Great and False Expectations
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Great and False Expectations After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History Br Marc Fisher Simon & Schuster 350pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Moderator, National...
...Fully integrating foreigners into the national community remains, as it does throughout Western Europe, a slow, demanding process...
...Marc Fisher, a reporter for the Washington Post, spent four years in Germany doing just that—driven, as he explains, by a challenge, a break with his New York Jewish family's strong views of the Germans...
...failure: "That symbol of Germany's postwar decision to accept responsibility for what happened under Nazi rule was finally torn out of the Constitution in 1993...
...Whatever that means, the gap was real enough...
...I remember Adenauer saying how worried he was that this might happen to his son...
...Germany, like noother place in the world, was an idea I had let others define for me...
...They concluded that "Germans suffer from 'anxiety, aggression, arrogance, lack of consideration, smugness, an inferiority complex, and sentimentality.'" A large part of the book deals with the relationship, after the euphoria of unity, between what had been East and West Germany...
...Casting a glance around the world, one can only say, "Welcome to the club...
...He plans to visit Poland again soon to reinforce the positive relationship built up over the years...
...Fisher records this as a mora...
...But the highly restrictive citizenship regulations have been relaxed only slightly...
...He sees a real danger in skinhead neo-Nazism feeding on a general inclination to suppress or rationalize the Nazi regime's atrocities...
...chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, is a leading figure in the Free Democratic Party, the partner in Kohl's coalition government...
...Why is Germany special...
...He is understandably disturbed by the attacks on foreigners that began when waves of asylum seekers rushed through the newly opened eastern border...
...If anyone today tried to warm up the old problems of Alsace, Schleswig-Hol-stein or Eupen Malmedy, he would be hauled off for mental tests...
...Nor could even this massive effort begin quickly to meet expectations in the east...
...They will not soon be cordial, but the Jewish community is growing and Ignatz Bubis...
...The accused have been brought to trial...
...The fire bombing of a house in Solingen in 1993 that killed two Turkish women and three children stirred a torrent of revulsion throughout Germany...
...It is a remarkable story of great and false expectations, disillusionment and recrimination...
...The guilty in other cases have been punished, as have violators of numerous laws forbidding neo-Nazi activities...
...Under the pressure of public opinion, the Bundestag voted—as the rest of Europe has done, not to mention the United States—to impose restrictions...
...Few of their children and grandchildren, bom in Germany and having adopted German culture, have any intention or reason to go to Turkey...
...Describing himself as a Germany agnostic, he says...
...His indignation is more fittingly directed at the treatment of 2 million Turks, the largest community among the 6 million foreigners in Germany today...
...To be sure, his vivid sketches are more than anecdotal...
...There is no reason for long-term pessimism once the fine machinery, machine tool and instrument-making skills that have long distinguished eastern Germany are allowed free run...
...Some western entrepreneurs came in as carpetbaggers...
...Materially, to overcome it, the Federal Republic has poured something like $ 100 billion a year into what are called the neue Lander, the five new provinces of the east, to correct 50 years of mindless dilapidation...
...The reader is left with the impression that the Germans, east and west, are strongly neurotic...
...Foreigners out...
...A great deal of what a country stands for is revealed in its relations with its neighbors, in this case justifiably skeptical former victims...
...One indication of how far things have moved is the formation of a mixed Dutch-German corps within the European defense structure...
...They and China, too, killed millions...
...Some ghosts of the past have been laid to rest once and for all...
...Most of them stayed to enjoy it, rather than return to a homeland they had outgrown...
...Now, I would have to consider it for myself...
...He dwells on the haunted relations between Germans and Jews...
...The eastern picture is still gloomy: sharply falling marriage and birth rates, higher death and suicide rates, and high unemployment...
...These were, in the main, economic migrants taking advantage of the German Constitution's asylum provisions, the most generous in the Western world, during an economic downturn...
...The title promises more than the author can deliver...
...They contain a great deal of information that the author takes pains to present with an even hand...
...The fact is that in the last year of the War, young men drafted for military service were as likely as not to be assigned to the Waffen-SS as to the Army...
...They reflect the turmoil of German reunification, the hopes, the strains, the disappointments, the persistence of a cultural wall after the fall of the concrete and barbed wire barrier with its minefields and hair-trigger guards...
