Reflections of a stormy petrel

I was listening to the Pope's last Angelus, and I found myself smiling when he greeted the Poles in their own language (as he did with the other main languages). I found myself thinking that there would be a special pleasure for citizens of Poland to hear a German addressing them in their own language. The recent history of the two countries has been a crescendo of mutual hatred, ending in the massacre of one-fourth of the Polish population, followed by the expulsion of millions of Germans under circumstances of terrible brutality.

But then I realized that really I could say the same for myself. When I grew in Milan, vicious prejudice against Germans was a living reality. And it's not just a matter of Nazi and torture jokes; it was a matter of real racial prejudice, with Germans being not only oppressive and homicidal, the designated enemy, but idiotic and foul-smelling too. Their Italian was uniformly terrible and expressed a basic stupidity. A German officer reaching an area flooded by its defenders is bewildered - his maps don't show any lakes there. (Germans, you see, are too stupid to understand the concept of wartime flooding.) One gag had a goat (the smelly animal par excellence) escape the company of a German: it couldn't stand the smell.

This is more than the inheritance of one, even two, world wars, and as a matter of fact it is rather better explained by much older events; it is, in fact, likely enough to be typically Milanese, and I might never have encountered it in such a virulent form if I had grown up, like my parents, in Rome. For Milan and Venice, along with surrounding areas, were the only parts of Italy to be under the direct government of the hated, German-speaking Empire of Austria from 1815 to 1859. Now, to call the hygienic twentieth-century German, even in his most murderous guise, evil-smelling, is clearly nonsense: even their mass murders were carried out with great attention to cleanliness - that was the meaning of the immediate mass destruction of murdered bodies in ovens, before they had the time to spread disease. But an evil smell was in fact a feature of the Austrian occupation troops, mostly not even German themselves, in the eighteen hundreds. In spite of their resplendent white uniforms, they had a bad habit of stiffening their martial moustaches with tallow, and apparently the result could be really stifling at close quarters. Milanese jokers seem to have needed no more than a mention of tallow or of smell to get a laugh.

This ethnic cliche' might have died out if the break with Austria after 1859 had been clean and swift; alas, it was neither, ended up trapping considerable Italian minorities behind a permanent frontier, and made sure that the hatred between the two countries lasted until the final Italian vengeance of 1918 and the annihilation of the Austrian Empire. Obviously, under such circumstances, the Milanese were not going to forget the evil smell of "German" troops for the mere reason that they were no longer around to be oppressive. Then there was the poisoned alliance of 1940-1943, the nightmarish occupation that followed, the savage partisan revolt of the last two years of war, the German massacres, all centred on Milan; and if ethnic hatred had ever had a chance to go out of style, that must have settled it. In a Milanese folk-song from the immediate post-war period, German soldiers are called "black rats":
...poeu su in muntagna a ciapà i ratt:
negher Todesch de la Wermacht,
mi fan morire domaa a pensagh!
"...then we took to the mountains, to do some rat-catching -
Black German rats from the Wehrmacht,
Makes me feel ill just thinking of them!"

These were the memories I grew up with. To people like me, and I would say to a huge amount of Europeans from all kinds of parts of the Continent, to welcome the German nation back to the world of civilized people must have been at least as much a dislocation as for Americans of the southern States to accept equal rights for their darker skinned fellow citizens; harder, if anything, because American blacks and whites at least spoke the same language, and, when the worst came to the worst, could sing the same songs. I know that, for a long time - even after a German hospital effectively saved my brother's life - I could not relate to Germans or to Germany without a certain sense of doubt and alienness. I speak German, I have been to Germany and Austria, I have German and Austrian friends, I warmly admire at least one German woman as a genius...

