Books: Dissection of the Germans

THIS GERMANY: THE STORY SINCE THE THIRD REICH by Rudolf Walter Leonhardt. 275 pages. New York Graphic Society. $7.95.

“The Germans find themselves in the same position as the French, the English, cats, or tobacco,” aphorizes Author Leonhardt. “To be hated for the right reasons is not always pleasant, but to be loved for the wrong ones can be downright embarrassing.” With that essentially negative prelude out of the way, the West German journalist launches into a wry and gritty explanation of what it is like to be a German today. Leonhardt feels that the Germans are among the world’s most unliked peoples, but his apologia gives a tough, fascinatingly qualified answer of yes to the question: “Do you like being a German?”

“Protest-Weary.” Leonhardt, 43, is eminently qualified to answer that question. As cultural editor of Hamburg’s prestigious weekly Die Zeit, he knows Germany inside out; seven years in England as a foreign correspondent taught him also to know it outside in. Published in Germany under the title X-Mal Deutschland (X-times Germany), this John Gunther-like look at both Germanys sold 300,000 copies and raised many a hackle—or wattle, as Leonhardt would put it.

In a series of curt, kaleidoscopic essays loosely tied to the framework of a trip Leonhardt made through Germany with a group of non-German friends, he discourses on anti-Semitism (“Since they murdered the Jews, the Germans are becoming more and more stupid”), the abominable German tourist (“His yearning to communicate assumes loudspeaker proportions as soon as he crosses the border”), the political decline of West German Protestantism (they are “protest-weary”). But Leonhardt is too thorough a journalist not to buttress his arguments with shocks of statistics and a quorum of quotes from sources as disparate as Madame de Staël (“Love of liberty has not been developed at all among the Germans”) and Thomas Wolfe (“How can one speak of Munich but to say it is a kind of German heaven?”).

“Tough Humility.” At the heart of Leonhardt’s book, though, lies the schizophrenia of a Germany divided—affluent and self-satisfied to the west of the Iron Curtain, lean and paranoid to the east. Earlier conquerors—the Romans, the armies of Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic French—dropped their Iron Curtains between north and south. Over the centuries there developed a dour, methodical, Protestant North, and an affable, beer-drinking, Catholic South. The East-West split, Leonhardt argues, has cut this historical Germany into quarters and generated an “Athens v. Sparta” complex that most Germans believe can only be cured by reunification.

Being a German today, he feels, means accepting not so much the disgrace of political separation, since Germany has been a nation for only 75 years in her long lifetime, but rather the pain of a sharp cultural rupture. “There we are,” Leonhardt concludes, “saddled again with a mission and not at all sure which one. Bulwark against the east? Bulwark against Leipzig and Dresden [both East German cities]? If it were a question of industry, thoroughness, organizing talent, we would have nothing to fear. But I am afraid the world is going to ask of us just what we have least of: the imagination to understand somebody else’s point of view and still preserve our own: the tough humility of the democrat.” That challenge, Leonhardt believes, makes being a German worthwhile.