my critics, at the time so intoxicated with unity, whether they had any second thoughts when they learned recently that the so-called Jewish barracks at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp had been burned to the ground...
...That no longer applies...
...178 • DISSENT The Condition of Germany Or people ride their hobbyhorses: one person sees only the hole in the ozone layer, another is obsessed with health-care issues...
...That was what BO11 had requested...
...the slow-acting poison is taking effect...
...But perhaps our fear of strangers is the price we pay for the cultural multiplicity of the country, which often becomes apparent at state and athletic events...
...to the moderates, any such thing is a fate worse than death, and they find themselves sympathizing with the right-wing terror, though it makes them uncomfortable: "What will people say abroad...
...As if the two events had been mischievously wired in parallel, the athletic triumphs and disappointments in Barcelona provided a running commentary on the daily dying in Sarajevo...
...Granted: speaking without an echo is new to me, and in the long run not very stimulating...
...Does no healing herb exist to cure this German tendency to regress...
...Meanwhile the Soviet Union was collapsing, allowing the western camp, and with it capitalism, to declare itself the winner over communism...
...That is why I have titled my address "On Loss...
...A person without a homeland has wider horizons that people who inhabit small or even large inherited plots...
...Influential newspapers urged us to jettison the burden of the German past, hitherto a painful component of our self-definition...
...To finance it I suggested rigorous cuts in military expenditures and a graduated surtax...
...A bit later the police were busy intercepting left-wing demonstrators...
...Perhaps this last example makes it clear how estranged the Germans are from each other...
...Loss as the prerequisite for literature...
...Since then Germany has changed...
...When I described his activity as secretary general of the Christian Democratic Union as that of a "skinhead with a tie and hair," he dismissed this characterization as tiresome sniping...
...Why should this be...
...that is why I addressed the convention of the Social Democratic party (SPO) on December 18, 1989 to call for a "farreaching equalizing of the burden—due immediately and with no further preconditions...
...Deport them...
...They do not talk about it, or at most in ironic asides...
...Adopting the style and methods of the Jacobins, they are already busy reintroducing load-bearing lampposts, as well as a relic from medieval times, the whipping-post...
...With the differences between east and west hardening, Mecklenburgers and Saxons over there feel farther than ever from Rhinelanders and Swabians over here...
...And above the meadow, above the dunes, the skies are always filled with flight patterns, a writing which, when decoded, gives rise to legends...
...A routine had been worked out for transforming xenophobia into violence...
...With public opinion already at risk from the galloping formation of press conglomerates, this trend to political conformity could be the death blow...
...In May 1945 the Greater German Reich finally capitulated to the Allies...
...What stupidity caused us to miscalculate what it meant to take in sixteen million Germans, so that we ended up saddling these people, who had already suffered the injustice of "real socialism," with capitalism's own brand of injustice...
...Being fragmented has been normal for us—since the Thirty Years' War, at the least...
...There were a few years there, when Willy Brandt was chancellor, trying to make a reality of his first official exhortation, "Take a chance on more democracy...
...Political opponents were quickly dubbed enemies...
...The "ugly German" was rearing his head again...
...Back in 1990 they were all using the same demented railroad metaphor: "The train has left the station, and no one can stop it...
...But I have no patience with such simplifications, handy though they may be...
...Of how I did not want to let go of this country...
...No one takes their side...
...When Siegfried Lenz and I accompanied the chancellor to Warsaw in December 1970, we did not feel as though we had merely gone along for the ride...
...When I finished my speech, it was killed with faint applause, but at least it found its way into the written record of the meeting...
...Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan," ibid., and in Dissent, Fall 1990, pp...
...They could teach us how meaningless borders are...
...Heinemann responded with exemplary brevity, "I don't love the state, I love my wife...
...At the same time there is no lack of effort to place further restrictions on the already battered Basic Law...
...But I plan to continue pointing out the likeness, because terrorist behavior must not only be recognized for what it is, but also called by name—in the camp of the perpetrators...
