THE GERMANS AGAIN
Mayer, Milton
The Two Worlds The Germans Again by MILTON MAYER This is part of a series of articles by Milton Mayer, whose recent and extended travels took him not only to the "tourist beat" of Poland and the...
...But didn't militarism mean war...
...It no longer stood...
...If you can't do anything else for them, at least you can do nothing to worsen their situation...
...But they aren't...
...Just begun...
...High Command for the Occupation of Germany...
...The Communist monster is nothing but the monster of revolution, of any revolution, the monstrosity which rejects the existing order...
...Within the Germany that never accepted the Weimar democracy were the seeds of Hitlerism and Adenauer-ism...
...The Two Worlds The Germans Again by MILTON MAYER This is part of a series of articles by Milton Mayer, whose recent and extended travels took him not only to the "tourist beat" of Poland and the Soviet Union, but throughout East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as a guest of the Protestant churches of those countries...
...We ordered it to disappear, and it obeyed orders like a good German...
...It made him prosperous, just as it always had...
...So the Germans were denazified, democratized, and re-educated...
...the same Ja...
...For the Russians reunification means the German aggressor on the border again, and, of course, for the Poles, Czechs, and the Hungarians...
...If he were more lovable, he might be loved...
...The awful intensity of control is reflected by the white-lettered red signs and banners everywhere proclaiming, "Undying Friendship with the Soviet Union," "Victory for Socialism," "We Build for Tomorrow...
...Bourgeois Germans, being bourgeois, are hard to commu-nize...
...If Germany is to be armed, who will arm it...
...We did not restore one-man government in Germany...
...These things can be and are because they must be...
...they must be...
...It smells like home, and not like the grease of England or the oil of France...
...People under pressure need the pressure taken off them...
...These men are the reliable men...
...Dummer Michel had to get the idea...
...These things not only can be...
...If they weren't, they must be the work of our good German allies, the bulwark of democracy, the people who eat American fried potatoes...
...Of course there was never again to be a German army, but, just in case there ever was, who were its generals to be...
...Who is like us except them...
...In 1951 I saw a movie produced by the U.S...
...The seeds are deep...
...The pressure of German life is terrific...
...I think of my anti-Nazi friends—some of them heroes—in Germany when the Ami proscripted the new Nazi party after the war...
...1952 was the year...
...For the West Germans, it means economic support of the Eastern zone and, for centrist and rightist West Germans, an upset of the political balance from the area which was always the stronghold of German socialism...
...Like it or not, they are building for tomorrow under the Russians...
...Now it will be young men, who have never known a Jew...
...The Germans are supposed to be ashamed of having been the first Nazis and proud of having been the first anti-Communists...
...It looks like home (without the war), or like what we wish that home looked like...
...You just look at the banks of the Moselle," an old Nazi once told me...
...The Ami had confirmed what the Kruppianer had believed all along —that you can't get along without a good Leiter...
...The Christian Democratic Union loses local election after local election—local power in Germany is mostly administrative— but in three successive national elections, with Adenauer at the head of the ticket, it wins easily...
...None...
...East Germany was an agricultural area, with a large infertile strip running through it...
...An analysis of them in the succeeding months reveals that in every case (except one) where the perpetrators were identified, the offenses were committed by middle-aged, lower middle-class men: The veterans, not of the murderous SS or the professional Gestapo, but of the hoodlum SA...
...For ten years, until 1958, they did their Communist duty without bourgeois reward...
...The West would seem to be the more Christian—if only forgetting were the same as forgiving...
...It was intensified with the air lift of 1948...
...Loving him is inconceivable, too, and as long as he isn't loved he will have to hate and be hated...
...Michel isn't that dumb...
...1952 was the year...
...It seemed possible once, even inevitable...
...And the Ami paid for it all...
...Do you remember Silone's frustrated antifascist who could think of nothing to do but sneak out at night and scribble No on the village walls...
...The sharp increase in anti-Semitic incidents began in the fall of 1958, with the Berlin crisis...
