“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
Thoughts on Germany since 1945
ANGER KEEPS ONE YOUNG, they say. But if it is accompanied by a feeling of complete impotence, it leads to a mournfulness that is not a “work of mourning” in the psychoanalytic sense but resignation. And resignation ages one, no doubt about it. Speaking out is a waste of words. The voice grows brittle, must fade and die even before the speaker exits. Nonetheless, the impotent anger is there. Its causes, and also the effects that are still possible despite all, will be my subject here. Therefore, I will begin by asking permission to speak in the first person. For there is a degree of personal involvement that turns every attempt at detachment into not only a psychological falsification but a moral and political one as well. How were things then and how are they now?
In 1945, “arisen from the dead” (to borrow a phrase from the Catholic Creed), my head still heavy from the blows and my own useless brooding, I imagined that the world belonged to us, the defeated who had become victors, the utopians whose most extravagant dreams suddenly appeared to be surpassed by reality, the visionaries of a future that was now the present and that today seems even to us as the most distant past. Radical evil, so we thought, was destroyed. One had only to set about clearing away the filth that it had left behind and the world would be as we had wished it: free, just, and fraternal. How naïve, indeed, how childish must our ideas have seemed to our contemporaries, especially the young ones! How naïve were we, in fact? Exactly as naïve as anyone else who believes that hope can ever be completely realized.
As for me, after my liberation in 1945 from two years of concentration camp imprisonment, I was completely unable, and probably also not at all willing, to recognize, to perceive the real power relations: who was now against whom and would be tomorrow. While entirely new fronts were already forming and many believed, in keeping with a pronouncement attributed to Winston Churchill (rightly or wrongly, I don’t know), that in Hitler one had “slaughtered the wrong pig,” we were still living within the mentality of the Résistance. Whoever had fought against Hitler was our friend; whoever had been on the side of the monster was our enemy. That’s how simple everything seemed to us. Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, liberals, militant Catholics and Protestants, socialists, communists: they were all equally welcome as our comrades. For us the USA was still Roosevelt and his New Deal and the Soviet Union was the land of the great sacrifice, thus holy and irreproachable. If someone told us of the bitter fights that had been fought, still during the war, between the right and left wings of the resistance movements, we stopped our ears. Before our eyes, the “last battle” was being fought in France between de Gaulle and the communists, in which both were losers. But we did not want to see it. There was only Nazism and anti-Nazism. (As yet no one on the Left was slyly concealing the concept of Nazism behind that of “fascism,” nor on the Right behind that of “totalitarianism”). We lived in the illusion of a “Popular Front” that embraced all of the democratic forces, from a bourgeois but upright Babbitt to an Ivan Ivanovitch who was zealously attending the ideology courses of the Communist Party.
We were, I hope, not stupid. But we were miserably informed—and besides that, my skull ached. Also, we were not free of a victory euphoria that no doubt appears comical today. Perhaps we had done nothing more than distribute flyers that were as foolishly conceived as they were ineffective. But this, so we believed, gave us the right to march in rank and file with the defenders of Stalingrad and the British and American soldiers who had landed in Normandy. Today we may laugh at such nonsense; but I forbid even the faintest smirk to those who were not with us in the abyss, be it that they were too young, be it that they were too cautious.
At this point, I beg permission to digress. What I have to present here is based on the fact that I, together with others like me, did not experience the days of liberation in war-ruined Germany but in Western Europe, where the fight against Nazism was always national at the same time. Further, all of us had a roof over our heads, however sorry our abode may have been at times; and we had something to eat, and, as is well known, eating comes not only before morals but also before any politics. This means, of course, that when I conjure up the memory of 1945 I am distinguishing myself radically from most of the contributors to this volume. They saw only Germany, and that was understandable and legitimate. I didn’t see it. I had not the faintest notion of the hardships, of the reconstruction that laid the foundation for the present-day Federal Republic of Germany. For just this reason, perhaps, I am able to muster a certain understanding for the fact that the West Germans in the “Bi-Zone” and later in the emerging Federal Republic were less concerned with freedom, equality, and fraternity than with a house, a bit of bacon for dinner, and a cigarette, and that from such an “objectively historical” situation a mentality arose for which the concept of economics became central.
