THE GERMAN AWAKENING

WHATEVER became of Faust? His pact with the Devil is well remembered, not to mention his unfortunate affair with Gretchen. Less familiar is the fact that he was rehabilitated, at least in Goethe's version. He ended up in charge of a kind of symbolic public-works program, draining swamps and reclaiming land from the sea, thus creating new territory where millions might live "not in security, but active and free." To Goethe, the serene humanist poet, it seemed like the perfect task for a character snatched back from the brink of damnation.

Technology has a way of re-enacting poetry. West Germany is currently considering a network of Autobahnen im Dunkeln, or highways in the dark: huge subterranean pipelines that will carry industrial waste and scrap to the coast, dump them into the ocean and form new land. "Under green fields, under our feet," writes an awed British journalist, "the thick current of Germany's yesterday will creep endlessly down to the sea." The scheme is symbolic of contemporary Germany; for 20 years, its people have sought to eliminate the rubbish of their past and build anew.

The Contradictions

In many ways, they have succeeded spectacularly well. But redemption through hard work, whether prescribed by Goethe or by Ludwig Erhard, has its limitations. Despite the visible and invisible Autobahnen, despite the gleaming cars and ambitious towers, despite the homburgs in Hamburg and the shoulder minks in Munich, despite all the scenes of prosperity, West Germany is deeply troubled.

Seelenkleister, or brooding about the state of one's soul, has always been a pastime of the Germans, but now they have more than usual cause to engage in it. For years, the economic miracle represented a kind of occupational therapy, a materialist escape; while it remains the dominant fact in Germany, more and more people no longer find it enough. Germans are uneasy about their place in the world, impatient with the obstacles that loom on all sides, resentful of the contradictions in which they are forced to live.

Two decades after the end of World War II. Germany is still divided, with 18 million people condemned to subsist in the prison camp that is the Russian-occupied Eastern zone. Less painful divisions elsewhere have started international tantrums, blood feuds, wars. Yet the Germans have been relatively patient and reasonable.

West Germany is the world's second largest trader after the U.S. Yet German political influence is not remotely equal to its economic power. In foreign affairs, Bonn is subservient not only to Washington, but often to London and Paris, and it moves uncertainly in the rest of the world; during the recent Middle Eastern imbroglio, West Germans felt that they were kicked around even by the Arabs.

West Germany's 400,000-man army is the most important single factor that gives NATO a remaining degree of reality. Yet much of the West still expects the uniforms of its German allies to be made of sackcloth. Erhard may be an honored guest in the U.S., as he is this week; the British may graciously send their Queen to visit, or the French artfully try to woo Bonn away from the American alliance--but the Germans still feel unloved. "Joyous bonfires burn in the night sky all around Germany as her former enemies celebrate their victory of 20 years ago," noted Theologian Helmut Thielicke during last month's V-E day commemorations. "But we are still pushed away from the light of the bonfires and deep into the disgrace of the past."

As Germany's leaders have often said, the enormities of the Nazi past cannot, in a sense, be expiated; one reason that the Germans are so sensitive to every real or fancied slight is that they themselves are unable to forget. But the Germans never really had a full chance to come to terms with their guilt feelings: less than four years after their defeat, they passed from being pariahs to valuable pawns in the East-West struggle--a bewildering and indecent haste hardly calculated to reinforce any moral lessons. Moreover, West Germany has become a youthful nation: over half its population of 58 million were born or grew up after the Nazi era. These new Germans, who had nothing to do with Hitler, will agree with ex-President Theodore Heuss in accepting a "collective shame" for their nation's past, but they refuse, and understandably, to shoulder forever a "collective guilt" for the sins of their fathers.

"I am sure history will record 1965 as the year when, after 20 years of sleep, the Germans awoke to a sense of nationalism," asserts one French diplomat. This new nationalism shows none of the ugly, fanatical marks of the Nazi era. So far, at least, it consists of an increased self-confidence and a growing concern with national purpose. Unsettling though it may be for a watching world, this awakening was, as Willy Brandt said not long ago, "as inevitable as the sunrise. No people can live without pride."

The thought was echoed this week in a commencement speech at Heidelberg by George McGhee, U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. "For two decades the German goal has been to earn the world's acceptance," said McGhee. "The Germans have worked hard for it. If the world should ever force on the Germans the conviction that nothing they can do can ever gain them full acceptance, then it will not be the Germans only who are the losers. Germany has made its case. It is time for the world to weigh that case."

