Baghdad is aflame, and before this war is over, it may well be in ruins. The debate over what the damage signifies -- over who is responsible and whether the force expended was justified -- will doubtless continue far longer than the war itself. So it has been in Germany, where the smoldering ruins of German cities symbolized not just the Third Reich’s well-deserved defeat, but also the plight of German civilians, both guilty and innocent.
Until recently, it could be argued, the gaps and fissures left by war defined not only the urban landscape, but public memory of the assault. Still, Germans have, over the past few decades, paid generous homage to wartime suffering, including their own. In the capital city of Berlin, the jagged profile of the Gedächtniskirche (Memorial Church), shattered by bombs, has been left untouched as a perpetual reminder of war’s costs. Dresden, whose firebombing was memorialized by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, for decades kept its Frauenkirche in ruins as a peace monument. Since German reunification in 1990, rebuilding efforts in these two eastern cities have been pursued with vigor. But the country’s physical renaissance has been accompanied by a strange psychic fallout. Even as Berlin remakes itself into a 21st-century showplace of skyscrapers and museums, and Dresden painstakingly recreates its Baroque heart brick by brick, the issue of German victimization has exploded more forcefully into popular consciousness.
It is unlikely that this new introspection will entirely replace the ongoing cultural preoccupation with the Holocaust and other German atrocities. But the current debate, fueled by several new books and an amplifying media response, does represent a significant nod toward the perspective of Germany’s vanishing World War II generation. Interestingly, and perhaps necessarily, given the complicated politics of postwar Germany, three of the works are by authors whose credentials as ex-post-facto “good Germans” are unquestionable; a fourth is by an Englishman. If this is revisionism, it comes, as it must, with a politically correct imprimatur.
Anthony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Viking Press, 2002), recently translated into German, details the mass rapes and other war crimes committed against the German people by the Red Army as it captured Berlin and avenged its own massive losses. Another history, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-45 (The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-45, Propyläen Verlag, 2002) by the Holocaust scholar Jörg Friedrich, appropriates Holocaust terminology to describe the deadly bombing of German cities. It has not yet been published in the United States but has provoked considerable comment both in Germany and in Britain.
Two other key texts, also controversial in Germany, are now available to American readers. The Allied air attacks, and specifically the presumed failure of German literature to represent them, are the subjects of the first part of W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (Random House, 2003), a set of posthumously published essays. The Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s Crabwalk (Harcourt, 2003), a historical novel, has a somewhat different target in its sights: It explores the aftermath of the January 1945 sinking of a German refugee ship by a Soviet submarine, and, by extension, die Vertreibung, or expulsion, of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe.
Both a novelist and literary critic, Sebald was born in 1944 -- far too late to have been implicated in Nazi crimes -- and spent most of his adult life in England. He died in an automobile accident in 2001. His novels intertwine the landscapes of England with fragmentary reminiscences of wartime Europe, and “document” fictional characters and incidents with black-and-white photographs. His narratives cede to internal digressions, stories within stories, a complex web of interlocking tales.
Sebald has written sympathetically about the travails of German Jews. In Austerlitz (Random House, 2001), for example, the central character is a survivor of the Kindertransport in search of his past, and The Emigrants (1992; with an English edition from New Directions, 1996) features Jewish characters who are similarly displaced. In The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (Routledge, 1999), Ernestine Schlant, an emeritus professor of German at Montclair State University, praises Sebald as one of the few postwar German authors who have managed to give authentic voice to Jewish suffering.
So Sebald was particularly well placed to redirect attention to the sufferings of non-Jewish Germans. He launched the first fusillade with his 1997 Zurich lectures, which appear, in revised form, as the essay “Air War and Literature” in On the Natural History of Destruction. His central argument in this rambling text is that German novelists, in the grip of a taboo, largely avoided discussing the toll of the Allied air campaign, which claimed 600,000 civilian lives.
In his book’s foreword, Sebald harshly calls Germany “a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition.” In German writing from 1930 to 1950, he says, “we are always looking and looking away at the same time.” (That is not so different from Schlant’s argument, though she is more concerned with the German failure to look clearly at the Holocaust.) The result, Sebald contends, is the creation of literary works “marked by a half-consciousness or false consciousness designed to consolidate the extremely precarious position of those writers in a society that was morally almost entirely discredited.”
While citing some exceptions, Sebald pre-emptively dismisses most postwar “literature of the ruins” by writers such as Heinrich Böll (though he likes one long-suppressed Böll work, The Angel Was Silent). Still, whatever the gaps in the literature, Sebald overstates his case. He declares, for example, that the air war “left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the public consciousness.” That seems patently untrue, even if that pain didn’t always find literary expression.
In fact, Germans have had a long tradition of seeing themselves, both with justification and without, as victims of the Versailles Treaty, hyperinflation and unemployment, the Nazis, Allied air attacks, the brutal Russian advance, and even de-Nazification efforts. In Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton University Press, 2003), Konrad H. Jarausch, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Michael Geyer, of the University of Chicago, talk about what they call the phenomenon of “selective perception,” which allowed Germans to ignore their own participation in “military killing, racial genocide, or slave labor” during World War II. Instead, the authors detected a “prevalence of the victimization perspective in German recollections of wartime and postwar chaos.” That perspective has persisted, at least among older Germans.