Now and then on the plane or the Trans-Europe Express I see the sons and grandchildren of the people who were clearing away the rubble in those days. They talk about the business deal they want to “get in on,” rummage in their attaché cases, are corpulent and well groomed, while the likes of us are lean and shabby. I find them intensely repugnant. But, for heaven’s sake, I am not passing judgment on them. Their teacher was hollow-cheeked want; it taught them to grab and to grin broadly at the unworldly ideologues. They drive big cars, live for the day and leave eternity to God (in whom they certainly believe, without exerting themselves spiritually in the process). They are nouveau riche and nothing frightens them more than poverty, about which their fathers may have told them. Are they of a “restorative” mind? Perhaps. But most likely only in a peripheral way. They pay honor to the old fat but detect clearly that it tastes somewhat rancid. The new fat is aromatic and stirs the appetite. No wonder they prefer it. And, moreover, they tell themselves—provided they have read Goethe—that they are only preserving the inheritance from their fathers in order to possess it. They imagine themselves quite progressive. For progress is for them quantifiable expansion, the production that is now being questioned in turn by their own sons, sometimes vehemently.
My digression is at an end. Again I am among my own kind in the epoch of our great illusions, the immediate postwar period. It is interpretable in manifold ways, and the argumentatively strongest interpretations are the Marxist on the one hand, and the purely power-political on the other. The resistance, so it seems to me, was borne by the élan vital of a leftist view of politics, even when it was nationally tinged. I have in mind not only French Gaullism but also—and this may stir violent objections—the conservative German resistance against Hitler, which reached its climax on July 20, 1944. The officers who roused themselves to topple the Third Reich—no doubt, too halfheartedly and too late—were naturally men of the Right, that is as clear as day. They not only wanted to free Germany from National Socialism (which they had stoutly served!), but at the same time, or above all, they wanted to guard it against Bolshevism. In the global-political sense, their success would certainly not have produced desirable results. If one applies the customary categories—which seem to me, when I ponder them, ever more in need of revision—they were not only conservative but ultrareactionary. Today, more than three decades later and now in full knowledge of the concrete situation, without any illusions, I still persist in believing that their deepest motives, which they certainly would not have wanted to declare and were also hardly aware of, fit the world view of the Left; but only on condition that we are prepared to revise the concept and by the term ‘Left’ no longer mean an attitude toward the problem of economic hegemony but essentially a radical humanism.
It is yet another matter that the class struggle, which should be understood in a strictly Marxist sense, was still going on at the same time, and if the brave men of the twentieth of July had triumphed, they would have fought it against the Left. Here there are more profound and frightening contradictions than Marxist analysis is able to grasp, since they were fought out in the depths of the human soul, and, hélas, there is still nothing that could be called a Marxist psychology. But the German resistance by the men of the twentieth of July, to whom I concede humanistic motives and thus, from my point of view, ultimately leftist motives (that already bear the seeds of a revision of the whole concept of the Left), was only a peripheral phenomenon. At the center was a Résistance that was leftist in the stricter and very strictest sense, that is to say, inspired most decisively and in an unforgettably selfless way by communists. All of us, “le peuple de la nuit,” of whom de Gaulle had once spoken in a magnificent speech, thought that it was along with them that we would now make a clean sweep of the oppressors. We imagined that the old power structures would collapse by themselves; we would hardly need to nudge what was already toppling anyhow.
Not until 1948 did the Cold War awaken us from our extravagant dreams of liberation. If today one looks back in anger and sorrow, one recognizes how at that time traditional power politics and class politics overlapped to the point of congruence, then separated, only to join again, and why for that reason both interpretations of which I spoke earlier, the Marxist and the realpolitical, are valid. Two superpowers, the only ones to survive as such, the USSR and the USA, confronted one another. In their shadow the classes cowered, ready not for the “last battle” but certainly for a protracted guerrilla war. In the leftist camp, that was bound to produce grave errors, to which I as well as all too many of my friends succumbed. In February 1948 Czechoslovakia, which already in the period between the wars had proven itself to be both a modestly liberal and a socialist republic, turned into the People’s Democracy that already bore the seeds of the catastrophic events of August 1968. The Right howled. We leftists were silent. The Soviet Union and its vassal Communist parties in East and West appeared to us as the guarantors of the future. After the first all-embracing euphoria of liberation had faded, the USA was in our eyes merely the protector of restoration. It actually was supporting reactionary regimes everywhere. It wanted to rearm Germany. It soon reached the point where Nazi war criminals were treated with kid gloves; the ones who had survived were really the true victors in the Cold War. “The Kaiser went, the generals stayed,” Plivier had once written. Hitler was dead, his retainers were alive and set out on a short march through the German institutions, where they settled in forthwith. And if they didn’t exactly attain high dignity of office like that unspeakable Globke, they did enrich the budding German “economic miracle” through the same efficiency with which they had once helped the Führer to carry out his murder plans.
