Germany Toward Unity

The profound and icy mistrust which the German arouses whenever he gets any power into his hands is the aftermath of that vast horrible fear with which, for long centuries, Europe dreaded the wrath of the Teutonic blond beast.

— FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The 16 million citizens of East Germany will be $70 billion richer this week, at least on paper. Even before the day of reckoning this past Sunday, crowds had been standing patiently in line to complete the paper work for converting their ostmark savings into deutsche marks at a rate of 1 to 1 for up to 6,000 marks, and 2 to 1 for anything beyond that. On Sunday itself, cash was being handed out at some 10,000 bank branches, police stations and temporary disbursing points. The vast shift in wealth is part of the price of German unification.

As of that day of economic union between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic, an entire society will be transformed. After nearly a half-century of communism, East Germans are now living under West German rules on corporate and union activities, welfare and insurance. Although there is still no agreement on important details of the political and military future, the economic merger reflects a historic moment that until recently few people imagined they would ever live to see: the peaceful rejoining of Germany. Before long, the united country will take West Germany’s official name, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the G.D.R. will formally be abolished.

The merger process is not proving to be easy — and no one expected it to be. The most nettlesome outstanding issue is the military future of Central Europe, with Moscow balking at the West’s insistence that a united Germany remain a full member of NATO. The West has offered substantial inducements: no NATO troops in East Germany, the continuance of Soviet forces there for a time at German expense, plus substantial German aid to the Soviet economy.

On the domestic side, questions remain on how to raise the East to the West’s level of prosperity and how to smooth the joining of different economic and social systems. There are arguments about where the new capital should be: in the imperial — and Nazi — capital of Berlin or in democratic but provincial Bonn.

Whatever the obstacles, the conservative governments of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Bonn and Prime Minister Lothar de Maziere in East Berlin are pressing full speed ahead. Kohl in particular is determined, as he puts it, “not to miss the unification train, which may not come another time.” With a large majority in both Germanys supporting merger — even though there are some reservations as to speed and cost — the Chancellor is planning to hold all- German elections in early December.

All the economic problems can be negotiated among the Germans themselves, but among their neighbors, unification has aroused quite different concerns. Will a united Germany mean the rebirth of dreaded words like Lebensraum and Drang nach Osten? In short, will a united Germany turn nationalistic, threaten its neighbors and try to dominate Europe? “Today the Germans want to think of the future,” says Fritz Stern, Seth Low professor of history at Columbia University, “but their neighbors are thinking of the past.”

On the evidence of the past two or three decades, which is all the evidence % needed on most other political questions, such anxieties seem almost irrational. Germany was mostly united back in 1949, when the U.S., British and French zones of military occupation — 70% of Germany’s 1945 territory and 72% of the nation’s population — were merged to form the Federal Republic, with its headquarters in Bonn. Economically, the figures are even more impressive: the East German economy that now has been joined to that of West Germany forms only one-tenth of the combined total. During those past 40 years, the world witnessed cruel wars in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Nicaragua, but the mostly united Germans caused no trouble to anyone.

Yet even their recent peacefulness can apparently be held against them. “The Federal Republic is unique among the great powers in ((that)) it came to life without a drop of blood being shed in its birth,” Arthur Miller wrote in the New York Times. “No German soldier can say, ‘I fought for democracy’ . . . What Germans lack now is the consecration by blood of their democratic state . . .” But whose blood should the Germans have shed in their “consecration,” and what would Miller say if any German were foolish enough to offer such a gory theory of “democratic faith”?

Part of this self-induced anxiety about German unification derives from the widespread but questionable theory that different nations have different national characters, that the Germans, because of their history or their upbringing or whatever, are both aggressive and docile, robot-like people who love order and discipline, work and war. Like the stereotypes of the snobbish English or the immoral French or the crass Americans, such caricatures are generally created by one’s enemies, often in times of war. “There is such a thing as national character, but it changes,” says William Manchester, a Wesleyan University adjunct professor of history and author of The Arms of Krupp. “And the German national character has changed. The Germans are united by language, by culture. And young Germany — which is most of Germany today — is also united by a horror of the Second and Third Reichs.”

The real origin of the suspicions about Germany’s future is, of course, its dark past, namely the crimes committed during the twelve-year reign of Adolf Hitler. Hitler, after all, did not commit those crimes by himself; other Germans piloted the bombers over Warsaw, and other Germans operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Though the majority of today’s Germans were not even born when those crimes were committed, the nation remains tainted by the Nazi legacy that endures in the world’s memory.