...In the spring of 1945, when the Soviet armies were pushing westward, many thousands of Germans fled over the Baltic to Denmark, which had been occupied by the Wehrmacht since April 1940...
...they contradict each other only in coy asides...
...But according to the radio, there was no lack of crises...
...Contradictory evidence offers itself...
...On the contrary: it is not only, and not primarily, the skinheads who are shattering the democratic consensus of our society with their telegenic theatrics...
...And up until the Historians' Debate*— which took place shortly before unification — didn't we bear patiently the burden of the past, the German guilt complex, the shame of a stigma that refused to fade, hoping, to be sure, that some day all that could be laid to rest...
...Was the situation ever different...
...Something decisive had taken place...
...Whenever this woman makes an appearance, sparks fly from the television screen...
...Two years earlier the island setting had been canceled out by the Persian Gulf crisis qua media event...
...This article, slightly cut for reasons of space, is taken from an address the noted German author gave in Munich on November 18, 1992...
...Somewhere in secret a constitutional commission is in session...
...They acknowledge each other's existence only reluctantly...
...a push for reform held out the promise that we would finally overcome our social backwardness...
...and communities taking in asylum-seekers would dispense aid in kind rather than cash support...
...No arrests were made...
...Now and then a heron startles the gaggles of geese out of their languid rest...
...Must everything, even the miraculous gift of possible union, turn into something monstrous in our hands...
...And the delights of the Olympics turned the horror into a mere subplot...
...The past remained a compulsory topic for discussion in schools...
...There are exceptions to this unified editorial policy, of course...
...Simultaneous events appeared equally significant...
...Do ancient runic inscriptions compel us to repeat the past...
...In Munich, where not long ago a few dozen leftist penny whistles evoked a massive police response, one can clearly perceive, even without referring to the precedent of the Weimar Republic, the right-leaning weakness of the enlarged Federal Republic...
...While everything continues in the same old groove, east of the Elbe the baby has fallen into the well and is screaming...
...What are we lacking...
...Since this purge began, enlivening the editorial pages and providing some excitement at panel discussions, the democratic left can be found in only two forms: as a ghost one can conjure up, or as a few lone fossils...
...And this year it was Germany that caught up with us...
...no one could accuse her of being slick...
...The social consensus, hammered together with such difficulty, at once began to crack at the joints...
...Willy Brandt's death made me feel this loss more acutely...
...this type of effectiveness had already been demonstrated in Hoyaswerda* and elsewhere...
...Do we, whom other countries admire for our earnest efforts to achieve security within our own four walls, really go overboard so badly...
...458-460...
...But all I could manage to get down in my notebook were scribblings on Germany...
...All this afforded the young folks ample comfort and freedom of movement, and held out the prospect of a peaceful, tolerant society based on heavy consumption of youth-oriented products...
...I, the "self-appointed pessimist of the nation," the "notorious enemy of Germany unity," was accused of "instrumentalizing Auschwitz," of trying to abridge the Germans' right to self-determination by dredging up this old subject...
...Are we, still smarting from the wounds from our last excursion into the absolute, incapable of civil, humane dealings with each other and with foreigners...
...Even where no real market existed, the free-market system was imposed with narrowSPRING • 1993 • 183 The Condition of Germany minded dogmatism...
...That evening Germans saw them on television watching and cheering...
...To speak of these matters in Munich and not mention the Siiddeutsche Zeitung would be impolite...
...The plan to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first testing of the V-4 rocket in Peenemtinde, called off only because of protests from abroad, is just one indication of how far things have gone...
...Even in church the minister remarks that too much is happening at once...
...Styles changed innocuously, and the Zeitgeist was god...
...And altogether, don't we prefer to define phrases like "fond of order," "socially tolerant," "willing to compromise," "balanced," to arrogant demands of the "either-or" and "at any cost" variety...
...When I try to conjure up this period, so brief, yet of such lasting significance, I am speaking of something lost...