...But they were not to have the chance to be something other than what their fathers had been...
...built by whoever has money or credit to build it...
...Now there are twelve hundred, not placed at all...
...The only thing that had happened to them—things don't happen fast—was their utter disillusionment with the word Nazism and all its trappings...
...Were there no other reason for ducking out of the East, that was enough...
...This is not as un-European as it is un-American...
...The Ami filled them...
...Yes...
...Yes," the class said in unison...
...The real economic miracle of Germany is in the East, not in the West...
...Herr Krupp personally, the man the Ami had tried to hang as a war criminal, went back to his 90,000 Kruppianer with Ami money to rebuild Krupp's and put them back to work...
...But the staples, and most of the amenities, are in full supply now, and the controlled prices are lower than the West's...
...The boys with the electric canes...
...It was done with German genius: Without a drop of oil—a pipeline from Russia is being built— a whole chemical industry (including the production of all motor fuel) was built on soft coal...
...Hadn't the Germans been denazified...
...Must we begin all over again to think about the gas ovens that we had forgotten and tried to get the Germans to forget...
...But the pressure has been building in the German pressure cooker since the Occupation of 1945...
...The sender of the telegram was not a Communist provocateur, but Konrad Adenauer...
...The Frenchman's farm is falling down, and he is leaning against a tree smoking his pipe...
...Ten years later an American seeing it would have said that it was Communist propaganda...
...Visits to the mass graves of Nazi victims are de rigeur for the tourist in eastern Europe...
...The movie explained the indispensability of disarmament to the reconstruction of German civilization, and even (for the pious Germans) to salvation...
...Yes...
...And whatever form the furtive No takes in East Germany, it does not take the form of the swastika...
...They are the seeds we Americans nourished after the second, by feeding them deceit...
...There are no former Nazis in high public office in what our State Department calls the so-called German Democratic Republic...
...Better to surrender the Germans again, to the forces within them that had ruined them...
...It is we who had a choice in Germany...
...Where except there do you get American fried potatoes...
...best of all, say nothing...
...Not altered, or revised, or revamped...
...The Nazi monster was the monster of the existing order, from our existing order...
...His merchants of death were newly financed by the Ami...
...Nazism—which the swastika recalls and, recalling, sets us barking up the wrong tree—is as dead as the Edsel...
...The Americans—that is, "democracy," which Hitler had told them was cynical—were cynics...
...An American, if he is anything more than anything else, is a German without a history...
...That is why the student agitators against remilitarization ten years ago are non-political professional men now...
...But a man needs something to live for...
...They were going to use Michel for a powder monkey...
...In the West the first thing that is built (or rebuilt, or repaired, or repainted) is a front for the quick sell...
...The slave laborers Krupp murdered, or Krupp...
...We are afraid of the Germans, and we hate them...
...This meant iron dictatorship...
...In 1952, with the cold war the central fact of life, and Germany in the nutcracker, came the American Diktat to remilitarize...
...The poet who said that forever is a long time hadn't met any American Presidents and generals...
...We had the choice of getting out of there and of giving without getting...
...East Germany as a whole is cheerless to look at...
...So Michel became cynical, and the burgeoning suspicion that militarism and war were not good for him flickered out...
...Can these things be...
...the Napoleons always built themselves public Colosseums, Etoiles, and Tivolis...
...And in America it was inevitable that the editor of the New York Times should suspect that the daubs were the work of Communist provocateurs...
...It tastes like home, with its hamburgers, its frankfurters, its noodle soup, and its coffeecake...
...I repeated the experience," he said, "in every class I visited...
...Being loved is inconceivable to him now...
...Herr Friedrich Flick, the great industrialist, was Hitler's armorer...
...He needs a new word, not for leader, but for duty...
...It isn't that the Communist governments don't want tourists...
...We still think of them as the Nazis, and the Marxists won't let us forget the Nazis...
...On the other bank you see the fine German houses and the fine German fields and the German people working hard...
...Germans, old, cramped, and homogeneous, have long since learned to tell their masters what their masters want to hear, so Dr...
