March 23, 2010 Op-Ed Contributor

Benedict’s Fragile Church
By PETER SCHNEIDER
Berlin

POPE BENEDICT XVI’s strongly worded apology for the child-abuse scandal in Ireland, issued last week, left Germans like myself scratching our heads.
Where is the apology for the abuses in Germany? After all, even as the number of Irish abuse cases mounts, the depth and history of abuse in Germany is just now becoming clear — more than 250 cases are known, with more appearing each day. At least 14 priests are under investigation by the authorities.
Though Germany is a secular country and Catholics make up only a third of the population, the scandal has engendered a national debate — about religious education, about single-sex institutions and, above all, about the role of celibacy in the Catholic Church.
And while the scandal is not unique to Germany, the current wave of abuse revelations sweeping Europe feels particularly German, because the pope is German: Benedict was once Joseph Ratzinger, the archbishop of Munich and Freising and long a leading voice of conservative German Catholics.
While it’s too soon to know for sure how the scandals will affect church membership, rumor has it that the number of resignations by churchgoers in Munich, where the Catholic Church is traditionally strong, has doubled or even tripled in the last month.
Catholics in Bavaria are especially outraged about the case of the priest Peter Hullermann. In 1979, Father Hullermann was accused of abuse in the western German city of Essen; he wasn’t convicted, and he was soon brought to Munich, for therapy.
He was allowed to continue working with children, but was soon convicted of abuse and sentenced to 18 months probation. Yet the diocese still allowed him to work with children — up until last week, when news of his history forced the church to suspend him.
One almost has the impression that the church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is responsible for cases of sexual abuse, told the dioceses to follow a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Did Archbishop Ratzinger know? His defenders say no. But Germans would like to hear it from the pope himself.
To be fair, there is possible wisdom in Benedict’s silence — with sex scandals involving priests erupting from Austria to the Netherlands, the situation is too fluid for a definitive papal statement.
And yet Pope Benedict should also recognize how precarious the Catholic Church is in Germany. Like Americans, Germans have already had to cope with a general loss of trust in public institutions. First there were the bankers, with their insane bets and bonuses. Then the politicians, who couldn’t stop the bankers. Now there is a loss of trust in the church.
But unlike in America, religion in Germany is already weak. In the former Communist east, only 2 percent of the population go to church on Sunday; in the western states, the number is 8 percent. Some dwindling congregations have had to sell their church buildings.
So far the church is benefiting from the breadth of sexual abuse scandals. Victims are also coming forward from Protestant institutions, from secular boarding schools and elite academies, from children’s homes. Many critics argue that any closed institution where male educators have charge of male children runs the risk of sexual abuse.
Conservative Catholic bishops go further, saying that the sexual abuse committed by their priests is a general social problem, traceable not to the church but to the sexualization of society, to the zeitgeist, to the sins of the 1968 generation. The truth, they suggest, was that the evil had struck in all sectors of society. Others have warned of the dangers of a witch hunt, and some have even highlighted a new form of political correctness.
But the figures available so far show that the problem is especially severe in the Catholic Church. Alois Glück, president of the Central Committee of German Catholics, has urged consideration of the “church-specific conditions that favor sexual abuse,” which many have taken as a call for the church to reconsider the matter of its priests’ celibacy.
This is yet another difference between the Irish and American scandals and our own. Ireland and America are deeply religious places; if priestly celibacy is not as well understood there as it once was, it is nevertheless respected.
Germany is not only a secular country, but a sexually liberated one as well. Many Germans find the Vatican’s demand of priestly celibacy completely alien, and we recognize it as a historical, rather than holy, tradition, going back to a decree by Pope Benedict VIII in 1022. Indeed, in a poll conducted last week, 87 percent of Germans said that celibacy is no longer appropriate.
It’s not hard, then, for us to draw the conclusion — fair or not — that the church’s problems are rooted in celibacy. Much more so than in the United States, the German debate is about the fundamental structure of the Catholic church: Must a person be chaste to exercise the office of a priest? Does this condition not attract sexually disturbed and pedophiliac men, who count on cover and understanding in the bosom of the church?
How Benedict handles the issue in the coming weeks will determine not only how well the German church endures, but whether it can survive in its current form at all. None of the victims has yet sought reparations, but sooner or later, the church will have to offer compensation. The American church has paid $2 billion to abuse victims since 1992; can the German church afford the same?
Peter Schneider is the author of “Eduard’s Homecoming.” This essay was translated by John Cullen from the German.

---

The Other Face of Europe

Peter Schneider

According to the Greek myth, Europe owes its name to a divine infidelity. Zeus, the supreme, chronically unfaithful god of the Greeks, fell in love with a beautiful, probably dark-skinned princess named Europa, who lived on the shores of ancient Phoenicia, today’s Lebanon. To deceive his jealous spouse Hera, Zeus transformed himself into a bull, took Europa on his broad back, and abducted her to the island of Crete. When the beautiful princess asked where they were going and what the foreign territory they were approaching was called, the divine kidnapper replied that, to honor her, this part of the earth would forever bear her name: Europe.
1
They have almost been forgotten again: the happiest days in Europe’s recent history. In the weeks and months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world witnessed an unprecedented historical process. In a rapid succession of peaceful revolutions, the citizens of the Soviet satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe gave notice to their hegemon that they would no longer be obedient. Starting from the margins, the subjects of one of history’s vastest empires dismantled it, piece by piece. The great Soviet Union fragmented into its component parts within two years and left the stage of history without firing a shot. The still-enormous torso that remained after the amputation was now called the Russian Federation. Years later, Vladimir Putin termed this event “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of recent history”. When he came up with this formulation, he may have thought of the images of the icy shores of Antarctica, from which, under the influence of global warming, whole mountains are breaking off and plunging into the sea.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union was followed by a triumphal march of democracy. For the first time in a long time, the word “Europe” again aroused enthusiasm, especially in the liberated satellite states. Suddenly this name stood not only for a common past and a vague future that in the West had been invoked solely on political holidays. “Europe” became a keyword with which the peoples of the Warsaw Pact laid claim not only to freedom, but also to political affiliation. The natural addressee for this claim was the West: Western Europe and the United States. The onrush was so strong that the European Union felt overwhelmed by the need to evaluate all applicants seriously. At the European Council in Copenhagen in June 1993, rules for a kind of entrance examination were hastily formulated. The candidate nations had to harmonize their laws with those of the European Union, permit political parties, protect minorities, hold free elections, show progress in privatizing or dissolving state-run companies and in developing a free market economy, and guarantee freedom of opinion. Who could be surprised that the transition was chaotic? Never before have so many countries transformed their systems in such a short time and with so little preparation. The libraries of the world overflowed with texts describing in detail how a capitalist society is transformed into a communist one. There was not even the most rudimentary handbook for the reverse process. To this was added an objective need for haste. With the law in mind that every political vacuum immediately attracts new power-holders, usually undemocratic ones, the European Union felt compelled to accept even unsuitable applicants. And so it came that sometimes even countries that could hardly fulfill even one of the criteria were held out prospects of admission. It was as if candidates who would have received an F at every provincial college had been invited for an interview with the Head of Admissions at Harvard.
Caught up in the euphoria and the acceleration of history, people failed to notice that clearly unequal partners had joined together in the expanded EU. The Wall that had divided not only the city of Berlin, but all of Europe, had created the illusion that only a wall divided Europeans. In reality, the nations to the east and west of this line had had extremely divergent experiences in the last 60 years. One side as vassals of a tyrannical hegemon that suppressed with tanks every energetic movement toward freedom. The other as the pampered children of an American guardian who guaranteed them freedom, democracy, and protection from the Eastern superpower. It was only a question of time before the freshly united parties discovered that, under the shelter of the Wall, not only two different societal systems, but also different mentalities and cultures had developed.
Not the first, but the most recent and spectacular clash between the old and the new member countries arose during the conflict in the Caucasus. Georgia’s President Micheil Saakashvili – perhaps encouraged by the Bush administration – had resolved to bring the separatist Georgian province of South Ossetia back under its control. When Russian tanks, long-since waiting, rolled into Georgia, stopping the Georgian advance within hours and lodging themselves in Georgia, the European camp divided. The governments of Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states all demanded from the EU and NATO deeds, rather than declarations, against the Russian invasion. Polish President Lech Kaczynski accused the European Union (on August 16, 2008 in the newspaper “Rzeczpospolita”) of “acquiescence” and “subservience”. – Despite this accusation, the reactions of the Western European countries remained moderate, even when the Russian government ignored the agreements it had just made with the President of the European Council, Nicolas Sarkozy. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier repeatedly underscored how important the Russians’ complete withdrawal from Georgia was to him, but avoided any word about what the European Union should do if the troops were not completely withdrawn. The former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who, since stepping down as Chancellor, has been Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of the North European Gas Pipeline Company, a sister company of Russia’s Gazprom, went the furthest in the strategy of placation. He blamed the Caucasus conflict solely on the “obvious gambler” Saakashvili and, alluding to the construction of American anti-missile systems in the Czech Republic and Poland, spoke of “the West’s serious mistakes” in relation to Russia. He refused any word of reservation about the Russian advance into Georgia, which had been in preparation for months.
In the Central and Eastern European countries, the divided reaction of “unified” Europe arouses old fears and bonds together their quarreling political camps. Adam Michnik, an icon of the Solidarnosc movement and certainly no friend of the Polish President, agreed with him on this point. “The declaration was a sign of Europe’s weakness – and unfortunately no surprise,” he answered my question. “The only surprise was the brutality of Russia’s move. The message is clear. There are large Russian minorities in Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and elsewhere. So in the future, whoever does not want to suffer the fate of Georgia may prefer to permit Russification. The most important thing is: the time of a certain way of thinking about Russia, the idea that, despite all its difficulties, Russia is headed in the right direction, the philosophy of détente – is over.”
The Czech Foreign Minister Johannes Prince of Schwarzenberg relinquished many of his hereditary landholdings, but not his experience as a citizen of a small country in the immediate neighborhood of Russia. “We cannot accept that it is called an operating accident when a large country occupies a neighbor. You won’t score any points with us by arguing that at least Russia is stable and that that is good for the economy. We know what stability can mean – namely, forty years of dictatorship! Jaruzelski also created a stable situation! … Should we accept that Russia feels secure only when it is surrounded by vassals?”
Actually I had wanted to wear a suit and tie when meeting Lech Walesa, the legendary strike leader at the shipyard in Danzig and later the President of Poland. My doubts vanished instantly when he greeted me in the cramped office of the “Lech Walesa Institute Foundation”, which he heads. Walesa wore pants that had not been ironed, held up by a kind of cowboy belt, and a checkered shirt that was more reminiscent of his past as a worker than as a president. His commentary on the Russian invasion in Georgia sounded rather enigmatic. “No one is talking about the real reasons,” he said and then spoke about the “toys” that Russia had left behind in its former satellites. “Many of these ‘toys’ are so well hidden that not even the authorities in the new republics know about them. One can ask why the Russians are so interested in a republic like Georgia? My assumption is that some of their ‘toys’ are hidden there or nearby.”
When I asked whether when he used the word “toys” he meant Russian military facilities, like those on the Crimean Peninsula, and whether he could name a few of these ‘toys’ for me, Walesa wrapped himself in silence. He didn’t want to tell me anything more about them at all.
The most caustic judgment came from the young Slobomir Sierkowski, the leader of a leftist political movement in Poland that attracts young people in particular and that is meanwhile considered the fourth-strongest political force in the country. Polish observers foretell a great political future for the charismatic leader. “Europe’s reaction to the invasion of Georgia only proved that NATO and the EU – just like the UN – are actually zombie institutions. And I’m afraid that if even Poland were in danger again, the response of our new Western allies would be hardly any different. Apparently there is no intermediate response between open warfare and diplomatic blah-blah. Of course no one wants to begin a war with Russia. But Europe reacts like someone who wants to be woken up by his cell phone. He ignores the first wake-up call in trust that another wake-up call will come 15 minutes later. But he sleeps through it, as well.”
The Romanian philosopher and architect Ioan Augustin, who lived in the United States for a long time, does not understand the empathy with which the Western Europeans and especially the Germans pamper the supposedly “poor, humiliated” Russia, “tormented by fears of being surrounded”. No one forced the Russians to become a superpower and to enslave the neighboring nations. He defines the difference between the Eastern Europeans and their Western allies: “We have some open nerves about totalitarianism. We know all the tricks of Russia. Don’t trust anything they say.”
My interim evaluation is contradictory: Almost all of my approximately thirty interlocutors in Central and Eastern Europe were dissatisfied with Western Europe’s response, while at the same time condemning Saakashvili’s “stupid”, rash actions. But I was astonished that not a single one of them could suggest an approach that the EU and NATO could have taken to the Russian provocation in Georgia that was completely different from the one resolved in Brussels. “So what do they want, then?” snapped a German diplomat when I told him about this result, implying that what really counts in politics, after all, is not words, but practical measures.
But I think he is wrong precisely about that. The quarrel in Europe is not so much about a practical response to the Russian invasion, but about the evaluation of the conflict. In politics, as in the rest of life, it isn’t just deeds, but also gestures and words that count… The conflict is about nothing less than the soul of the European Union.
2
The image of a Europe at odds with itself in crisis situations had already emerged during the Iraq War. At a conference in Munich as early as 2003, the German Foreign Minister at the time, Joschka Fischer, had briefly commented on the reasons that the American Secretary of Defense adduced to go to war: “I’m not convinced, Mr. Rumsfeld.” Indeed, a large part of the Western European camp refused to follow its American ally into this war. The governments of Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic countries responded quite differently. Former intellectual pioneers of the democracy movements in the Czech lands and Poland, like Vaclav Pavel and Adam Michnik, also voted for the Iraq War. And so Donald Rumsfeld drew his notorious distinction between the “Old” and the “New Europe” – a formulation that immediately ignited a furious controversy.
In hindsight, we can say: Rumsfeld’s distinction was a sharply pointed polemic, but it has turned out to be essentially true. The intra-European chasm that came into view at the beginning of the Iraq War has opened up again over the conflict in the Caucasus, with certain deviations in the fissure line.
The new member states’ mistrust of Old Europe has a long prior history. The longer the Cold War and the division of Europe lasted, the more Eastern Europe disappeared beyond the West’s horizon; it became a habit to apply the name “Europe” solely to Western Europe. In the eastern half of the continent, the name “Europe” stood for a promise that receded ever farther away. As Prince Schwarzenberg puts it, “If you lived in Moravia or southern Bohemia, you could view this promise on Western television. It meant: freedom, democracy, a life in abundance. But you could also see that Western Europe had completely forgotten the East.”
The bulldozing of the Prague Spring was a traumatic experience for the Central and Eastern European democracy movements. Despite great sympathy, the West watched this act of violence with its teeth clenched and its arms folded. The “soft” camp’s reaction to the ban on the trade union movement Solidarnosc may have left even more scars in Central and Eastern Europe. On the day when General Jaruzelski declared martial law, the German Chancellor of the time, Helmut Schmidt, who was just then making his first state visit to communist East Germany, said, “We regret that this became necessary.” He didn’t say, “We regret that this has happened.”
In 1989, history proved that the democracy movements in Central and Eastern Europe were right. Accordingly, the rebels of Prague and Warsaw now see themselves as farseeing pioneers whose example prepared the revolution of 1989. By contrast, a large part of the Western Left experienced the 1989 collapse of “actually existing socialism” as a defeat and as a deep affront to its worldview.
Today all the speechmakers agree: the Prague Spring and the “restive” Poles’ ten-year struggle were the prelude to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But current issues bring out the old conflict lines again. “The same doubts about the Prague Spring and Solidarnosc,” says the Czech historian Oldrich Tuma, “are now raised about the stationing of American anti-missile stations in Poland and the Czech Republic: You are unreasonable, you are crazy, you are endangering world peace!’”
The Polish Ambassador in Germany, Marek Pravda, also asks, “What is actually so scandalous about the anti-missile missiles? If I really wanted to make the Germans truly happy,” he continues, “I would have to reassure them that, now and in the future, we Poles want to remain absolutely defenseless.”
3
I hadn’t been in Prague and Warsaw for half a decade. Both cities have changed in a breathtakingly short time. Prague radiates the charm and savoir vivre of a southern metropolis: a successful combination of cobblestones, Habsburg, and Internet. The downtown districts vibrate with life and pleasure in the new freedom. The pedestrian zones are overflowing with shops offering only the superfluous: jewelry, Armani clothes, Prada shoes, Montblanc fountain pens, expensive watches. You have to do some real searching to find a bakery or grocery store in these neighborhoods. As in Paris or Berlin, Prague’s young women wear tops that reveal their navels, but unlike in Berlin, they wear pointy, high-heeled shoes that they place with ballerina-like virtuosity on the street, with repeated rapid glances downward to avoid getting the heels stuck in the gaps between the cobblestones.
Warsaw is hardly different. Here, too, a tremendous boom has developed in recent years. Everywhere Internet cafés, boutiques, shops offering the luxury articles made by Europe’s famous manufacturers. On Saturday, Sept. 6, 2008, I sat in an Internet café on Chmielza Street. Like all the other guests, I left my laptop standing when I heard samba drums outside. Before my eyes a kind of street party developed. But there was no polka music or Polish folklore. The young girls of Warsaw celebrated a Brazilian Carnival procession to the rhythms of skillfully played samba drums. They wore colorful feather headdresses and – in not exactly Brazilian temperatures – pushup bras and tanga pants, and they swiveled their hips no less seductively than their colleagues from Rio de Janeiro.
Bucharest, the youngest of the new EU capitals, still has the years of tempestuous growth ahead of it. The international airport is the size of an airport in a provincial city in the West. Fruits and vegetables are still planted on the shoulders of the expressway into the city; only a few, isolated shimmering palaces of Western investors rise on the fields. “That’s the advantage of falling behind,” Ioan Augusti explains to me, grinning. “If you are late enough, you suddenly find yourself at the forefront of progress again! What you saw they are now calling ‘urban agriculture’ in the United States and Western Europe; it’s considered the wave of the future.” Car drivers display the same recklessness one sees in all developing countries. On the streets of Bucharest, “freedom” and “democracy” sometimes mean that every car owner feels entitled to race along like a president – but without a limousine or police sirens. At the end of the kamikaze drive, the visitor lands in a so-called luxury hotel whose rooms offer the luxury of a 60-euro Berlin boardinghouse, but at a price of 240 euros.
Economically, the EU accession of the new member states has been an overwhelming success that exceeded even the optimists’ expectations. Romania, the most recent joiner, is growing tumultuously. The Romanian National Prognosis Center (CNP) expects growth of about 6.5% for the year 2008 and a continued reduction of unemployment. The Romanian National Bank calculates that the still-high rate of inflation (6-8% this year) will be cut in half with the introduction of the euro, which is slated for 2013.
The Central Statistical Office in Prague, too, reported record figures this year: the lowest unemployment rate (4.3%) in the history of the republic, a high economic growth rate (5.4% in the first quarter of 2008), and a glorious rise in the value of the Czech Krone, which is meanwhile one of the hardest currencies in the world.
With growth at 7.4% in the first quarter of 2008, Poland too is recording the highest rate of economic growth of the last decade. Employment rose in July 2008 by 4.7%, so that the still-high rate of unemployment is down to about 12%. The shadow side of these three booming economies is the rapidly increasing wage and non-wage labor costs and – in the Czech Republic and Poland – a palpable lack of skilled specialists.
The economic rise of the new EU members has already led to something no one expected: a strange exchange of roles in some border regions. Löcknitz is a poor northern German community of 3,000 near the German-Polish border and the old Hansa city Szecznin, formerly Stettin. It expected that Poland’s membership in the EU would lead to a little boom. German companies would settle here to take advantage of cheap Polish labor. The Polish communities on the other side of the border had complementary fears: masses of Polish workers would seek work in the German communities near the border, and German nouveau riches would buy up all the best Polish land near the border and build their villas there. – Events proved otherwise. In a few years, the wage difference between Germany and Poland fell from 10:1 to 3:1. The wage relationship between Löcknitz and neighboring parts of Poland was even reversed in some fields. And so six Polish companies have meanwhile settled in Löcknitz, while German skilled laborers who cannot find work in Germany work, “undocumented”, in Polish firms close to the border. And in contrast to the original presumptions, it is not the Germans who buy real estate in Poland, but the reverse: affluent Poles are buying property in Löcknitz and surrounding areas. The Germans, most of whom cannot speak Polish, are withdrawing and have difficulties adjusting to the new, paying clientele.
4
The differences in attitudes toward the EU between the Western Europeans, on the one hand, and the Central and Eastern Europeans, on the other, are obvious and will be felt for a long time to come. They are based on sixty years of experienced communist dictatorship and will break out whenever the relationship to Russia comes up. But the Central and Eastern Europeans don’t want a military conflict with their former hegemon, either; they advocate tying Russia into the West economically and politically. “In the end they will become part of Western Civilization. They can’t resist pop culture!” says Ioan Augustin, and reminds me of a distant historical experience: In the 17th century, Russia still bitterly combated the Western Enlightenment, only to institute it under Peter the Great. And in fact Romania was not modernized by the Western Europeans, but by the Russians, who also gave it its first progressive constitution.
What repeatedly arouses mistrust and outrage in the new member countries is the impression that the Western Europeans repeatedly fall for the “tricks” of the Russians and that they subordinate their democratic convictions to their economic interests. Germany in particular is accused of “naiveté” and too much empathy with the “humiliated” Russian soul. An example that is mentioned again and again in this context is the agreement between Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin to build the gas pipeline running from Russia directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea. There has been next to no public discussion in Germany of the political implications of this business deal. The projected gas pipeline through the Baltic is at least three times as expensive as it would be to build one on land. But the latter would have to go through one of the Baltic states and Poland. And, as the Polish Ambassador Pravda explains, the business partners Schröder and Putin term Poland “an unreliable transit country”. The Poles don’t have to guess for long what this terminology means: In case of conflict, Russia could not employ gas deliveries as a political weapon against Poland without cutting off Western customers as well (as happened in the case of Ukraine). This and nothing else is the reason for the expensive underwater pipeline. With the bilateral agreement, Schröder has served Russian power interests and pandered to German fears of an “unruly Poland”.
“It’s not as simple as the Central and Eastern Europeans are making it out to be,” replied Germany’s Foreign Minister Walter Steinmeier, when I conveyed these misgivings to him. The Baltic Sea pipeline could transport at most a sixth of the volume of Russian gas that would be needed in the future. Additional pipelines would have to be built, including some on land. So the Polish fears had no basis in reality. Besides, continued the Foreign Minister, “the Central and Eastern Europeans must finally begin developing their own foreign policy toward Russia. A NATO shield alone is not enough.”
The future shape of the European Union is still open. At the moment, only astrologers can say whether it can develop into a true political union and breathe a common identity, a European soul, into its citizens or whether it will remain a politically loosely-connected, economic association that grants its member states the greatest possible autonomy. What is certain is that for a long time Europeans will not have a common narrative about Europe: the Central and Eastern Europeans will tell the story of the 20th century differently from their neighbors in the West. “If we don’t accept that,” says the Czech diplomat and current Czech Ambassador to Ireland, Tomas Kafka, “we won’t move one step further.” It bodes well for the advances in intra-European understanding that the adherents of both camps – the friends and the opponents of political union – have long been found on both sides of the former dividing line. And it could be that the future face of Europe will be shaped much more by the newcomers to the European club than by “Old Europe”.