We, the resurrected, stared into the world in foolish disbelief. Many of us were threatened by new persecutions (even if they were by no means comparable to the earlier ones!). To be a victim of the Nazi regime became shameful at a time when McCarthy was setting the tone in the USA and the term “premature antifascism” was coined there. John Foster Dulles was the secretary of state of every European country. The communists had been maneuvered out of the governments of the Western European states. The resistance movement became folklore. Thus one learned to hate. Only all too well, and with shame, do I recall the days when I despised everything American like the plague and on the other hand accepted even the trials against Slansky and Rajk—skeptically, to be sure, but without decided protest. Perhaps they really were traitors, I thought, and added even more pitifully: You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Kravchenko was one of the first to tell how matters really stood in that country about which our communist friends proclaimed in song that “there is no other land on earth / Where human hearts beat so freely.” He reported, and we took him to be a paid liar. Arthur Koestler analyzed, and we told ourselves that he was a mercenary of monopoly capitalism. Ignazio Silone appeared on the scene and spoke of his disappointments; we considered him to be a grumbler. And when I say “we,” I don’t mean the party-member communists, in whose ranks I never marched, but rather the leftists in general and the (not always intelligent) leftist “intellectuals,” among whom I proudly counted myself. In truth, we were blind in the left eye. But that I understood only much later, and not fully until Czechoslovakia was raped a second time.
Nonetheless, we can claim extenuating circumstances. The restoration of the old forms of power in Western Europe and especially in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the Nazis were profiting from it, had to discourage us, had to cause us to lose our sense of proportion. The global politics of the United States—“normal” power politics, which Kissinger professed in theory only much later and without great fuss—were having calamitous results in the countries of America’s sphere of influence. We understood but poorly that disaster was also descending on the people of the other side. We were so far away. We saw only the sorry figures of the Fourth Republic in France, who traveled to Washington to receive their orders; we saw only Adenauer and Erhard, only a Herr Zehrer, who was romping about briskly upstage, only the Nazi generals who were inspecting American troops, only the Europe of the trusts that had been preconceived by Jean Monnet, only the manifestations of a rabid and unthinking anti-communism. What we failed to see was not only the conditions in the people’s democracies, which we regarded at most as the “childhood diseases” of growing socialism, but also the simple fact that people in Western Europe, and especially the Germans, were content with the development for which the Marshall Plan had paved the way. I believe that this was our most consequential error, and for just this error I can find no excuses that would exculpate me.
Despite all the evidence, we convinced ourselves that the nation was unhappy about the restorative trend, which not only integrated and partly even rehabilitated the old Nazis and reactionaries of every variety, but was about to create concrete, consumable prosperity. After all, we had the magic word “alienation” at hand. People were eating themselves full, had rebuilt their houses, were living decently and clothing themselves well. But that did not matter. They were alienated, evidently so much so that they didn’t notice how unhappy they were in feeling happy; happy or, at least, halfway content. The wretched of the earth moved into pleasant one-family houses and bought subcompact cars. We scornfully shrugged our shoulders. On the other hand, we waxed enthusiastic about youth festivals in Eastern Bloc countries, over photos from China, where—if one was to believe the pretty, laughing faces—harvesting was pure joy, and over reports about the latest production increase in the Soviet Union.