...That's what it means to be a superior race...
...but it had given them (in their own polite phrase) a nose:ful of war...
...Going back to Germany is always a little like going back home...
...Consumer goods were bitterly thin and poor...
...The evil of Nazism was our evil, the evil of the present...
...The capitalist world has no interest in weakening itself by bringing the socialist portion of Germany back into Germany, and the past and potential victims of a united Germany are safe (or at least safer) as long as the Germans are divided against one another...
...What is increasingly clear in both Germanys—and everywhere else, on the quiet—is that they will not be reunited for a long, long time...
...When I first went to Germany after the war, the Ami had forbidden the Germans to use the good German word "Fuhrer," "leader," any more...
...Oh, well," said the American liberal, or servant of deceit, "if the Germans are to be rearmed, at least they'll be a part of a NATO army...
...Michel is accustomed, collectively, if not individually, to using other people...
...What choice have the Germans...
...Best of all—again and again the foreigner heard it, in Germany, in 1935 and in 1950—say nothing...
...Where they disable real Communists—forbidding them to be—we disable real Negroes...
...It was done with the frightening German energy, efficiency, and conscientiousness that did it in the West, but without Krupps and without Nazis...
...reversed...
...Last year, on Herr Flick's seventy-fifth birthday, he received a telegram congratulating him on his "great and amazing life of achievement, in long, self-sacrificing toil...
...But it is this German who carried Western Christian racism to the unmannerly extreme which his fellow Christians dare neither to recognize in themselves nor condone in him...
...rationed coal is half the Western price and even unrationed coal is lower than the Western price...
...The Americans...
...The new model won't look like the one that flopped...
...The Diktat was forced upon the rising generation, whose dream of a new world had been the wonderful phenomenon of postwar Europe...
...What was once lovely Dresden is like Dusseldorf fifteen years ago— the whole center of the city is bare— but outside Leipzig you may see, stripping the earth for soft coal, the largest movable piece of machinery in the world...
...A great alarum went up...
...There used to be twenty thousand Jews in Cologne, many of them highly placed...
...the more so now, since American decor, American jerry-built, American hustle, and American heart attack pervade the scene...
...They were told—these were Harry Truman's words and Dwight Eisenhower's, as they had been Franklin Roosevelt's—that militarism had been their ruin and they were going to be saved from future ruin by being demilitarized forever...
...No more...
...Forbid anti-Semitism...
...A Czech Sunday school superintendent told me he was putting a confirmation class through the parables and asked them, "Are the Italians our neighbors...
...Only a people diverted by daubs on walls can ask, "Can these things be...
...after all, they had the same history and the same nationality and the same language...
...Can it be that there are German judges who were Nazi judges, German teachers who were Nazi teachers, German police chiefs who were Nazi police chiefs, German cabinet ministers who were Nazi satraps...
...We have the makin's: Where they have anti-Semitism without Jews, we have anti-Communism without Communists...
...Hannibal's...
...he said Ja to a different set of questions, but the idea he got was not the one that his Ja suggested...
...No, militarism meant peace...
...The Nazis hadn't been cynics, whatever else they had been...
...Yes...
...There was nothing left but the walls of hundreds of thousands of German homes, and a German home is built to stand forever...
...Must we reappraise everything we have done and appraise it as a failure...
...Must we dream that one bullheaded old man stands between NATO and another Ribbentrop-Molotov pact...
...Not in the West...
...tell the motions of the heart to go away...
...They had believed what they said, though what they said was awful...
...Nazism and its identifying trappings—including the swastika—are stone dead in Germany...
...Something else had begun to happen to them...
...If we were very old and cramped into our land and of homogeneous stock, why wouldn't we be as solid and mercurial, as dull and romantic, as the Germans...
...It was done in part with the assistance of Russian credits and imports that was niggardly compared to America's priming of the West...
...Whatever is right today may be wrong tomorrow...
...Be Prepared...
...they were ordered to say "Leiter" instead...
...He emerged from the things we admire or accept...