---

The Panic Savers

 

Peter Schneider probes the depths of German melancholy and miserliness

 

When I used to read the business section of the newspaper, mainly out of philological interest, I'd make fun of the expert jargon. The vocabulary of finance has borrowed heavily from weather forecasts. One speaks of "market perspectives," of "economic highs," of a "brightening" or a "dampening of the atmosphere," of a "climate of consumption."

 

A second major source seems to be the terminology of sex therapy. "Analysts" speak of "interrupted" or "growing consumer interest", which ideally peaks in a "consumption rush", they refer to the entrepreneur's "appetite for" or "disinterest in" investment – not to forget terms like "climax" and "sleeping off." To judge from its choice of words, the business world seems to be full of eternally pubescent patients who are swept this way and that, according to their whim.

 

On reading further, however, my sarcasm diminished. Economists of the world seem to agree that "the mood" is a decisive economic factor.

 

This temperamental child called "Mood" does respond to objective factors such as current developments on the labour market, growth rates or half a sentence of the President of the American Central Bank. "Mood" can, to a certain extent, be measured. Nonetheless, there's a high degree of uncertainty in such calculations, because "Mood" responds to non-economic happenings – a terrorist attack, a sudden change of government, a flood. As ridiculous as it seems, bad weather on the last two weekends before Christmas can wash out the annual balance sheet of retail sales.

 

And nations respond differently again to the same event. The reaction depends on the mentality, habits, historical experience and self-confidence of the people. In the unlikely event that Americans and Germans were to register exactly the same economic data in a given quarter, they would definitely not react in the same way. With zero growth, as is the case in Germany, Americans would presumably continue to blissfully consume and, with their notorious willingness to go into debt, unwittingly boost the foundering economy.

 

In this situatation we Germans tend - there's no need to speculate here – to save. As matters currently stand, we boast the highest savings rates (10.5% of net income) in all of Europe. And this, although Germany remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world with the third highest social standard. By the year 2010, roughly 1,000 billion euros will have been bequeathed; by the end of 2004, private accounts, very unevenly distributed, had accumulated 10,000 billion euros in gross assets. There's something desperate about a government that has to threaten the tough customer known as the consumer with a raised – and now postponed until 2007 - value added tax, in the hopes that he will be driven into a consumption craze, at least for a year! One smart alec claimed that the government would have had to threaten a value added tax of at least 30% to loosen up the German constrictor muscle.

 

Psychologists have interpreted this impulse to hold on as "panic saving." The explanation they offer is that, since the post-war years of hunger, Germany has experienced an almost constant period of growth, leading to the illusion that ascendency should be something constant, infinite and continuous. It did in fact seem as though the law that prescribes that boom leads to bust had been suspended. Incomes seemed to be increasing according to the guidelines for the pay-scale of German bureaucrats.

 

But does that really explain the very peculiar delay and rigidity with which Germans responded to the economic standstill and its underlying structural crisis – a situation that had been anticipated well in advance? Obviously a mental factor is involved, a basic attitude of sorts. No profession has influenced the German view on life as greatly as the class of bureaucrats and civil servants, with its guaranteed "appointment for life," irrespective of individual achievement and general economic development. No other industrial country features a comparable degree of participation in this professional sector. In all the hasty reforms that followed the shock of the PISA results, this bastion of German immobility and sullenness remained untouched, which is not surprising when one considers that the "party" of the civil service makes up the majority in the German parliament, regardless of who wins the election.

 

The art of minimising risk makes sense to a certain degree; all peoples practice it. But we have refined it to the point that foreign observers occasionally have the impression that we've succeeded in abolishing not only life's risks but life itself. Certain is, that if a positive mood is a pre-condition for economic rebound, Germany doesn't stand much of a chance. I'm often reminded of the saying with which a friend of mine prepared me for the USA: anyone who makes it through the door to the USA gets 10 points in advance, which they can bring down to zero pretty quickly. In Germany, you start with minus ten points which, if you're lucky, you can work up to zero. There has been, according to the latest surveys, a "brightening of the mood" but who invests any faith in these after the absolute failure of all polls and prognoses in the last elections?

 

There's no question about it, we have serious grounds for concern. Anyone who is not yet depressed, need only turn on the news. Every morning at 5:30, astonishingly lively, well-paid and upbeat newscasters provide their listeners with a daily ration of bad tidings: Deutsche Telekom has to cut 32,000 jobs, DaimlerChrysler has to lay off 16,000, Volkswagen would like to get rid of thousands of employees, Deutsche Bank wants to send 6,400 packing, Allianz is in the running with 8,000 jobs to strike, in Nürnberg, 1,750 workers are fighting for the survival of the headquarters of AEG. And all this, although most of these companies are raking in the biggest profits in years. If jobs are actually being created in Germany, we're not hearing about it. Good news is the sole preserve of the weather forecast which, in Germany, is no guarantee of pleasant surprises.

 

The atmosphere of crisis which is confirmed daily in the news, is exacerbated by the suspicion that there's been a fundamental change in the social market economy. The saying that what's good for the company is good for the job market has been inverted. The higher a company's profits, the more likely it is to strike or export jobs. The new formula is: ten percent less expenses for the personnel = forty percent more profit.

 

But the lost jobs don't disappear, they go elsewhere, to cheaper countries that we've invited into the competition. The well-worn words of comfort that fall so easily off the tongues of politicians of all parties, that Germans have to focus on their strengths and work better and more innovatively than the cheaper competition, sound like fairytales. Who's to say that the Indians and Chinese, once they've finished destroying our traditional local industries – like textile manufacturing - won't flood our markets with smart products from pharmaceutical, computer and nano- technologies for a tenth of the labour costs. Those who are so inclined will see the results of anarchic justice: the plundering of the former colonies is now being followed by a "plundering" of jobs in rich countries by the poor. But this is not a uniquely German fate. The question remains, why smaller neighbouring countries like Holland, Denmark, England and Sweden, which have exactly the same grounds for concern, have managed to improve both their situation and their morale.

 

The German tendency to save so obsessively on food can certainly not be explained with shrivelling purses. Big discount chains have succeeded in practically eliminating small and mid-sized stores - at least those unable to save themselves with some form of specialisation – from the cityscape. I don't have the impression that chains like Lidl, Plus, Aldi etc. have conquered France and Italy to nearly the same extent. After the most recent rotten meat scandal, nutrition experts tried carefully to make clear to German consumers that chicken for 1.50 Euros in the supermarket is not a reason to grab but rather to move on, quickly. The discount chains were not invented for the poor; you're more likely to find them behind the till, or packing and sorting. It's perplexing that the well-off middle and upper classes are lining up at the cashes of discount stores. One can indeed speak of cultural poverty. It's the better earners who are setting up to a quarter of their earnings aside and then, in the event of tragedy, opting for a bargain burial (including cremation in Ukraine).

 

In no other country in the world are so many people choosing to live as singles as in Germany. More and more women (14.6%) and men (23.6%) are content with the idea of having no children. "A rejection of children," commented Interior Minister Otto Schily in response to the statistics from Wiesbaden, "is a rejection of life." Other commentators refer to a hidden death wish. A plucky defender of the sinking birthrate found herself in a talk show. The woman rather liked the idea that there would soon be only 60 or 50 million Germans. The creators of the "Geiz ist geil" (stinginess is sexy) campaign seem to have formulated a principle which Germans already apply to their own propagation.

 

I am summarising data, observations and speculations about a mental condition that is best described as "German melancholy." Something is gnawing away at the German soul, something that won't be pinpointed by the instruments of analysts and polling institutes.

 

When was a melancholic ever uplifed by a "chin up" and a reference to the fact that his situation is, in objective terms, enviable? In antiquity, melancholy – a well-known emotional condition – was defined as an "excess of black gall" which had "gushed into the blood." No subsequent explanation, from Kierkegaard to Freud, was able to meet the power and poetry of this description. Freud's definition of melancholy is good for a parenthesis at best; among other symptoms he refers to "the debasement of self-worth, expressed in insults and accusations against the self."

 

It has often been remarked that Germans suffer from a highly irritable sense of self-worth, maybe even an infectious self-hatred. Also, that there are good reasons for this dysfunction – and not just since Auschwitz. But nonetheless, there's the question of the chicken and the egg: is the lack of self-love a result of Hitlerism or is Hitlerism a result of this lack?

 

In the last years, German melancholy has been on the increase. Since the end of the war, the singular German crime – after an almost twenty year period of repression – has pushed its way to the fore. Knowledge of this crime has expanded greatly; on the various anniversaries, viewers are confronted with ever more pictures and documentations in television. The art of teaching children and the children of the war about this German crime without generating something like a feeling of guilt, seems to have not yet been discovered – despite the guilt-induced obligation to distinguish between guilt and responsibility. The attempts of the German government to establish the "totally normal German people" in the international community remain unconvincing because any attempt to present a "nation" as normal tends to demonstrate the opposite.

 

Halfway "normal" peoples want under no circumstances to appear "totally normal", but rather unmistakable, extraordinary, unique, excellent – think only of the French myth of the "grande nation" or the American self-aggrandizement as "the greatest nation in the history of mankind." The self-worth of the Germans is and remains damaged; an awareness of this damage is probably much more acute today than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

 

The recognition of this damage is no occasion for pride, but rather the basis of a new and cautious self-confidence. In any event, melancholics and doubters are preferable to cholerics and megalomaniacs. The simple statement of a young person who finds it "ok" to be German expresses more optimism than all calls for "more national pride" and a German "Leitkultur" (defining culture).

 

By the way, there is one people in Europe that is more pessimistic than the Germans. But the Italians draw very different conclusions from their notorious distrust of the future: Carpe diem! One celebrates the moment and lives with abandon in the present. And an Italian would rather be drawn and quartered than buy a pre-packaged beef filet at Plus.

*This article originally appeared in German in Die Zeit on January 12, 2006.

---

 

 

NY Times Magazine

December 4, 2005

The New Berlin Wall

 

By PETER SCHNEIDER

 

On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed on her way to a bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and upper body, fired at point-blank range. The investigation revealed that months before, she reported one of her brothers to the police for threatening her. Now three of her five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the prosecutor, the oldest of them (25) acquired the weapon, the middle brother (24) lured his sister to the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot her. The trial began on Sept. 21. Ayhan Surucu, the youngest brother, had confessed to the murder and claimed that he had done it without any help. According to Seyran Ates, a lawyer of Turkish descent, it is generally the youngest who are chosen by the family council to carry out such murders - or to claim responsibility for them. German juvenile law sets a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for murder, and the offender has the prospect of being released after serving two-thirds of the sentence.

 

Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter of Turkish Kurds. When she finished eighth grade, her parents took her out of school. Shortly after that she was taken to Turkey and married to a cousin. Later she separated from her husband and returned to Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave birth to a son, Can. She moved into a women's shelter and completed the work for her middle-school certificate. By 2004 she had finished a vocational-training program to become an electrician. The young mother who had escaped her family's constraints began to enjoy herself. She put on makeup, wore her hair unbound, went dancing and adorned herself with rings, necklaces and bracelets. Then, just days before she was to receive her journeyman's diploma, her life was cut short.

 

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu's capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a statement to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped wearing her head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that she had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle of friends." It's still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women on this topic, explained, "The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering." By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother's life - her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage. Meanwhile, the two elder brothers have papered their cell with pictures of their dead sister.

 

here is a new wall rising in the city of Berlin. To cross this wall you have to go to the city's central and northern districts - to Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Wedding - and you will find yourself in a world unknown to the majority of Berliners. Until recently, most Berliners held to the illusion that living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants was basically working. Take Neukölln. The district is proud of the fact that it houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40 percent of these, by far the largest group, are Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group consists of Arabs. Racially motivated attacks occur regularly in Brandenburg, the former East German state that surrounds Berlin, where foreigners are few (about 2 percent). But such attacks hardly ever happen in Neukölln. As Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman from Neukölln, put it to me, residents talk about "our Turks" in an unmistakably friendly way, although they are less friendly when it comes to Arabs, who arrived decades after the Turks and often illegally.

 

But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Parallel to the declarations of "unconditional solidarity" with Americans by the German majority, rallies of another sort were taking place in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building courtyards: a poor man's fireworks, sporadic, sparse and joyful; two rockets here, three rockets there. Still, altogether, hundreds of rockets were shooting skyward in celebration of the attack, just as most Berliners were searching for words to express their horror. For many German residents in Neukölln and Kreuzberg, Vogelsang recalled not long ago, that was the first time they stopped to wonder who their neighbors really were.

 

When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to practicing law is the author of "The Great Journey Into the Fire"; Necla Kelek ("The Foreign Bride"); and Serap Cileli ("We're Your Daughters, Not Your Honor"). About the same age, all three grew up in Germany; they speak German better than many Germans and are educated and successful. But they each had to risk much for their freedom; two of them narrowly escaped Hatun Surucu's fate. Necla Kelek was threatened by her father with a hatchet when she refused to greet him in a respectful manner when he came home. Seyran Ates was lucky to survive a shooting attack on the women's shelter that she founded in Kreuzberg. And Serap Cileli, when she was 13 years old, tried to kill herself to escape her first forced marriage; later she was taken to Turkey and married against her will, then she returned to Germany with two children from this marriage and took refuge in a women's shelter to escape her father's violence. Taking off from their own experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model Western democracy known as Germany.