...Notes took the form of questions: what have you done to my country...
...They truly are what we claim to be: born Europeans...
...It never crossed the Danes' minds to vent their understandable anger or even hatred toward the country that had occupied them in violent acts against the German refugees...
...Let half a million and more Roma and Sinti be among us Germans...
...Not until today do I fully understand Bö11's unspoken message...
...But then who in the West reads the eastern Wochenpost...
...When the country's political center lurches to the right, and this development is laughed off instead of being recognized as an existential threat, we Germans had better consider ourselves dangerous—before our neighbors begin to view us as a threat...
...Our past has tapped us on the shoulder, identifying us as perpetrators, fellow travelers, or members of the silent majority...
...Reports overlapped...
...Would her abrasive charm be compatible with our aesthetic of polish...
...The compromise adopted yesterday at the SPD convention* does not allay my fears...
...From the windows of neighboring buildings Germans watched and cheered as stones and Molotov cocktails were thrown...
...This article 146, since deleted, directed that in case of unification the German people should be given a new Constitution to vote on...
...That would mean a loss no democracy can survive...
...That is why I point out that the present crisis in the country has its roots in government policy...
...But before long extremists on the left were hurling their vituperative slogans against the vituperative tirades of Axel SPRING • 1993 • 181 The Condition of Germany Springer's right-wing press conglomerate, and political murder came into style, starting with the attempt on Rudi Dutschke's life...
...The modesty we had been trained to display was denounced as hidebound and provincial, and braggadocio became the order of the day...
...By contrast, in the German towns to which they were assigned by the government they experienced persistent xenophobia...
...This damned inertia, like having lead weights in one's soles...
...184 • DISSENT The Condition of Germany for Kurt Georg Kiesinger and thousands of lawyers and judges with Nazi credentials...
...Everywhere the headlines read "Rostock...
...What do we Germans, in the midst of all our wealth, lack...
...Why can't we Germans act humanely, if not toward foreigners at least toward our own people...
...We cannot expect much of the middle-class moderates...
...But even before the fall of the Wall and the slam-bang unification, the impression that Germany, at least its western part, had been cleansed turned out to be a delusion...
...This is a country not noted for excessive friendliness toward strangers...
...This is what I see when I look around me: the left has been ground down...
...Our vacation radio carried the voices of politicians trying to outdo each other in displays of that easily mimed attitude known as bewilderment...
...The debate in the 1980s about the nature and sources of Nazism...
...On the contrary: though suffering from shortages themselves, they provided for their enemies...
...Though slightly irritable, we are nevertheless numbed...
...And the democratic left was to be removed from the picture entirely, for the sake of setting everything straight...
...Instead, I want to use the question mark to drill down to the deeper layers...
...Different values became important to me...
...Clips of howling mobs were disseminated worldwide...
...In the West it seemed reasonable to hope that a last relapse had been survived...
...Since no ideology artificially inflated the value of my loss—for nothing primally German was lost...
...Some people might say, What difference can one more break make...
...At the same time, being German would mean suffering from the absence of unity, which in turn explains why we are always preoccupied with ourselves...
...How were critical economic decisions left to that sinister trio, Bange-, Hauss-, and Möllemann?* What producer came up with the brilliant idea of smuggling the topic of dissension-ridden Germany into the bla-bla of the evening talk shows...
...These distinctions result from our history, which promoted separatism and only rarely, and for the most part reluctantly, furthered unity...
...As the years went by, Gdansk, too, became a topic that wanted to be written about...
...The local police and reinforcements summoned from West Germany provided a protective escort...
...Meanwhile the individual right to asylum—a jewel in our Constitution—is being put on the auction block to satisfy the instincts of the Volk, which the Nazis insisted on characterizing as "sound...
...Loss made me eloquent...
...They were never offered the option of Western freedom...
...They are vulnerable to the handwriting on the wall invoked by the likes of Stoiber, when he points to the "threat of the racial dilution of the German people...
