0.cached.png
By Newsweek Editors
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Among Germans, no argument against war in Iraq seems complete without recalling the nation's own trauma in World War II. "Anyone like I, who experienced the bombing of the virtually defenseless city of Dresden, will be convinced forever that there can be no legitimate reason for [war on Iraq]," says east German peace activist Wolfgang Ullmann. Indeed, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder speaks for most Germans when he says that war on Iraq is wrong because "we Germans have learned our lesson."
That Germans are more reluctant to go to war today than they were in the last century is surely a good thing. But are the 86 percent who want to avoid fighting in Iraq at all costs drawing the right lesson from history? A small but increasingly vocal band of intellectuals thinks not. In an open letter published last month in the Berlin daily Die Welt, about 100 writers, editors and prominent thinkers wrote that Germany's peace movement is driven not by honest opposition to war but a "naive longing for political innocence."
At the root of the divide is a conflict about the true meaning of the past. Germany's peaceniks are guided by the lesson of 1945: their country's destruction was the price they paid for waging war. But their critics recall the lesson of 1938, when the Western powers caved in to Adolf Hitler in an attempt to "preserve" the peace. A little war then might have gone a long way, saving tens of millions of lives, says Michael Wolffsohn, a historian at Bundeswehr University in Munich who signed the letter. The result of the standoff is a kind of moral fundamentalism that kills any chance at enlightened debate. "Germans are trapped by their history," says Wolffsohn.
Read More on News
That history keeps returning to haunt them. Just as the debate over Iraq was heating up last fall, a powerful new book on the British-American air campaign against German civilian targets during World War II surged up the best-seller list. This winter also marked the 60th anniversary of the German surrender at Stalingrad. In German postwar iconography, the 800,000 soldiers who died during that ferocious battle represent the idea that Germans, too, were victims of Hitler's megalomania. Such rituals of remembrance imprint a gut fear of war on yet another generation.
But it's no accident that Germans' remembrance of their suffering coincides with the peace protests, says Harald Martenstein, another critic of the German consensus. "They're searching for an identity that consists of more than just crimes," he wrote in a recent editorial in the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel. By identifying themselves as victims as well as sympathizing with other potential victims, they can "finally be 100 percent good." It may be a romantic, black-and-white view of the world. But never in postwar history have so many Germans asserted they are "proud to be German again."
What troubles the critics most is that even Germany's political and intellectual --elite subscribe to such a view. Wolffsohn says that a visceral, moralizing pacifism pervades all elements of the German elite--arts and media, politics and business--because the people running Germany today came of age in the 1960s and '70s; they were the first to fully confront the country's Nazi past. Their desire to be Good Germans is doubly acute. "Because of what we Germans have learned we must say no to this continuing madness called war," says Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass, who is a close friend of Schroder's.
To be sure, there's nothing wrong with an aversion to war. "But the idea that there might also be good reasons in favor of war is an absurd thought with which German mainstream intellectuals don't want to sully themselves," says Kurt Scheel, editor of the Berlin political monthly Merkur. Their preachy pacifism is what Scheel derides as "moral hygiene" intended to prove that Germans have come clean of their dirty past. But in trying to overcome that past, today's Germans risk going down a new path of self-isolation, unwilling to deal with the difficult realities that societies--and individuals--must sometimes confront to survive.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines