Germany as Victim

...many no doubt deplore its self-pitying aspect...

...Around the turn of the decade, though, certain changes became apparent in the German national mood...

...It is true that there were some 10 million German refugees, and that they suffered greatly...

...Granted, not all Germans, or even a majority, subscribe to this view...

...Ronald Reagan's visit to the Bitburg military cemetery in May 1985 was enthusiastically welcomed by ordinary West Germans as putting an official seal of approval on this way of thinking...

...It solved problems by simply ignoring them, and left West Germany with a strangely hollow identity...

...The seemingly contrary political developments were accompanied by a curious convergence of Left-wing and Right-wing rhetoric...

...Ten years ago it was not popular to talk about the "German Reich" as having been "shattered," and it was considered bad taste to bring up the Vertrieb-ene—those Germans from the regions of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia who were forced to flee their homes near the end of the War in the face of the Red Army's depredations...

...The word Widervereinigung (reunification), taboo for so long despite its being enshrined in the Federal Constitution, started to crop up in the political vocabulary...

...The idea was that war is hell, and soldiers just have to do nasty things, whether they are Germans, Americans or Russians...

...The President, it was noticed, seemed to go out of his way to draw parallels between the Holocaust and other 20th century enormities, confirming many in the judgment that the Holocaust was not really all that different from the horrors of the Gulag, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians during World War I, the mass death in Cambodia in the late '70s—or the Vietnam War, for that matter...

...It became acceptable, even common, to refer to something called "the German nation...

...If there was one thing they could agree upon, it was that Germany was about the right size now...

...It was time for Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past)—particularly with respect to the Third Reich...

...Echoing the sentiments of many, one veteran at a 1985 SS reunion at Nesselwang offered Bitburg as proof that "we were soldiers just like the others...

...Left-wing ideologues felt free to advocate the formation of a nonaligned "confedStephen Brockmann...

...what assumed its place was a country without a history, unhaunted by specters of the past, facing a limitless future...

...Suddenly the zero hour was an inadequate notion...

...But in the Willy Brandt-Helmut Schmidt era such talk was frowned upon: The former homes of the Vertriebene were now a part of Poland and the Soviet Union, and the slightest expression of Heimweh (homesickness) might give these countries a jittery feeling of deja vu...

...Is it possible that Hitler and the National Socialists committed an 'Asiatic' deed only because they considered themselves and their kind to be potential victims of precisely such an 'Asiatic' deed...

...Thefashion-able thing in the era of detente was to forget that Germany had once been a substantially larger, united nation...

...All this engendered nervous speculation elsewhere in Europe about the possibility of a "new Rapallo," i.e...

...The view that the Holocaust and the disintegration of the Third Reich are somehow comparable—as suggested by the historian Andreas Hillgruber in his recent book, Two Kinds of Destruction: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry—is not, however, really new...

...the eminent historian asked cryptically (taking care to couch his message in the interrogative, so that if pinned down he could reply he was not asserting anything...

...Several West Germany media giants blamed the supposed scapegoating of the country on the American press, predictably charging that it is dominated by Jewish interests...

...From the inarticulate opinions of the man on the street to the arch musings of intellectuals such as Hillgruber, Nolte and Fest, one discerns a common theme: Germany is not history' s reprobate, but its Opfer (victim...

...Fest's reasoning was guarded, but his conclusion was clear: "Hitler's will to destruction was for the most part inspired by the threat of destruction of the Russian Revolution...

...it was merely Germany's bad luck to have lost the War...

...A few die-hards continued to refer to the German Democratic Republic as "Central Germany" instead of "East Germany," advertising their contention that the real East Germany was somewhere around Kaliningrad in the USSR—formerly the German port of Konigsberg, the home of Immanuel Kant...

...Might this be the ultimate meaning of Brandt's Ostpolitikl It is easy to dismiss such fears as a paranoid reaction conditioned by the traumas of two World Wars, yet the fact remains that something was happening in Germany, and to outsiders it did not look pretty...

...West Germans wanted to see themselves as part of the whole panorama of German history...

...From that sort of sentiment it is a small step to Hillgruber's book placing the postwar distress of the Germans on the same plane as the genocidal campaign the Nazis waged against the Jews...

