Germany remembers the sixties
Neiman, Susan
THE PHOTOGRAPHS of the foreign minister should not have surprised anyone. Indeed, most observers of German politics were still getting used to seeing him in three-piece suits when the pictures...
...The saddest aspect of the Fischer affair is the fact that the reporter who unearthed the original photos is the daughter of Ulrike Meinhof...
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...The coalition government that had, for the first time, made the Greens part of the national government and Fischer the second most powerful man in it, was as clear a change of generational paradigm as politics ever offers...
...Under Konrad Adenauer, the CDU instituted reparations payments but not discourse...
...it was aimed at certain forms of speculation in northern European housing developments...
...nothing, in the words of Theodor Adorno, was merely harmless...
...that the sit-in was the product of the civil rights movement, not the Frankfurt School...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...The tendencies to see traces of Nazism in every moment of ordinary life often had grotesque consequences...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
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...it was always possible that the former terrorist had spent a few nights there, even possible that they'd exchanged sleepy phrases over stale bread and Nescafe...
...Nostalgia for the German sixties thus seems out of place, but this doesn't preclude a form of pride...
...It is simply true: fury at the father whose complacent suburban existence is untouched by whatever the plumber or the plumber's kid did at My Lai is different from fury at the father who will not tell you exactly what he himself did in the Wehrmacht...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...The calls for Fischer's resignation are now confined to the right fringes...
...Germany is a country whose basic social democratic commitments cannot be challenged by anyone aspiring to political relevance...
...The willingness to rip itself and its elders apart was a willingness to pay Germany's dues in something more essential than cash...
...But seen over the span of a generation, one has to judge the efforts as largely successful...
...Ask a librarian for a good summary of the debate about the Berlin Holocaust memorial that is now under construction and you will receive a collection of articles the size of the Manhattan phone book...
...Germany is also, slowly, redefining itself as a country that is not racially constituted, but in principle open to immigration...
...The memory business can strike outsiders alternatively as painful and painfully DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 19 POLITICS ABROAD amusing...
...Still, it is a problem in context: Germany has admitted more asylum-seekers than other European states and is still behind England, France, and Italy in incidents of violence directed against them...
...UT IF IT is no longer dominating headlines, there is still good reason to think the sixties debate will dominate the election next year...
...Political demand produced a scholarly apparatus...
...This is partly because there are so few other concrete things to debate...
...SUSAN NEIMAN is director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam...
...Memory is a political category like no other in Germany...
...Even his far less popular colleague, Green environmental minister Jurgen Tritten, managed to stay in office after two awkward revelations that revealed his own sixties origins...
...Although other nations may not think twice about referring to their leaders as Tony, Bill, or Bibi, Fischer—whose given name is Joseph—is the first German politician in memory to be known by his nickname...
...Nazi fellow-travelers were prone to justify themselves with a kind of pious whine: those were turbulent times, we were engaged in life and death struggle with the enemies of civilization itself, and anybody who expects us to remember every little mistake made on the way does not understand what we lived through...
...It showed the world that one German generation, at least, had grasped the fact that business as usual was over...
...While the latter is the result of a recognition that sinking population figures will soon bring economic deficits, it is also fed by a sixties-inspired insistence on remembering that hostility toward the Other has consequences that will be visited on countless generations...
...so the entire uproar was actually a foreign import...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Fischer had to testify at the trial of a terrorist he had known in the seventies— the first time a minister in office had been subpoenaed on criminal charges...
...The left's reaction was a great disappointment...
...The past was always present, and immeasurably diffuse...
...The claim that the German people's guilt is constitutive of its identity is not, for Fischer, confined to ceremonial occasions, but part of the self-awareness with which he took to the streets some thirty years ago...
...more than one commentator has noted a sinister tendency to prefer the memory of dead Jews to the ordinary experience of living ones...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Both the health and educational systems are in need of repair, but in a society where every office worker views six weeks annual vacation as a fundamental human right, the CDU cannot propose more than minimal cuts in the social system...
...Far more than prime minister Gerhard Schroeder, Fischer embodies the new phase in German politics...
...The disagreements about the best ways of doing these things are tactical...
...As I write, German news is dominated by debates over the shape of the new immigration law, the mad-cow disease crisis, and the amount of money to be allotted to families with children...
...substantial differences loom very small...
...A different former terrorist had written a memoir in which she claimed to have shared a commune in Frankfurt with Fischer some time in 1972, 18 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 POLITICS ABROAD a claim he initially categorically denied...
...He reconsidered...
...Right-wing violence toward foreigners has resurged at different moments and is currently a problem again...
...German students who took to the streets shared dreams of liberation with their contemporaries in Paris, Prague, and Berkeley...
...Nor do foreign policy discussions seem likely to generate disagreements that will move voters in any numbers...
...The sixties demanded discussion and opened up a memory debate of nearly industrial proportions...
...These had led groups of young people to take over empty apartment buildings in a movement called "squatting" in peaceful Amsterdam, "occupying" in neighboring Germany...
...an assertion not much more eloquent than giving one's elders the finger...
...Nothing was beyond the bounds of criticism...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...At present, the only issue on the horizon likely to generate controversy is murkily ideological: where do you stand on the sixties...
...more than the normal lines had been crossed...
...On the left, he was never regarded as a man of vision...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Meinhof was a very eloquent terrorist who headed what the right-wing press referred to as the BaaderMeinhof gang...
...Suddenly, for several months this winter, there were calls for his resignation...
...That her daughter clearly made the photos public as an act of revenge toward those leaders who managed to survive the sixties, and survive them brilliantly, is only an extreme example of the way the left can tear up its own...
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...The fact that the calls came from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), still hurt by last year's revelations of financial scandals, didn't make them less threatening...
...his speech contained nothing but the usual assurances that Germany was aware of its past guilt and its future obligations to the Jewish people...
...It was time for the left to abandon its ever-present self-righteousness and examine its own sins...
...Indeed, most observers of German politics were still getting used to seeing him in three-piece suits when the pictures of Joschka Fischer lunging at a Frankfurt police officer during a violent demonstration in the 1970s leaped from the photo archives to the front pages...
...Fischer is definitely clever, and quick on his feet, and he soon soared above Schroeder in the popularity polls...
...Vicious tongues—and where there is success like Fischer's, they will never be absent—were quick to point out that words like these were used in self-defense by his generation's archenemies...
...The demonstration at which Fischer hit the police officer was not a demonstration against the war in Vietnam or the putsch in Chile...
...Common to all of them was frustration with cramped and hypocritical cultural forms whose day, they firmly believed, was done...
...As short-term political strategy, this was successful...
...The left's other response was an astounding mea culpa: we erred, we were violent, but deserve your forgiveness, for now we too have learned that there's no substitute for liberal democracy...
...but someone who can become foreign minister without ever acquiring a high school diploma can, if he is clever, arouse widespread admiration...
...While the court was busy finding his relation to the accused to be unexceptionable, critics busied themselves with another relationship...
...Somebody located the relevant police officer, so that Fischer could apologize personally for charging at him thirty years earlier...
...The coalition that seemed rocky in March is stronger than ever, if only because the CDU is flailing under a leader, Angela Merkel, whose politically correct features—she is the first East German woman to achieve such a position of power— do not make up for the fact that she is a terrible politician...
...That there might indeed have been room for this form of expression was often chillingly demonstrated by the shouts of angry bystanders: "Too bad they forgot to gas you too...
...In refusing to give Fischer more than a lukewarm defense, German leftists forgot that his success is the success of a generation whose struggles have given their country a chance at normality, showing that Germany can rebuild not only its bombed-out factories, but also its devastated morality...
...Two kinds of responses were offered...
...The establishment they were attacking had been built by, and still contained large numbers of, ex-Nazis who were no more repentant than expediency required...
...The latter terminology lent itself to such slogans as "Better to occupy empty houses than foreign countries...
...THE EDITORS DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 21...
...He has an ability to represent, for outsiders, something larger than himself...
...There had been a woman's commune next to the men's commune...
...It could not be for anything he said...
...Kent State notwithstanding, this realization produced convulsions for which the American sixties had no parallel...
...Will the German left appreciate that ability, and use it aggressively...
...All this, said the opposition, was not enough...
...The right happily responded to the Fischer photos by insisting that the left do some memory work of its own...
...IF THE SIXTIES signified an attitude toward the past, it was always tied to the present and the future...
...MORE THAN anything, the German sixties were about memory...
...Let us hope they remember in time for the next election...
...AT THE OPENING of the new Israeli embassy in May of this year—a first for Berlin— Fischer received a long ovation...
...The reminders of the American sixties thus mark a welcome change in the relationship of contemporary Germans to America, but they give little evidence of historical self-understanding...
...Even worse: precisely the middle-class youths who, in Germany as elsewhere, formed the backbone of the New Left, had to face the fact that their parents and teachers were overrepresented among those who had voluntarily joined the Nazi party...
...Looking for others to blame is always embarrassing, but such claims were especially and painfully striking for those of us who remember that the German left was once so violently anti-American that it was prone to deny the very existence of leftist American culture (or indeed of culture in America at all...
...Here was an unsettling confirmation of the change...
...The warmth with which Fischer was received, in contrast to the polite reception accorded Berlin's longtime CDU mayor, was a function of the perception that Fischer's clichés are backed by his own rocky history...
...Here Fischer's defense trod on dangerous ground, and not only because it looked like waffling under fire...
...But frustration is not quite rage, and unique to the German movement was a quality of anger whose source is no mystery...
...Her death in jail under mysterious circumstances in 1976 gave the German left an ambiguous martyr...
...The German left's demand to remember was a demand to own up to a past that was as personal as it was criminal...
...Anyone who expected him to remember all the encounters that took place on all those mornings had no clue about what it was like to be alive then...
...Indeed, demographic necessity has brought all parties to agree on the need for in20 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 POLITICS ABROAD creasing support for families with children as well as encouraging immigration...
...It is hard to find a small German town that hasn't participated in the memory hunt, which invariably includes a trip to the nearest Jewish cemetery, along with a painstaking investigation tracing the steps of those nice neighbors, the Blumenthals, who disappeared one morning in 1942...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...The man, to whom fate had given the surname Marx, responded genially: after all that time he felt no rancor, and it isn't, after all, everyone who gets hit in the line of duty by a future foreign minister...
...So what is left to distinguish government from opposition...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...The first was an exercise in false memory: one columnist after another rushed to remind readers that the sixties had started in Berkeley, not Berlin...
...She responded with a description of a breakfast conversation...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