Were we stupid? By no means! After all, we had read Adorno, Sartre, and Bloch; we dissected concepts with the utmost precision; we “demystified” capitalist society, discerningly penetrated the mechanisms of manipulation; we were talking about “consumer compulsion” and at the same time we ourselves were participating, more or less happily, depending on our skill or elbow power, in the social game of consuming. We acted as though it were not simply up to us not to buy cars but to use a bicycle, not to go along with fashion but to dress like Chinese farm workers. Actually, some of us did that, but it was nothing but a cheap gesture: after all, every one of us had at least a blazer in his closet.
What had stricken us was not stupidity but rather a totally unforgivable intellectual arrogance and an even more unforgivable blindness to the longings, hopes, and fears of our fellow human beings. While the word “concrete” was a key word in our vocabulary, we grew more abstract with each passing day. Alongside us, uninfluenced by our debates and essayistic excesses, history was running its course and with it, naturally, not only the power-political conflict of the super-powers but the class struggle too. The latter, however, was being fought by entrepreneurs and unions, slowly, tenaciously, without dramatic culminations or revolutionary impulses on the one side, or oppression on the other. Therefore, we projected our unrealized revolutionary utopia, which was not shared at all by the people around us, onto the Third World. I remember reading Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth with earnest approval. He said that if a colonial kills a colonizer, then two would die, the “oppressor and the oppressed.” I believed the maitre implicitly. The new, socialist man will arise out of revolutionary violence, out of blood and death. Decades later I happened to be in Rome when they found the body of Aldo Moro in a parked car. I witnessed how an entire people condemned the murder in deepest mourning and outrage. In the meantime, I had learned a few other things. For example, the undeniable fact that after the national and allegedly socialist—or why not simply say: national-socialist—revolutions in the developing countries, the new man and the new fraternal society had not been born at all. Dictatorships arose, theocratic fanatic movements emerged, the liberated peoples were afflicted by indescribable misery that was much worse than colonialist oppression (and here I am thinking of Cambodia, but also of Uganda).
The Left was on the spot to protest, fortunately, when it was a matter of battling avowed rightist dictatorships: Chile, Argentina naturally, Iran, and so many others. It remained silent whenever exhaustive and dependable reports spoke not only of the horrors in Cambodia, but also of the oppressive regime in Vietnam, for which they had screamed until their throats were sore. Hadn’t those been the good old days when one could still rhythmically yell “hohoho-chi-minh!” Uncle Ho is dead. From the country that claimed to carry on his legacy the people are fleeing without cease on overloaded junks, knowing that their chances of survival are slight and that they will find no refuge. The Left is silent. (Probably, that too is only one of those notorious “childhood diseases of socialism.”) It is at hand whenever prisoners suspected of terrorism are mistreated, and I expressly congratulate the Left for such readiness to protest; and I join its protest against the behavior of guardians of public order who take themselves all too seriously. I do it today as I did yesterday and before then too, when I was always ready to endorse the motto: “Wherever there are those who are stronger, always take the side of the weaker.” But I don’t put up with the one-eyed view of things anymore; precisely because my own left eye was opened very late. I believe that it is necessary to say this. And we must also not succumb to the fear of receiving approval from the wrong quarter. Our anger and sorrow are directed against reactionism, that is clear. But we can no longer overlook those who hand arguments to the fascist and Nazi obscurants, arguments to use as they please. It is high time that we work out a new concept of the Left, and at the proper moment I intend to contribute my small share to the effort.
For I really am concerned with the Left and its further existence. Now as ever, my aversion is directed at the Right, which has shamelessly profited from our preoccupation with abstractions and our onesidedness. Or does anyone believe that a “Filbinger case” would have been quite so possible if the people, neglected by us, had been on our side?1 I mean the real people, and not some conceptual bugbear. Does anyone think that the Nazis in Germany and the collaborationists in France, Belgium, and Holland could have regained a strong position if we, for our part, had not been compromised on the one hand by a “socialism” to which we understandably but rather unwisely remained loyal, and on the other hand by our unworldly theorizing? The enemy triumphed on all fronts, but not only because it practiced its intrigues in the lee of the United States, not only because soft social democrats were prepared to cooperate with the CIA, also not only because international monopoly capitalism had already assembled right after the war and seized the offensive with concentrated power. If we are where we are today, faced with difficulties, although still not directly threatened, we must ascribe a great part of the blame to ourselves. We were not lacking in “theoretical rigor,” but we certainly lacked that lucidity that is not degraded if it is called common sense (a quality that is very unjustly and arrogantly decried as being “banal”).