...Because their very existence calls our value system into question...
...Translated by Krishna Winston with A.S...
...the Roma and Sinto do not recognize borders...
...But in Romania, too, and elsewhere the gypsies are the quintessential victims...
...As soon as the Wall fell, this fact should have been acknowledged and acted upon as a matter of priority...
...But could we put up with this woman...
...The refugees' return to Germany had none of the earmarks of a brutal deportation...
...by slam-bang annexation, and suggested instead a confederation, at least for the present...
...But even this disgraceful situation, in which the notion of "Europe" was revealed as a chimera, quickly became commonplace...
...Streibl's allusions to a "multicriminal society" and Minister of Finance Theodor Waigel's certainty that "future elections can only be won to the right of center" have not fallen on deaf ears...
...Rostock on the radio: the German Broadcasting System...
...It's its own fault it fell in...
...Warnings against latent and overt antiSemitism and about pogroms aimed at gypsies have been overtaken by events...
...One of these politicians, Volker Riihe, has in the meantime become minister of defense, and behaves as though he were singlehandedly holding the nation together...
...Did we West Germans secretly hope to prove ourselves at the "Ossis' " expense...
...Were they, our often invoked "poor brothers and sisters," supposed to indemnify us for the things that went wrong under the sun of the economic miracle...
...Let me mention, as an all-too-compliant supplier of material to Der Spiegel, the agency set up to sift through the STASI's files* looking for informers...
...Actually the island of Mon has plenty of homegrown excitement...
...The expensive set for future debates and window appearances has been dedicated...
...She rejects the prevailing genteel tone...
...Now they have taken on a life of their own...
...But at the end of the sixties, when the NPD, a party of mostly older right-wing radicals, won seats in a number of local parliaments, the democratic left was there, too, and succeeded in reducing the threat to insignificance by confronting, in an open, nonviolent way, the issues the NPD raised...
...Yet no political force seems willing or able to stop these repeated criminal acts...
...What do they want now...
...Then news arrived from Germany, confirming once again that August was the month for crises...
...It appears here with the author's kind permission —Ens...
...Protest was voiced, declarations and appeals gathered signatures...
...We Germans, however, despite all our efforts, all our asseverations, have not succeeded in mending the crack in German society's civilized veneer that became visible in 1933...
...Actually nothing new, just the same old stuff in a more extreme form...
...There were no distractions...
...Because they steal, and roam from one place to another, and have the evil eye, and also have that disturbing beauty that makes us look ugly...
...When Willy Brandt went to Poland and knelt before the Warsaw Ghetto monument, his act was greeted with scorn, even in the Bundestag...
...Isn't it true that, as far as the western part of the country is concerned, forty years of continuing education in democracy have resulted in an exemplary degree of social ** Revolt of the workers of East Berlin, June 1953...
...This question of the unfair distribution of the burden has troubled me and caused me to speak out since the early sixties...
...Now the editors of the cultural pages of these papers are interchangeable...
...Seven years ago Heinrich BO11 was laid to rest...
...Were they supposed to do penance for our permitting ourselves Chancel* The East German secret police...
...But during the last three years, that is, as long as I was criticizing German unification, misconceived from the outset, and making a litany of my warnings against the slam-bang process, I eventually had to recognize that I was speaking and writing into a void...
...Ironically, the STASI's hard work is finally paying off...
...In addition, the loss of my homeland has freed me up for other sorts of commitments...
...I am almost tempted to concoct a theory based on this experience...
...I do not hesitate to call the Bundestag's decision to move the capital from Bonn to Berlin a farce...
...Smoke them out...
...But, at the time, my party comrades, who apparently believed in miracles, thought Willy Brandt's wonderful promise, "Now everything that belongs together will grow together," would come true without their lifting a finger...
...And perhaps we lack most acutely those found farthest down on the scale of contempt: the Roma and the Sinti, commonly known as gypsies...