While millions of people know about the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich, it seems all too widely forgotten that German history did not begin in 1933. Nor did it begin in 1871, when Bismarck created the autocratic Second Reich. German history goes back more than 2,000 years, to a murky era when a variety of Germanic tribes lived in a land that, according to Tacitus, “either bristles with forests or reeks with swamps.” Even then, German tribesmen had a reputation as fearsome fighters, and it was immensely important to the future history of Europe that they annihilated three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, leaving the Rhine as the frontier between the Roman and Germanic worlds. But it was the Romans who originally invaded those forests to “pacify” the Germans, as they had pacified Gaul and Britain.

The Germanic tribes began moving into Roman territory during the 3rd century, not as the “barbarian” invaders of popular legend but as immigrants and refugees. Even the Visigoths, who conquered Rome in A.D. 410, subjecting it, in Gibbon’s majestic words, to the “licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia,” had originally entered the empire peacefully, and many had loyally served in the Roman army. The celebrated sacking of Rome was primarily a humiliation, nothing like the all-out Roman destruction of Carthage, Thebes and Jerusalem.

The idea of restoring the Roman empire three centuries later inspired Charlemagne to voyage to Rome in A.D. 800 and have himself crowned by the Pope. Both Germany and France claim the Frankish leader, for he governed from Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), and the territory under his rule rather closely resembled what is today the European Community. Not long after his death, however, his empire was divided among three grandsons.

While France and Britain developed centralized monarchies in the late Middle Ages, the German empire remained a crazy quilt of kingdoms, duchies, bishoprics, free cities and other flotsam. In the late 13th century, the imperial crown came into the hands of a Swiss family named Habsburg, but the Habsburgs’ only real power and wealth came from their family possessions in Austria and Bohemia; the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, a concept that exercised a magic attraction in the Middle Ages, had about as much authority as the United Nations has today.

And then in 1517, the political divisions also became religious — and correspondingly bloodier. An obscure monk named Martin Luther nailed to the church door in Wittenberg his 95 theses against the Roman Church’s sale of indulgences, partial pardons for souls in purgatory. The Lutheran faith, subsequently known as Protestantism, spread rapidly across northern Germany. Then, in the fratricidal ordeal known as the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), the French, Swedes and other nations joined in playing out their political and religious rivalries on German soil. Much of Germany was devastated and the starving survivors reduced to misery. In one of his best plays, Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht sketched the scene: “The religious war has lasted 16 years, and Germany has lost half its inhabitants. Those who are spared in battle die by plague. Over once blooming countryside, hunger rages. Towns are burned down. Wolves prowl the empty streets . . .”

Gordon Craig, professor emeritus of history at Stanford University and author of The Germans, sums up this tragic period: “The Germans from earliest times were a free and independent people, and dreadful things happened to them, which inhibited those qualities and induced others. After the Thirty Years’ War, habits of authoritarianism and dependence crept into the behavior of average Germans. One result is what one German writer has called the ‘retarded nation.’ The nation never did have the opportunity to get a political education, as in the English Enlightenment or the American Enlightenment.”

The feebleness of the Habsburg suzerainty over fragmented Germany inspired not only the aggressiveness of France but also that of a newcomer — Prussia. Originally a Baltic tribe, the Prussians were conquered and Christianized in a 13th century “crusade” by the Order of Teutonic Knights, but only in 1525 was the remote duchy of Prussia acquired through a marriage by the Hohenzollerns, the family that served as electors of Brandenburg. Brandenburg- Prussia was a rather bleak and impoverished land, its capital, Berlin, little more than a dusty garrison town. But its ruling Hohenzollern family was shrewd and single-minded in building up its wealth, its holdings and its army. When King Frederick the Great acquired the throne in 1740, just as Maria Theresa became Empress of Austria, he ruthlessly attacked her and seized the prosperous province of Silesia. Maria Theresa fought two bitter and unsuccessful wars of revenge, then shamelessly joined Prussia and Russia in partitioning Poland. Frederick thus put together for the first time the various Hohenzollern holdings from East Prussia to the Rhine.

Frederick’s Prussia claimed with some justice to be a major power in Europe, but his successors lacked his many talents, and when the French once again appeared on the horizon, Prussia ignominiously collapsed before Napoleon on the battlefield at Jena. Napoleon finally abolished the moribund Holy Roman Empire in 1806, keeping the title Emperor for himself. He seized all German territory west of the Elbe and created a French-dominated Confederation of the Rhine, with his brother Jerome as King of Westphalia. As Napoleon was retreating from Moscow in 1812, however, the repeatedly beaten Germans rose up again to fight what they still call the Wars of Liberation. An allied army defeated Napoleon at Leipzig, drove him back to Paris and then into exile.

The Europe that was reconstituted at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 included a new German Confederation, headed by the Habsburgs of Austria, but also containing 38 other kingdoms, duchies, free cities and such. It had a great culture — this was the age of Beethoven and Schubert, Goethe and Hegel — but it was hardly a nation. The very idea of German unification was nothing more than an abstract concept, a dream of liberal intellectuals.