...But Michel would not be used, not, at least, by foreigners who had just finished burning his house down...
...Hitler's ghost was walked again...
...Like the rest of us, they reject the shame and accept the pride...
...Then the daubs appeared in America—was this the work of the Communists, too...
...It will be afraid of itself...
...Hadn't we exterminated Nazism...
...Who were to be the generals of the new German army...
...And goods are still lower in quality than they are in the West, and imports non-existent...
...The dutiful East Germans have been put to work building a new world which most of them—two-thirds would be a conservative estimate—do not like...
...They do not want tourists as much as they want tools...
...It had destroyed their country in the place where destruction teaches—inside their homes...
...In all the Communist countries exhibits of Nazi horrors continue, year after year...
...And for the Poles and the Czechs it means the loss of their "German" territory...
...And the Germans are like us, or like what we wish we were: clean, dependable, thorough, and, withal, ingenious and inventive...
...Last Holy Night—how loudly they and we sing Heilige Nacht!—a swastika was daubed on the synagogue wall of Cologne...
...their Western brethren are building for yesterday...
...The Russians have no intention whatever of taking any chances with the recently Nazi Germans (or the recently fascist Hungarians...
...Mayer, who has lived in Germany, is the author of a book on the Germans, They Thought They Were Free.—The Editors...
...As long as the Germany of Adenauer—which is the Germany of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—nourishes the seeds of the Germany of Hitler, the West will not be able to move...
...And the same Germans, with the same indefatigable virtues that made Milwaukee famous and Auschwitz infamous...
...No to a rotten world...
...Napoleon's...
...that first of all...
...The alternative assumption, of a recrudescence of Nazism in Germany, was much more painful...
...But first things first...
...It recited the glories of peace...
...but it will run...
...A practical people, like us, except for— except for what...
...This Ohio-sized land is—or was—as hopelessly incapable of economic self-support as Israel...
...But when a German wants to tell you about his holiday in Italy—where the farms fall down the fastest—he says he lived "wie Gott in Frankreich," "like God in France...
...maybe all...
...The German is the Boy Scout par excellence...
...They were re-educated to say Ja to a different set of questions...
...Their suspicion that militarism and war were not good for them was fortified by their new masters...
...They hated it, but they did it...
...In 1945 he had only his bare hands, marvelously energetic, persistent, and talented hands...
...even they...
...Nothing better illustrates the contrary notions of capitalism and Communism than the difference in the Western and Eastern facades—a difference that staggers every visitor to the two Berlins...
...they need the foreign currency desperately, and they want the brainwashed Westerner to come and have his brain rewashed...
...What the swastikas mean on the German walls today is No...
...They grow from within...
...forbid Communism...
...Civilizations grow organically...
...Adenauer told the Americans that it must be the work of the Communists...
...In the East, the totalitarian state mobilizes money, material, and manpower, and builds for the slow sell...
...In 1946 we hanged Germany's two best generals for the brand new crime—the first postwar deceit—of obeying orders...
...Militarism and war—as long as it was only cold war—were wonderful for him...
...There is a thick-headed German cartoon character called dummer Michel...
...That's all...
...NATO lip service to reunification is nothing but cold war...
...This is the significance of the swastika on the walls, a significance much more awful than the nightmare shape of the crooked cross...
...In 1936 what is now West Germany produced sixty-two times as much iron as the East, thirty-three times as much hard coal, seventeen times as much iron ore, twelve times as much ingot steel...
...In West Germany, yes...
...War hadn't made pacifists of the Germans, for pacifism is as un-German as it is un-American...
...In his factories, during the war, the lower races, imported in freight cars, worked and died, not as men, or as prisoners, but as slaves...
...The evil of Communism is the evil of the future, and the future can always argue, as it does, that its evils are forced upon it by the death struggle of the present...
...Refugee" has come to mean not only a burden on the Western taxpayer, but an enemy from the Communist, and always more thoroughly communized and competitive, East...
...Anti-Communism— without Nazism—is only something to live against...
