Enough!

JOURNEY THROUGH A HAUNTED LAND: THE NEW GERMANY by Amos Eton. 259 pages. Holt, R/neharf & Winston. $6.50.

No murderer ever escapes his victims; they are linked irrevocably through guilt and revenge. Just as Nazi Germany was mankind's most methodical mass mur derer, the Jew is mankind's most experienced victim. The intelligence of his Talmudic tradition is analytical and speculative, but the intelligence of his history is empirical: survival demands more than a dwelling on the past; it requires careful soundings of the symptomatic currents of the present.

Thus it is understandable that Israel is inordinately interested in Germany, periodically dispatching journalists to scour the land for insights. What is more surprising is that an Israeli newspaperman has produced an important analysis of both East and West Germany. Amos Elon, 40, foreign correspondent for the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha'aretz, claims no objectivity; he begins his tour in 1965 at Auschwitz in Poland, clearly announcing that he carries 6,000,000 cinder chips on his shoulders. But prejudice soon gives way to perception, and recrimination to compassion.

Horatio at the Wall. Many of Elon's observations are familiar enough. He reviews the industrial resurgence of West Germany. One reads again of the neo-Nazi lunatic fringe, but Elon suggests that a vigilant press and growing democratic values keep the extreme rightists cornered. And there are also the usual set pieces: the Horatian discourse before the Berlin Wall, the discovery of the Germans' compulsive need to be loved, the bloody reappearance of Schmisse (dueling scars) on the Nordic faces of West German Korporationen youth.

But the main theme of Elon's book is the ambiance of "moral schizophrenia" regarding the guilt for Germany's past. In West Germany it is always "they," the Hitler government, who committed the crimes; in East Germany it is always "they," the present West German government, who are assigned the guilt.

Only the intellectuals, artists and the press, Elon believes, seem to be aware of the magnitude of the moral problem confronting Germany. Few others express concern that in West Germany former Nazis still occupy many government posts and that in East Germany former Nazis still hold responsible positions in the army. Elon concedes that no people can go on feeling guilty forever; still, he is pained at the philistinism he finds among West German politicians, who seem determined to blank out the past. But he admires the attitude expressed by Catholic Writer Heinrich Boll (The Clown). "The sum of suffering was too great," says Boll, "to attribute it to the few who were un equivocally guilty; a part remained and has not been accounted for until today."

Class Project. More concrete and damaging is Elon's discovery of the breakdown in the German education es tablishment, and here he delivers a devastating and well-documented charge: the decline in German education that began during the Third Reich has not been stemmed. Not only has West Germany ceased to be an academic Olympus--the world center of study for mathematics and medicine, physics and philosophy--but it even lags behind the rest of Western Europe when it comes to significant scientific research. In 1965, only 17.6% of West Germans between the ages of 15 and 19 attended school full time, compared with 66.2% in the U.S.; only 6% of working-class West German students received higher education v. 30% in the U.S. (TIME Essay, Jan. 13).

In East Germany more higher education is available, but the student there has to wade his way from kindergarten on through a Marxist garble that includes a typical class project called "Everyone Loves Walter": "Objective--The children become acquainted with the picture of Walter Ulbricht, the Chairman of the State Council. They pronounce the name correctly, they listen carefully when [told] his story, and are supposed to feel that he is a good person." And in both countries, some of the textbooks are exercises in controlled amnesia. For example, a widely used West German textbook dismisses the Nazi death camps as "intensified measures against the Jews."

As a surrogate victim Elon is often appalled by his discoveries, but he recovers his cool quickly. Though he notes similarities between East and West Ger many, he never forgets the differences. After a drab night on the town in East Berlin, he concludes: "The D.D.R. has a sobering effect on those who come to Germany with a bagful of resentments; it even makes one feel guilty. Somehow as a foreigner and as a Jew you are imbued with a dark, inexplicable, rarely uttered feeling that the fortune bestowed on the West Germans is in some way indecent. Somehow you want to see Germans in hair shirts, barefoot, and covered with ashes. East Germany in its way changes this attitude. You think of the lonely people you meet here, of their perennial despair, of the young people who look so old. You think: for God's sake, enough! It is enough!"

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