It is this modest but by no means useless mental tool that I am going to employ in jotting down the following few thoughts about the intellectual and political situation in the Federal Republic—which naturally interests our readers most. I realize, of course, that because I live abroad and visit Germany only briefly from time to time, I am an outsider, certainly less informed about the details than any random German newspaper reader. But I don’t believe that this peculiar situation disqualifies me from judging German conditions. On the contrary, this very distance enables me to view them from proper perspectives. Otherwise, I would certainly not have decided to write this article.
The Germans, and especially my friends of the Left, don’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak. With the help of the international press, which I read faithfully, I recognize from the distance not only the forest but the contours of the hills and mountains too. Thus, I may ask myself what has happened in Germany since the war ended and what is happening there today, trusting that I will find a few reliable answers. I have already alluded to a few things above. At the start, the Germans were not concerned with ideologies, ideals, or utopias but rather with bare survival from one day to the next. Having stated this, I must pause and speak of a commonplace to which I myself fell victim. According to this commonplace, the country suffered from the fact that the middle-class revolution had never been fought through to its end, that twice, in 1918 and 1945, Germany did not attain democracy on its own, but had democracy imposed on it. The notion of the unsuccessful middle-class revolution may be correct; here too, however, the professional historians toss their weighty judgments onto the scale and tell us that a certain element of the revolt by the third estate (for example, religious tolerance) was brought along by the conquering emperor Napoleon in his train and that for this reason alone middle-class freedoms and concurrent national suppression became an insoluble historical contradiction for the Germans.
In 1918 the situation was different. Wenn wir 1918 . . . was the title of a book that was much read during the time between the wars. Yes, if in 1918 we had only . . . But at that time, too, the situation was such that revolution would have meant something akin to “foreign rule.” Just think of Thomas Mann’s deep bitterness right after the war ended! The middle-class revolutionaries were looking toward the West—that was dictating the all too well-known “peace of dishonor”; the emerging proletarian revolutionaries were looking toward the Soviet Union, about which even people like Rosa Luxemburg were very soon having sad thoughts. But no matter, a German revolution would have been thinkable in 1918 and might have given the country a new and better face. Germany was undamaged. The army was “undefeated in the field”; one heard that often enough and joked about it, without asking oneself whether this claim did not contain a tiny kernel of truth. The factories were in working order. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils could have been constituted and taken over the administration as well as the economy. None of that was unfeasible. What argued against feasibility was not historical logic but facticity. The cadre, impregnated by the stab-in-the-back legend, was not merely anti-revolutionary but clearly antirepublican. The dominant powers in the economy and industry were in full possession of their privileges and had no thought of giving them up, especially since they were sure of the approval of the victors in this regard. Still, the question “if in 1918 we had only . . .” was legitimate.
But the constellation in 1945 was totally different. The entire country was occupied. It presented the indelible impression of a tragic landscape of ruins. To be sure, the Western allies were not viewed as political liberators; for the people had accepted the rather cleverly managed Nazi unfreedom with relative indifference. But the victors were helping the hungry. And the fear of the Russians was not only a relic of Goebbels’ propaganda but, in considerable measure, also the fruit of a terrible object lesson. A few years after the collapse of the Reich, when the GDR emerged from the “Zone,” many a liberalminded citizen who was happy to be rid of the Nazis could, in regard to East Germany, really echo the words of Kästner: “You can’t build a country with these people.” In 1945 the German revolution was simply not on the agenda; not only because the occupying powers would have smothered it in any case, but also because the people in its overwhelming majority wanted no part of it. One forgets today, because it was so long ago, that Berlin was more than just the “display case of the capitalist masters”; it was very clearly the obvious example for a reality that the masses were better aware of than the leftist intellectuals who were scattered about the country and who were, and have remained, homeless to this day. During the blockade food was brought into the western sector of the city; in the eastern sector people were being forced to attend Marxist training courses.
