The villa in Wannsee is the “final solution” house. It is where, on Jan. 20, 1942, members of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich meted out all the ways in which they planned to exterminate Jews from the planet. The pictures on the wall are gruesome; the minutes of the meeting, laid out in a display case, are stunningly matter of fact – the banality of evil under glass.
Fifty years since its unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, Germany is still full of these horrific places; the jarring, unavoidable reminders of the furies that consumed it and all of Europe at midcentury. In one of west Berlin’s choicest neighborhoods is a Jewish community center; a police guard bearing a machine gun stands out front, stationed there by law. In the now trendy neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg in east Berlin there is a police station that was a Jewish old-folks home before the war. During the war, a sign points out, Jews were sent to the camps from there.
However commonplace such sites are to Germans, they are very public symbols that the history of the Nazi era has not receded. Their neighbors won’t let it, and neither will the Germans themselves. The so-called 68 generation, those who came of age after the war, were the first to ask their parents what had happened, and who was responsible. The country hasn’t stopped asking since.
The shadow of the war hangs over virtually every aspect of German public life. Having sundered Europe twice in the 20th century, the Germans know they are consigned to live under a microscope, their every move scrutinized, every societal tic examined for signs that they might be getting crazy again. History’s burden is that no matter how peaceful, stable and prosperous the Germans become, there will always be doubts. “We are a society that will forever be on the couch, analyzing ourselves and being analyzed by others,” says Michael Wolffsohn, who teaches at Munich’s Bundeswehr University, Germany’s armed forces college.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and unification in 1990 has only made life more complicated. During the cold war, the Federal Republic was snug in the Western Alliance, a junior member in a group led by Washington. Unification raised expectations – and fears – of a more powerful Germany on a continent where the U.S. military presence is slowly receding. Now Germany is the biggest kid on the European block, and virtually everything it does is still seen through the prism of the war.
Consider the sudden influx of refugees from Bosnia into Germany in 1992 and 1993. It was the last thing Chancellor Helmut Kohl needed given the deep economic slump that followed unification. But for Germany to shut its borders to thousands of refugees from a war in which the Serbians were waging a policy of “ethnic cleansing” was simply unthinkable. So by the tens of thousands they came from Bosnia. Initially the German government set up camps in which to house them – and railed agonizingly about what to call them. It ultimately came up with a word that in English translates to “collection lodgings.” As Marc Fisher, a Washington Post correspondent, writes in a forthcoming book, the English-language press didn’t use that phrase, preferring instead “collection camps.” “The Bonn government went ballistic,” Fisher writes. “They had created a new word expressly to avoid any overlap with ‘concentration camps’.”
But language was the least of the country’s problems. The influx of immigrants helped spark a series of neo-Nazi attacks that spooked the world. German skinheads were bashing foreigners, holding marches and shouting “Sieg Heil.” Kohl, who considered them nothing more than a bunch of hooligans, stubbornly refused even any symbolic gesture toward the issue. No, he would not go to a funeral or a bombed-out foreigners’ residence – a huge public-relations blunder.
Finally, one of the key traits of postwar Germany clicked in: a basic political pragmatism. In May 1998 the legislature passed a law slashing the number of refugees allowed into the country each year. It also toughened laws aimed at neo-Nazi groups, curtailing their right to demonstrate and display Nazi symbols. Last year the number of neo-Nazi incidents was down by 45 percent compared with 1993. In last year’s federal election, the far-right Republican Party failed to win a seat in the legislature. The danger from extremists now seems remote.
But history’s burdens extend well beyond Germany’s borders. Germans know that anything they do in the conduct of foreign policy will draw fire from someone. In 1991, Germany surprised its allies in Washington and Europe by recognizing Croatia as an independent state before anyone else. Ever since, Bonn has heard the whispers that the decision accelerated the disaster in the former Yugoslavia, or, worse, that it was old-time-read Nazi – loyalties that drove the decision: a charge that is not true.
On flagpoles throughout Germany, the blue European Union flag often flutters, while the tricolored Federal Republic banner is nowhere to be seen. Yet trying to be a good European cannot heal all the old wounds. Just the delicate dance over how to commemorate the May 8 anniversary opened a few. Kohl infuriated Poles when he failed to invite President Lech Walesa to the ceremonies in Berlin. If he had invited the Poles, Kohl said, he would have had to invite all of Germany’s wartime victims. Last week former Polish deputy defense minister Radek Sikorski wrote a bitter public response, saying that the “fact that invitations were handed out by Helmut Kohl, chancellor of defeated Germany, shows us who has come out victorious in the end.”
It is no wonder, as Fisher writes in his new book “After the Wall,” that so many Germans pine simply to be a “bigger version of Switzerland.” Not necessarily neutral, but just there, making machine tools, riding the autobahn, minding their own business. Fifty years later, the country has actually come remarkably close to that vision. “Germany,” says Ted Werner, a 32-year-old architect in Berlin, “is one of the most modern and industrialized countries. We all live very comfortably, everything works smoothly. But when we go abroad, we Germans are shy; we make ourselves small and stay in the background.”
Still, there is what Werner calls “all that history.” The bomb squad showed up at one of his building sites south of Berlin two weeks ago. In Germany, that usually has nothing to do with terrorism, but with defusing old, undetonated bombs from the war. How many are still buried? Can they be found before they explode? The Germans will never know for sure.