...I wish to put the Social Democrats on notice: any SPD member of the Bundestag prepared in the near future to limit the right to asylum that is guaranteed by our Constitution will, by such an act, retroactively strike a blow against all emigrants, dead as well as living—all those who were forced to leave Germany and found a refuge in Scandinavia and Mexico, in Holland, England, the United States...
...The SPD voted not to eliminate the constitutional provision for asylum and the guarantee that individual cases would be considered on their merit...
...On our wild-goose island, we did our best to put the alarming events of this month of crises out of our minds...
...Says Interior Minister Seiters, and gets Romania to cooperate...
...On October 3, the Day of German Unity, right-wing radical hordes stormed through the streets of Dresden shouting the old Nazi cry, "Juda verrecke" ("Death to all Jews...
...later I tried to transfer it with a cold needle to copper plates: punctuation as a last resort...
...I could tell you about refugees from East and West Prussia who not once during their time in Denmark were reminded that they were refugees...
...persons denied asylum in another country would not be able to apply for asylum in Germany, applicants who falsified documents, suppressed records, applied under a false name, or were found guilty of a crime would be deported...
...These comments unleashed a storm of indignation...
...That is why I have chosen to denounce some of these solid citizens as arsonists, and to name them...
...that despite internal dissension had shown itself stalwartly patriotic in defending the Constitution...
...This even though it became apparent only weeks after the fall of the Wall that nothing worthwhile was ready to grow on its own, while profiteering was spreading like a cancer...
...Yes, in retrospect I am proud of having been in Warsaw with Brandt...
...How can this government be expected to stop the double-dealing it initiated intentionally, and continues to pursue out of abject fear of the Volk, with its obstinately "sound" instincts...
...Perhaps we remembered vaguely from our history that unity had brought us Germans nothing but misfortune...
...Our federalist structure is appropriate...
...Actually it was all familiar...
...Having a real homeland carries a certain compulsion to stay put...
...Here medals were counted, there casualties...
...Something that could have continued, but remained a one-time phenomenon...
...If you read it carefully, you realize that it provides for deporting any Roma who seek asylum in Germany...
...let me confine myself to a few telling examples...
...That is why my "Address on Germany" must avoid distracting details and excursions into superficial patriotism...
...What made this mess they call unity possible...
...From morning till night a sweeping meadow, rimmed by Baltic dunes, enjoys incessant air traffic...
...From the ashes of the once straitjacketed GDR press a few journals have managed to emerge in new forms...
...we need them desperately...
...This time, too, the police showed understanding for this terse expression of the people's will, and practiced restraint...
...Yet in Denmark the kind of hatred that finds expression in a thirst for murder— such as we witnessed in Hoyaswerda, Rostock, and hundreds of other German towns—is unheard of, hardly thinkable, even under conditions of extreme stress...
...So sitting there on my Danish island I jotted down notes for this address...
...Only Regine Hildebrandt, minister for social welfare of the state of Brandenburg, has enough voice left to get people to listen to the baby occasionally...
...Because our society is overinformed, it behaves as if it were uninformed...
...What a rustling of leaves we had in the German journalistic forest when Der Spiegel was still true to its original promise, offering a clear alternative to the Springer press...
...They are acknowledged to be useful for operas and operettas, but also seen—even if it sounds bad and reminds us of something bad—as asocial, degenerate, worthless...
...We are suffering from too little exposure to those whom fear makes us hate...
...Isn't it true that we made every effort to comply promptly and obediently with any NATO directive, like good defensive players...
...Compared to millions of refugees who had a difficult time coming to feel at home in the West, I was well off...
...He, too, enjoyed the company of intellectuals, even for a game of cards...
...Toward the end of the two-state period, many even began to question the significance of June 17**— the national holiday instituted to commemorate a leaderless workers' rebellion in East Berlin, which West German politicians' rhetoric had transformed into a popular uprising...
...To be sure, there were still old Nazis around, externally wedded to the past, in Nietzsche's phrase...