But do such unalterable facts justify the powers of conservatism and do they expose the women and men of the Left, some of whom had come out of Hitler’s concentration camps, as childish dreamers? Naturally not. I am certain that the lack of an authentic Left was responsible for the German calamity: the unorganized of the Left were incapable of aligning with one another and already at that time replacing the SPD with a new socialist party. But this party would absolutely have had to be a party without illusions. It would have thrived no better in the intellectual climate of the Frankfurt School than in that of the realism in which the SPD thrived instead. God knows, the SPD still prides itself on having no ideology and muddles through from day to day and election to election and, like the old Weimar social democrats, is deathly afraid that its foes might make it out to be a “rootless bunch.” Would it have been possible? Nothing is less rewarding than historical retrospection with “if’s” and “but’s.” Inevitably, however, one starts speculating and asks oneself questions that in principle can’t be answered. Along the lines of what I have suggested above, one can say that it would have been impossible to create an authentic socialist party. For one, the Western allies would have nipped it in the bud, and, second, the people of West Germany—intent only on sheer survival, maimed by the Russian trauma, and still under the spell of Goebbels’ propaganda—would have wanted no part of anything that was even remotely reminiscent of Marxism (which was evil through and through). However, still another development—not probable, but also not impossible—could be imagined: Suppose the “Bi-Zone” and later Federal Republic had tried to make good the middle-class revolution that was never carried out—without terror, guillotine, and corpse carts, but in a single unbloody revolutionary thrust that would over-run the traditional ruling structure. Thanks to its nonviolence, the occupying powers could hardly have prevented it. Such a move actually was included as a possibility in the party platforms, even in that of the CDU. “Demands arising from natural rights” for a new distribution of the great bread loaf of the future would have mobilized the people—not a mythical people, but a very concrete one. Simultaneously, la patrie, la nation would have constituted itself in West Germany after the French model. A socialism would have grown out of the ruins, and it would have borne no resemblance to all the disappointing socialist models that we know.
But this is an intellectual game. It was restoration that became reality. It created a country in which one could, and can, live and that was first attacked as “fascistoid” only by those who were its most spoiled, most privileged children: by the young student generation, which was less “alienated” than it cared to admit. To the extent that they were honest with themselves, these young people experienced the “spend-and-buy compulsion” they kept talking about as blissfully as a masochist feels the blows from his self-chosen master. This generation was led by a number of oh so distinguished, refined, esthetically sensitive university professors, who lived, traveled, and did their thinking in luxury. The revolution, or its myth, became a consumer good itself. But the few who felt shame over this miserable state of affairs marched on to what they believed was the real “action.” At first, there were only fires in department stores. Soon blood was flowing. When the Germans get serious, things become horrid all over the place.
It was the ruling powers who rubbed their hands, and in Germany that meant those paleo-Nazis who, of course, were already preparing to nurture Neo-Nazis. Nothing could have suited them better than the consumer-revolutionaries who were playing their games in the shade of the restoration on the one hand, and the terror-revolutionaries who had fled directly from their dazed idealism into the realm of the pathological on the other. Cleverly, they not only organized popular rage in the best Goebbels manner but also so intimidated the SPD that the name of the admirable Willy Brandt is now bound up in a really tragic way with one of the government’s most stupid and also most ineffective acts—an act, moreover, that damaged the reputation of the Federal Republic abroad to an extent that cannot quite be imagined by German politicians who, drunk with a new feeling of power, tend toward all sorts of excesses. I am speaking, of course, of the Radicals Decree, which has been discussed through and through ad nauseam. My readers surely know better than I, who am an outsider in regard to Germany (and also wish to remain one), that this decision is not directed against certain respected lawyers, officials, or aging corporation men with brown or red blemishes on their greedy hands, not against juveniles who find brown or black shirts more becoming than a jeans outfit, not against politicians who are convinced that Herr Rudel’s honor as a German soldier not only cannot be impugned but should be presented as a model to the recruits of the Bundeswehr. No, the decision directs its entire constitutional rigor against a young teacher who distributed Maoist leaflets ten years ago, against a lawyer who in passing once signed a subversive manifesto, also against a writer who dared to speculate about violence.2
Rejuvenating anger stirs at all this. Well, well, they are dragging out the Majdanek trial, quietly hoping that the few surviving witnesses will die off or grow so sclerotic that every miserable scoundrel will have an easy time of ridiculing their testimony; but in the dossiers of tenured high-school teachers who for years have had no other interests but their work and their family, they search for black marks (which they would like to turn into yellow badges). But the anger becomes resigned sorrow when one asks oneself where the old, experienced Left was during the course of events that brought us to where we unfortunately are now, when we are more helpless than ever before. Were we—and I very personally include myself—“on the alert”? Or were we battling as aging Don Quixotes against windmills, while at the same time the enemy battalions were grouping methodically and in line with sanctified tradition? If I look back, it seems to me as though all of us failed pitifully, and not only in Germany. Not few of us had no other concern than the obsessive desire not to lose touch with the young. But youth is no more sacred than old age is venerable. Because of its experience and knowledge (which are never the result of personal merit but simply accumulated with time), the older generation, without any claim to wisdom, has the social obligation to teach.