...but I think I can say honestly that I have never completely lost that sense of doubt and alienness until I first saw and heard Pope Benedict with my own eyes. One of the things this wonderful man immediately does is disarm ethnic hatred. He is so obviously kindly, so obviously open, so obviously everyone's beloved old uncle or father figure, that you can't help but take him as he is and love him for what he is. I like to think I am speaking for many others when I say that, to me, this gentle, tired old university professor is a living human token of peace and respect between nations.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of guys. In order to make sure of their own Opel factories, Germany destroyed the Fiat bid for the Opel-Vauxhall company, broke European law with enormous state subsidies, and, even more inexcusably, brought in the Russians, who are not our friends and who have quite enough influence in our continent already. Now GM have decided that they are not selling at all, and that they will restructure their European operation instead; which, in the present circumstances of high Euro and low GB pound, means thousands of jobs going in Germany, and few or none in Britain. Germany really must learn some time that brute self-serving attitudes such as they showed throughout this saga are self-defeating. There is a place for honour in international relations, and if you show none, none will be shown to you.

The admission by Guenther Grass, Nobel Prizewinner for literature and "conscience," or at least leading figure, of Germany's hard left, that he had been a member of the Waffen SS, raised some ugly thought in me.

That there was a long subterraneous - or not even so subterraneous - solidarity between Brown and Red, especially at the level of what might be called the international intelligentsija, is not exactly news. Everyone knows, for instance, that the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger was all but sheltered from de-Nazification, and given genuine new lustre, largely thanks to the French Communist writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Heidegger had done as much as anyone to aid the Nazi takeover of the German universities; and as the universities were the most prestigious and internationally respected bodies in Germany, it may be said that someone like Heidegger bore more guilt for the rise and propagation of Nazism than anyone outside the Party circle proper. But Heidegger and Sartre shared the philosophy of Existentialism, and, from his point of view, Sartre was quite right in trying to shelter his master - even though another Existentialist, Hannah Arendt, had told Heidegger to his face that Nazism was a natural and inevitable development of his, Heidegger's, philosophy.

Of course, Grass was not a philosopher of international repute, on whose writings people wrote PhD theses, when he committed his little indiscretion. He was a teen-age boy. At 15, he had tried to volunteer for the submarine service, but had been rejected on grounds of age; the Third Reich, at the time, was not yet desperate. It may have been on account of that earlier attempt that when he was drafted in 1944, he was sent, not to the Army, but to the Waffen SS, a wholly separate body. By late 1944, the SS had ceased to be a volunteer troop, as they had been through most of their history: frightful losses on the Russian front, the loss of most auslandsdeutsch districts - German-speakers outside Germany - which were their main recruiting ground, and the dubious loyalty of the Army after the July 20 plot, had made recruitment for them a matter that could no longer be trusted to volunteering. Even so, they were treated as elite units, and conscripts sent to them were regarded as select.

Grass admits that. He claims that he was drawn to the Waffen SS not by their political meaning, but by their reputation as the last-ditch troops, those who were sent to stop breaches in the line and on desperate or unconventional missions. He also claims that the two missions in which he took part were dangerous long-range reconnaissances far behind Russian lines, which is credible enough; and that he never shot a bullet in anger, which is rather less credible. ON April 20, 1945, as the whole front was slowly melting into the fire of advancing Russian American, British, Allied and Partisan armies, he was wounded and taken to a field hospital; and that was the end of his war. That is his story. I see no reason to doubt its detail, and it is not the detail that troubled me.

What roused my thoughts was that, until now - and it must be admitted that Grass seems to have made his admission of his own free will - he was believed to have served on an Anti-Aircraft unit. This connected him to another important German intellectual, his exact contemporary, Josef Ratzinger, who was forced out of the seminary where he was studying for the priesthood to be conscripted into one.

The difference between the two is the enthusiasm with which the teen-age Grass threw himself into the war effort, first trying to be a submariner, then taking with pleasure the role of a chosen soldier of the Party and Fuehrer. Young Ratzinger, on the other hand, entered the seminary in the clear consciousness that anyone who took that step deprived Army and State of his services - until the State, in its death throes, abolished the exemption of the priesthood and forced them into military service - and placed himself in an unfriendly position. And when he was recruited, he soon deserted.