...This could not have been more pleasing to Germany's neighbors, both to the east and west...

...Perspectives GERMANY AS VICTIM BY STEPHEN BROCKMANN Several appalling reinterpretations of the Holocaust are the latest indications of a mounting desire among Germans to see their nation as history's whipping boy...

...Political manifestations included the rise of the peace movement, increasing demands for greater West German independence from the Atlantic Alliance—if not downright neutrality—and accusations of American "colonial" politics toward the country...

...Across West Germany, subjects formerly banned from the conversational menu were increasingly regarded as salonfahig (fit to be discussed politely in one's parlor...

...The operative ideology was one of forgetfulness: In the midst of the Wirt-schaftswunder (the economic miracle), Germans would work hard and simply not have time to ask themselves unpleasant questions about the years before the zero hour...

...Nolte's thesis was given added respectability when, on August 29, it won the endorsement of Joachim Fest, editor of the A llgemeine and author of The Face of the Third Reich...

...But these wishful re-vanchists were only a small minority, inhabiting the extreme Right wing of the Christian Democratic opposition and various fringe parties...

...Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last June 6, Nolte submitted that Hitler, terrified by the brutality of the Stalin regime, may have initiated the mass murder of the Jews in order somehow to deter Stalin from victimizing Germany...

...Unspoken residual guilt could be dealt with by making reparations to the victims of Nazism, and by a foreign policy bent on demonstrating that West Germany was a cooperative, responsible, democratic country, firmly ensconced within the Western alliance...

...In the giddy heyday of Ostpolitik, West Germans tended to accept the European status quo, resigning themselves to the existence of two Germanies and the permanent loss of their former eastern territories...

...Every nation has skeletons in its closet, the feeling went...

...And it is only another small step to Ernst Nolte's construal of the Holocaust as a weird act of self-defense...

...By the beginning of the 1980s enough water had passed under the bridge—and the generation implicated in Wartime events had grown old enough— for younger generations to start asking questions...

...Yet the popularity of the Germany-as-Opfer idea is growing, and its political pendant, Chancellor Kohl's Center-Right coalition, is expected to derive strength in the upcoming January elections...

...After all, it was reasoned, Moscow holds the East German card and Bonn the economic card—what is to stop them from coming to some ominous understanding...

...To make the disturbing ferment intelligible requires a look at Germany's relation to its past, and the change this is now undergoing...

...West Germany set up an extensive network of organizations for them called Landesverbande—where they used to gather and reminisce about old times in the East, hoping that some day, by some miracle, they would be able to return...

...Among intellectuals the new concern with pre-1945 Germany took the form of a serious examination of the nature of Hitler's fascism and of the vestiges of fascist ideology still alive in the country...

...The nation's supposed scourges have been many—World War I and Versailles, the Russian Revolution and Stalin, the Great Inflation, Hitler's tyranny, the Holocaust, and finally postwar dismemberment...

...It is therefore difficult to escape the impression that Germany, like neighboring Austria, is intent on shirking its responsibility for and to history...

...Fran-fois Mauriac spoke for many Europeans when he said Germany was such a wonderful country, it was a good thing there were two of them...

...eration" comprising East and West Germany, while Chancellor Kohl began making official visits to the Landesver-biinde—where he was greeted with the display of slogans like "Silesia is ours...

...To cite one example, a film about life on a German submarine during World War II called Das Boot became a big box-office draw because it depicted German sailors as normal fellows caught in the grip of forces beyond their control...

...But at the popular level it was more a matter of searching for sources of pride in an atrocious era...

...This proved to be an unsatisfying way of dealing with the past...

...who teaches German at the University of Wisconsin Madison), spent last year in Leipzig...

...The old Germany had by Allied decree ceased to exist...

...Until late in the '70s, the dominant mythology of postwar German historiography was based on the idea of a zero hour, when a completely new nation rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Third Reich...

...What is new is the openness with which such comparisons are being bandied about...

...At the Federal level, the Center-Left coalition that had held power throughout the 1970s faltered, and was replaced by a conservative government under the leadership of Helmut Kohl...

...arepeat of the 1922 treaty of recognition and cooperation between the Weimar Republic and Bolshevik Russia...