...But when he borrowed the money to pay the bills the deficit sent the overall economy reeling, and when he then levied taxes and surtaxes to get back on an even keel he did not win the affection of the western German taxpayer...
...The author portrays a people searching obsessively for identity, with some finding it in mean-spirited clannishness or outright xenophobia (Germany for the Germans...
...The result is an elegantly written book: After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History...
...He pokes fun at Margaret Thatcher's convening a round table of experts on Germany in 1990, with reunification already accomplished...
...Many easterners found it difficult to learn not only new professional skills but also the western way of doing things that has filled the vacuum left by the Communist system...
...Yet earnest as they are, the accounts fall short of suggesting how these Germans and their new Germany will help to shape the Europe of which they are the core...
...that condones, even applauds, violence...
...He chose to look beyond the politicians and business leaders and focus on people's personal stories...
...Was this an aberration or the expression of a national flaw...
...Today Kohl, the committed European, sees German interests served best by "mutual truthfulness," as he put it to the Czechs, with eastern neighbors as well...
...His book is long on the burdens of history, but the definition of Germany and the Germans is, by the nature of his approach, impressionistic...
...Were they the same people...
...Democracy in Germany is alive and well...
...Fisher contributes a bit of Charlie Brown analysis: "The easterners were heavily marked by their years under Soviet domination, but in a sense they were the 'purer' Germans, free of the American influences of pop culture and individualism that had so sharply altered western German life...
...There is something to all of this, but hardly enough to warrant the book's doomsday undertone...
...Other brush strokes might be added to Fisher's portraits...
...Actually, the author acknowledges that the second German republic is far from being the combustible social, economic and psychological mixture that destroyed the first after World War I and the Versailles peace...
...They first were welcomed as "guest workers" in the 1950s and '60s, to do the dirty jobs of the economic miracle...
...This upheaval has generated a certain nostalgia for the Spartan security of the old dictatorship...
...Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised that no one would suffer in the process...
...As it happens, last October's election gave the Right-wing Republican Party, which had shown strength in local contests, less than 2 per cent of the vote and no representation in the Bundestag...
...Fisher at one point describes Germany as "a society in transition—economically troubled, politically divided and socially riddled with self-doubt...
...The author criticizes Kohl for his rather robust patriotism, finds his use of the word Fatherland somewhat menacing, and accuses him of hijacking Ronald Reagan to a military cemetery where some Waf-fen-SS soldiers lie buried...
...Property rights are inevitably a source of friction, especially between the legal inhabitants of confiscated dwellings and the original western owners who want them back...
...Old and young live as second-class residents, mocked when they are not ignored and bashed by skinheads and extremists...
...Other wounds are perhaps too deep and still too fresh for a conclusive judgment, but the German effort to heal them has been accepted as genuine...
...France and Britain as the anchor of German security...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Moderator, National Public Radio s "America and the World" GERMANY is the steady object of analysis and speculation...
...Official figures now indicate that the picture is improving as western investment in new infrastructure matures and the German economy moves out of recession...
...Hitler introduced genocide into human affairs as a political program...
...Kohl is also pursuing conciliation with the Czechs, brushing aside the reservations of an important political constituency, the Sudeten-German expellees...
...It has marked this century indelibly and is now a major factor, perhaps the determining influence, as Europe struggles to find new purpose in a time of trouble...
...The Soviet Union and Japan also waged aggressive war...
...In answering the basic question, collective performance and the stand taken by the nation's leaders probably form a more reliable index than selected cases...
...Earnings are coming more into balance and the number of jobs is slowly increasing...
...Fisher gives the "purer" Germans of the east more sympathy than their westem compatriots...
...Forty-five years ago, Konrad Adenauer concentrated on building trust with the United States...
...In a recent emotionally charged visit to Rotterdam, bombed to bits in 1940, Kohl sought to flesh out the two countries' proper diplomatic relations with a reconciliation of the two peoples...
...The manufacturing, distribution and communications facilities being built there are the most modern in Europe...
...The Holocaust alone forces the question and many have gone in search of an answer...
...The Nazi regime, however, moved beyond the limits of civilization, betrayed the values that Germany had shared as a pillar of Western culture, retreated to a mechanical Darwinism in killing and enslaving Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and others...
Vol. 78 • June 1995 • No. 5