I encountered it just over three years ago in a conversation with a group of German train passengers. When I mentioned that I was visiting to report on the Jewish Museum and the planned Holocaust memorial in Berlin, one elderly woman, a native of the former East Germany, asked me angrily why only Jewish losses were being commemorated. Hadn’t the war, and especially the bombing of German cities, been ruinous for the German people as well? she asked. Hadn’t she, too, been made to suffer?
Her sentiments were hardly unique. A recent American television report on German opposition to war against Iraq adverted to the collective memory of the flattening of German cities -- a memory transmitted through stories and pictures to those too young to have seen it firsthand. What Sebald calls “an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression” operated only sporadically at best.
It is also difficult to second either Sebald’s outrage at the “indiscriminate” bombing of cities -- a tactic employed earlier, if less effectively, by the German Luftwaffe in England and elsewhere -- or his assessment of its utility. Here, again, his case suffers from overstatement. Sebald cites bombing critics as saying that “despite incessant air raids the morale of the German population was obviously unbroken.” That contravenes the testimony of observers such as Victor Klemperer, who escaped imminent deportation to a death camp only because of the firebombing of Dresden. According to Klemperer’s account in I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 (Random House, 1999), the leveling of German cities gave the lie to incessant Nazi victory propaganda and sapped support (finally!) for the regime.
Even granting the terrible superfluity of the destruction -- by 1945, when Dresden was virtually leveled, the Allied victory was already certain -- there is still the issue of retributive justice. Sebald himself, in a postscript to the lectures that seems to undercut much of his argument, admits that “we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived.”
The entire literary career of Günter Grass, beginning with his 1959 classic The Tin Drum, has reflected his preoccupation with German history. His bent for panoramic narratives and the juxtaposition of memoir, history, and fiction has also animated such recent works as Too Far Afield (1995; first American edition, Harcourt, 2000) and My Century (Harcourt, 1999). In deference to the shadow Auschwitz cast over 20th-century Germany, Grass even objected, unpopularly, to rapid German reunification.
So Grass, too, is well positioned to take on the issue of German wartime losses. Grass’s own family were refugees from Danzig (now Gdansk, in Poland), and he has told interviewers that his mother was raped by Russian soldiers. Even so, he approaches the topic of the expulsion somewhat gingerly. The central metaphor of Crabwalk is an analogue of Sebald’s notion of simultaneously looking and looking away. The method, says Grass’s narrator, is “to sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways, and thereby working my way forward fairly rapidly.”
In fact, Grass -- or rather his surrogate, Paul Pokriefke -- keeps circling through time, as though afraid to alight on a single moment, in a manner reminiscent of Sebald’s own discursive texts. The historical incident around which Crabwalk pivots is the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea in January 1945. Many of the estimated 9,000 dead in this greatest of all maritime disasters were refugees from East Prussia -- among the millions of Germans either expelled from their homes or fleeing ahead of the brutal Soviet advance.
Pokriefke was born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack. Having left East Germany before the construction of the Berlin Wall, he is now a journalist. And, overcoming his initial reluctance, he is trying to reconstruct the events of that all-but-forgotten night. “No one wanted to hear the story,” he complains, echoing Sebald. “For decades the Gustloff and its awful fate were taboo.” It is the character of Grass himself, “the old man,” and Pokriefke’s mother, Tulla (a character in two previous Grass novels), who urge him on.
Crabwalk interweaves three main threads: the life of Wilhelm Gustloff, a real-life Nazi organizer, and his Jewish assassin, David Frankfurter; the fate of the Wilhelm Gustloff, originally a cruise ship used for the Nazi vacation program “Strength Through Joy”; and the tale of an Internet battle that concerns them both. One of the participants in the Internet fight turns out to be the divorced Pokriefke’s neo-Nazi son, Konrad, bringing history full circle. The book’s violent climax seems contrived. But this remains Grass’s most accessible novel in years, with a colloquial style and enough plot momentum to keep readers absorbed.
In his historical assessments, however, Grass remains wary. While leading his characters through the labyrinthine past, the author, crablike, sidesteps precise answers about the apportionment of guilt. Are Germans, or at least these German refugees, more sinned against than sinning? Grass doesn’t quite say, though he does elicit our sympathy for them. All he is sure of is that the debate over “the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up” will continue. “It never ends,” he writes. “Never will it end.”
Still, fashions in guilt do change, and such metamorphoses seem to occur in Germany with surprising swiftness. An American friend visiting Dresden in 1992 was taken by his German host to see the ruins of the Frauenkirche, which, unlike the Gedächtniskirche, was finally slated for reconstruction. My friend asked pointedly whether there were similar plans to rebuild Dresden’s synagogue. No, his guide responded matter-of-factly; after all, there were no Jews left in Dresden.
Seven years later, a different historical consciousness had emerged, marked by an extraordinary televised fund-raising appeal. A voice-over somberly declared, “The destruction of Dresden began with this building” -- and a photograph of the old synagogue, burned by the Nazis on Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938), flashed on the screen. The new synagogue opened in 2001, on the 63rd anniversary of its destruction. That, to me, far more than the latest literary cataloging of German losses, counts as progress.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 32, Page B0