 

Reading their books brought to mind a forgotten scene from seven years ago. Every time my daughter, who was 14 at the time, invited her schoolmates for a sleepover, the Muslim fathers would be standing at the door at 10 p.m. to pick up their daughters. My wife, an immigrant herself, was indignant. I didn't like these fathers' dismissive, almost threatening posture, either, but I was a long way from protesting. Nor did I worry much when my daughter told me that one or another girl in her class was not taking biology or physical education and no longer going on field trips.

 

For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale district of Charlottenburg.

 

But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like me didn't care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for which there is only one word: slavery.

 

Seyran Ates estimates that perhaps half of young Turkish women living in Germany are forced into marriage every year. In the wake of these forced marriages often come violence and rape; the bride has no choice but to fulfill the duties of the marriage arranged by her parents and her in-laws. One side-effect of forced marriage is the psychological violation of the men involved. Although they are the presumed beneficiaries of this custom, men are likewise forbidden to marry whom they want. A groom who chooses his own wife faces threats, too. In such cases, according to Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli, the groom as well as the bride must go underground to escape the families' revenge.

 

Heavily veiled women wearing long coats even in summer are becoming an increasingly familiar sight in German Muslim neighborhoods. According to Necla Kelek's research, they are mostly under-age girls who have been bought - often for a handsome payment - in the Turkish heartland villages of Anatolia by mothers whose sons in Germany are ready to marry. The girls are then flown to Germany, and "with every new imported bride," Kelek says, "the parallel society grows." Meanwhile, Ates summarizes, "Turkish men who wish to marry and live by Shariah can do so with far less impediment in Berlin than in Istanbul."

 

Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There have been 49 known "honor crimes," most involving female victims, during the past nine years - 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the "miscellaneous" column along with other family tragedies and given a five-line treatment. Indeed, it's possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was "not in keeping with the religious regulations." Volker Steffens, the school's director, decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and teachers. More than anything else, it was the students' open praise of the murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and soon of all Germany.

 

During 50 years of continuing immigration, the Germans, most of the time under conservative governments, deluded themselves that Germany was not a country of immigrants. Suddenly, the obvious could no longer be denied. Alarmed by the honor killings, Germans began to investigate the parallel society: a society proud of its isolation; purist and traditional yet, in its own terms, creative, forward-looking and often contemptuous of the German host society. The recent riots in France have increased the sense of alarm. German politicians and experts lined up in the news media to point out why such riots are unlikely in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart or Hamburg. They claimed that young Muslims in Germany (although up to 50 percent of them are unemployed) had full access to the German welfare state and were not isolated in high-rise projects as in the suburbs of Paris. True, there were some cars set on fire in Berlin, but such incidents were interpreted as purely imitation crimes, nothing to be taken seriously. Yet in all these official declarations you sensed an undertone of panic. Germans' confidence that their nation can continue as it had been - integrating immigrants without an integration policy, remaining true to the traditional German identity, preserving the reassuring post-1945 chronology of advancing modernism - is on the line. It turns out that in the heart of German cities a society is growing up that turns modernity on its head. How could this happen? The Turkish writer Aras Oren, who has been living in Berlin for 40 years, once told me about one of his first plane trips from Istanbul to Berlin. He was sitting next to a farmer from Anatolia, who had evidently never been in an airplane before. The man had no idea what to make of the seat belt, the overhead warning lights, the tray table - nor did he understand his neighbors' explanations. When Oren saw him sitting there, in his sandals, with his cap on his head and his prayer beads between his thick fingers, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that his fellow countryman was enclosed in an invisible time capsule he wasn't going to leave even after he landed in Germany. It made no difference whether the man was traveling to Istanbul or to Berlin. This farmer had never seen a city; he was living in the 18th or 19th century and would carry the customs and rites of his homeland with him to his living room in Berlin. And he would cling to them doggedly if the Western democracy where he was living and working did not make a determined effort to acquaint him with its rules and laws. For decades, Oren has been preaching that it has never been so much a question of multicultural sensitivity as of turning peasants into city dwellers.

 

After 1945, Germany, in the process of reconstruction, needed great numbers of workers and initiated recruitment campaigns in the poor countries of Europe and on the Mediterranean rim: in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco. The arrival of the 100,000th immigrant worker, in the 1950's, was cause for celebration; the exhausted man climbed out of a train at a German station and was immediately handed a check. But from the beginning, the invitation came with a certain reservation on the part of the host and the proviso, often repeated, that Germany was not really a country of immigrants, not a melting pot. It was no accident that the foreign workers were called gastarbeiter, guest workers. Guests are expected to leave after a while.

 

The first Muslim immigrants came without their families. They slaved away repairing streets or working below ground, generally slept in men-only dormitories and for the most part had the same expectations for themselves as their employers had for them: they would work for a few years, send as much of their earnings home as possible and then, if all went well, drive back to their villages in a used Mercedes with enough capital to buy a house.

 

Naturally, things did not work out as expected. The Swiss author Max Frisch recognized the contradiction early on: "Workers were called," he wrote, "and human beings came." These were people who wanted their families to join them, people who after a long, hard working life wanted to spend their remaining years in Germany, people who wished to provide their children with an education and a better future in that country. Germany did not give guest workers passports or the vote, but it did repay them by incorporating them into the social system and giving them the opportunity for social advancement. A result was the rise of a Muslim middle class - relatively broad in comparison with those in France or in England - contributing around 39 billion euros annually to the gross national product and billions to the national pension funds. But as the German economic miracle came to an end, the most important condition of this precarious idyll changed. Although active recruitment was stopped as early as 1973, more and more Turks and Kurds moved to Germany, in accord with a ruling on reuniting families. And these parents, wives, husbands and children took their traditional lifestyle onto the German streets. Whereas during the first years of immigration, Turkish women wore Western clothing, they now appeared in long flowery skirts, hand-knitted jackets and tightly bound head scarves. The plastic trunks in which they had brought sacks full of dry beans, bulgur wheat and chickpeas metamorphosed into Turkish grocery stands. And with the food and the family members, traditional celebrations in the Muslim districts gradually became more and more like those back home as well. In the back rooms of the vegetable stands and halal butchers, prayer rooms sprang up, and in time these rooms became mosques. The German-Turkish author Necla Kelek sums it up this way in "The Foreign Bride": "The guest workers turned into Turks, and the Turks turned into Muslims."

 

Growing unemployment in Germany (now 4.8 million people, roughly 12 percent of the work force) hit the Muslim immigrants doubly hard - especially the youth, who frequently drop out of school before obtaining a diploma. "Seventy percent of the newcomers," according to Otto Schily, a former minister of the interior, referring to the period since 2002, "land on welfare the day of their arrival." Whole enclaves sprang up consisting of extended families living on the dole. Necla Kelek asked a group of "import brides" who had been living in Germany for years how they had actually prepared for their future in Germany. Their answer: incredulous laughter. Prepare? How and for what? "But how can you stand living here?" Necla Kelek went on. "You don't have anything to do with this country, you despise its culture and the way people live here." But we have everything we need here, was the answer; we don't need the Germans.

 

Those with no work and no future were looked after by the mosques, which increasingly became the most important place of communication. Inside their apartments, women resumed their traditional ways - apart from the "unclean" who ate pork, drank beer and let their daughters go unchallenged to parties and discos. Amid the German refrigerators, televisions and mobile phones, a rural culture was celebrating its resurrection, where Turkish was spoken, where people ate, prayed, fasted and celebrated according to custom, and where the surrounding local culture of unbelievers and the unclean was looked down upon. The riddle of the time capsule brought up by Aras Oren came to an unexpected solution. Some hundred thousand Muslim immigrants were able to take up, in Germany, the life of their ancestors in Anatolia. Indeed, maybe life in Anatolia was meanwhile more modern and secular than in the Muslim districts of Berlin.

 

Many sociologists attribute the growth of a Muslim parallel society to the discouraging social circumstances of the third Muslim generation of immigrants - high unemployment, high dropout or failure rates in public schools. But this explanation is incomplete, to say the least. It turns out that the Muslim middle class has long been following the same trend. Rental agencies that procure and prepare rooms for traditional Turkish weddings and circumcisions are among the most booming businesses in Kreuzberg and Neukölln.

 

Cem Ozdemir, a German deputy (of Turkish origin) to the European Parliament, tells two different stories concerning ritual circumcision. He himself grew up in the south of Germany; his own circumcision three decades ago was an absolute nightmare. It took place in a gymnasium, where six boys between 4 and 9 years old lay stretched out in six beds, and was performed by the local Turkish doctor, who took his instruments out of the tool case he'd brought along and started cutting away. He made a wrong cut on Ozdemir and sewed up the wound after the local anesthetic had worn off. To drown the child's deafening cries, a Turkish band started up with traditional music, and relatives danced in honor of the circumcised. More recently - in other words, some 30 years later - Ozdemir took part in another, more modern type of circumcision, this time as a godfather. The parents had the operation performed by a doctor in a hospital. There was no ritual, and the patient went home the same day. Some days later, when the boy was fully recovered, the parents gave a party that, as Ozdemir explains, "really was for the circumcised, and not for the relatives." All the participants, the boy included, enjoyed themselves.

 

For Ozdemir, the difference in these two stories showed that Muslim immigrants can hold onto their rituals by transforming and modernizing them. But there is a third story unfolding today in the rented halls of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, a story that emphasizes separateness and a communal rejection of compromise. The technical standard of the circumcision might be of the highest order, but it will have to happen in the presence of family and friends. The father of the circumcised might carry a German passport and run a successful company; but he will also worry about how his son's circumcision is judged by his friends and neighbors.

 

This conservative, fearful trend is likely to guide the next generation. For more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City officials aren't in a position to control Islamic religious instruction. Often the teaching does not correspond to the lesson plan that was submitted in German. Citing the linguistic deficiencies of the students, instructors frequently hold lessons in Turkish or Arabic, often behind closed doors.

 

Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming and sports as well as class outings.

 

There are no reliable figures showing how many Muslims living in Germany regularly attend a mosque; the estimates vary between 40 and 50 percent. Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques in Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they continue to address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities are gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose home page - until a recent revision - praised the attacks of Sept. 11, designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals. "And that kind of thing," she says, fuming, "is still defended by the left in the name of religious freedom." This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a frontal assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are fighting on two fronts - against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. "Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these mountains of German guilt," Seyran Ates complains.

 

It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.

 

German immigration policies (and liberal multiculturalism) are only one side of the problem. The other side is the active refusal of many in the Muslim community to integrate. It is an illusion to believe that a German - or French or Dutch - passport and full rights of citizenship are enough to make all Muslims loyal citizens. "The attacks in London," Seyran Ates says, "were in the eyes of many Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western community. The next perpetrators will be children of the third and fourth immigrant generation, who - under the eyes of well-meaning politicians - will be brought up from birth to hate Western society." It's only a question of time, Ates says, before Berlin experiences attacks like those in London and Madrid. When we spoke, the riots in France had not yet happened.

 

It is encouraging that some Muslim residents of Germany are forcefully calling on Germans to defend our democratic achievements against Muslim traditionalists and fanatics who incite hatred of democracy under the banner of respect for cultural difference. "What I am asking of the Germans," Necla Kelek says, "is nothing more and nothing less than equal treatment. I'm entitled to the same rights as any German woman."

 

Merely citing "lessons from the German past," as Germans tend to do, does not guarantee that these lessons are correct. It is a perversion when, out of respect for the "otherness" of a different culture, Germans stand aside and accept the fact that Muslim women in Germany are being subjected to an archaic code of honor that flouts the fundamental human rights to dignity and individual freedom. This has nothing to do with Germany or the "guiding German culture" that German conservatives want to put through; it has simply to do with humanity, with the protection of basic human and civil rights for all citizens of all ethnic backgrounds.

 

Politicians and religious scholars of all faiths are right in pointing out that there are many varieties of Islam, that Islamism and Islam should not be confused, that there is no line in the Koran that would justify murder. But the assertion that radical Islamic fundamentalism and Islam have nothing to do with each other is like asserting that there was no link between Stalinism and Communism. The fact is that disregard for women's rights - especially the right to sexual self-determination - is an integral component of almost all Islamic societies, including those in the West. Unless this issue is solved, with a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the West, there will never be a successful acculturation. Islam needs something like an Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their own Enlightenment, with its separation of religion and state, can the Western democracies persuade their Muslim residents that human rights are universally valid. Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary for integration to succeed. "We Western Muslim women," Seyran Ates says, "will set off the reform of traditional Islam, because we are its victims."

 

Peter Schneider is a writer based in Berlin. This article was translated from the German by Philip Boehm.

---

Wall Street Jornal

 

The Miracle Candidate

 

By Peter Schneider The Wall Street Journal via Dow Jones

 

BERLIN - If there's anything sensational to report about the early elections in Germany, it's the candidacy of the challenger, Angela Merkel.

 

Angie, as she's called by her fans, has fallen into the German party landscape like a meteor and continues to puzzle geologists of all sorts. The only certainty is that Angela Merkel's candidacy represents a radical, three-fold break with Germany's traditional electoral behavior.

 

Never before has a woman aspired to the most important political office with any likelihood of success. And as if this were not enough novelty, this woman is from the East, or more precisely from the so-called new states that were united with the old Federal Republic after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Finally, and this is perhaps most peculiar, this woman from the East has succeeded as a candidate in a party that has a reputation -- not without justification -- to be a purely male-dominated party.

 

Discussions on emancipation, demands for quotas for women like those that have left a mark on the other three traditional parties from the old West Germany (Social Democratic Party (SPD), Greens, Free Democratic Party), have bounced off the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, like snowballs from an armored windowpane. Helmut Kohl's 16-year reign was based on an inveterate, beer-swilling, male culture, merely confirmed by the patriarch's legendary telephone conversations with the wives of difficult party-members. It was no accident that after reunification, the few surviving East German dissidents sought their new political home with the SPD and the Greens. The many survivors from the Communist party (SED) celebrated their rebirth under the new name PDS ("Party of Democratic Socialism") -- an abbreviation that was soon interpreted by dissidents as "Praktisch das Selbe" or pretty much the same. How was this political miracle, Angela Merkel, possible? Perhaps not least because no one has found a convincing answer to this question so far. Nothing in Ms. Merkel's rather colorless biography suggests her fitness for the self-proclaimed mission for which she may well receive a mandate in the Sept. 18 elections: saving Germany. This mission can be described in a few lines: delivering the country from stagnation through a radical reform agenda; creating growth and jobs and accepting the social pain of the reform process: "Socially just is what creates jobs!"

 

Angela Merkel grew up as the daughter of a Protestant country pastor in Mecklenburg-Pomerania; her parents had moved to East Germany from Hamburg and still prefer the SPD or the Greens to the party in which their daughter found a political home.

 

As a member of a pastor's household, Ms. Merkel undoubtedly soon experienced the spying and harassment of the East German state security apparatus. This experience may have contributed to her choice of the relatively apolitical discipline of physics as her profession. But she could not have studied this subject, let alone made it her profession, had she ever drawn attention as a dissident. There is no evidence that the young physicist and member of the Academy of Sciences ever had any disputes with the East German authorities.

 

In the wild months of upheaval prior to the fall of the Wall, she joined the group "Demokratischer Aufbruch" (Democratic Awakening), which later became part of the CDU. Perhaps her decision to join Helmut Kohl's party can be seen as the first rebellious act in Ms. Merkel's life - against her parents' political preferences.

 

Authenticated and described extensively is the second act. When, in election year 1998, her political mentor Helmut Kohl found himself in difficulty due to the so-called "Party Contribution Affair" - several million marks of unknown origin had flowed into CDU campaign coffers from hidden Swiss accounts - she published a lucid article in the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung demanding a thorough investigation of the affair. With this act, she triggered Mr. Kohl's downfall and laid the foundations for her rise to power. For what had heretofore been the weakness of the newcomer from the East - that she had no power base in the CDU and was unfamiliar with the party's various alliances and secret agreements - suddenly proved to be her strength. By virtue of a novice's naivete and lack of attachments, she could demand something that seemed too complicated for the mutually-obstructing princes of the party: strict adherence to the rules of democracy. That she accomplished the overthrow of the patriarch, Helmut Kohl, entirely on her own and without any apparent exertion revealed for the first time something of Angela Merkel's character and sources of strength.

 

She is anything but a typical representative of CDU culture. A divorced woman with no children who married her partner just a few years ago - most likely not out of reverence for the sacraments of marriage, but in order to meet the minimum social criteria of a conservative chancellor candidate. Until a few years ago, she had hardly ever left Germany, and one could say she draws her concentration and ability to prevail - similarly to President George W. Bush - from a solid lack of experience of the world.

 

Endless articles have been written about her unfortunate hair style and her sometimes puzzling outfits. She must have been amused by the ways in which computer artists prettified the notoriously down-turned corners of her mouth and her lips. Ideological statements and religious allusions are also foreign to this physicist. In clear, completely undemagogic, more scientifically-oriented language, she analyzes Germany's problems and campaigns for their solution.

 

No doubt, Ms. Merkel cannot deny the cultural influence of the country she grew up in. But this also means that she remains an unpredictable factor for the party she leads. The world of CEOs and managers is alien to her. The "auto chancellor" Gerhard Schroeder, although a Social Democrat, is more at ease in the world of big business than the pastor's daughter from the backwoods of East Germany. Therefore no one going to the polls next Sunday really knows what a victory for Ms. Merkel would ultimately mean for the country.

 

It is ironic that many voters in former East Germany see Ms. Merkel, who shared their fate, as an apostate and traitor and fear further "colonization" of the East under her rule. I believe such fears are nostalgic. It has long ceased to be only the West Germans who set the rules for unification.

 

This much is true: The first result of unification was the economic and political absorption of East Germany. But the supposed "bargain" (in Gunter Grass's words) proved over 15 years to be difficult to digest, and has driven the swallower to its knees. Under the pressure of the economic crisis and the fear of the future, structures of thought and emotion that had been seen as typically "eastern" gained ground in West Germany. One might say, with only slight exaggeration, that the westernization of living standards in the East was matched by an easternization of attitudes towards life in the West. A study by the Infratest Institute commissioned by Der Spiegel magazine recently determined that the level of dissatisfaction among East and West Germans has become astonishingly similar: Since 1986, it has risen from 8% to 30% among West Germans, while it is 38% among East Germans. The convergence is particularly dramatic on the question of "social justice." In 1993, 39% of westerners and 65% of easterners believed it to be particularly important; now it is valued equally -- at 67% and 68%, respectively.

 

Adding to this, former SPD politician Oskar Lafontaine, by aligning a West German splinter party with the formerly communist PDS, has made the worldview of staunch East Germans acceptable in the West as well. It remains to be seen which side will be strengthened by the probable victor, Angela Merkel, in this culture war between right and left, West and East, women and men. In any case, this is the most exciting electoral campaign in a long time.

