SPIEGEL Special -- The Germans How Germans See Themselves
Did the Coen brothers get it right in their cult-classic The Big Lebowski? The Germans as a bunch of nihilists, crybabies who believe in nosing, the self-mutilating, rodent-owning, ransom-hunters who cannot even get the ground rules of kidnapping right and cut the little toe off one of their own gang members to send in the post. Of course, we would never believe in cultural stereotyping if it didn't contain some truth, if the Germans didn't somehow accept their own stereotypes as the head-hanging baddies who listen to car-crash music and end up getting the wrong briefcase with the dirty undies inside.
The German self-image is a complex, painful mess of contradictions which is often misunderstood, even by themselves. Sixty years after the end of the war, five times the duration of the Third Reich, the signs are that this has begun to change. The pangs of reunification, the economic downturn, the rediscovery of their own wartime trauma, as well as the larger European issues of multiculturalism and integration, have all contributed to a new kind of self-awareness. All those life-essential ingredients of identity such as language, home, belonging and nationhood are back in focus. What does it mean to be German in the 21st century?
The Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, and his opposite number, Angelika Merkel, are practicing new vocabulary like values, patriotism and "I love my country" as if they cannot quite get the pronunciation right yet.
In Britain, the view of Germany brought about, however accidental, by Prince Harry's gaffe -- wearing the swastika with the flag of the new Berlin republic -- seems like a more symptomatic misunderstanding of history. Late last year, Downing Street may have prefaced this event when the European secretary, Denis McShane, urged the Germans to forget their obsession with Hitler and move on, to which the German ambassador, Thomas Matussek, protested that the Germans can never forget.
Is the past really a weakness?
Perhaps Downing Street still believes the Fawlty Towers version of "Don't mention the war." The subtext of the London message could be that the past is a weakness, that history prevents a German sense of adventure. Lighten up, in other words. But if the Germans have begun to move towards a new understanding of themselves and the world, it is not by entering into another messianic global enterprise. The war in Iraq has deep resonance in German public thinking. More than any other people, they understand that no progress can ever be made without reference to the past, and perhaps this will turn out to be the greatest German contribution to the 21st century and a new concept of global conscience. Prince Harry may have done us all a favor by reminding us of the demonized corporate logo of Nazism, but can we trust the global corporate logos that we live with now?
The problem for Germans is that they have become numbed into believing that they cannot speak up for the rest of the world. Since World War II, they have been keen to demonstrate to themselves as much as to international onlookers that they despise the traditional, inherited values of nationhood which led to the great disaster of the Nazi era.
A mass grave of feelings
They dismantled the idea of fatherland in a kind of rage against the inside. They have lived with an inspired mistrust of longing for anything but the most remote places like Connemara and Lake Titicaca. The German novelist Wilhelm Genazino describes the postwar German society as "a mass grave of feelings."
"No direction home," sang Bob Dylan. Germans invested so much in suppressing their emotions that they forfeited all homing instincts. Those unmeasurable cradle-virtues became extinct, anachronistic, like an obsolete domestic appliance. Their dreamlife was substituted by new low-fat versions of identity offered by Ikea and other consumer dreams. Or is it the football team you support? Maybe the whole idea of belonging has simply shifted to the products you consume, the model of car you drive.
Maybe Heimat has now been replaced by a new brand loyalty. At the time of reunification, Guenther Grass could not even speak the word Germany, it gave him a furry feeling in his mouth. But was he not officially denying something which he had been doing himself for years, reasserting the nation through language, through writing? What makes national self-image such a potent dream is that it can never be fulfilled. It is constantly being reshaped by cultural expression, by tabloids, by government press secretaries. Home for Germans is not some recurring hologram of Fachwerk villages. Every country, and every human being, has a kitsch room, but there is something deeper which the Germans have yet to rediscover. Their best way home is through a vital new mix of cultural energy, through the new art of "Generation Berlin."
Even the graffiti and the scratch marks on the S-Bahn windows in Berlin represent a search for belonging.
Up to the present, they have lived with a forbidden identity. The unresolved loneliness of being German forced them to live beyond spontaneity, beyond sadness, beyond any collective self-awareness other than their perpetrator status. All of this became part of the courageous rebuilding of the German conscience, but it has also given them the cold, un-dead features of a people in fear of making mistakes, a society without qualities which could never trust itself again.
A taboo against relativism
Perhaps this is also the German strength. In the eighties, historians in Germany fought each other to establish a taboo against relativism that would allow comparisons between Nazi war crimes to atrocities elsewhere, such as what happened to the Native American Indians. It was vital to fully acknowledge German history without caveat.
There could be no comparisons with Nazism, but that should not exclude comparison with the future. This warning from the past may be more essential now than ever before, otherwise history really is a weakness.
The Germans should celebrate their newfound openness to the world. It is the key to our understanding of identity in the global landscape, that your home is no longer purely a place on the map, but a collection of cultural experiences, a place in the imagination. Of course, the Germans are afraid of terrorism and can be fed on fear again like any other country. But they are in a unique position to assert the more positive, inclusive concept of multiple-identity and multiple homeland which characterizes the generosity of the European spirit. European membership for countries like Turkey may be the best alternative to pre-emptive war.
For this to happen, Germans must also stop denying their own sense of belonging.
They have to believe that Hitler is dead and begin to trust their own feelings, that basic hunch-science of human instincts. One of the prerequisites of creativity is that you cannot fear mistakes. There is a suspicion that German stagnation is the result of too much memory, that it has led to a blind spot in which their historical inheritance often compels them into a self-mutilating, sack-cloth vigil in which they are obliged to become the world's headhangers.
The past is not a weakness, however. Not, at least, when you read authors like W.G. Sebald and Bernhard Schlink. Not when you see the brass cobbles on the pavements of Berlin, remembering the disappearance of Jews. Sixty years later, the past should be a strength, a source of courage, a source of assurance that we will never repeat the same mistakes. The German gift of self-doubt should help to bring us to a place beyond the principles of narrow self-interest, it should question the ground rules of our present world order and rescue us from any new colonial, isolationist form of world dominance which has begun to polarize the world all over again today. The Germans cannot be nihilists. They cannot believe in nothing. We must use the German past as a positive force to create a true global conscience.
