Down Memory Lane

By KARSTEN PRAGER RECKLINGHAUSEN

The table at Josef Niehues' house is elegantly laid -- sparkling glass, glistening silver, fine china, all arrayed around a platter filled with white asparagus and ham, a seasonal delicacy. But the seven men, immersed in conversation, pay scant attention to either setting or food. The discussion, about something that happened four decades ago, still rivets their attention: Was one of their teachers then an apologist for Nazism or merely an outspoken nationalist?

The question -- never fully answered that evening -- will recur, along with related themes, over a 1988 Riesling, as the talk stretches into the early morning hours. The seven have seen little of one another since their graduation in 1956 from the Hittorf Gymnasium, a prep school in Recklinghausen (pop. 123,000), where the industrial Ruhr melds into the rich farmland of Westphalia. The reunion, prompted by the visit of a journalist classmate living in New York City, provides a perfect opportunity to catch up. Here with intensity, there with a curious lack of passion, their talk at Niehues' home in Recklinghausen ranges over a lifetime -- and is echoed later, in separate conversations, with former classmates living elsewhere in West Germany.

Eleven voices and plenty of topics. Pleasant and not so pleasant memories of school days. Personal achievements and setbacks. National guilt. Pride in a democracy and in the European family. And finally, astonishment at something not expected in their lifetime: impending unification. "We are part of the rubble generation," says Hartmut Ruge, managing editor of the daily Recklinghauser Zeitung. "A generation of moral disorientation and guilt. Now there is normality."

Eleven voices out of a class of 20 hardly amount to a representative sample: after all, the class of '56 included no women -- though Hittorf is now coeducational -- and, by the standards of the '50s, its members belonged to an educational elite. But their opinions -- serious, measured -- and their lives -- steady, prosperous -- do reflect the country they helped shape and that in turn shaped them. Raised in rubble, they went on to bridge and rebuild: youngsters touched by the fury of World War II; adolescents molded by the struggle out of the ruins; adults rewarded with stability, their lives dominated by a quest for acceptance -- and security. More than 40 years later, Manfred Poeck, a transportation planner in Munich, succinctly remembers the day after the war when, at eleven, for the first time in his life, he was not hungry.

He and most of his classmates had no specific plans when they walked out of their school in March 1956. "We were just feeling our way," says Wilhelm Wiethoff, a secondary-school teacher. "For a working-class boy like me to have graduated seemed enough." Making money did not figure high on anyone's agenda. "We knew things would go upward," says Niehues, a lawyer who considered following his father into public service and instead found his place at Ruhrgas, a large utility. "We simply wanted a well-ordered, good life, and we wanted to help shape the future."

Ruge, whose father was killed in the war, studied history and political science, volunteered long enough for the army to get his parachute wings and then turned to journalism. Karl-Ernst Freitag and Artwin Priebisch studied marine engineering, spent a couple of summers sailing the high seas, only to drift into other endeavors: teaching for Freitag, business for Priebisch. Harm Smidt leaned toward the law but turned to the sciences and engineering and wound up a partner in a firm dealing with environmental-impact studies.

Two semesters of dentistry were enough to convince Klaus Hoell that he should switch to business administration; he is now an executive with Mercedes-Benz. After wondering whether to attend university at all, Poeck moved into engineering and an eventual partnership in a consulting firm. He spent several years working in Asia and Africa, where he thinks he can contribute more than at home. Dieter Klussmeyer studied law on his way to the civil service post of district draft-board chief in his hometown. Only Werner Marker, an ophthalmologist, and Klaus Giersiepen, a lawyer, were certain of their career plans.

Now, at Niehues' table, the subject is unification. Those among them who visited the old East Germany remember, as Giersiepen recalls, the "iron faces of the Vopos ((people's police))." When the Wall went up in 1961, they wondered, fleetingly, whether the West would intervene, whether war might even come. The crisis passed, and, preoccupied with starting careers and families, they learned to live with Germany's division. "I always thought history would take care of the separation," says Hoell, "but maybe in 100 years." Born and raised outside Berlin, he fled with his mother to the West in 1949; sneaking across the border, they stumbled, just short of West German territory, into a Soviet soldier -- who let them go. Standing outside his house today, near a sunny Swabian vineyard, Hoell muses about going home sometime to the Brandenburg marsh and lake country.

