The post below sets out my attitude to the Germans. As it happens, I gather that Ian Buruma, in his latest book, Stay Alive, Berlin 1935-1945, has come to a similar conclusion. It concludes: ‘The city itself is a monument, not only to man’s blackest depravity, but to its capacity to be reborn and to live again.’ On the previous page, he had referred to ‘the way the scars of its worst crimes are openly on display.’
While I had heard favourably of him, I had not read any of the work of this writer before. He has been prolific and successful. He can afford good research assistants, and he is a master of composition – something so often lacking north of Mexico. He is also engagingly humane. He understands that people make history and that it is a collection of biographies. This book is a string of anecdotes. What kind of evidence is not anecdotal? They are strung together artfully and seamlessly throughout. Mr Buruma is, I think, a natural.
The story of Berlin at the end of the war – not long before I was born – is as close to a picture of Hell on earth as I can imagine. It is certainly beyond my comprehension.
I was completely engaged from the first page to the last, and I commend the book to your attention. It is not often now that I am so sorry to put a book down.
And this is on a subject – the capacity for evil in all of us – that we have an abiding moral obligation to confront head on.
The Germans and I
What is it about the Germans that attracts me?
When I left school in 1963, they gave me a copy of Alan Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. When we got to 1934, I was shocked to read that in some churches they replaced the crucifix with a sword and the bible with Mein Kampf. In a perverse way, that had as much impact on me as the mass murders. How could a people that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Kant, Beethoven and Goethe have murdered millions of people and taken us all back to the primal slime?
That question has stayed with me since, and it is behind almost everything I have read or written of history.
In 1967, I hitch-hiked the length and breadth of the nation. I found people trying to answer the same question. I went to Dachau, which was not a death camp, and I wept in the snow for what its inmates had suffered.
But I went to Berlin and saw the Wall keeping out a new form of soulless barbarism. (I did not know then that Stalin’s murders probably exceeded those of Hitler.)
When I returned to Berlin in the 80’s, I was transfixed by the progress of reconstruction and the richness of its cultural life. I was falling in love with the city. I made a point of going to Dresden twice to see the site of the maximum suffering of the Germans. I do not regret one bomb. When a resident said that that raid was late, I had to bite my tongue – it was only months later that some of the ovens were turned off. A nation that stands behind a government that created the SS Death’s Head Division, and waged a war of aggression against Europe, the USSR, and the United Sates, a nation that buried its doubts about that war or its government when they thought they were winning, simply has no standing to complain if the nations that it has attacked respond with attacks of their own to the last fibre of their being.
And some forget that the failure of the Allies to finish the job in 1918 led to the result that General Pershing predicted and made it imperative for the Allies to demand unconditional surrender on this occasion. Both Germany and Japan were reduced to ashes because they were led by manic war criminals who could not bring themselves to surrender.
Later I went to Wannsee and Sachsenhausen. Then after the Wall came down, and the country was reunited, the Germans had to come to grips with the horror – that is the word – of the Stasi, and the misery inflicted on so many Germans by so many other Germans.
Lawyers at a high-level conference descended into the heart of darkness and mile after mile of files in the Stasi HQ at Normanenstrasse. Later I would compare the agony of those taken there by the Stasi to that suffered by those taken to the HQ of the Gestapo at Prinz Albertstrasse (corner of Wilhemstrasse). The new Jewish Museum is the only building I have been in that feels to me like a work of art.
All the while, I was penetrating the history of the common law that might fairly be said to have crossed over to England from the forests of Germany – one American jurist said that the laws of America were more German than those of Germany itself.
I have visited Berlin and New York on about six occasions. They have about them a kind of in-your-face cosmopolitan directness that makes me want to laugh out loud when I step outside. I have so many happy memories from both.
There is a pub at the top of Friedrichstrasse where I was once recognised as some kind of local. That’s where I ate the most outrageously large pork knuckle and drank the biggest glass of beer I have ever seen. It’s not far from a guest house named after one of my absolute heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
It became a ritual for me to buy a Picasso or Chagall lithograph from Bridget, the flamboyantly displayed owner of an art gallery on Dorotheenstrasse. I toured the canals with my German friend Gudrun and saw how moved she was at the remnants of the Wall that had divided her nation’s capital.
Berlin has the best transport system and museums in the world, and at least until recently, it was the one city in Europe where I did not feel like I was being suffocated by traffic and tourists.
Angela Merkel is head and shoulders above any other statesman in the world, but the Germans do not aspire to leadership, and they get nervy if they see too many flags out.
I have long wrestled with the fact that the beauty of the music in the Ring Cycle was given to us by a jerk who was so egocentric that he had to write his own libretti (as Gough Whitlam said), but if we cut out art created by unattractive people, we would miss an awful lot.
When I started to follow Formula I, Michael Schumacher was way ahead of the rest. He did some bad things. So did Ayrton Senna – worse, in truth. But we were told that with Senna, it was Brazilian flair; with Schumacher, it was ruthless Teutonic efficiency. Stereotyping shows a very bad state of mind.
In fine, I am very fond of Germany and the Germans. And one thing I do know. The evil and misery created by the Gestapo and the Stasi did not come from a German weakness. It came from our human weakness. Those who believe otherwise risk treading in the footsteps of Stalin and Hitler.
With Compliments 