The New Reality

The case is impressive. For a nation without any meaningful democratic traditions, the Federal Republic's institutions are working surprisingly well--in large measure, the legacy of Konrad Adenauer's remarkable 14-year chancellorship. Politics in Bonn are contentious, abrasive and unpredictable. According to one of the opinion polls with which the Germans constantly take their own pulse, ten years ago some 30% of German voters thought power should reside in one man at the top; today only 18% still have such authoritarian longings. West Germany's press and television are strong, free, and outspokenly critical. Hardly anyone advocates extremist solutions for anything. The army bears little resemblance to its goose-stepping ancestor. It is a citizen force, and most of its members are self-conscious in what are often derided as bus-conductor uniforms; indeed, most German bus conductors look more like soldiers than the soldiers.

While not claiming that it can make amends to Nazism's victims, West Germany has paid $1 billion in reparations to Israel as the symbolic representative of world Jewry. With only 30,000 Jews now living in West Germany, anti-Semitism is not an issue. But its propagation is formally outlawed--perhaps not the most democratic way of coping with it--and people go to jail for passing anti-Semitic material.

The vast majority of Germans wanted to let the statute of limitations against further trials of Nazi war criminals expire this spring and the whole business be done with. Franz Josef Strauss, the erratic ex-Defense Minister who is trying hard for a comeback, sneered that if the trials were to continue, "war criminals" on the Russian side should be tried too. But Chancellor Erhard and the Bundestag extended the statute. In a moving speech on the site of the Belsen concentration camp, President Heinrich Luebke recalled that many non-Jewish Germans were executed or imprisoned for opposing the Nazi regime. "Their number is many times larger than the number of hangmen. Their death and suffering make us part of the international solidarity of all men and women who fight and die for freedom, and they unite our people to the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered."

All too often, such words and the spirit behind them are ignored or taken for granted by the world, while the old caricature traits of the Germans are seized on as instant proof that "they haven't changed"--tourist arrogance, preoccupation with titles, heavy humor, gross appetites. There are, in fact, more serious atavistic qualities to be found in German life: authoritarianism in the courts and schools, a tendency to function in groups, a passion for obedience. In his book This Germany, Journalist Rudolf Walter Leonhardt doubts that the past could repeat itself or "that Germans may go insane in the same way twice," but he fears that his countrymen still have a hankering to find scapegoats and suppress dissent. The most controversial current book is titled Training for Disobedience in Germany, by Sociologist Ulrich Sonnemann, who calls for "a humanization of the German attitude." To achieve a new identity, he says, the German must learn "disobedience" and join in a revolution "against institutionalized souls."

The Old Mystery

Only conscious or unconscious racists claim that Germans carry a hereditary taint. But all examinations and self-examinations of Germany must sooner or later lead to the legitimate questions: How did Hitler happen? How could Nazism seize a civilized country? Despite all the words expended on the subject, the phenomenon essentially remains a mystery. But part of the answer had to do with national identity. Though Hitler behaved like a nationalist possessed. Germany's sense of nationhood was always a fragile and insecure state of mind. In 1871, Bismarck belatedly forged German unity under Prussian hegemony from the anachronism of myriad principalities, but he sent Germany marching into the 20th century as little more than a feudal relic in modern dress. German society never experienced a nationalist, middleclass, democratic revolution or evolution comparable to those of France or Britain. The last and only real German revolution was Luther's Reformation.

After the World War I defeat and the Versailles Treaty, which sought to impose "war guilt" on the vanquished, Germany developed, in the words of one historian, "an overwhelming sense of communal shame"--not for causing the war, but for the old Spartan sin of losing it. Delayed nationhood, humiliation, plus economic chaos and the example of Communist methods from which the Nazis borrowed much--each is essential but none is sufficient to explain Nazism. It could not have happened but for two additional qualities that in the past at least have always seemed to be part of the German character. One is romanticism, the antirational worship of Wagnerian life and death of which Nazism represented a cancerous acceleration. The Hitler regime was romantic, even idealistic, in a perverted way; as Heinrich Heine said, "We Germans are idealists even when we hate." The other, and contradictory, quality is an alarming literal-mindedness, which made it possible even for many educated Germans to absorb and act on Nazism's pseudo science; other people have accepted crackpot theories about inferior races, but, unlike the Nazi leadership, they have not moved from the false premises to the insanely logical conclusion of systematic extermination.