In vain, I ask myself the exacting question of whether we did carry out the work of teaching we were charged with. All of us were in a confused state of mind, caught between resentments, a false feeling of triumph, and unrestrained hopes. We lacked buoyancy. We demanded that the unprotected, unknowing young people agree with everything we say. At the same time, we were eager to concur with everything they were saying, and disregarded the fact that they were still not able to express themselves. Some of the exiles from the Third Reich returned from America. There they had lived in ghettos of emigrés and intellectuals. They did not know that vast land at all, but they presented it as though it were the homeland of both the Babbitts and the bloodthirsty gentlemen from the military-industrial complex. Restorative West Germany, which in no time became a mini-copy of the USA and a kind of trans-Atlantic model farm, was seen through the glasses of the America-weary, who had just experienced McCar-thyism. Since they were alien to the giant land, they could not foresee that the Americans would get rid not only of the disastrous senator but, much later, of the considerably more dangerous Nixon, or how they were energetically beginning to solve the race problem. Their false image of America produced in our minds a distorted image of the Federal Republic. Thus, we convinced ourselves and those whom we were supposed to teach that along with all of its NATO partners the Federal Republic was a hell, “as uninhabitable as the moon.” Locked within our Neo-Marxist abstract conceptual world, we saw fascistoid manifestations because there were banks and industrial complexes; and in view of such horror we forgot about ordinary fascism, Nazism, to be more exact (for the equation fascism = Nazism is false!). And in a truly unpardonable way we neglected at least partially to enlighten the youth about it. Instead of analyzing historical reality, we erected conceptual houses of cards. With very few exceptions, such as Victor Klemperer, who reflected on the “LTI,” the still-unconfronted language of Nazism, we didn’t talk about everyday life under the Nazis.3 Instead, we shrilly screamed “Danger! Fascism!” when an ill-bred minister of economics called the leftist intellectuals “pinschers.” The young people screamed along with us. It is not their fault that they lost sight of all proportions. Instead of calmly developing our pedagogical and political strategies, we were shooting at mosquitos with cannons. The masses watched our battle of words with complete indifference. They had what they needed—and some to spare. A Bavarian concentration-camp comrade, a communist, whose superiors had urged him to write articles on the misery of the workers in the Federal Republic, told me resignedly in the early sixties: “I write and write. But the folks say: What the hell do those stupid bastards want, the idiots!” Today I know that the “stupid bastards” were not only the CP functionaries but we too. Someone just moving into his new one-family house was not alienated, but returning home from the alien territory of the rubble. Someone in France who was awakening from the dullness of declining village life and saw arising around Grenoble the industrial complexes that were creating work (and, in addition, four-week vacations, and apartments suitable for human beings) didn’t feel he was being “manipulated” by an anonymous machine. He saw new horizons opening. That is why, in May 1968, it was inevitable that the approximately nine million striking workers entered very quickly into serious salary negotiations with the Pompidou government and impatiently dismissed the cascades of words at the Sorbonne and in the Théâtre de l’Odéon with a wave of the hand. We, the older generation, were miserable teachers. Our anger must be directed not only against the enemy of the working class—who was, is, and will remain that, and to this extent we may all safely be Marxists—but above all against ourselves.