 

Mr. Schneider is a novelist. (Belinda Cooper translated this essay from the German.)

---

 

Across a Great Divide

 

By PETER SCHNEIDER

New York Times

Published: March 13, 2004

 

BERLIN, March 12 — The war in Iraq has made the Atlantic seem wider. But really it has had the effect of a magnifying glass, bringing older and more fundamental differences between Europe and the United States into focus.

 

These growing divisions — over war, peace, religion, sex, life and death — amount to a philosophical dispute about the common origins of European and American civilization. Both children of the Enlightenment, the United States and Europe clearly differ about the nature of this inheritance and about who is its better custodian.

 

Start with religion. The United States is experiencing a revival of the Christian faith in many areas of civic and political life, while in Europe the process of secularization continues unabated. Today the United States is the most religious-minded society of the Western democracies. In a 2003 Harris poll 79 percent of Americans said they believed in God, and more than a third said they attended a religious service once a month or more. Numerous polls have shown that these figures are much lower in Western Europe. In the United States a majority of respondents in recent years told pollsters that they believed in angels, while in Europe the issue was apparently considered so preposterous that no one even asked the question. When American commentators warn about a new fundamentalism, they generally mention only the Islamic one. European intellectuals include two other kinds: the Jewish and Christian variants. Terms that President Bush has used, like "crusade" and "axis of evil," and Manichaean exclusions like his observation that anyone who is not on our side is on the side of the terrorists, reveal the assumption of a religious mantle by a secular power, which in Europe has become unthinkable. Was it not, perhaps, this same sense of religious infallibility that seduced senior members of the Bush administration into leading their country into a war with Iraq on the basis of information that has turned out to be false?

 

Another reason for Europe's alienation from the United States is harder to define, but for want of a better term, I call it American narcissism.

 

When American troops in Iraq mistakenly shoot an Arab journalist or reduce half of a village to rubble in response to the explosion of a roadside bomb, there will inevitably be a backlash. Only a fool would maintain that an occupying power could afford many such mistakes, even if it is under constant threat of suicide attacks. The success of an occupation policy — however temporary it is meant to be — depends on the occupier's ability to convince the population, by means of symbolic and material gestures, that it is prepared to admit to mistakes.

 

In its use of the language of power the Bush administration has created the opposite impression, and not just in Iraq. The United States apparently cannot be wrong about anything, nor does it have to apologize to anybody. In many parts of the world people have come to believe, fairly or not, that Americans regard the life of their countrymen as infinitely more valuable than the lives of any other of the earth's inhabitants.

 

Of course, even in Europe only a pacifist minority denies the existence of necessary, unavoidable, justified wars. The interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan were supported by many European nations, even if some took a long time to make up their minds. European soldiers took part in those wars and continue to play a part in the peacekeeping aftermath.

 

What arouses European suspicion, though, is the doctrine of just, preemptive wars President Bush has outlined. Anyone who claims to be waging a preventive war in the cause of justice is confusing either a particular or a partisan interest with the interests of humanity. A president who makes such a claim would be arrogating the right to be the ultimate arbiter of war and peace and to stand in judgment over the world. From there it is but a short step to dismissing a basic insight of the Enlightenment, namely that human judgment and decisions are fallible by their very nature. This fallibility cannot be annulled or ameliorated by any political, legal or religious authority. The same argument goes for the death penalty.

 

Animosity isn't the only feature of the trans-Atlantic relationship. Europe is rightly envious of America's multicultural society. There can be no doubt that the United States has produced the world's most varied and integrative culture, and it is no accident that it is the only one to have a worldwide appeal.

 

But the American multicultural model also generates an illusion. Since Americans really have come from all over the world, in the United States it is easy to believe that you can know and understand the world without ever leaving the country. Those who were born and brought up in America forget that these people "from all over the world" first had to become Americans — a condition that new immigrants generally accept with enthusiasm — before they could celebrate their cultural otherness.

 

This is why it is always an American version of otherness that is encountered in the United States. You will not necessarily learn anything about the culture and history of Vietnam by working alongside a Vietnamese doctor in the teaching hospital at Stanford. You can sit next to an Indian in the same dot.com company in Los Angeles for years without learning much about the manners and customs of India. And going to a French restaurant in Atlanta is no guarantee that you will be served French cuisine.

 

Foreign films account for less than 1 percent of the American film market, and the figures are similarly low for books and news from abroad.

 

The impressive integrative power of American society seems to generate a kind of obliviousness to the world, a multicultural unilateralism. The result is a paradox: a fantastically tolerant and flexible society that has absorbed the whole world, yet has difficulty comprehending the world beyond its borders.

 

These differences and irritations add up to a substantial disagreement on the joint origins of American and European civilization. Europeans think that Americans are on their way to betraying some of the elementary tenets of the Enlightenment, establishing a new principle in which they are "first among unequals."

 

And Washington accuses Europe of shirking its international responsibilities, and thus its own human rights inheritance.

 

After all, what is the point of international law if it prevents intervening in the affairs of a brutal regime to stay the hand of a tyrant? Who is the true advocate of human rights: the one who cites international law to justify standing by while genocide is being committed or the one who puts an end to the genocide, even if it means violating international law?

 

Unfortunately, we cannot expect the news media in the United States or Europe to present a nuanced view of this dispute. In 20 years of traveling back and forth between Germany and America I have become convinced that news broadcasts usually confirm their audiences' views: in Europe, about America, the "cowboy nation," and in the United States, about Europe, the "axis of weasels."

 

These disagreements will be influenced but cannot be resolved by the the American presidential election in November. The divisions are too deep, and Europe cannot meet the United States halfway on too many issues — the separation between church and state, the separation of powers, respect for international law, the abolition of the death penalty — without surrendering its version of its Enlightenment inheritance.

 

On other contentious issues the United States feels as strongly: the universality of human rights and the need to intervene — if the United Nations is unable to act — when there is genocide or ethnic cleansing, or when states are failing.

 

So are we standing on the threshold of a new understanding or a new historic divide, comparable to the evolutionary split that occurred when a group of pioneer hominids thousands of years ago turned their backs forever on their African homeland?

 

So far it has usually been the Americans who have had to remind the Europeans of these common origins, which the Europeans, in turn, have so often betrayed. Maybe this time it is up to the Europeans to remind the Americans of the promises of the Enlightenment that the United States seems to have forgotten.

 

Peter Schneider is a German novelist and essayist.

 

This article was translated from the German by Victor Homola of The New York Times.

---

Op Ed on the Middle East

 

By Peter Schneider

 

Trans. Leigh Hafrey

 

To those who follow the international media as they report and comment on events in the Middle East, it must by now be clear that the European public views these events differently from most Americans. Since Europeans and Americans believe they have a commitment to the same world order and rules for civilized dialogue, our disagreement in this instance invites us to pause and take stock of the situation. It seems unlikely that one party is completely right and the other completely wrong. Though that is possible, common sense dictates that we not explain our differences here as one side's knee-jerk dislike for or bias against the other; rather, each side probably has legitimate reasons for its position.

 

This reciprocal faith hardly shows anymore in exchanges between Europe and the United States. Each side wields cliches and prejudices, with the primary aim of strengthening its own position. Europeans ascribe America's practically unqualified support for Ariel Sharon's "war against terror" to cowboy worship or Rambo--when in doubt, shoot first, talk later. Europeans also frequently cite the American inclination to a "Manichean world view" and "simplistic solutions." Americans increasingly characterize Europeans as "weaklings" and "cowards." Europe's criticisms of the Sharon administration and its brutality in "Operation Defensive Wall" are easily dismissed as anti-Israeli or even anti-Semitic.

 

Let me first highlight where most Europeans and most Americans agree: in a revulsion at the barbaric suicide-bombings by Palestinian terror groups, and a conviction that nothing can justify such attacks. Germans empathized with Israeli victims before the attack in Djerba produced German victims. German commentators agree that nothing has hurt the Palestinian cause more than its strategy of terror and Yasser Arafat's at best ambiguous stance on the matter. Worse, it's still hard to find an Arab intellectual who condemns the suicide bombings.

 

Let me cite another point of agreement: no mainstream politician or citizen on this side of the Atlantic questions Israel's right to exist, or its right to defend itself by any-including military-means against the attacks of Hamas and Al-Aksa.

 

Still, the differences between Europe and the U.S. start roughly here. Over the last few months, I have had the opportunity to follow the conflict from both sides of the Atlantic; and I would argue that, unlike Europeans, Americans have barely registered points of view other than their own. This doesn't enhance the exchange: so I'd like to set forth a few valid reasons why Europeans dissent from the American position.

 

With regard to information, so far as I can tell Europeans have access to roughly the same data as do Americans. In the public arena on both continents, all (even the most extreme) points of view are represented. But that fact tells us little about which points of view dominate in the media that determine mainstream opinion. Here, our differences are in fact considerable.

 

I was struck by the fact that, as recently as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to the Middle East, American television has barely raised the subject of settlements in the occupied territories. Hardly anyone has noted that, in the short time since Sharon took office, 30 new settlements have been created-a policy of illegal land seizure that every Israeli administration (with the exception of Rabin's) has pursued. When commentators mention this problem, they treat it as inappropriate behavior, a misdemeanor something like speeding: it may warrant a ticket, but certainly doesn't justify any kind of defensive response.

 

No one seems to want to mention the settlements by name, as if to escape the suspicion that they might be offering a plausible motive for the suicide bombings. Nothing can justify these attacks, but that doesn't mean that we must silently tolerate Israel's silent land-taking. Absent a recognition of this issue, protesting Palestinian civilians seem like a blindly raging mob, with no legitimate grounds for their rage.

 

Europe and the U.S. also differ in their assessment of Arafat and Sharon. As in the U.S., in Europe we now widely believe that Arafat is following a split strategy: preaching peace when he speaks in English, fomenting a "jihad" when he speaks in Arabic. Still, Europeans are stunned by the speed and conviction with which the Bush Administration embraced Sharon's view that Arafat is the "head terrorist," and consequently has the power to stop Palestinian terrorism with a single word. I doubt there is an informed citizen in Europe or the U.S. who can cite evidence for this view. The photos that show Arafat sitting by candlelight with a cell phone in his devastated headquarters do nothing to make this version of the situation more convincing.

 

But even assuming for a moment that Arafat is the head terrorist, why would the U.S. Government simultaneously promote him as an equal partner in the negotiation process, and do nothing while the Israeli Army holds him captive? How can the Bush Administration demand that the Israeli Army withdraw immediately [from??? lh], and at the same time not specify what sanction it might impose if its demand is not met? And what sense is there in destroying, not just Arafat's headquarters, but all the infrastructure that even the most Sharon-friendly Palestinian authority would need: the seaport, the airport, the tv station, the radio station, municipal structures such as streets, streetlamps, public phones, gas and electrical lines, apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals? To judge by international press reports, in "destroying the terrorist infrastructure" the Israelis have so completely wrecked the civilian infrastructure for a future Palestinian entity that it will be years before anyone can even conceive of a functional state.

 

We, the citizens of Europe and the United States, know for a fact that Arafat has, over the past 30 years, accomplished nothing for his people; and that he has rejected an opportunity-perhaps the only one--to achieve a just peace. That alone should be enough to discredit him as a negotiating partner. But what about Sharon's credibility? The Bush Administration calls him a "man of peace." These days, Sharon invokes Barak's peace initiative; at the time, though, didn't he do everything he could to torpedo the initiative? Hasn't he justified the settlements by asserting that a female settler who is expecting a child must have the right to add a room or two to her house? And doesn't he depend for his position on a conservative-Orthodox party that has publicly said that the settlements must never be surrendered? On what do Americans base their conviction that Sharon really does want an autonomous Palestinian state that is worthy of the name?

 

We now come to our third difference of opinion. The U.S. has always insisted that it is Israel's best friend. As a relatively new state under constant threat of annihilation, Israel needs such a friend. But how can Israel's best friend simultaneously serve as an honest broker for Palestinian interests? Does it really wish to? How can the U.S. Government be simultaneously partisan and neutral? Or to put it another way: if even the Europeans aren't convinced that the U.S. judges Israeli and Palestinian interests by the same standard, how will the Americans ever convince the Arabs that they do? Wouldn't it be better for the Americans to say: yes, we are partisan, and since we are, we need a third power in the Middle East, one that will help us serve as an "honest broker"? Americans rightly protest that Europeans don't speak with a single voice, that they always complain, and that in the end they leave the Americans to take military action and absorb the cost. I would argue, though, that the Europeans have allayed such concerns through their unified response to the September 11 attacks; and if the U.S. dismisses its allies' views simply because those allies don't have America's military clout, what kind of an alliance is it?

---

Angela Merkel in the US

Peter Schneider

 

On her visit to the United States this spring, German opposition leader Angela Merkel published an editorial in the Washington Post under the headline "Schroeder doesn't speak for all Germans"-and was accordingly well received in the halls of power. Of course, you can't go wrong with a statement like that; but in essence it was misleading. While voter confidence in the Schroeder regime has indeed dropped dramatically since the elections, the dissatisfaction is clearly with the ruling coalition's lackluster performance in domestic issues and the economy. If there's one position where Gerhard Schroeder enjoyed the overwhelming support of the German public, it was in his refusal to take part in the war against Iraq.

 

The Germans and other "old Europeans" were not the only ones to take this stand. And when commentators in the United States asserted that Europe is split on the question of the war, they were only half right at most. Throughout the new Europe, from Spain to Lithuania, polls indicate that seventy to eighty percent of citizens opposed participating in the war. It was not the people of Europe who were divided on this issue, but their governments.

 

Meanwhile, those governments not in accord with Washington are perceived as straining the alliance, of creating a deep transatlantic rift that American observers like to attribute to old or new varieties of "anti-Americanism." I have to confess that I find this explanation insufficient and more than a little self-righteous, as it suggests that the Germans--and like-minded Europeans--had no better argument at their disposal than sheer simpleminded aversion. Of course it would be foolish to deny the existence of such prejudice, just as it would be foolish to claim the USA is free of anti-European bias, and naturally chauvinism on any side can only make things worse. But this rationale fails to explain how the same Germans and Europeans who gave such unambiguous support to the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 and in the war against the Taliban now oppose the invasion of Iraq with equal determination. How could it happen that, in less than a year, this worldwide solidarity changed to global disapproval and mistrust? Anyone who points at Germany and cites the rampant pacifist euphoria and rabid anti-Americanism must also explain why Germans-both with regular troops and special forces-fought in Afghanistan from the very first day.

 

In the future, after Saddam Hussein is finally defeated, politicians and historians alike will track down the pieces of the transatlantic spaceship and investigate how this fragile instrument broke apart, how the commanders, the former "partners in friendship" managed to let it happen, and whether it can be repaired. Even now we may venture a few considerations.

 

In my opinion, the strong German dissent to the policies of the American-led coalition had less to do with the war against Saddam Hussein than it did with the way in which the Bush administration attempted to force this war on the international community. Who on earth could seriously oppose the project of stopping a murderous despot like Saddam Hussein?

 

The problem with the American policymakers was that they never left any other option open except for war. Nobody had any illusions that the impressive US-UK deployment in the Mideast meant anything but what was finally begun on Monday? : war. No American president would send two hundred thousand soldiers halfway around the globe to remove Saddam Hussein and then stop and have them turn around because he'd suddenly been converted by the international community. Indeed, it seemed clear that the US administration had their sights set on ousting Saddam Hussein from the start, and only declared the elimination of weapons of mass destruction as the primary objective in order to win over world opinion for war that had already long been planned. In fact, until the fighting actually began, the stated objectives shifted back and forth, as spokespeople for the Bush Administration kept outlining different sets of goals for the "possible war" --thereby clouding the issue. The bellicose posturing of the American president and his defense secretary made the European even more mistrustful, with pronouncements such as "You're either on our side in this fight against terror or on the side of the terrorists." Wasn't this a superpower telling its allies "you better accept what we propose or you'll suffer the consequences?" Wasn't the Bush Administration tacitly replacing the principle of "first among equals" with that of "first among unequals?"

 

As for the United Nations, it's hard to criticize the countries who quibbled with the US policy; after all, they were simply taking the official goal of the deployment-i.e., the peaceful disarmament of Saddam Hussein-literally; since it was the only objective with precedent in international law. Of course their protracted quibbling spared the rest of the international community from really having to decide whether removing Saddam Hussein was, in fact, the only viable means of achieving this goal in the long term. Meanwhile, the fact that it was only thanks to the American threat of force that the inspectors were able to resume their work at all was conveniently swept under the rug. The Europeans, and especially the Germans seemed like clever stock brokers, sensing their chance on the market (a chance they had long written off and did not contribute to) for a moral payoff, where they would appear as angels of peace in contrast to the war-crazy Americans. But why didn't the Europeans act on their own-especially since it had been proven that such threats were necessary to enforce the longstanding UN resolution? At the very least they could have offered to share the costs of the Anglo-American show of force. And then there's the question of what to think of a government such as the German one that claimed it would insist on unhindered inspections but under no circumstances would support military intervention if the inspectors were hindered.

 

Mistakes were made on both sides. I don't think the current rift is as irreparable as some pundits maintain. We should not enoble poor diplomacy, superpower arrogance, and crafty manipulating of the moral market by naming them a "structural rift" in the transatlantic alliance. And beyond the mistakes is a genuine difference of opinion, one that the alliance must be able to withstand. With the rebuilding of Iraq now in sight, the Germans-who have had respectable reasons for standing aside thus far-will be urgently needed, and it would be shortsighted to renounce their help out of vindictive anger.

Translated by Philip Boehm

 

This article was written in 2003 for the oped pages of The New York Times but not published

---

A Hero with a Blind Spot

 

By Peter Schneider

 

Fifteen years ago, as I was setting off to visit the United States for my first extended stay, a knowledgeable friend gave me the following advice about the difference between the United States and Germany: "When you enter a house for the first time in America, you begin ten points ahead, but can quickly drop to zero. In Germany, you start ten points in the hole and have a decent chance of working yourself up to zero."

 

His rule of thumb was confirmed. Anyone who has sent a child to school in the United States has observed the effects of the psychological drug called "high expectations": "You're good! We believe in you! You can do things others can't! In fact, you can do anything, be anyone-Michael Jordan or Bill Gates or the President!" It's easy to challenge this sort of naive American dreaming, which, in any case, American don't take literally. Europeans fail to understand that the unreal career promises represent schooling in a frame of mind: "The world lies open before you. Grab hold of it. You'll see its limits soon enough."