Today's Germany seems more cautious than romantic, more skeptical than literal-minded. But its sense of national identity remains uncertain; in fact, there are new causes for the uncertainty.

The young of West Germany are pragmatic, slightly cynical, distrustful of slogans, emotions and religion; they believe in Gelassenheit (playing it cool). They never use the word Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, except ironically. Compared with American youngsters, they are polite toward their elders, but they are learning to disobey and to question. German Historian Karl Kaiser, 31, a visiting lecturer at Harvard, points out that the present younger generation is the first to grow up in a genuine democracy. Toward the past, he says, they play "a strange double role": abroad, they argue that Germany must not forever be accused, but at home they do much of the accusing.

This duality is well-illustrated by Novelist Guenter Grass, who, at 38, is scarcely a member of the youngest generation, but in many ways is a spokesman for it. Not long ago he told Americans: "We want criticism, but we don't want you constantly seeking the old phantoms." Yet he is raising quite a few phantoms himself. In his newest book, Dog Years, written in his dense, explosive prose, he imagines West Germany flooded with miracle glasses whose lenses permit anyone under 21 years to "uncover, recognize, worse, unmask father and mother . . . acts of violence performed, tolerated, instigated: murders . . . smoking cigarettes and looking on while. Record entries. Blowing on rubber stamps . . . Every father has at least one to hide."

Many of the fathers resent such accusations from the young, who can judge in perfect safety without ever having been themselves subject to the pressures and temptations of the Nazi era. Whether or not their sense of moral superiority toward the older generation is justified, their gods are certainly different. They are not even particularly patriotic; as for the worship of national sovereignty, says a young German poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "the beer hall is the only place left in which it is still taken seriously." But, paradoxically, the young bitterly resent the division of Germany, and if they have any single overriding concern, it is reunification.

The Larger Goal

Western observers sometimes talk themselves into the dangerous illusion that reunification does not really matter very much. Even Adenauer occasionally hinted at this. Germany, after all, so goes one argument, has been a nation for less than a hundred years. But this overlooks the fact that Germany was an idea and society long before it was a state. The trauma of the division is much stronger than many outsiders realize. Berlin is far from universally loved by Germans, but its precarious isolation in the Eastern zone's grey wasteland leaves Germany without a real center where its mind can come to rest. German intellectual life is scattered and provincial. Moreover, prosperous Germans feel reproached by the suffering of their countrymen in the East. They also tend to blame many troubles and frustrations on the split, whether or not there is any real connection. "Why does no postwar novel present the Federal Republic as a flourishing, gay country?" asks Novelist Heinrich Boll. "This is a sad country without sadness. It has delegated its sadness, pushed it over the Eastern border."

No practical solution is in sight. The continued split represents a danger to Russia itself because it might bring about a jingoist explosion in Germany. But Moscow, whether from a genuine fear of a reunified Reich or simply because it cannot afford a spectacular retreat from the heart of Europe, is not about to listen to such reasoning. Neutralization of Germany as the price of reunification is acceptable neither to the West nor to most Germans--although quite a few would be tempted. Some believe that eventually the East zone may mellow, and growing cultural and economic ties might paper over the division--but it is a faint hope.

If it is not to lapse into disillusionment and bored nihilism, West Germany must find a larger national role than serving as a pawn between East and West. Such a role might have been--and one day still may be--helping to build a united Europe. But for the present, Charles de Gaulle has virtually wrecked that vision. De Gaulle has thus both frustrated German ambitions for an acceptable, even idealistic, role in the world, and provided an old-fashioned example of nationalism that is highly contagious.

A few Germans have been saying for some time that Bonn ought to ignore its allies, who have not been able to do anything about reunification, and negotiate with Russia directly. The overwhelming West German sentiment is still that the country must stay with the U.S. and in the Western Alliance, but as Germany's frustrations mount, more go-it-alone talk will be heard. Says Andre Franc,ois-Poncet, twice (1931-38 and 1949-55) France's Ambassador to Germany: "A country cut in two is monstrous, and as long as Germany is not reunited, there will not be real peace in the world." Or, for that matter, in the German soul.

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