What people unfamiliar with events will not realize is that, by deserting, Ratzinger showed no less purely physical courage than Grass reconnoitering behind Russian lines. Both risked a quick and nasty end. When American and French divisions crossed the Rhine in April 1945, they found the trees of the Black Forest hung with hundreds, thousands of dead young men hanged by their neck to save ammunition. These were soldiers who had been found to be AWOL, and been executed without trial or waiting. Some were hanged in their front yards, in front of their families Their executioners, on orders from Central Command, were the Waffen-SS - Guenther Grass' lot. As the chosen bearers of Nazi faith, they had been ordered to force the rest of Germany to resist to the last man, woman and child.

I am certainly not charging Mr.Grass with murder. As I said, I see no reason to doubt his unsolicited account of his wartime days, clearly the result of a deep personal unease. It is rather that this story places the two men, at a time when neither can have had even a suspicion of their extraordinary and iconic future, at opposite ends (Grass even says that he met Ratzinger in a POW camp after the war) of a really iconic group of events and institutions, and does so by anything but chance. What the one young man sought, the other fled. I do not know whether the misleading statement that young Grass fought his war in an Ack-Ack battery came from him or whether it was something he just allowed to be believed, it is clear that it was the sort of thing that could be believed of a decent, untainted German; that it did nothing to damage the reputation Grass was getting, as the moral authority of the German left. Yet young Ratzinger wanted nothing to do even with that, and risked the noose to escape it.

What attracted young Grass - whose parents had named him for a pagan Teutonic hero - and repelled young Ratzinger - whose parents had named for the husband of Mary and several Christian saints - was the suicidal appeal of the dying Nazi party. Whatever the ordinary German teen-ager might know, suspect, or be unwilling to suspect, of the horrors and crimes of his government, there was one thing that nobody could miss, that was the very daily atmosphere of dying Nazism: the heavily charged sense of suicidal, revolutionary glory and doom, of a whole party and nation turning kamikaze in order to bring down their enemies and themselves in one red and monstrous ruin. Weltmacht oder Niedergang, world power or annihilation; "Better an end in terror than a terror without end". These were not, unlike the massacre of Jews or Russians or disabled or negroes or homosexuals, things done in "night and fog"; they were the slogans and the reasons for existence of the Nazi Party, its mind and passion, its proudly exhibited belief. That those beliefs then led to political criminality on an untold scale is, in a sense, secondary; that is, in order to become thieves and murderers, men had first to assent to this mental attitude.

The revolted romanticism, the highly-charged, throbbing emotion of disgust and rejection, that lay at the heart of Nazism, is the join between the last days of Hitler as young Grass experienced them, and his destiny as Red Pope, moral authority of the anti-American, anti-capitalist, fanatically pseudo-pacifist hard left. The conclusions may be different; the root is the same. I do not know whether either Grass or Ratzinger ever thought of the other as in any way his opponent, his counter, the symbol as much as the leader of the forces he himself rejects; yet they oppose each other with a perfection that belongs more often to mythology than to real life. At seventy-eight years of life, filled in both cases with tremendous achievement and worldwide renown, the White Pope faces the Red still on the grounds of what the one rejected, and the other passionately accepted, in the dying days of Germany's awful night.

A man hands himself over to another to be killed and eaten. (And the court only sentences the murderer to six and a half years in jail.)
A woman bears nine children, and murders each of them shortly after birth.
A father and mother agree to starve their six-year-old daughter to death, and do so.

I do not like to foster ethnic cliches, and I am very fond of the country, but from time time Germany does throw up some uniquely weird nastiness.

They really gotta get into every act, haven't they?( Read more... )What I want to know, though, is why I should find out about this from the Taipei Times of Taiwan?