 

Germans do not regard the art of encouragement and praise as a virtue. Whoever finds fault first-with a product, a project, or a colleague-supposedly proves his intelligence; whoever praises someone is suspected of having ended his studies prematurely, or of being in the person's debt. In the Old World, people underestimate the intangible energy one feels in the United States-the optimism, daring, and self-confidence.

 

I witnessed a rather comical illustration of this contrast with the introduction of the impotency pill Viagra. On American television I saw the failed Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole give an ecstatic thumbs-up. He had tested the blue pill after a prostate operation, and, like hundreds of thousands of American men, he had experienced the miracle of resurrection.

 

In Germany, too, the news about the wonder drug triggered waiting lines in front of urology clinics. But in the special reports about Viagra on German television, you saw only the deeply concerned faces of experts who outdid one another with warnings: If you want to experience dizziness, headaches, and stomach pains, become blind, and risk a heart attack, take Viagra! As Americans celebrated the hundreds of thousands of men who could enjoy their regained stamina, Germans focused on six men who had died-and warned those who survived that they had better visit their psychiatrists. We'll have to leave open for now the question as to which reaction will prove wiser over time. But to the question "Where would you prefer to live in the interim-with the 'thumbs-up optimists' or the 'head-shaking pessimists'?" the answer is easy.

 

What is in fact not always easy is to distinguish between Americans' politeness and praise and their outright lies. I recently visited an acquaintance's newly furnished Georgetown apartment with two Washington friends. We strolled through this gem of a home exclaiming repeatedly "How wonderful!" and "Just amazing!" before winding up in the kitchen. It was an expensive kitchen, decorated with deliberate hideousness. Nothing matched-the rose-colored rug covering the marble floor, the fake gold knobs on the teak cabinetry, the heavy chairs set around the oval-shaped glass table. But my two friends so outdid each other with compliments that I began to question their taste. We had barely said good-bye to our host and reached the street when they broke out in a fit of laughter: They had never seen so absurd and screwed-up a kitchen!

 

Since that experience, I tend toward caution when I am the recipient of American compliments. I ask myself what these friendly people might be saying about me once they reach the street. And when an American editor says nothing more than "really interesting" about one of my articles, I know that he might pay me for it, but that he'll never print it.

 

If you ask me which, in the end, I prefer-phony American politeness or an honest German insult-I'll opt for the American approach. I've profited from the American culture of encouragement and positive overstatement. There have been times when a stay in the United States has been like time spent at a health resort: I'm able to recover from the generous disbursement of mistrust and competitive putdowns that I get at home. Why should I not say loud and clear that I'm grateful to America and Americans for their good mood and optimism? I simply take it in stride that I never know exactly what Americans are really thinking.

 

To be sure, I discovered very early on certain limits to American openness and hospitality. The limits became clear the moment I answered a polite question about the origin of my accent. Here I must dispel an illusion. It's not true that the foreigner in the "land of individualism" is perceived first as an individual. On the contrary, it's been my experience that I'm seen first as a German and then, after a kind of quick test, as an individual.

 

That may have more to do with a passion of the American media than of its citizens. In fact, I am totally baffled by the omnipresence of Germans on American television. No matter when I click through the channels, I recognize gestures, symbols, and, above all, sounds from Germany. Apart from Spanish, German is the only foreign language, I believe, that can be heard on American television. But the omnipresence that any other nation might envy has a catch. Almost every image and every narrative refers to a period some 60 years ago-specifically, those 12 years in which Germans became world famous for a colossal crime whose singularity only a few hopeless crackpots dispute.

 

It's not that people distrust me or my kind because we're German. Among educated people, the idea of collective guilt and its transmission to third or fourth generations is obsolete. The problem is at a lower level than the intellectual discourse. If you are a German in the United States, that one subject always comes up quickly, and you are asked politely about it. And, of course, there's a difference if you are the one posing the question or the one who has to answer it.

 

Many of the Germans I know in the United States have gone through a transformation: They try to act as un-German-as much against the stereotype-as possible. That's not as difficult as it sounds. First of all, you avoid all the vocabulary that we might call "Hollywood German"-commands like "Komm her!", "Halt!", or "Achtung!", even when your child is about to cross against a red light at a dangerous intersection. You avoid names like "Fritz" or "Hans" or "Wolfgang." You also avoid seeming too earnest or profound; you display a sense of humor even if you have none; you work at being nonacademic and relaxed. Above all, you try to become the exception to the rule: You learn to be the "good German," the German who is struggling appropriately with his past, the German who is always ready to show feelings of guilt, the German who dislikes any kind of German patriotism and expresses doubts about German unification (doubts that Americans find hard to understand).

 

This transformation business extends further still. The not-exactly-flattering image of what is "typically German" has even provoked many young people in Germany to behave in the most "un-German" of ways, often with strange results. Sometimes you get the impression that the German trying to be the exception has become the rule. Germans are the only people in the world who think that "typically German" is a naughty expression.

 

But these efforts are all in vain. Just turn on the television in the United States and, on a regular basis, you'll find a German. He's blond and, more often than not, good-looking. But he's got those cold blue eyes, he's wearing a brown or black uniform, he's snapping his heels together, and he's shouting "Zu Befehl, Herr Obersturmbannführer!"

 

I asked a friend who's a specialist in German-American relations whether Germans from 60 years ago could possibly be shaping the popular image of Germany in the United States today. His answer was refreshing. "Oh Peter," he said, "you mustn't take that so seriously. The Nazi story assumed a place long ago in the library of great historical myths. For Hollywood it is, among other things, a great plot line: legendary bad guys, singular crimes, degenerate, pent-up sex, and daring, victorious heroes-who, as a rule, are Americans. No one associates those things with real Germans anymore."

 

I had no difficulty with the first part of his answer. Today's Germans don't have much to offer the media.. To be sure, 50 years of democracy, 20 years of Helmut Kohl, the amiable Gerhard Schröder, candlelight vigils, and self-mutilators and identity seekers are infinitely preferable to what Germans offered the world in those infamous 12 years. But are they exciting? They can't compete with the Nazi plot line-and thank goodness. If Warhol's belief that everyone can be famous for 15 minutes applies to nations as well, the Nazis have made Germans famous for all time.

 

But I doubt my friend's opinion that the omnipresence of Nazi Germans in the American media has no effect on the contemporary image of Germans. As evidence, I need only consider most of the articles I've been asked to write for American journals and newspapers. They have two themes: Germans facing their Nazi past, and Germans facing the Neo-Nazis.

 

A journalist friend of mine worked for a long time in Berlin. He, an American Jew, and his wife, a Pole, moved recently to a suburb of New York. At first, his sixth-grade son spoke better German than English. When it was his turn to hold the American flag during the pledge of allegiance, he was excited and proud. But a classmate insisted that the boy had no right to hold the flag because he wasn't an American. And another classmate was more blunt: He called the twelve-year-old a Nazi.

 

If such is the pedagogical outcome of the option the Holocaust Museum gives children to track the fate of a Jewish child in Nazi Germany right up to extermination, we need to ask some questions. Might it be that the visual lesson in the museum deludes the young into thinking that, because of their birth and mother tongue, they are to be counted among history's good and justified? Had my friend's son really been a German, would his classmates' actions have been justified?

 

Millions of Germans have married and had children with immigrants from Poland, Yugoslavia, Denmark, Hungary, and Russia-countries that were attacked by the Nazis. Why should one of those children have to justify himself to an American child the same age? With every generation it will become more difficult to distinguish by means of mother tongue and passport between the progeny of the victim and the progeny of the aggressor. Does the danger of an illusory feeling of superiority really apply only to sixth-graders?

 

The somewhat recent American culture of remembering the Holocaust has made a definitive contribution to the historical understanding of that unparalleled crime and to the moral education of those born after the fact, not only in the United States but also around the globe. But does this culture of remembrance have a side effect? As identification with the victims of the Holocaust becomes a part of American identity, does it tempt Americans to suppress the crimes of their own history? It is truly astonishing that no monument or museum on the National Mall in Washington recalls the history of American slavery. The Vietnam War Memorial honors the approximately 50,000 American soldiers who were killed in the conflict-but there is no mention of the approximately 3 million Vietnamese dead, most of whom were civilians.

 

Perhaps my greatest concern about American culture is that its inherent drive toward purity and innocence (a redeemer quirk) and its inclination to self-righteousness come at the price of denying a good portion of the America's history. It seems to me that in this Christian country they know only the sins of others, but not forgiveness. I realize that I'm now jumping on the character trait I praised-for good reason-at the start. But the wonderful, highly productive optimism of Americans flows from a belief that in the eternal struggle between good and evil the good empire flies the American flag.

 

The world needs and wants a good cowboy, whose justice and righteous individualism overcome evil empires. In contrast to all the other superpowers, America has actually lived up to this self-elected identity several times. What to do, then, when the justified have eyes only for the sins of others and not for their own? The worldwide transmission and attraction of American culture leads Americans to view the rest of the world as a kind of outpost for their way of life. Are their powers of judgment and faculties of perception not fatally crippled if they regard their own highly egocentric interests as the measure of humanity? In the future, only a limited number of conflicts will follow the good-versus-evil pattern. The conflicts will revolve rather around the control and distribution of finite energy resources-and the grotesque waste thereof in the United States. Questions about whether meat with hormones is healthy or whether biologically altered food should be marked accordingly are not answered by the conviction that what's good for America is good for the world.

 

And yet, my objections do not alter my fondness for a country in which I have spent some of the best years of my life. We Europeans ought to be excited that, of all things, the American way of life has become the model for the emerging world culture. Of course, it's not a good thing that the paradigm of a society that depends upon competition suddenly has no competitor in the world. One hopes for a strong and equal Europe simply to save Americans from overweening pride and ignorance. Still, the anxious and envious inhabitants of the Old World might ask themselves what makes the American model so attractive. Precisely because it is incomparably more open and welcoming to integration than European society, American society is, to date, the only society in which every non-American can recognize a part of himself.

 

The image of the United States in Europe is similar in many ways to the image West Germany had in the East German media for 40 years: The negative details were correct, but the overall picture was fundamentally wrong. What gets lost in the media is that, after each episode of intolerance, racism, and moral one-upmanship, a counter-movement arises. Americans have not avoided many of the historical evils that befell Europeans before them. But in contrast to the Europeans, Americans have freed themselves from most of those evils on their own.

 

The Maryland village of Friendship Heights recently attempted to forbid smoking on public property-even outdoors-in accordance with the crazy slogan "A smoke-free America!" Meanwhile, heroes in Hollywood films are smoking as never before. Perhaps this is the unique quality of American culture: Of everything good or bad you can say about it, the opposite is equally true.

---

NY Times Magazine, 29.4.2002

 

Scenes from a Marriage

 

By Peter Schneider

 

Translation by Leigh Hafrey and Kira Petersen

 

The DaimlerChrysler merger reminds one, in many ways, of the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana--only in this case, two coaches were exchanging vows. An elite, old-line car company had asked for the hand of a beautiful, populist bride from the New World, and its petition had been accepted. It was a dream wedding--a "wedding made in heaven," as Daimler CEO Jürgen Schrempp called it in May 1998. The wedding party-among them, Wall Street, its analysts, and even major stockholders like billionaire Kirk Kerkorian--was enthusiastic. "For the auto industry, it was like the Berlin Wall coming down'" said Andrew Card, president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association (quoted in Bill Vlaslic and Bradley A. Stertz, "Taking for a Ride," p. 248 [something's missing in this title-lh]). DaimlerChrysler shares promptly rose to a dream high of $108.62 when they went on the market on November 11, 1998.

 

The fortune that the newlyweds brought to the marriage was immense: when it proposed, Daimler was valued at almost EUR 72 billion; after some haggling, Chrysler agreed to the union with the Germans for about $38 billion. It was the most expensive transatlantic wedding in the history of the industry. And the two complemented each other so splendidly! Precisely because they had practically nothing in common, they made an ideal couple--because in the world of cars, different laws prevail than in a marriage between man and wife. Daimler meant expensive luxury cars; it catered to high income consumers the world over. Chrysler, by contrast, appealed to the masses with its economical and popular jeeps, vans and pickup trucks; but it sold only in the American market. Still, the German groom insisted this was a pairing of equals: they set out with two CEO's and a promise that they would share everything that could be shared: parts, service centers, debt and personnel.

 

By the press conference on February 26, 2001, the dream couple had undergone a remarkable transformation. The American bride had apparently vanished--or, to be more precise, she had turned into a German with a bald spot and a mustache. To American ears, CEO Dieter Zetsche's name sounds more like "Mrs. Thatcher" than "Princess Di." The management board did speak English for the occasion, but with a thoroughly German accent. Daimler still looked terrific at this event; but with Chrysler it was all gloom and doom. "We have to face facts," said Jürgen Schrempp, now the solo management board chairman of DaimlerChrysler, "the U.S. situation has taken a serious turn for the worse."

 

Daimler reported record earnings: smart [this is the brand-I don't know how you want to punctuate it-lh] and Mercedes had grown 7% worldwide for fiscal year 2000, with sales of 1,154,900 units. Chrysler, by contrast, had lost $1.3 billion in the last quarter of 2000 alone, with losses of another $2-2.5 billion expected for 2001. A month earlier, management had announced a restructuring plan that would cut 26,000 jobs in the U.S. over the next three years--almost a fifth of the entire work force. The once euphoric witnesses at the wedding-Wall Street and its analysts-weren't impressed by Jürgen Schrempp's proposed restructuring. In the wake of the press conference, the price of DaimlerChrysler stock dropped to about $50 a share, which is where it had been in March of the previous year. In the months following the merger, the stock price of the third-biggest car company in the world had declined by half; the company was now worth less than Daimler alone had been, pre-merger. It was all the harder to believe, because Chrysler had had far better earnings than Daimler at the time of the merger in 1998.

 

What had happened? Had the three- and five-pointed stars collided instead of aligning themselves in the heavens? Was the super-merger becoming a super-nova?

 

Analysts work on shorter deadlines than astrologists: they don't savor their readings. When $50 billion goes up in smoke, blood flows; someone's got to find a scapegoat. But who was the culprit? Had the Daimler chauffeur, known for his love of red wine and Cuban cigars, driven Chrysler into a wall in just two years? Or was it the other way around: had he been taken in by his elegant and rather publicity-shy partner, Bob Eaton, and bought Chrysler just as the firm was going over a cliff? It's easy to guess which interpretation prevailed on which side of the Atlantic.

 

Cars are highly symbolic and emotionally loaded products. In the emotional life of the average, motorized family, cars come right after kids, and possibly after pets. We sublet our apartment before we sublet our car. Unlike wiring, building materials, a pipeline or computer chips, the fate of car companies can arouse collective passions. When a popular make of car changes owners and the change causes damage, it awakens passions that no kitchen equipment company can elicit. This, despite the fact that cars, like portable phones, designer clothes, and soccer and basketball teams, has a national identity only in their name--everything you touch and see in them comes from some other part of the world.

 

The stakes increase dramatically, too, when the opponents are the winners and losers in the last world war. Even before the wedding, people had feared a "Germanization" or hostile takeover by the Germans. "New World Order? Chrysler might merge with Daimler-Benz--or be taken over": thus, the forebidding headline in the Wall Street Journal on March 6, 1998--which now seemed prophetic. Daimler took precedence over Chrysler, not just in the firm's logo, but everywhere. The firm had its headquarters in Stuttgart; it was a German "AG," not an American corporation; and, one after another, all of the members of the "dream team" that had led Chrysler in the glorious 90's left. Schrempp fired the last American CEO in November 2000. And what about the promised "merger of equals"? When the Financial Times asked Jürgen Schrempp this question on October 30, 2000, he gave an answer for which he apologized later to Chrysler's employees; but the cat was out of the bag. He had never envisioned anything other than the current structure of the company, said Schrempp: "we had to go a round-about way, but it had to be done for psychological reasons. If I had gone and said Chrysler would be a division, everybody on their side would have said‚ 'there is no way we'll do a deal.' But it's precisely what I wanted to do."

 

This fabulously undiplomatic confession earned Schrempp and his company outrage in the American press, and an $8 billion lawsuit from major Chrysler shareholder Kirk Kerkorian. "Mr. Schrempp handed us the most difficult part of our brief on a silver platter", Mr. Kerkorian's lawyer, Terry Christensen, told the Wall Street Journal, " He told us not only that he had lied, but also why."

 

"What' s Daimler ever done for Chrysler?" John Kipphoff asked in a chat room [?-lh] piece for the Financial Times on July 27, 2000. In response, he received letters like this one: "Daimler has done nothing for Chrysler. Except deceive American workers . . . . As an American I do not like the way they have treated the workers and the UAW and I will not buy any of their cars". (Guest 69, Feb. 21,2001) "Mr. Schrempp has initiated a conquest mentality, by eliminating all foes at what was once a proud franchise" (Guest 67, Feb. 21, 2001) "Is there any particular reason for believing in this Teutonic invasion? It sounds very silly to me" (Guest 64, Feb. 20, 2001).

 

Many workers at Chrysler felt they knew the score: at the time of the merger, their company had been seen as the most profitable car manufacturer in America. One after another, their best people - among them Bob Eaton, Bob Lutz, and Thomas Stallkamp - had left. Management at Chrysler headquarters were now all "Krauts," and things were going downhill fast. No wonder old memories and resentments got mixed into the analysis of the situation. As the company went deeper and deeper into the red, the bosses lost the confidence of the workforce. A victorious American army had entered World War II Germany in Willys Jeeps; the Willys Jeep, a main attraction at the company museum, was now being driven by the people who had lost the war. In 1998, Schrempp had been named "industry leader of the year" by the industry journal Automotive News, and "manager of the year" by Manager Magazin. Now, a lot of people simply called him "Shrimp."

 

Chrysler bought Willys in 1987. The Jeep is displayed in the Walter P. Chrysler Museum [???-lh] in a lovingly recreated diorama of wartime France--charred wood, crumbling walls, smashed windows. On the car seat lie, as if they had been left there just two minutes ago, an American army knapsack and an assault rifle. Next to the Jeep, two life-sized American soldiers made of plastic study a map. On the bullet-riddled wall to the right, a roadsign says "Versailles." An exhibition panel explains that "the Jeep became and remains a symbol of liberation and a triumph over adversity."