...Isn't it true that up to the moment when we regained our national sovereignty we presented ourselves cautiously and modestly to the rest of the world...
...She calls the continuing injustice by name...
...When the prospect of unification suddenly appeared on the horizon, the West Germans were terrified, for in spite of the chancellor's lies, they had a pretty good idea of what it would cost...
...Yet federalism, a clever insurance the Germans took out against themselves, has suffered damage in the recent unification process...
...Would we be brave enough to tolerate Regine Hildebrandt, the glowing passion of her demands, which would fuse the newly splintered country together again...
...By the way, it was not only Brandt and his inner circle who contributed to this form of political culture...
...I said this at the beginning: during the summer, which was harsh and obstinately dry, the wild geese had halted their flights to our island...
...Renunciation of utopian ideals was prescribed like a cure for worms...
...I was not alone...
...some of them may even have recognized themselves...
...God or whoever preserve us from the zeal of these converts...
...In unfair measure they, not we, bore the burden for a war that was lost by all Germans...
...After more than forty years of division, we Germans share only the burden of a guilty past...
...Recently huge rallies were organized to prove that we could still put up resistance...
...In Germany today, gypsies are once more being classified as asocial elements...
...Perhaps we are lacking those we fear—fear because they are strangers to us and look strange...
...But then the rest of the world got involved, because as more and more asylum-seekers' * In September 1991 in Hoyaswerda neo-Nazis pelted a home for asylum-seekers with bricks as a crowd cheered...
...Taking such steps was, and still is, the only right thing to do, for the East Germans spent forty years walled in, constantly spied on, and disenfranchised...
...It would not hurt to have some aspects of their way of life rub off on us...
...Here they showed greater zeal: this business could not be allowed to escalate...
...For his final music he wanted these profoundly mournful, then suddenly desperately merry tunes...
...The previous year it had been the failed putsch in the disintegrating Soviet Union that dominated our vacation and glued us to the radio...
...Constant racket, which eventually swallows itself up...
...And—the question has a certain urgency—is the inveterate foreignness that exists between Germans the source of the present hostility toward foreigners (whom we call "outlanders") that is covering our country with shame...
...We Germans are used to breaks and splits...
...And meanwhile neither the government nor the opposition seems willing or able to stop the shameless close-out sale being conducted with the assets of the bankrupt GDR and to take SPRING • 1993 • 179 The Condition of Germany concrete steps to equalize the burden borne by the two parts of Germany...
...This was painful, for the other hot spots could do no more than distract attention from this blatant failure of European politics...
...The bold concept of "political culture," now reduced to a mere rhetorical flourish, was actually lived for a while...
...188 • DISSENT...
...Isn't it true that French and American political scientists and historians—Alfred Grosser and Fritz Stern, for instance—have, when asked, given us a satisfactory grade in political maturity...
...The younger generation had at its disposal a democratic preserve, generously equipped with discovery playgrounds, heated swimming pools, discotheques, and sociological expertise on tap...
...You hard-bitten Germans, let your hearts be touched at last, and give the skinheads an answer dictated not by fear but by courage, a humane answer...
...Losing them is more difficult to accept, because they do leave a gap that cannot be filled...
...Whatever possessed us to behave so mercilessly toward battered, humiliated human beings...
...The gypsies are at home everywhere in Europe...
...which explains why we are constantly striving for unity, usually in vain, or at too high a cost...
...As painful as this loss remained, I could understand and accept the reasons for it...
...Hoyaswerda could still be swept under the rug somehow, but since Rostock all the solemn declarations that accompanied the euphoria over unification have plummeted in value...
...There is no state to which they might appeal and which would be willing to support and embrace, as a matter of national policy, their claim, justified since Auschwitz, for what is pathetically termed reparations...
...Or have we Germans become so estranged from one another that we can no longer see past our established property rights...
...As pan-Germans, we threw in our lot with the winning side, determined to set everything straight once and for all: there was to be no Third Way or even democratic socialism from now on...