...Here is a nominally Christian people who apotheosize the Western Christian virtues of honesty, industry, courage, and efficiency...
...The Russians...
...And they seem to be in most Germans...
...How was it done...
...All he wants is to live like God in France, to relax, so that he can be less industrious, less conscientious, and less efficient without feeling like a truant or a traitor...
...we restored all the conditions that made one-man government inevitable, along with the daubs on the walls...
...That, and nothing else...
...Like the Germans, who beat and hanged democracy out of people, we hanged and beat Nazism out of the Germans...
...It will take years, maybe centuries...
...Today the per capita consumption of butter, sugar, and animal fat in the East is higher than it is in the West...
...He got the idea all right...
...We tried to remember the anti-Communists—and we found the Nazis helping us...
...maybe nourish them a little here, starve them a little there...
...They can be relied uporr to do what Krupp and Adenauer want done: to fight Communism...
...The Germans weren't ready to be taught democracy, and their teachers weren't ready to teach them...
...Michel was a barricade on the highway to America...
...These were the seeds the French and English blockade nourished after the first war, by starving the Germans...
...That is why German school books and teachers are silent about Nazism...
...Or the German generals we didn't hang...
...There was no answer...
...The West German Social Democrats have just renounced their socialist doctrine...
...But that would have meant a settlement with the Communists, a "surrender...
...being Germans, they are easy...
...they have not been rewarded for being Nazis...
...Both alternatives are unrealistic...
...The Russians have put their Germans under fearful pressure, but its essence is positive...
...But East Germany was, apart from Bohemia, the one truly bourgeois area of the world taken by the Communists...
...So they said "Leiter...
...If he were less dutiful, he might be more lovable...
...But three-thirds of them are free from cynicism and materialism...
...Long after the cold war reached its hottest, West Germans still longed (as only Germans can long) for their Eastern brethren and treated them as royally as the larder could afford...
...The Communists won't let us forget the Nazis," said the Christian who believes in forgiveness of sin...
...When I said, "But that's not democracy," they said, "Germany is not ready for democracy...
...It had committed the worst of all German (or American) crimes: It had failed...
...They have done it before...
...per capita production of electricity surpasses not only West Germany's, but Russia's, and it is half as expensive as West Germany's...
...The doves were as thick as American cigarettes in the black market of Frankfurt...
...German beatnikism...
...Der alte—"the old one"—the Germans call him...
...We could not...
...Steel production, starting almost at zero, will surpass West Germany's in two years...
...For the East Germans, almost entirely Protestant, reunification means the Catholic clericalism of Adenauer —and war besides...
...This meant more iron dictatorship...
...Germany symbolizes the paralysis of the West...
...best of all, say nothing...
...The American policy—first principles, when they are about to be scuttled, become policies—was reversed...
...Now militarism was good for the Germans, so good for them that we would pay for it, the way we'd paid for food and clothing under the abandoned Marshall Plan...
...The Poles...
...They thought the Ami were right...
...And unlike Bohemia, it was the country of Russia's worst enemy...
...We Americans tried to forget the Nazis—and we found the Germans helping us...
...What choice has Adenauer as the rampart of American parliamentary capitalism...
...Nor are the few colossal—and often atrocious—stadiums, memorials, and People's Palaces in the East un-European...
...We did not create in Germany...
...Then, over the holiday time— an unsettling time everywhere—the daubs appeared all over West Germany...
...He got the idea that the Americans were cynics—what J. Edgar Hoover, speaking of Communists, calls masters of deceit...
...this is the way it was once done everywhere in Europe...
...The only thing you can do is watch them...
...These are the things our deceit demanded...
...Whoever has lived in Germany recently knows that its three dominant motifs are cynicism and materialism (both of them imported from America) and a frustrated hunger for something to live for...
...If they were going to fight the Russians, they were going to fight them in Germany, with Germans...
...Of course the East Germans have come down in the world they attacked...
...This was the suspicion that militarism meant war and that war wasn't good for them...
Vol. 24 • May 1960 • No. 5