 

With anger over the Germans' "betrayal" of Chrysler came the suspicion that Daimler had taken all but $2 billion of the approximately $9 billion in cash reserves Chrysler had set aside in case of an economic downturn, and gone off to buy Mitsubishi. Hardly a month after wedding Chrysler-and to the dismay of Chrysler's still American executives--Schrempp the groom had departed for Japan to propose further weddings--with Mitsubishi, Honda and Hyundai. "Where has all the Chrysler money gone?" Daniel Howes asked in the Detroit News, and demanded that Schrempp step down: "Mr. Schrempp, we don't like you!"

 

But then, in the spring of 2001, something strange happened. Without any change in the red ink at Chrysler, a change of heart began to make itself felt in Detroit, where the outrage had centered. "The mood has changed," mused Paul Krell, press secretary to Steve Yokich, President [????-lh] of the United Auto Workers: " The issue of the 'evil Germans' has turned into questions about Bob Eaton's management, and all the millions the merger earned him."

 

Doron Levin, chief columnist of the Detroit Free Press, was still writing on November 21, 2000 about the "Auburn Hills massacre, carried out with cruel efficiency by Juergen Schrempp and his henchmen." But in January, 2001, he suddenly changed his tone, reminding readers of Detroit's pathetic "boom-and-bust approach to building cars and trucks," and continued: "Monday's bloodletting in Auburn Hills has little, if anything, to do with Chairman Juergen Schrempp's management style . . . . Had Eaton not sold the company, he would be the one undertaking cutbacks. His good fortune--foresight?-was to scamper off the stage before the economy ran out of steam."

 

Even Steve Yokich, who held his peace surprisingly long after DaimlerChrysler announced the biggest U.S. layoff in 2000, amazed the public by commenting: "I don't think there would be a Chrysler if there wasn't a Daimler with a fatter purse than we have here in Michigan." (Detroit News, April 5, 2001) And, for the benefit of Chrysler CEO Bob Eaton, who had taken early retirement [???-lh], he added: "Bob Eaton, he made his own bed and I'll let him sleep in it". When I asked him how he justified his defense of Daimler, he answered: "Chrysler would have been in the crisis a year earlier without the merger." And when I asked about Schrempp's "betrayal" of the "Merger of Equals," the union leader calmly replied: "The word "merger of equals" means nothing. They bought a company. I saw it as a takeover from the beginning".

 

Yokich sees a big advantage in German business regulations [Peter-Betriebsverfassung? lh] dictating that labor leaders be informed early about a company's situation and included in decisions on restructuring. A contract signed in the fall of 1999 gave unionized Chrysler workers severance pay [??--lh] and an ample early retirement plan. [??--lh] Unusually generous by American standards, the contract prevented a strike or even the threat of a strike. "Yes, we like codetermination'" says Steve Yokich.

 

How to explain this surprising twist in the DaimlerChrysler saga? By now, journalists had examined Chrysler's figures, and discovered that the company the Germans had bought was not exactly flourishing. According to this diagnosis, Chrysler was suffering from an illness Americans call "overconfidence": in the 90's things had gone so well, they would always go that well; Chrysler managers weren't prepared for the collapse of the market in 2000. The company's production costs were too high; it introduced too few new products; it overloaded its cars with expensive electronics and then-faced with competition from Honda, Toyota and VW, which offered similar or better equipped cars at lower prices--was unable to sell its product. Recalls and rebates of up to $4,000 per car sent Chrysler's losses soaring, which ate up those cash reserves within months.

 

As recently as 1996, Chrysler had set the standard for productivity. Three years later it was the other way around: by 1999, Chrysler needed more workers than all of its competitors [combined??? lh] to achieve a one-percent gain in market share [???? lh]. During these three years, Bob Eaton and his team had increased the size of the workforce by a fifth--roughly the 26,000 employees that Dieter Zetsche now planned to let go, with the approval of Steve Yokich.

 

Steve Yokich and the Detroit press didn't necessarily do Schrempp--the man who had conceived the merger--any favors by unexpectedly rising to his defense, because their defense suggested that Schrempp had completely misjudged Chrysler. In the global economy, you don't get points for character. Given the choice between being the "evil German" who had ruthlessly duped the Americans, or the fool who had been suckered into buying an ailing American company for much too much money, Schrempp would probably have preferred the reputation of the "evil German."

 

Now the storm broke out in Germany. People had already accused Schrempp of letting the Americans muddle along in Auburn Hills without enough supervision. He was unable to appease the 11,000 outraged shareholders at the Annual Meeting in April in Berlin with his announcement that the Chrysler restructuring was proceeding on schedule. "We want to see other numbers or other heads", said Klaus Kessler, spokesman for the German Association to Safeguard Shareholders, and called Schrempp "the biggest capital destroyer in German history". (Financial Times, April 11, 2001). And as is the custom in envy-ridden Germany, some suspected that Schrempp had pushed ahead with the merger only for his personal gain.

 

"There was indeed a cultural problem with this merger," says Manfred Gentz, financial head of DaimlerChrysler. But it was exactly the opposite of how the American press portrayed it. It was precisely the fear of being seen in the U.S. as arrogant, know-it-all Germans that prevented the people at Daimler from intervening in time at Chrysler. "For two years we told ourselves that the Americans must know what they're doing, and that we shouldn't step in." In fact, Chrysler was under American management until James P. Holden stepped down in November, 2000. Dieter Zetsche and Wolfgang Bernhard took over at Chrysler only when it was basically too late. Up to that point, the fused companies had in fact met all the essential conditions of a "merger of equals"--two CEOs, two headquarters, two product and sales departments, and so on. But from the start, of course, the plan had been to alter these separate infrastructures--because the truth was that DaimlerChrysler was no longer Daimler or Chrysler, but a new firm altogether.

 

If Gentz is right, if the Germans observed the decline in Auburn Hills for too long precisely because they wanted to avoid being seen as German "invaders," then this culturally motivated hesitation has cost the shareholders--German as well as American-billions of dollars.

 

When it comes to "arrogance," Gentz continues, it was really two kinds of arrogance coming into conflict. "The Chrysler people told us: you have no idea how to build cars. And we told them: you don't know how to plan product cycles. You can't sell the same cars for ten years and then dump ten new models on the market in one year." And so it went, from questions of reporting and accounting to sales management and long-term planning. The people at Chrysler muddled along with their planning from quarter to quarter; the Germans had a passion for thinking ten years ahead, but neglected the next quarter. Two proud companies, two know-it-alls went at each other with their respective prejudices-and the clashes hurt. Still, learning opportunities began to emerge: for example, where speed was concerned, the people at Daimler had a lot to learn from Chrysler. The Americans, for their part, had started to study the planning of product cycles at Daimler.

 

But wasn't it wrong, even suicidal, I ask Christopher Walther, the PR head at DaimlerChrysler, to entrust the German Dieter Zetsche rather than an American with the task of leading Chrysler out of the crisis? "The guiding principle was: one man for every job, the very best," Walther replies. All the decisions concerning personnel that caused such an uproar in the American press had been specified in the original agreement. "It had always been planned that--after a transitional phase--there would be one CEO, not two; one chief legal counsel, not two; one engineering director, not two; one procurement director, and so on." Walther doesn't think it's carved in stone that the best men for the two seats on the DaimlerChrysler board "happen" to be German. "In this case, there were no qualified Americans." When I ask whether he could imagine an American or Japanese CEO someday running DaimlerChrysler, Walther replies without hesitation: of course.

 

In all likelihood, Walther is being sincere. He and Gentz belong to a generation of Germans for whom nationalism is a horror rather than a seduction. This may be why the Stuttgarters made a crucial mistake in pitching the merger to the American public. Because they were so eager to do the right thing and therefore hesitated to intervene, their belated and hurried intervention appeared authoritarian, inelegant and "typically German." The American public had indeed taken literally the promise of "equality." They believed and wanted to believe despite the significant difference in the two partners' clout--Daimler has 58% ownership of the new company, Chrysler 42% [Peter-is this what you're saying? Lh]-- that the word "equal" was more than a declaration for the IRS. Instead of clarifying at the outset that this "merger of equals" was merely transitional, the Stuttgarters nurtured the illusion, as Jürgen Schrempp himself loudly admitted. After all, the illusion facilitated the merger; without it, the deal might never have materialized. Yet in the end, the Germans turned out to be victims of the very illusion they had created: they were cheaters cheated. Because the merger of equals not only prevented a closer look into the books; it prevented timely intervention.

 

Auburn Hills, Michigan, is one of those built-up moonscapes where Wal-Mart counts as culture. No one believes there is life outside the company walls. The visitor can wander for miles among office buildings with tinted windows, without coming across a single café or store. For accommodation, he has to rely on a $200 per night executive suite, complete with a breakfast that could have been donated by the Salvation Army. If he wants to go to the Mexican restaurant three miles away for lunch or dinner, he has to call a cab; and the meter is set at $25 when he gets in.

 

At the Auburn Hills headquarters I talk to two leading members of the "post -merger integration team." One of them, Kenneth R. Ference, is sitting across from me in person; the other, Peter Fries, is on a down-link from Stuttgart. The working language is English. This team, which started its task in June 1998 and wrapped it up at the end of 1999, had the job of developing a common "business culture." "What we had learned in training courses was not exactly helpful," says Ference. Standard formulas from the intercultural training program--"Americans are like peaches - soft on the outside, tough on the inside. Germans, on the other hand, are like coconuts - tough casing, soft interior"--had not helped to prepare anyone for the encounter of peach and coconut. "For example, I had learned that I should not greet a German colleague with my hand in my pocket," Ference remembers, "or he wouldn't take me seriously. At our first meeting with a dozen German managers, every other one had his hand in his pocket."

 

Peter Fries did not fare much better. On his first visit to Auburn Hills with his family, his colleague Ference invited him to his house. The prep' course instructor warned him: this was simply one of those American courtesies that should not be taken literally. Fries was advised to book a hotel room if he didn't want to end up on the street. So imagine his surprise when Ference picked him and his family up at the airport, wouldn't take no for an answer, and drove them straight to his home.

 

By contrast, other preconceptions and prejudices proved all too accurate. The Germans came to meetings bearing thick folders; they printed out entire banks of data. The Americans came unarmed, and preferred to talk without an agenda. The Germans produced minutes for every meeting; the Americans were happy with memos. On this point, Fries believes, the Americans have triumphed: today at DaimlerChrysler, the volume of paper--once notoriously high at Daimler-Benz meetings--has been reduced by a third. The same can be said about efficiency: whenever the Germans want to begin a session by revisiting the last meeting's decisions, the Americans stop them: why bother-it's all set!

 

And then there was the issue of first names! In the company of the Americans, the Germans began to address one another by first name. They even started to use the familiar "du"-you--form. Among themselves, they would address each other with the formal "Sie," but still use first names. After a while, the pairing felt ludicrous; some executives who had used the formal "Sie" with one another for decades, now went over to "du." Peter Fries estimates that he now has three times as many "close" German colleagues as he had before the merger.

 

So, were the Americans the casual ones, and the Germans stiff and formal? Yes; but then again--no. The heated and carpeted garage for former Chrysler boss Bob Eaton provoked a lot of commentary. The Germans were also astonished when they accompanied their "informal" colleagues to the cafeteria in the Chrysler building at Auburn Hills: the same managers who didn't care about titles and hung their jackets on the backs of their chairs had no problem with the multiple, hierarchically segregated cafeterias for management. In Stuttgart it was common practice to use the formal "Sie" and people's titles--if they had one--but everybody ate in the same cafeteria.

 

Differences like these were easily passed off with a joke or a casual comment. But there were also differences that could not be addressed with simple curiosity. Take, for example, the large income differential: by comparison with the salaries of their American counterparts, German managers were collecting pocket money. In the year before the merger, the ten top executives at Daimler-Benz earned about DM 20 million. The income of Chrysler CEO Bob Eaton alone surpassed the salaries of Daimler's entire top team: $9.8 million, comprised of salary, bonus, and stock options. Chrysler's top five managers combined earned approximately $35 million in 1997. And these earnings were far surpassed in the wake of merger, when managers exercised their stock options. Bob Eaton alone is said to have earned $70 million from the merger. That same year, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz, Jürgen Schrempp, had to make do with EUR 2.3 million. (S. Waller, p. 310).

 

When asked about this discrepancy, Schrempp is said to have replied quite casually that he wasn't exactly living below the poverty line. He presumably had no idea that this attitude, which would have been enough to earn him love letters from the left in Germany, made him slightly suspect in America. There had to be something wrong with someone who appeared not primarily concerned with his own material well-being; he had to have different, darker motives. It seemed clear that the sinister German was after something more important than tangible wealth: perhaps it was power for power's sake. And perhaps this suspicion was not unfounded.

 

The Americans as the generous global players, immune to stinginess and envy? The Germans as small-minded pedants, obsessed with consensus, and green with envy? Yes, and then again, not quite. Because in one respect, the Americans were the hicks in the marriage with the Germans. Daimler was and is an international company: many of its managers had already worked for Mercedes in South Africa, Asia, and Latin America; in addition to their mother tongue, they spoke English and other languages. They could not believe that most of their American colleagues did not even own a passport so that they could travel to Stuttgart; they had never left America, and spoke nothing but English.

 

"When Jim Donlan, the controller, participated in a meeting in Stuttgart," remembers Peter Fries, "there were ten Germans in the room besides him, but all ten of us had to speak English. That wasn't easy for us, but it had the benefit of shortening the discussions. Because if you don't really know the language, you make your point quickly and clearly, not the way you would do it in German. In the end, we were glad when we had an American at the table in Stuttgart."

 

At the same time, this practice led to widespread separation anxiety among the Germans. It wasn't so much a deep-seated love of their mother tongue, but more the fear of actual, monetary losses: "We don't understand a thing, we're being taken to the cleaners! How can we be sure that our managers understand the fine print, when all the meetings are in English? They'll give things away, simply because they don't know enough English." But six months later, the fear had passed.

 

Strangely enough, the Americans had the same fear, precisely because the Germans didn't have the requisite skills in that global language: English. Ference remembers that he often found himself with a group of Germans who were speaking German unrestrainedly among themselves, despite the fact that all of them knew English. They always tried to be fair and translate everything for him. Had he never suspected that they might not be translating the most important parts? I ask him. Ference laughs politely.

 

The most remarkable thing about this much-discussed "clash of cultures" is, perhaps, just how fast many of the disagreements and differences vanished. Precisely because both sides brought prejudices to the merger that came into play more quickly and more violently than usual, they were more easily overcome. "People always ask me about the differences," says Ference. "The only surprise was discovering how similar Peter and I were. It was almost scary to see how alike we were."

 

Standing on the 15th floor of the Chrysler Group headquarters, I have a hard time surpressing a feeling of awe. My God, I think, you Stuttgarters have really done it, this is a real coup. A German now presides over this venerable American car company: he rules over 107,000 American employees. Every day, he can look out his panoramic office windows to the highway nearby, and tell himself that every fourth car passing by is made by the company he runs.

 

There he sits---slim, wiry, wearing a white shirt and tie but no jacket--across from me. Like Jürgen Schrempp, he must be a tennis-player; maybe, like Schrempp, he's also a mountain climber and a test-car driver. But unlike Schrempp, he has the reputation for being down-to-earth, someone with a modest manner and an ability to listen. When I ask him what language we should speak, he says, "whatever you prefer." Fine, Mr. Zetsche--I begin in German--let's start with the basics: may I smoke in this room? The new Chrysler CEO answers in German, but with American bewilderment: " No one has asked me that question yet. But--I think not." I am impressed, can't think of a snappy comeback.. Should I apologize? Maybe we should have spoken English after all.

 

What does he, Zetsche, find most surprising about his new job, I ask. How quickly and thoroughly stereotypes can be broken down, replies Zetsche. "The Americans," he says, "observe you with an open mind, see how you behave. They don't pigeon-hole you, just because you're a German." He has never felt that someone resented him personally. The important thing is to address critical issues directly and not to put a spin on anything. The evening before the annual UAW meeting on March 26 in Las Vegas, he went with Wolfgang Bernhard [who is???-lh] to a UAW party. He hadn't given it much thought, he just wanted to have a beer and chat with union members. Many people stopped by their table. The next day, this little, private appearance was the talk of the town. Apparently the American managers had never done anything like it. Steve Yokich had, at first, presented the new CEO from Germany as hostile to unions; but after Zetsche presented his turn-around plan-in the course of which he also had to justify laying off 26,000 employees--Yokich backed him completely and with a determination "that was almost eerie." Something like that was unthinkable in Germany.

 

Of course he, Zetsche, was still being asked what the Germans had done with Chrysler's $9 billion reserves. "Then I answer: one night, we packed all that glorious Chrysler cash on a shuttle, flew it to Japan, and bought ourselves Mitsubishi."

 

Zetsche's style sits well not only with the American press, but also with the Chrysler employees. Ask anyone there, and they answer with a conviction that is almost cult-like: "We'll make it. With our new leadership it will work out!" Whether they're right or not depends perhaps least on their ability to surmount the cultural differences between Americans and Germans. It's really just an everyday business opportunity.

---

The New York Times Magazine, Febr. 13th, 2000

Saving Konrad Latte

or, how a Jewish musician survived in World War II Berlin

 

by Peter Schneider

 

translated by Leigh Hafrey

 

I

 

The First Book of Moses recounts a memorable negotiation between Abraham and God. God wants to destroy the faithless and corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham tries to sway him from his purpose. There may be 50 righteous souls in the city of Sodom, Abraham suggests-surely You don't intend to kill them along with the unbelievers? God accepts Abraham's argument: if there are 50 righteous souls, I will spare the whole town! But Abraham doubts whether he can actually find 50 righteous souls. So he talks God down, from 50 to 40, from 40 to 30, and so on. At ten, God breaks off the negotiations and sends two angels into the city, and they find a single righteous soul in the city. So God waits until sunrise, until the angels have brought this solitary righteous man, together with his family, into the city of Zoar; then He rains fire and brimstone on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

 

Among the many memorials recalling the persecution and destruction of Berlin's Jews, not one honors the Berliners-not an inconsiderable number-who helped the fugitives from Nazism, who hid and protected them. Historians estimate that between five and ten thousand German Jews chose to go underground before and during the war, about half of them in Berlin; about 1,400 Jews actually lived through the war in Berlin. It's a very small number when compared with the 170,000 or so Jewish citizens of Berlin who were driven out and murdered; but when one considers how often those in hiding changed their hiding place, and how many people helped them to do so, the demographics of resistance change. Hardly one of those who went underground could stay in one hiding place or with one protector; most were forced to change their location, often at a moment's notice, and to entrust themselves to someone else's care.

