As Mark Twain, who is supposed to have said everything, is supposed to have said, Germany is the most beautiful country in the world. Especially in summer, when my wife and I like to visit. From the Alps in the south to the Baltic in the north, from the flat, wide-open spaces in the north east to the more densely settled, often rolling, provinces in the southwest, no country has more variety. And no country is better tended by its citizens. The mountains. The “fairy tale woods.” The clean rivers and equally clean lakes. The infinitely numerous hiking trails that lead everywhere and nowhere. The tree-lined streets, including the one on which we live at the moment. The parks, the greenery that graces most cities.
As Nietzsche, himself a German (though he did not like Germans one bit), says, at bottom history is nothing but a list of atrocities. Such as have been pruned to suit the historian and his readers and chronologically arranged. That is as true of Germany as it is of all other nations; including, in a minor but certainly not negligible way, the on to which I myself belong. However, until 1933, on which more in a moment, the list of German atrocities was no worse than that of most other countries. There were even times when things German were held up as examples for others to follow. The rude, but honest and courageous, tribesmen and tribeswomen the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about. The flourishing cities of northern and southern Germany during the middle ages and the Renaissance. Luther and the Reformation first ridding the Church of much accumulated mumbo-jumbo and then forcing it to reform itself. The German Aufklaerung (Enlightenment) and its contribution to world literature. “Athens on the Spree” (Berlin from about 1800 on).
The list does not end there. It also includes the modern German university system, the house of whose founder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, my wife and I went to visit the other day. German science, and medicine (from about 1860 to 1933). The best organized, most efficient, and least dishonest civil service and judiciary (during the same period). For those who care about such things, the most powerful, army the world had ever seen (ditto). I happen to own a replica of a 1903 Sears and Roebuck catalogue containing descriptions and drawings of thousands of products. Leafing through it, one cannot escape the impression that anything German was considered best. Including something known as a Heidelberg belt; a battery-operated device into which one sticks one’s penis by a of a cure for impotence.
Enter the Nazis. They too had, as perhaps their most central objective, building eine heile Welt, a clean and healthy world. One cleansed of democracy, an imported system which was not only slow and cumbersome but, by putting quantity ahead of quality, went against what Hitler personally saw as the eternal laws of nature. One cleansed both of communism and of the harshest, most exploitative, forms of capitalism. One cleansed of all sorts of incurably diseased people who were to be given a Genadentodt (mercy-death). Once cleansed of “degenerate” art which, deliberately designed to weaken the human spirit, produced not masterpieces but unseemly monsters. One cleansed of feminism, the product of the twisted brains of “unnatural” women who did not or could have children and were effectively eugenic duds. And cleansed of Jews, the race whose members united in their own persons all these bad things and then some.
Years ago, visiting the former concentration camp at Dachau, I came across a sign, not far away. I paraphrase. Visitor, it said, do not forget that our town, Dachau existed a thousand years before anyone ever heard of Hitler, National Socialism, concentration camps, etc. So please do not judge us solely through the prism of those terrible twelve years. Fair enough, many people would say. Me included.
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The problem is that it does not work that way. To be sure, the Nazi years only took up a tiny part of German history. Arguably, given that until 1871 a political entity called Germany did not exist, it is not even the most important part. Yet it is this tiny part that has taken over, forming a kind of telescope through which both the past and the future are seen. Almost without exception, works originating in, or dealing with, the pre-1945 period raise the question as to whether A, B, C or D was or was not a forerunner of, or at least had some affinities with, the extreme evil that was National Socialism. Almost without exception, those originating in, or dealing with, the post-1945 period are judged by whether or not they show traces of that dread disease. Do I have to add that anything originating during the Nazi period itself is bad by definition? Outside Germany, the situation is even worse. Out of every ten works on German history that are published in English, perhaps nine deal with the Nazi period. As has been said, whenever two persons argue for more than a few minutes at least one of them is going to call the other a Nazi.
Living in Germany, even for a short period as I do, one sees the consequences all around. I do not mean just the countless museums, exhibitions, memory sites, day tours, and the like that focus on the years from 1933 to 1945. I mean the kind of day-to-day politics in which the Left, taking the high ground, accuses the Right of being Nazis and the Right is constantly forced to defend itself against that accusation. Fear of being considered Nazi also does much to explain German foreign policy. Starting with the relationship between Berlin and Europe’s other capitals and ending with the way refugees are treated. Aliis licet, non tibi; what others are allowed to do, you, for historical reasons so obvious that they do not have to be pointed out, cannot.
Of my own acquaintances, not one is old enough to have reached maturity during those terrible days. The oldest is 86; how old he was back in 1945 you can figure out for yourself. He is a former East German, retired professor of economics who loves cats, likes gardening, and has a good sense of humor. He is also a kind man with whom my wife and I have enjoyed the best of relationships for almost twenty years. Others are much younger. Often so much so that not only they but their parents and even grandparents too cannot have done anything wrong.
Thus the Nazi attempt to create a wholesome word resulted in the latter’s opposite. Not only are Germans tainted, but practically all of them who are adults realize it. And will likely remain tainted to the end of days.