The last French invasion was the invasion of another idea: revolution. When Paris mobs overthrew King Louis-Philippe in 1848, radicals and nationalists all over Europe took heart. The Italians rose against their Habsburg overlords; and even in dormant Germany, crowds began marching through the streets of Berlin, Vienna, Dresden. The armies of Germany’s princes eventually suppressed these demonstrations, but not before liberals organized a constituent assembly, which met in Frankfurt and drafted an all-German constitution. The legislators decided that they could put their ideas into practice only by offering the crown of a united Germany to King Frederick William IV of Prussia. But he considered himself King of Prussia by the grace of God, and scorned any crown offered him by people or parliament.

The members of the confederation still met in Frankfurt, and the Habsburg delegates still exerted unofficial leadership, but the young Prussian delegate determined that this must be changed. “Before very long,” Bismarck wrote back to Berlin, ‘we shall have to fight for our lives against Austria . . . because the progress of events in Germany has no other issue.” Prussia’s King William I appointed Bismarck Minister-President in 1862, and within four years, Bismarck was ready for a showdown with Austria. Prussia’s chief of staff, Count Helmuth von Moltke, had revived the army of Frederick the Great, making it once again Europe’s best. Moltke attacked the Austrians and cut them to pieces. Germany’s three centuries of intermittent civil war between north and south, Protestant and Catholic, Hohenzollern and Habsburg, were now over.

Bismarck was convinced, and probably rightly, that France would never permit a united Germany, so he provoked Emperor Napoleon III into a misguided declaration of war. Moltke invaded France with 300,000 men, trapped the French at Sedan and captured the Emperor and 100,000 of his men. When an improvised government in Paris proclaimed the Third Republic and vowed to continue the war, Moltke insisted on besieging Paris. By now it seemed clear to the German princes who had followed Prussia into the war that their future lay in a united Germany under Prussian leadership. Bismarck artfully arranged to have William crowned Kaiser (Caesar) in January of 1871 in the palace of Versailles, that bastion of the French kings, while the hungry citizens of nearby Paris endured the Prussian siege.

For the next 20 years Bismarck used all his craft and guile to maintain the peace among Europe’s constantly maneuvering rulers. But his Reich was deeply undemocratic: he despised the legislators of the Reichstag, and was not responsible to them, but only to the Kaiser, whom he bullied and cajoled. Everyone expected that when the aged William finally died, his relatively liberal and high-minded son Frederick would lead the empire into a more enlightened era. But when William did die, in 1888, Frederick was already mortally ill with throat cancer, and so the throne soon passed to his temperamental and bellicose son William II, then 29, of whom his own mother once said, “My son will be the ruin of Germany.”

Unwilling to tolerate the domination of the 73-year-old Bismarck, William forced him out of office, took charge of military and diplomatic matters and left the rest to underlings. When a band of pro-Serbian nationalists assassinated the Austrian Crown Prince Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, all the great powers found themselves enmeshed in a net of commitments that almost guaranteed disaster. The Austrians declared war on Serbia. The Russians went to the defense of their fellow Slavs and the Germans to that of the Austrians. When the French mobilized, the Germans declared war on them, and when the Germans invaded Belgium, the British honored a commitment to defend Belgian neutrality.

Historians of the day spent a good deal of effort trying to demonstrate German “war guilt,” but in retrospect, it all seems more a tragedy of errors. The German strategy somewhat optimistically called for a bold sweep all the way to Paris and then an encirclement of the French defenders. But the French blocked the offensive at the Marne, within 30 miles of Paris. Then came the years-long horrors of trench warfare, with thousands of lives wasted for the capture of a few hundred feet of barbed wire and mud. Plus all the horrors that modern technology could add to the arts of combat: bombers, tanks, machine guns, poison gas. When it was over, four years later, more than 3 million German and Austro-Hungarians were dead, as well as 4.8 million of the Allies, including 126,000 Americans — not just numbers, but the best of a whole generation.

The German, Austrian and Russian empires disappeared. In Berlin the Socialists proclaimed from the balcony of the imperial palace the birth of what would be known to history as the Weimar Republic. Though still physically united — minus West Prussia, which was turned over to the newly independent Poland to give it a corridor to the sea — Germany was still divided against itself. Traditionalists in the army, business, the judiciary and the schools never believed in the republic at all. Right-wing extremists, including a young Austrian demagogue named Adolf Hitler, attempted coups in 1920 and 1923. Others sabotaged the political process by assassinations. A powerful Communist Party periodically staged strikes and street battles. The punitive peace treaty imposed at Versailles forced Germany to pay huge war damages. Out of that came the ruinous inflation of 1923, when the reichsmark plummeted to 4.2 trillion to the dollar, wiping out both the savings and the faith of the middle class.