Smidt is ready to make his move even now: he plans to open a branch of his firm, Ecoplan, in Leipzig. He is well prepared, having spent many a vacation since the early '70s traveling in the East. "What pleases me," he says, "is that after 40 years of totalitarianism, independent thinking remains in the East. The people never identified with the communist state."

A few weeks after the Wall had fallen, Giersiepen and his wife visited Berlin. "You felt as if you had been touched by the breath of history," he says. "I am happy, not so much that Germany has come together -- we should not be too jubilant about that -- but that Europe has grown bigger, that it no longer ends at the Elbe, and that we are part of it."

Some ambivalence remains about the details of unification. Wiethoff is not sure the capital should be moved to Berlin. "Berlin reminds me of the great Nazi marches of the '30s and '40s, of Hitler's 'Do you want total war?' " he says. "Bonn stands for 40 years of tested democracy."

As comprehensively as Hittorf had prepared them, there was one notable gap in their education: modern German history. At a time when the country was only beginning to come to terms with its immediate past, textbooks dismissed the Hitler period with conspicuous brevity. "I can't recall our discussing the dark days," says Giersiepen. "It was a taboo time." Eventually they caught up. Those who attended nearby Munster University remember courses on the Third Reich being so crowded that lectures were broadcast campus-wide on a public address system. "What we heard led us to question parents and relatives about the era," says Freitag. "They said they had not known or had known only toward the end. We knew they should have known."

Poeck recalls angry arguments with his father, who served as a minor functionary in the Gestapo. "I have real problems with our past," Poeck says, "a sense of deep shame." Others speak with equal intensity, though with less personal involvement, about war and Holocaust, about remembrance and guilt. "We may have had nothing to do with it," says Niehues, "but we belong to the people who let it happen."

Clearly, the past colors perception of present and future. "No one hesitates to say he is German," notes Niehues. But it is never mentioned in the context of anything that could even vaguely be read as old-fashioned nationalism. Instead they see themselves and the country embedded in an integrated Europe. Says Priebisch: "I think of myself as a European first, perhaps because I have traveled a lot." He is about to leave for the Soviet Union, where his company is launching a joint venture.

If they are outspokenly proud of anything, it is the evolution of the ; Federal Republic into a mature, confident democracy, a state based on law and social justice, founded on a "constitution worth living for and worth defending," as Freitag puts it. The lessons of the Third Reich and of East Germany under the communists have not been lost. "We have built a society that can defend itself against the state's overstepping its bounds," says Giersiepen.

They have no political heroes, though they recognize what Niehues describes as "some leading figures." President Richard von Weizsacker gets high marks for, as Freitag says, "telling Germans the truth about their past without insulting us." Willy Brandt is praised as the architect of West Germany's Ostpolitik, Helmut Schmidt as a "savvy world politician." Most find kind words for Mikhail Gorbachev, without whom unification would have remained a dream, but they worry about his staying power. Says Giersiepen: "I used to be depressed by so many things; there always seemed to be money for war but not enough for human needs. Now, maybe, we can go on to things that benefit mankind."

Perhaps some things to benefit themselves and their community as well. "We have developed a kind of perfectionism that bothers me," says Hoell. "We could probably make do with 80% and live better." Working hard -- perhaps too hard -- has been part of the price paid by a generation that Priebisch says "was forced to perform, to build something from nothing." The society, says Wiethoff, has a lot to learn. "It has to do with prosperity, which has made us hard and asocial. We talk a lot about our wealth and our clever politics, but what's the use if the human dimension is missing, if there is coldness and impatience and little contact with one another?" That too has been part of the price for success. Creating a gentler balance will be up to the next generation.