The truth is that we failed. That is why we are defenseless today when threats arise such as the Radicals Decree, which I cite merely as an example. What matters now is to make a clean sweep of things, not only among the “oppressed,” as the “Internationale” goes, but also in our own triste little circle. We must redefine the concept of the Left for ourselves and then act pragmatically in accordance with it, and pragmatism, of course, does not exclude the grand utopia but rather fills it with real content. Only under these conditions will we be fortified, not for “the final battle,” which is still an uncertain matter, but merely for the number of more or less fierce skirmishes that await us and that we must fight to the end, without larmoyance, without persecution obsessions, and without apocalyptic hallucinations. For Hitler is not standing ante portas, no matter what sort of nonsense about Germany the French press, which I follow only too closely, is spreading. History does not repeat itself, and even “fascism” (which, by the way, is by far not Nazism) is no immediate threat, not even if par malheur that arch-Bavarian, whose name I don’t have to mention, were to become the German chancellor.
If I see things correctly, what threatens the Germans is not a tyranny as in Argentina, not to speak of Chile or Nicaragua. Those who have such notions and consequently undertake acts of countervio-lence are only playing into the hands of the truly dangerous elements. I mean good old German authoritarianism, which in the days of Kaiser Wilhelm got along without torture and without any signs of physical brutality, so that the Thomas Mann of the Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man felt he could profess loyalty to it. Slowly, step by step, they will seek to limit civil liberties. We won’t be able to fight that with concepts that say nothing to the people, also not with doom-laden catchwords like the “great refusal.” What is incumbent on us is, first of all, the courage of one’s convictions, which I miss just as much today as in the years when by speaking frankly one wasn’t risking a lucrative career, say, but rather one’s neck. In those days, the SA beat us up; today some stupid busybody is sniffing around in our dossier. We must not accept the snooping. On the contrary, we must fight it with all of the means that “formal” democracy places at our disposal. In so doing, we must shun no risk, but we also do not have to imagine immediately that each of us is his own Ossietzky. Our untiring vigilance, our readiness to struggle must not mislead us into shouting “fire” when there are still no flames. The tough, watchful, lucid conduct that common sense dictates has nothing heroic about it. We will have to get along without heroism and plans for personal salvation. That may be regrettable for a few of us, whom they will perhaps try to bar from the media, but there is nothing at all tragic about it. Then we old leftists, who were witnesses, will regain the credibility that we lost and will again have the chance to succeed that, in gloomy moments, we thought was already forfeited.
I believe that what lies before us is not the great drama with the historical culmination point of a bloody last fight. We must reconcile ourselves to fighting limited battles, consisting above all in the patient work of enlightenment. They will become plausible to the populace—they, and not the shrill cries of warning that some of us emit, and surely not the unholy and pathetic conceptual speculations to which nobody listens and that we can always cultivate as a kind of political pastime whenever we hanker for it. Luckily, the Hitler whom we experienced, we and only we, and not the young assistants in contemporary history seminars, is simply not present. The old Nazis are dying out with us. Good! Their grandchildren, who are discovering the anti-charm of uniforms and emblems, do not seem to me to be dangerous—not yet, even if I don’t at all share Martin Walser’s opinion that they are nothing but a stupid Mardi Gras bunch. Our dreams from 1945 are dying with us. How sad! But that is the will of historical reality, for which they are only rubbish. But one must not complain. No brown battalions are violently clearing the streets so that they can go stamping through them. New masters with new claims are here. In their overwhelming majority they certainly resemble Monsieur Giscard more than Röhm. We must oppose them with different arguments, indeed, with an entirely new view of the world than the one with which we opposed our adversaries of the years from 1930 to 1933. But who are “we”? We are only the ones who are bowing out, who with the help of statistics can more or less figure out how long our voices will still resound. What matters is those who will come after us. We cannot transmit our experiences to them. But thanks to these very experiences and provided that we have rationally assimilated them, we can give them some advice. We can do it if we bridle our anger (which does not mean that we stifle it!). It may and it will flare up, but this should happen only within the boundaries of our personal experience and memories. At the moment when we publicly address the younger generations our anger must already be transformed into radical reason. If it is unable to undergo this process, it will vanish like smoke, and nothing will remain but a stale smell from bygone days.
____________
“In den Wind gesprochen,” in Die zornigen alten Männer: Gedanken über Deutschland seit 1945 (The angry old men: thoughts on Germany since 1945), ed. Axel Eggebrecht (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1979), pp. 258-79.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.