Substantial U.S. aid helped the Weimar Republic in the late ’20s. But it was a fragile recovery, overseen by a badly splintered Reichstag and the octogenarian President Paul von Hindenburg, the losing commander in the war. When the Wall Street crash of 1929 set off a worldwide depression, Germany’s new prosperity crumbled. The number of unemployed soared from 1.5 million to almost 2.5 million in just the month of January 1930.

And a new voice was heard in the land, shouting that this was all the fault | of the “system,” of foreigners and Jews. “Germany, awake!” cried Adolf Hitler, and a frightened, impoverished and traumatized people began to listen. In private, the neurotic Hitler had a different view: “Brutality is respected. The people need wholesome fear. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.”

Hitler’s National Socialist Party, which had only 17,000 members in 1926, metastasized to 120,000 in 1929, to 1 million in 1930. Wealthy industrialists began contributing handsomely. In the Reichstag, the Nazis held an insignificant twelve seats until the elections of 1930. By 1932 they had 230 seats, the largest bloc in the Reichstag.

Central to the question of what went wrong is the question of whether Hitler’s rise to power was inevitable. Was there some fatal flaw in the history of Germany that predestined it to the swastika and the gas chamber? In one sense, everything that has happened may seem inevitable, simply because of the fact that it did happen. Yet it is extraordinary how narrowly Hitler triumphed, how many accidents and variables had to line up.

He still did not have a majority in 1932, and the constitution permitted President Hindenburg to name any Chancellor he wished, authorizing him to rule by a series of presidential decrees. The first time Hindenburg summoned Hitler and asked him to support a conservative regime headed by a dapper courtier named Franz von Papen, Hitler demanded full power for himself; Hindenburg not only refused but dressed Hitler down for lacking “chivalry.” In the last pre-Hitler elections in November of 1932, the Nazis lost strength, from 230 seats to 196. The party was an estimated $5 million in debt, unable to pay the storm troopers who fought its street battles. “The future looks dark and gloomy,” the Nazi party chief for Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary at the start of 1933. “All chances and hopes have quite disappeared.”

Then in the first week of January, chances and hopes almost miraculously returned. Hindenburg was persuaded to try the idea of a new conservative coalition: Hitler as Chancellor, Papen as Vice Chancellor, with only two other Nazis in the Cabinet. “In this way,” said the non-Nazi Minister of Economic Affairs, “we will box Hitler in.” A fatal misjudgment. A month later, the Reichstag was in flames, Hitler was persuading Hindenburg to suspend civil liberties, and the most terrible chapter in 20th century history was about to open.

So what is the lesson for 1990?

“There is no European country that hasn’t had its moments of trying to swallow up its neighbors, and I don’t think Germany is any worse than any other country,” says Carl Schorske, Princeton professor emeritus of history and author of Fin de Siecle Vienna. “Since the war, Germany has become rather European. In fact, even in the clues of personal behavior — the way people walk, the way people greet you, the way they speak their language — in all these things, there has been a tremendous change in Germany since the Nazis. I don’t see another Nazism on the horizon.”

“Germany is not a fixed concept or entity,” says Gordon Craig. “It’s something that has changed through the years. The history of Germany has been a long, slow, disappointed voyage toward the light, toward popular freedom. It started with the Enlightenment and was defeated. It tried to revive and was defeated by the way Germany was united in 1871. Finally, thanks to the utter destruction of Germany in 1945, it got another chance, and is now being realized. We should be celebrating reunification with at least two cheers.”

“The Germans are being given a second chance,” says Stern. “That is the rarest of gifts, and one can only hope that they will do justice to it. The Germans deserve friends who feel the burden of the past, as so many of them do, but who have compassion for a people who have had so rich and terrifying a history.”

In Germany itself, there are still observers capable of taking the future a little less seriously. One of the cleverest is the novelist and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whose latest book, Europe, Europe, includes a scene in which an American reporter visits Berlin in the year 2006. He finds himself in the midst of an environmental conference being conducted in the traditional Berlin style. “Masked demonstrators from the eco-anarchist milieu clashed with officers of the environmental police. A representative of the chemical industry, who made profuse ritual protestations of humility and reassurance, was shouted down.” Going to look at the onetime Berlin Wall, the reporter finds that it is now a nature preserve. “A unique biotope,” says an official. “There are wild rabbits here, hedgehogs, opossums.” The problem is that the environmentalists’ efforts to get rid of the Wall are being blocked by art historians. “They regard the Wall as a work of art,” the official complains, “because of the graffiti.” An expatriated Scot finally explains to the American that the “famous reunification” back in the 1990s was “all just coffee and cakes.” “Do you still remember how frightened of the Germans everyone was in the ’90s? And what’s happened? Nothing at all. Since then the German bogeyman has very quietly been laid to rest. We fell for it because we didn’t know the first thing about German history.”