 

At the Berlin Research Center for Anti-Semitism, Wolfgang Benz and his colleagues are putting together a study on "Attempts to Save Jewish Citizens." Benz applies the following rule of thumb: to save a single Jew in Berlin, at least seven people had to intervene, and that is a conservative estimate. Ludwig Collm, the secondary school teacher who, together with his family, went underground in Berlin in October 1942, remembers having 20 different hiding places. The writer Inge Deutschkron reports that she and her mother changed hiding places 22 times. The musician Konrad Latte names 50 protectors.

 

But even those who went underground to survive and still got caught, would not have made the attempt if they hadn't been able to count on friends and acquaintances. We will never know how many Berliners had the decency and courage to protect their Jewish co-citizens from the Nazis-20,000, 30,000? But we don't need to know that, in order to pay homage to this by no means typical, but still admirable minority. Just 300 of them have been awarded the Israeli order of "the Righteous of the People," and in the city where they did their deeds, they have remained generally unrecognized. A scenario not covered in the Old Testament offers itself: how would the Old Testament God proceed against a city that doesn't acknowledge its own righteous souls?

 

We don't lack for historical studies, biographies, scholarly publications, but until Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List," and despite all the efforts made by those who had been saved, the rescuers' stories had not penetrated the broader German consciousness. How to explain that indifference? Are the killers more interesting than the rescuers and, in this age of "infotainment," simply easier to market?

 

There are perfectly serious, apparently irrefutable arguments for this one-sided interest. During the decades of denial and mitigation of German guilt, it was essential that the guilty be turned over and brought to justice. Anyone who attempted to honor the few "quiet heroes" (Inge Deutschkron) who had given shelter to the persecuted, almost automatically came under suspicion of trying to hush up or whitewash Germany's past. It exemplified the spirit of that hypocritical post-war formula millions of Germans used to prove their innocence: "My best friend was a Jew."

 

But the argument that the rescuers' stories could be misused to neutralize German guilt doesn't hold up. Quite the opposite is true. In reality, the example set by these few makes the guilt of the collaborators and bystanders greater, not less: it contradicts the self-justifying myth held by the wartime generation, that the Nazis' terror machine was so finely tuned that obedience was the only option-unless you were willing to risk your life. Whole libraries have been written about Hitler's would-be assassins, and the military men whose revolt failed on July 20, 1944. A German holiday has been declared in their memory, probably because their fate seemed to explain the collapse of German civil society: whoever protested, resisted, got hanged or stood up against a wall!

 

The legacy of the little, unacknowledged heroes who hid and saved Jews is different. Their example shows that the choice between willing obedience and death-defying resistance is much too crude: you could resist without automatically risking your life. That's why the memory of these few rescuers threatens the conformists' self-portrait more than the story of the resistance fighters and would-be assassins who knowingly bet their lives against Hitler, and lost. We know all too well that heroism can't be required. But one doesn't have to be willing to die, to give bread or a bed or an address for the following night to a man on the run, an outcast; all it takes is good manners, some cunning, and courage. That is how the story of the quiet heroes alters the picture of daily life under the swastika.

 

The story told here can't compete with Daniel Goldhagen's seductive offer to the younger generation of Germans: give me your grandparents (all of them potential murderers, filled with "genocidal anti-Semitism" [English original? lh]), and I will give you your innocence (because you are young and grew up in a democracy!). The quiet heroes' story shows that no one is guilty or innocent simply by virtue of their membership in a specific generation. Even in the worst years of state terror, there was a choice, a small choice, and some citizens made that choice.

 

II

 

Today, Konrad Latte lives in Berlin-Wannsee with his wife, Ellen. Until three years ago, he had kept absolutely silent about his odyssey through the Berlin underground. I asked him why: now nearly 80, and a man who clearly enjoys telling a good story, the musician has no easy answer to the question. The biggest reason, he says, was a horrible feeling of failure-shame at having survived those murderous years when his parents didn't. For years he couldn't think about it without feeling suicidal. He has broken his silence now, because he wants to leave a memorial to those men and women, hardly recognized or honored, who helped him escape his executioners.

 

Konrad learned that he was a Jew--with everything that implied under the Third Reich--not from his parents, but more or less by mistake in high school, in Breslau. When his new teacher in sixth grade ordered: "Aryans, raise your hands!" Konrad instinctively raised his; he didn't know what "Aryan" meant. He only knew, in a vague sort of way, that there was some minor difference between him and his classmates; and he sensed that this new, foreign word defined that difference. When he turned around, he noted that all the other students had also raised their hand.

 

He was punished for lying, and shortly thereafter sent off to a Jewish school. His parents had no connection to Judaism, Konrad explains. "I wasn't brought up any differently from the other German children. At Christmas we went to (a Protestant) church, and at Easter we went to the (Catholic) Breslauer Cathedral, which was famous for its lavish Easter service." His father, a lawyer who wasn't beyond a bit of German nationalist sentiment, had enlisted as a volunteer and served during World War I and now ran his father-in-law's wholesale goods business; his mother was interested in art and literarature, and ran a right-thinking, middle-class household.

 

Eleven-year-old Konrad saw his transfer to a Jewish school as a punishment. The Jewish holidays, the phylacteries-he found it all "totally alien," and felt his classmates didn't accept him. His relationship to his new identity was colored by the fact that the Nazis had forced it on him. Decades later, when he told his story on Israeli television for a 50th anniversary commemoration of the Holocaust, Konrad Latte startled his interviewer by commenting: "I don't consider myself a Jew, I have no tie to the Jewish community--or any other community." And when the interviewer protested: "But you shared the fate of the Jews in its most terrible form-" Konrad answered: "I can't let the Nazis have the last word. I can't let the Nazis tell me: 'You're a Jew, you belong in this corner, this drawer.'"

 

Konrad subverted Nazi directives any way he could. He didn't wear his yellow star as specified, which is to say, sewn onto his jacket or coat; he put it on with a safety pin, so he could take it off anytime. He went to concerts, the opera, and church, where Jews were no longer allowed. He quickly discovered both the generosity and the cowardice and mendacity of great artists. He auditioned for the well-known Breslauer organist Johannes Piersig, who accepted him as a student. Of his own accord, Konrad communicated what the Nazis had taught him: "I am a Jew." "I didn't ask you about that," Piersig chided him gently, "I'll see you at two o'clock Friday for your lesson." When Konrad arrived at the church at the appointed hour, he found an old woman in place of his teacher. In a trembling voice, she informed him that her son had unfortunately been delayed, and then pleaded with him: "Don't trouble him again with your requests!" Then she hastily put a 20-Mark bill in his hand and disappeared. Konrad didn't even consider accepting the master's bribe; at the next church service, he threw it in the collection plate.

 

These were the experiences that helped the 20-year-old developed his sense of people, and his intuition. During his apprenticeship years as a survivor in Breslau, Konrad was forced to learn two things: first, how to hide his identity and lie convincingly; and second, how to reveal himself. After the war, he wondered how you could unlearn either.

 

On November 9, 1938, the Kristallnacht, his father was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. He spent six weeks there, in horrible conditions; then, just as inexplicably, he was released. He returned home, the unwitting bearer of scarlet fever. Konrad's 13-year-old sister, already sick with the flu, contacted their father's illness, and died in a matter of weeks.

 

Even after these experiences, though, Konrad's lawyer father wouldn't believe that criminals had now taken over the state he once served. The Jews of Breslau were receiving postcards telling them to report on such and such a day to the local police station, together with 50 pounds of luggage and three days' provisions. Father and son fought over how they ought to respond when they received their postcard. Konrad was firm: "We don't go," he declared, "even if it gains us just one hour." Manfred Latte felt that living as outlaws, perhaps for years, was too difficult. Thinking back, Konrad Latte muses that his father, a Prussian administrator, simply couldn't imagine not obeying an official summons. But the younger Latte insisted: "Whatever you decide, I'm not going!" The fact is, even he didn't know what happened to the Jews who reported to the collection point and were shipped eastward; he only knew that none of them ever came back.

 

In the end, with his mother's support, Konrad succeeded in countering his father's reservations against going underground. When they learned that another transport was in the offing, they decided to run. On March 3, 1943, they took the local train to Berlin; the family had relatives there. Still, they chose the Nazi capital, the source of their persecution, as the place in which to vanish, for another reason: in an anonymous metropolis like Berlin, they stood a better chance of survival than anywhere else in Germany.

 

By this time, Jews had long since been forbidden the trains. Konrad's mother, Margarete, "borrowed" a mourning outfit with a heavy veil from an acquaintance. Konrad, who had been working as forced labor in a paint factory, appropriated the coat of a friend of the family who had been arrested, and pulled it on over his paint-splattered work clothes. He also acquired a Nazi badge with the swastika from a friendly pharmacist; the badge later became a talisman of sorts. Among the few personal effects the family carried were three ampoules of cyanide-a parting gift from the pharmacist.

 

When the Latte family arrived at Berlin's Zoo Station, the city was in flames. Allied bombers had flown a major sortie the night before. Konrad's father had a sister living in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, but when they got there, they found her apartment sealed; the Gestapo had already rounded her up. Konrad's family walked on to Berlin-Schöneberg, to Curt Weiss, a cousin of Konrad's mother. Weiss was horrified to see his three relatives at the door: living with his Aryan wife in what the Nazis termed a mixed marriage, he was himself very much at risk. Just a few days earlier, authorities had launched an operation the goal of which was to make Berlin "Jew-free" by Hitler's birthday on April 20. The Lattes' cousin was in no position to hide his relatives from Breslau, he said; but he did know a young actress, Ursula Meissner, who lived alone in a large apartment in the Prenzlauer Berg section of town.

 

Twenty years old, Ursula Meissner was working at the Prussian State Theater under the direction of Gustaf Gründgens. She didn't hesitate when she saw the Lattes: she greeted them with a simple "Welcome!" She didn't say: "One of you can stay here," or "you can stay here for two days," or "two weeks"; she didn't set any limits. "It was the first and only time," Konrad Latte remembers, "that we had the luxury of hiding together under one roof."

 

I asked Ursula Meissner, now 77 and living in Geneva with her husband, why she had given a fugitive family shelter, even though she didn't know them. Almost shocked, she answered: "What else could I do?" Had she realized the risk she was taking? "I didn't think of the risk," she answered. And no, neither then nor later did she have any contact with resistance groups. "Which I regret," she added, "maybe I was too insignificant, or just too young--I always looked younger than my age."

 

The spontaneity and impulsiveness of Mrs. Meissner's offer to help may surprise, and it will irritate those who would have refused to help in similar situations. Was it just her youth and naivete that made her behave as she did? Was she just respecting her fatherly friend Curt Weiss's request? We have had a flood of psychological studies on the so-called "savior syndrome," which treat it as an anomaly. But these studies all miss the essential point: Mrs. Meissner's response is no different from that of hundreds of other rescuers, acting in other countries and under other circumstances. They weren't unaware of the dangers, but they thought first of the needs of those in danger, and only then about the dangers. That is what makes their behavior unique. "Mrs. Meissner comments: "You wanted to be able to look yourself in the eye, the following morning."

 

To her, it was also common sense that she stay in her apartment with the fugitives, even during bombing raids and counter to all safety guidelines: her "guests" would have drawn too much attention in the bomb shelter. (It should be said that the young actress's spontaneous decision did have a pre-history: in her class in school, she was the only student who refused to join the German Girls' League. When the director of the school encouraged the champion athlete to join the Nazi organization and asked her why she refused, she only answered: "I don't like it"; to her own astonishment, the director was satisfied with this less than comprehensive reply. And on the occasion of her confirmation, a Jewish friend of her father's had a book dealer send her Knaur's World Atlas. The book dealer was an informer, and told the Gestapo that the family was accepting gifts from Jews. Her father, a Prussian administrator, received an order through official channels to return the book. He refused, thereby earning himself a black mark in his dossier--but there were no further repercussions. The chronicler will find it difficult to record these minor acts of defiance: suddenly, it becomes apparent that the most monstrous crime in recorded history was based on the absence, repeated a million times over, of such small, by no means life-threatening gestures of revolt.)

 

The apartment in the Schivelbeiner Strasse was on the second floor. Curious neighbors both above and below--and there were plenty of "curious" neighbors-noticed the sudden increase in activity and noise in the apartment. It was also less than helpful that the inexperienced fugitives-termed, in Berlin slang, "U-boats," because they had gone "underground"-surfaced much too often, leaving the apartment in broad daylight. It wasn't long before one of Mrs. Meissner's neighbors commented to her: "Your bombed-out friends look awfully Jewish!" The Latte family took that comment in the stairwell as a warning to disappear immediately.

 

Thanks to a Quaker friend, Margarete Lachmund-who, though she lived in Mecklenburg kept them [is this the Lattes, Peter?-lh] fed through war's end--the Lattes learned of the existence of Harald Poelchau. The chaplain for Tegel Prison, Poelchau was a member of the "Confessional Church" and one of the most fascinating figures in the civilian resistance to Hitler. During his years working in the prison, he came to know almost all those members of the resistance who had been arrested, and knew better than most Germans the bestial underside of the Thousand-Year Reich. During his tenure, he accompanied hundreds of political prisoners as they walked to their deaths. As a man of the cloth, he enjoyed comparative immunity, which he used very much to his advantage: he tended not only to the spiritual, but the materials needs of his wards in the cells. He would arrive with the pockets of his extra-loosely cut coat and his bulging attache case filled with food, as well as messages from relatives and companions-in-arms who were also under arrest.

 

Those who survived their imprisonment remember him as a person of Mozartian serenity. "Poelchau was wonderful," Konrad Latte commented, "because he had nothing of the preacher about him." Poelchau could also exercise positively criminal talents. Once, when he was called upon to help clear rubble after an air raid, he discovered that the entrance and windows of a police substation had been damaged. With great presence of mind, he broke into the offices and made off with the forms and seals he found on and in the desks. Later, he filled out a citizens' militia registration form in the name of Konrad Bauer, notarized it with a Nazi seal that didn't actually belong on the document, and sent it off to the "applicant"-a paper of the greatest value to Konrad Latte. If he were rounded up by the militia, it would prove that citizen Bauer was already on the rolls.

 

(To rescue his friend Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who was awaiting execution, Poelchau even planned to get a coffin made in the prison carpentry shop and smuggle the Count out of prison in it. The plan failed, because it was impossible to find a suitable hiding place for von Moltke on the outside.) It's almost a miracle that this man of God, who broke every "law" in the name of justice and extended a sheltering hand over dozens of persecuted individuals, should have survived the Third Reich unscathed.

 

Despite his experience, Poelchau must have been thunderstruck when the three Lattes appeared in his office at the prison and made their request: they needed a place to hide, immediately and for all three of them. Konrad Latte still remembers the saying on the wall in the prison chaplain's office: "The Führer doesn't smoke, the Führer doesn't drink, the Führer works from dawn till dusk for the good of the German people. Let's follow him as best we can!" Poelchau didn't smoke or drink, either, but he immediately showed his petitioners how he understood the good of the German people. He gave the threesome some cash and, even more valuable, some ration tickets he had garnered from colleagues in the resistance; without food stamps in 1943, you couldn't get a loaf of bread or a pat of butter. At the same time, he made clear to them that they would have to split up: they had a chance of survival only if they traveled alone. Then he gave all three the most important item: addresses for temporary lodging and work.

 

Konrad's mother became a cleaning woman in Berlin-Wannsee. Manfred Latte found shelter and a job with a former political prisoner. Women who went underground during the war years in Fascist Berlin could move about more easily than men in civilian dress, men of draft age; so Konrad now entered a period of constant moving, a night here, three nights there. He no longer remembers how many people gave him a place for the night, thanks to Poelchau's intervention; there were dozens of them. But something else also protected him: a rare inner energy-call it his artistic temperament. His wife Ellen, his last protector and for 55 years now his wife, says: "In those years, Konrad was a young man in pursuit of the 'blue blossom,' the ultimate artistic truth." "I couldn't just pass the time," her husband interrupts her. "I had to do something."

 

Life underground was not only seedy and enervating, for the artist in Konrad it also seemed terribly boring. He felt he had a calling for music. He was determined to develop his talent; which is how his life as an outlaw took an unusual, hardly imaginable turn. In the middle of the war, right under the noses of the Nazi police who, with the help of a "dragnet" of black-mailed Jews, were combing the city for the last of the "social parasites," young Konrad set out to find teachers who would recognize and help him develop his gift.

 

III

 

The first person he turned to was the most famous teacher imaginable: the pianist and conductor Edwin Fischer. About Fischer's politics, Konrad knew only that he was Swiss and that his first wife was a von Mendelsohn-"under those circumstances, he couldn't be too much of an anti-Semite." During one of Fischer's rehearsals at the Philharmonic, Konrad came in through the stage entrance wearing his stained work outfit from the Breslauer paint factory. At the door to the green room, his heart suddenly stopped. He was about to enter the holiest place in German music-the green room at the Berlin Philharmonic. But Fischer promptly invited his unusual, paint-spotted visitor to his dressing room; and there, with the desperate courage he had acquired during his Breslauer apprenticeship in living on the edge, Konrad decided to risk all. He told Fischer straight out who he was and what he wanted.

 

The star understood that he had before him a young man driven at once by Nazi thugs and his love of music. He impulsively invited Konrad to come to the concert at the Philharmonic the following day. Konrad explained that he couldn't come to the concert at the Philharmonic in the clothes he had on-and he had nothing else to wear. Fine, Fischer said: wait for me on the street after the concert, and I will find you. Fischer kept his promise: after the concert, he quickly left his admirers, went over to the "painter's apprentice" who was waiting in the shadows, and gave him an envelope with a 100-Mark bill and a sheaf of ration cards inside. "Call me!" Fischer said, and added his telephone number. And so, Konrad had his first piano lessons in Berlin with the idol of his youth, Edwin Fischer, the teacher every talented young musician dreamed of.

 

But how can you practice when you are underground, how can you earn a living? Konrad found himself playing at the crematorium in Berlin-Wedding, thanks to the organist Drwenski, whose name he discovered on a poster and whom he met through a visit as unannounced as the one he had paid Fischer. This first contact quickly produced other engagements. Men were scarce in Berlin, and organists even more so. In a short time, Konrad became a very busy back-up organist at one of the large Protestant churches in Berlin. From the organ bench at the crematorium in Wedding, he would hurry to the Gedächtniskirche at the Zoo, and from there to the St. Annen-Kirche and the Jesus-Kirche in Berlin-Dahlem, where he provided musical accompaniment for the services of the opposition "Confessional Church."