...residences were set afire, there were witnesses abroad...
...But even when the rage ebbed, it left sorrow and anger behind...
...When the young man from Ltibeck [Willy Brandt] fled from the Nazis to Norway, and later to Sweden, he requested and was granted asylum...
...An almost frivolous pleasure in moving around indulges curiosity about the unfamiliar...
...That is to say, we listened to one another, a virtue that could be learned from Willy Brandt...
...Those whoops of triumph that greeted the end of the postwar period and hailed a new beginning, that festive mood that hoisted a unified Germany onto a pedestal—a dozen historians were already sharpening their pencils to write a new chapter in German history—that verbal prostitution so revolting even three years ago: all that has given way to a despondent meekness...
...Granted: it is still holding its own, at least for now...
...But although it is far more than a regional paper, it is certainly much better known in Bavaria than in Brandenburg...
...Those who initiated it, and are keeping it going, were primarily former communists and repentant Maoists...
...In point of fact the West Germans hardly suffered from the division of their country...
...And because they have mastered the art of inducing public self-incrimination like no others, the German denunciation business will have plenty to do for the foreseeable future...
...Germany has never suffered from a lack of cleaning men, but seldom has a clean-up been carried out so professionally...
...The movement for that is past...
...Only when you lose something entirely are you inspired with this passion for endless naming, this mania for calling the lost object by name until it finally answers...
...the Olympic stadium lay within range of the Serbs' mortars...
...Over five hundred right-wing radicals repeatedly stormed a residence for asylum-seekers in Rostock-Lichtenhagen...
...Is the world out of joint, or is it only that the stock market is acting crazy, as it has so often recently...
...My patriotism, which owes its allegiance not to the state but to the Constitution, was not welcome...
...Proud of Germany...
...The last defenders of the Constitution will soon be on display at the zoo as an endangered species...
...Meanwhile, in Schwerin any protesters who turned out to demonstrate against the unity chancellor, who was celebrating his great role in history in the Schwerin Theater, were prudently removed from the scene...
...But the government policies of the last three years, which are to blame for this most recent relapse into German barbarity, have not been altered in the slightest, because none of their proponents see anything wrong with them...
...It has become fashionable to assume an air of superiority toward the democratic left...
...no, the old German separatism, the accumulated self-centeredness of the provinces, their stubborn stewing in their own juice, their selfish scrabbling for subsidies and reparations, has robbed German federalism of that capacity to impose political structure that the federal government and the opposition have failed to manifest during the process of unification...
...Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where almost half a million Roma and Sinti were murdered, are very much with us again...
...Look at little Portugal, where, in spite of all the refugees from the former colonies, thousands of gypsies have found a place, as if it were the most natural thing in the world...
...Any vote curtailing the right to asylum that receives a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag will mean a break with the history of German social democracy...
...With the help of language I managed, not to overcome the loss, but at least, by piecing words together like patchwork, to shape something from which the loss could be read...
...Interior Minister Seiters recently negotiated an agreement with the Romanian government...
...that had proved the most reliable bulwark against threats to the Federal Republic from the radical right...
...Of what I lack, and what I miss...
...These questions I jotted down at the end of August in Denmark...
...Right after his election as federal president a journalist tried to trip him up with the question, "Do you love the state...
...If you grieve too much for the Bosnian refugees, you may neglect to include Somalia and the daily famine victims in your litany...
...The list is long...
...Not that the shock silenced us...
...Later, under the Danish sky, we ate the headless flounder hot from the skillet...
...What beer-induced enthusiasm persuaded the voting public to entrust this difficult task, which called for extraordinary political deftness, to a tax-cheat and a man who cooked the SPRING • 1993 • 187 The Condition of Borman books...
...The proposition I jotted down last August in Denmark in the form of a question could now be confirmed by further excesses over which the legislative branch of government has no control...
...Of how I somehow mislaid this country...
...At least that is how it appeared...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
