GERMANY: Hunter & Hunted

An old man, a recorder of hate and love and death, sits in the pale California sunshine, chasing through the shadows of his own heart a quarry of monstrous guilt. A half-century ago, on a vacation, he crossed Lake Constance, and remembers that the Swiss shore seemed like a part of the great world, as his home was not. There was a taint (he thinks now) in that feeling; and in Lübeck, his home, more than a taint.

“We lived in the Gothic Middle Ages—and I am thinking not only of the skyline with its painted towers, gates and walls . . . the crooked, haunted-looking alleys. … In the atmosphere itself something had clung of … the hysteria of the dying Middle Ages, something of latent spiritual epidemic. It’s a strange thing to say about a sensibly sober, modern commercial city, but it was conceivable that a Children’s Crusade might suddenly erupt there—in short, an anciently neurotic substratum was perceptible.”

Thomas Mann, the greatest living German writer, is examining Germany’s war guilt. He can do what neither Edmund Burke nor Nürnberg’s Robert H. Jackson dared—indict a whole people. The evil that lay beneath the Wehrmacht, and the Nazi Party, and the factories, endures. The victors, who underestimated and misunderstood the evil, cannot extirpate it by battle, or military rule or reparations, or trial & punishment. They cannot even limit it until they understand it. So Thomas Mann, now a U.S. citizen, has written of “Germany and the Germans,” in the current Yale Review.

“Arrogant Provincialism.” Though his indictment is deeper and more damning than Jackson’s, much of Mann’s evidence against Germany conies from the experience of Thomas Mann, hunter and hunted, who scorns the unconscious Pharisaism of many German expatriates:

“To play the part of the judge, to curse and damn his own people in compliant agreement with the incalculable hatred that they have kindled . . . that too would hardly befit one of German origin. For anyone who was born a German does have something in common with German destiny and German guilt. . . . The truths that one tries to utter about one’s people can only be the product of self-examination.”

In his Lübeck youth Mann (now 70) recalls a Germany which, while pretending to universalism, actually lived in “arrogant provincialism . . . the modern nationalistic form, of the old German world-seclusiveness and melancholy world-unfitness . . . cosmopolitanism in a nightcap.”

Thus introverted for centuries, the Germans never really participated in the political and social changes of Western civilization. “The relation of the German to the world is abstract and mystical, that is, musical. . . . The Germans have given the Western world perhaps not its most beautiful, socially uniting, but certainly its deepest, more significant music.*. . . Such musicality of soul is paid for dearly in another sphere—the political, the sphere of human companionship.

“Martin Luther, a gigantic incarnation of the German spirit, was exceptionally musical. I frankly confess that I do not love him. … He was a liberating hero—but in the German style, for he knew nothing of liberty. I am not speaking now of the liberty of the Christian but of political liberty, the liberty of the citizen—this liberty not only left him cold, but its impulses and demands were deeply repugnant to him. . . . Luther hated the peasant revolt which … if successful, would have given a happier turn to German history, a turn toward liberty. . . . He told the princes that they could now gain the kingdom of heaven by slaughtering the peasant beasts. Luther, the German man of the people, bears a good share of responsibility for the sad ending of this first attempt at a German revolution.

Germany v. Europe. “The German concept of liberty was always directed outward; it meant the right to be German, only German and nothing else and nothing beyond that. It was a concept of protest, of self-centered defense against everything that tended to limit and restrict national egotism. . . . The German idea of liberty is racial and anti-European; it is always very near the barbaric if it does not actually erupt into open and declared barbarism, as in our days.”

Mann then contrasts the European and the German approach to politics. “The peoples born and qualified for politics instinctively know how to guard the unity of conscience and action, of spirit and power, at least subjectively. They pursue politics as an art of life and of power that cannot be entirely freed from a strain of vitally useful evil, but that never quite loses sight of the higher, the idea, human decency, and morality. . . .

“[This] the German regards as hypocrisy. He was not born to get along with life … he regards politics as nothing but falsehood, murder, deceit, and violence, as something completely and one-sidedly filthy, and if worldly ambition prompts him to take up politics, he pursues it in the light of this philosophy. . . . Since he thinks it is unalloyed evil, he believes he has to be a devil to pursue it. …

“If it did not sound like a detestable condonation, it might be said that [the Germans] committed their crimes for dreamy idealism. . . . This story should convince us of one thing: that there are not two Germanys … it is quite impossible for one born there simply to renounce the wicked, guilty Germany and to declare: ‘I am the good, the noble, the just Germany in the white robe; I leave it to you to exterminate the wicked one.’ Not a word in all that I have just said about Germany, or tried to indicate, came out of alien, cool, objective knowledge; it is all within me, I have been through it all.”

Mann would not be Mann (or German) if, having written this, he did not take a step back to view himself as critic. “The tendency toward selfcriticism, often to the point of self-disgust and self-execration, is thoroughly German. . . .” As an example of German selfcriticism, Mann recalls: “In conversation, at least, Goethe went so far as to wish for a German Diaspora. ‘Like the Jews,’ he said, ‘the Germans must be transplanted and scattered over the world. … In order to develop the good that lies in them. . . .’ ”

They Wish to be Loved. That the Germans will be allowed to scatter, Mann does not believe. He hopes (without much confidence) that a world state may develop and that the German, who never could fit into the pattern of the nations, will become a peaceable citizen of the world.

“In the seclusiveness of the German, there was always so much longing for companionship; indeed at the bottom of the very loneliness that made him wicked lay always the wish to love, the wish to be loved. In the end the German misfortune is only the paradigm of the tragedy of human life. And the grace that Germany so sorely needs all of us need.”

*Bomb-ravaged Berlin is having a brilliant opera season this year. Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Magic Flute, Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, Otello and Rigoletto, Smetana’s Bartered Bride, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West, Hindemith’s Cardillac and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. There will be no Wagner this winter.