 

"In Berlin," Konrad reports with some pride, "church services became almost unthinkable without me. The preacher had to plan his sermon around my schedule." (Konrad's schedule was in turn determined by the schedule of Berlin's public transportation. His appointments were often so tightly scheduled, that he would only arrive after the service had begun. Once he had his father, a pianist of modest skill, stand in for him at the organ during the first minutes of a service at the Gedächtniskirche. His father heard the repeated, desperate cue from preacher Jacoby-"Let us sing Hymn 737"-but he couldn't find the score. Konrad was fired.)

 

In retrospect, it's hard to believe the distance Konrad covered every day on the streetcar or the subway. In 1943, every male civilian of draft age had to reckon with spot checks of his papers. Other than the swastika on his lapel, Konrad had nothing but a worthless postal form that any letter carrier could fill out, and a carbon copy of a letter he redated and sent out every two weeks to draft board in Berlin-Schöneberg. In the letter, he explained over and over that he had been bombed out of his home, that his service papers had been burned, and that he desperately needed another set of papers. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, an acquaintance of Konrad's during those years, wrote in her diary that the young man from Breslau was "reckless" and "daring." Konrad Latte rejects this description: it wasn't daring or a thirst for adventure that drove and in the end saved him: his ambition to excel in his profession was stronger, he says, than his fear of his persecutors, and to reach his goal, he had to criss-cross Berlin every day. It seems the Gestapo couldn't imagine a young Jewish man moving around so freely in a Berlin that was now almost "Jew-free."

 

At the St. Annen-Kirche, Konrad met Ursula Reuber. The young woman did nothing but sit in the church gallery taking short-hand. Konrad initially assumed she was a Gestapo informer; why else would anyone spend all that time taking short-hand notes? Even today, Konrad Latte is amazed that, evening after evening in the midst of the war, church services were held at which large numbers of people prayed for specific individuals whom the Nazis had pursued and incarcerated. Later, he learned that the young woman with her ceaseless scribbling had her own ambitions. She wanted to become a stenographer, and she, too, was training for her dream profession. The stenographer and the assistant organist joined forces. One day, she helped him out of a situation that today would seem trivial: Konrad had no shoelaces. Someone else would have made do with string, but not Konrad. The first rule of survival for an underground Jew was to dress impeccably in public-any suggestion of the caricatural "filthy" Jew could lead to a denunciation. Ursula Reuber gave Konrad her clothes ration card, and he bought himself laces.

 

Her gift of love proved her downfall, though. When Konrad was rounded up some time later, Ursula's ration card fell into the hands of the Gestapo. During Konrad's detention at the collection point in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, a guard slipped him a volume of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry. On the flyleaf, he found the name of the owner, Ursula Reuber, and then noticed pencil marks in the table of contents: every few lines, one letter had a dot. When he put together the letters, he had a sentence-"I am here, too." The guard, a Gestapo man, was perpetually drunk. It may be that the alcohol had preserved some vestige of humanity in him, because he arranged a reunion between Konrad and Ursula in the basement of the collection center: "Come on now, give her a kiss!" he grunted at Konrad. Ursula told Konrad that, for the crime of buying a Jew a pair of laces, she had been sentenced to six months in jail.

 

Meanwhile, Konrad's activities as a peripatetic organist weren't satisfying him: he wanted to be a conductor, not a pianist or an organist. He talked to Johannes Schüler, the bandmaster at the Staatsoper. That didn't produce results, but the contact with Schüler led to an acquaintance with the composer Gottfried von Einem. Von Einem belong to a circle of musicians at the Staatsoper, who felt they belonged to the opposition, in their lives and their work. Among them were Carl Orff, Werner Egk, Rudolf Wagner-Régeny, Boris Blacher, and the conductor Leo Borchard. Some of these men did much more than assume an inner distance on Fascism, later called "inner emigration." Von Einem himself was one of the most courageous in the group: born a baron, engaged to marry a member of the von Bismarck family, a musical success early on, the composer belonged to the cream of society.

 

All of this may have produced the aristocratic self-assurance with which von Einem shielded Konrad and other fugitives. In touchy situations, he showed a gambler's self-assurance: when Konrad suddenly materialized on his doorstep, von Einem lent him his Staatsoper pass. Konrad Latte comments: "For a couple of months, I went around Berlin as Baron Gottfried von Einem." Fortunately for both Konrad and his benefactor, the police never checked into Konrad's blueblood background.

 

Von Einem had just completed a ballet, "Princess Turandot," for which the later world-famous Tatjana Gsovsky was doing the choreography. Konrad took on the task of rehearsing the opera singers in this difficult composition. Again thanks to a recommendation from von Einem, Konrad got an appointment to see the conductor Leo Borchard, along with Karajan one of the stars of the younger generation. It turned out later that, in his ambition, Karajan actually joined the National Socialists twice, because he couldn't remember whether he had done so the first time. Leo Borchard, by contrast, couldn't reconcile himself to playing for Nazi bigwigs seated in the boxes at the Philharmonic, and he gave up what looked to be a brilliant career. From 1937 to May 1945, he only conducted twice with the Berlin Philharmonic in Germany.

 

Konrad went to see Borchard in his Steglitz apartment. Borchard listened without interrupting Konrad, as he spun his usual tissue of lies about why he hadn't been drafted. Then the tall, elegantly dressed man looked his visitor full in the eyes and said to him: "Lessons with me are based on one condition-you have to trust me." For a moment, Konrad didn't know what to say; then he made one of those decisions that, had he misjudged his circumstances, would have cost him his precarious life at the Opera. He told Borchard what only three or four close friends knew: who he was and under what constraints he was living. "Now I know," Borchard said when Konrad was finished, "and now I have forgotten it again." Then they began their first lesson together.

 

The lessons at Borchard's apartment in the Hünensteig were among the most glorious, and at the same time most unreal moments in Konrad's illicit existence. Borchard taught from memory, with no score or piano accompaniment. Lying on a sofa in his study, he had his student conduct the great Beethoven symphonies from the score. He would watch the left hand bring up the invisible string section, the right an imaginary wind section, and then interrupt him suddenly: "You have to bring up the horns five beats sooner! The players need time to get their instruments to their lips!" Then he would whistle a couple of beats for Konrad, to indicate where he should begin again. But the massive body of sound that the beginner's hands sought to call up sounded only in the minds of the two men: in the room itself, silence reigned. A curious observer might have had concerns about the goings-on in Borchard's study, where two men conversed for hours on end by means of hand signals.

 

During these sessions, the student unwittingly gave some of his identity back to the teacher. ( At the time, Leo Borchard was conducting only in his apartment: "Anyone could see," Konrad Latte wrote in August 1947 in a eulogy of his friend, "how troubling he found the idleness he had imposed on himself.") While Karajan allowed Party bigwigs to celebrate him as a talented anti-Furtwängler, Leo Borchard handled logistics for the underground-found hiding places, identification and ration cards for the "U-boats" (he also participated in the "Nein" project. In April 1945, the word "Nein [No] appeared in many parts of Berlin, in chalk or oil paint-a one-word, immediately understandable vote against Hitler and a continuation of the war.).

 

Immediately after the surrender, Leo Borchard became conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and conducted its first post-war concert (in the Titania Palace). And then, on August 23, 1945, Borchard's career met an absurd end: he and his companion Ruth Andreas-Friedrich were returning home in the car of a British officer. The night before, Russian and American soldiers had exchanged fire, and orders had been given at American checkpoints to fire on any vehicle that failed to stop. The chauffeur driving the musician home ignored the warning, and Borchard died on the border between the American and the British sectors.

 

The "half-Jew" Wolfgang Borchert introduced Konrad into the house of Anne-Lise Harich, in the Stubenrauchstrasse in Berlin-Zehlendorf. She was the widow of the writer Walther Harich, and the mother of Wolfgang Harich, later a literary critic. The gathering was interrupted by a moment of friction. The lady of the house went into the basement with Wolfgang Borchert to fetch candles and flashlights. While there, the two of them got into a fierce argument: what in God's name had possessed him, Mrs. Harich challenged Konrad's friend, to bring a Nazi into the house? Borchert hesitated, then explained Konrad's real identity. He got the paradoxical result he had hoped for: Mrs. Harich was much relieved, and offered Konrad her house as a sanctuary; and like Ursula Meissner, she did it without any question about how long he planned to stay.

 

The catastrophe came shortly afterward. In order not to endanger his generous landlady, Konrad took up residence at the end of September, 1943, at the Pension Wolf in the Nürnberger Strasse. It was one of the few boarding houses where, in exchange for a substantial fee, guests could register without presenting their papers. Konrad liked the boarding house, too, because his parents and his employers at the various churches and the Opera could reach him by phone. No sooner had he moved in, though, then someone asked him for help, someone he couldn't refuse: Wolfgang Harich, his former landlady's son, had just deserted from the army; he left a suitcase full of Communist propaganda at Konrad's.

 

The very next day, the Gestapo raided the area around the Zoo, and got its hands on both Harich's suitcase and its keeper, Konrad Bauer. Konrad's fancy papers were no help now. While he was being delivered to the collection point in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, the Gestapo waited at the boarding house for other "U-boats." When Konrad's father called, one of the Gestapo answered the call and passed himself off as a friend of Konrad's: Konrad had given up his room, but had left something for his father. Konrad's father came as requested, was arrested and brought to the collection point. When Konrad's mother learned what had happened to her husband and son, she turned herself in at the same collection point.

 

The collection point was a former Jewish old age home; it was the last stop before Auschwitz for Jews who had gone underground and been seized. (Even then, Konrad Latte insisted, he and his parents had no idea what the placename meant. When one of their fellow detainees tried to enlighten them, Konrad interrupted angrily: he didn't need to make their miserable circumstances worse by making up horror stories.) Konrad's parents had to declare their assets. The three family members were assigned to the 44th Eastern Transport. But as the 74 people scheduled for the transport gathered to leave, a voice barked over the loudspeaker in the room: "Latte, Konrad-stay put!" He had no time to say goodbye to his parents, but he learned later that, before his parents boarded the train, a Gestapo official by name of Dobbercke found the time to tell them that their son had been sentenced to death "for abetting desertion." With that bit of news, Konrad's parents began their trip in a cattle car of the Reich Railways. Konrad never saw them again.

 

Konrad was called back at the last second because of the incriminating content of Wolfgang Harich's suitcase. Harich had been arrested at the same time as Konrad, and was being tried for desertion. The court martial required Konrad to testify against the deserter, and so his deportation was postponed. (It seems not to have bothered anyone that Konrad's testimony was unacceptable under Nazi justice: as "sub-humans," Jews had no legal standing. In the end, Konrad didn't testify against Harich, or even get called to the witness stand. As for the "Aryan" Harich himself, the trial for a crime punishable by death in fact produced a remarkably mild sentence: in October 1943, he was sentenced to a brief stint in prison for "being absent without leave"-he spent just three months in jail.)

 

In the weeks that followed, Konrad became friends with Ludwig Lichtwitz, a printer who had been delivered to the same collection point a few days before him. Until his arrest, Lichtwitz had put his printing skills at the disposal of those opposing the Nazis, and those in hiding. He had the advantage of a mixed marriage with his "Aryan" wife, Wally, and produced masterly forgeries of many of the papers that the underground relied on-ration cards, work permits, company letterheads, army leave forms. Together with Lichtwitz, Konrad planned an escape. Both had been assigned to work in the coal and potato cellar, where the security center for the entire facility was located. On the evening of November 27, 1943, they disconnected the system, including the power for the exterior searchlights. Suddenly, everything went dark. As the two men expected, the guards stormed out to secure the main entrance; Konrad and Ludwig fled through the rear cellar door. Earlier, they had also liberated the key from the open guards' room: in the nick of time, they succeeded in locking the cellar door from the outside; then they fled over the wall of the collection point and into the Jewish cemetery behind it. (As soon as they reached the street, they split up. Konrad pulled out his badge with the swastika and pinned it to his collar. Berlin was burning: the Allies had carried out another raid on the city that evening.)

 

By a circuitous route, Konrad reached Tatjana Gsovsky, the Russian choreographer with whom he had become acquainted during rehearsals for the ballet "Princess Turandot." She lived in a large apartment in one of the poshest streets in Berlin, the Fasanenstrasse. She allowed him to spend the night, on one condition: he had to be out of the apartment by 5 am; her husband couldn't know Konrad was there (which left the fugitive wondering what his hostess feared most-her German husband's jealousy, or his politics).

 

In the following days, Konrad resumed his old contacts. Having barely escaped deportation to Auschwitz, in the gallery at the St. Annen-Kirche he experienced one of those subtle cruelties that, when added all together, had made the Holocaust possible. An elderly lady in the church choir turned to Konrad and whispered: "Please go. We won't start singing until you've gone."

 

"When she said that," Konrad Latte remembers, "I felt so hurt, so angered and demeaned, that I was ready to go back to the collection point in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse."

 

IV

 

Konrad's faith in other Germans--those who had helped him and not seen themselves as volunteer Gestapo--won out. He continued his underground life for another year and-a-half, changing roles, always a target for informers, and often saved at the last minute by previous and new protectors. But even after that escape, Konrad found a way to stay true to his passion for music: the composer Gottfried von Einem coolly bluffed his way into procuring Konrad a valid pass to all state musical facilities and events. He saw to it that Konrad again found employment at the Opera, as an extra, which led to tragi-comic and hardly tolerable experiences. Konrad appeared before Reichsmarschall Herman Goering as one of the golden-haired German children in the choir to Wagner's "Die Meistersinger," and had then to take a bow before the man-eater. But he also succeeded now and again in taking on a much more comfortable role: he had noticed that the box reserved for the managing director [of the Opera? lh] was generally empty. For five Marks an evening, he bribed the usher who tended the boxes--and who knew Konrad's identity--to let him occupy the box. In splendid isolation, he attended the entire fall and spring season for 1943-44.

 

By night, he relied on the constantly changing hideouts that the indefatigable Harald Poelchau and his colleague Gerdi Siemsen provided him. Through Poelchau, he met Willi Kranz, who managed the canteen at Tegel Prison. Kranz had taken in a young Jewish girl, whom he was raising with the help of his companion, Augusta Leissner, as his own child. Kranz in turn introduced Konrad to the superintendent of a building in the Klosterstrasse, Oskar Kling, who for a time gave him a place to stay in the basement. Later, Konrad secured a job as air raid warden for a bank in Berlin-Mitte; the job didn't pay much, but was worth more than any of his day jobs on this or that organ bench or as an extra at the Opera, because it came with sleeping quarters.

 

Over time, though, Konrad's underground existence became increasingly risky. Too many people knew he had escaped, too many knew who he was. At the Opera, he learned that a touring company was looking for a band leader. The director of the troupe accepted Konrad's explanation for his lack of papers. Since he reported directly to the Propaganda Ministry, he could vouch for Konrad. Konrad toured throughout northern Germany, and even performed on the heavily guarded island of Helgoland. During the tour, he met a young actress, Ellen Brockmann, who proved the most important acquaintance in his life. Konrad was almost found out by a National Socialist Party member and anti-Semite in the troupe; but at the last second, Ellen heard about the plot and saved him, a gesture for which she was fired.

 

After Propaganda Minister Goebbels closed all theaters in the fall of 1944, Konrad lived out the last months of the war in Bad Homburg (near Frankfurt) as Ellen's fiance. Shortly before the final collapse of the "Thousand Year Reich," his odyssey took one last, ironic twist. Baron von Wagenheim, who hosted musical evenings in the little town, commented that he would like to get involved with the resistance, but didn't know how to do so. Konrad confided in his eager host, but the latter simply wouldn't believe that Konrad's story was true: von Wagenheim decided to denounce Konrad to the Gestapo as a provocateur, and thereby eliminate him as a threat. For a time, the two men kept a wary eye on each other: "Each of us," Konrad commented, "deeply feared the other." Only a very unusual proof that Konrad [we'd better specify this-lh] was indeed a Jew living underground ended the threat of a denunciation.

 

American troops liberated Frankfurt on March 29, 1945, and reached Bad Homburg a few days later. Konrad and his fiancee, Ellen, were among those who felt most liberated by the Liberation. On a stroll through town, they happened on the headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower. On a whim, they sought out the duty officer and, in their broken English, informed him that "This is our high time!" The officer didn't understand at first, then broke out in laughter when he realized that the young couple wanted to get married. He approved an exception to the ban on public gatherings: Konrad and Ellen were allowed to celebrate their wedding with ten guests. In April 1945 they married under Konrad's real name, Latte, but Konrad's first postwar concert advertised him as "Bauer-Latte," since he was known in musical circles by his cover name only.

 

Konrad had expected that, as a student of Leo Borchard, he would be summoned after the war to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic or another, equally prestigious orchestra. He was wrong: the employment bureau coolly offered him a position in Berbau [???-lh], telling Konrad that he ought to be grateful that "he had regained his status as a member of the community." It took years to get recognition as a fugitive from the Nazi regime: a pretrial hearing dated October 10, 1951 produced results that might seem the work of an incompetent script writer. According to the text, the petitioner had "not remained true to his stance [as opponent of the regime], since he concealed his identity and toured military facilities in the service of the regime. In so doing, he violated para. 6, clause 6 of the relevant statute. His petition is rejected."

 

Despite these insults, Konrad remained true to the goal he had pursued during his years on the run. Left to his own devices, in 1953 he put together an ensemble that later became the Berlin Baroque Orchestra. For the new orchestra's first concerts, he needed to discover a venue--the largest lecture hall at Berlin's Free University. I heard him there in the early 1960's, as I was beginning my studies. Konrad's Baroque repertoire revealed a hole in Berlin's cultural offerings: his concerts sold out every time. Twenty-five years later, the by then internationally recognized orchestra moved to the Berlin Philharmonic. Konrad Latte remained at the podium another 12 years, the same podium from which his teacher Leo Borchard had conducted; in the fall of 1997, he took his final bow, in a sea of honors and applause. Few of those to whom the city owed Konrad's survival and continued citizenship were there to enjoy the moment.

 

Konrad and Ellen didn't emigrate from Germany, because they felt a tie to the 50 or so "other" Germans, those who helped him escape his Nazi persecutors from day to day for over two years. His first "hostess," Ursula Meissner, and his wife, Ellen, were awarded the Israeli order of "The Righteous of the People." Yet the righteous people in Konrad's story, while not many, were many more than two. They came from all walks of life: pensioners and musicians, superintendents and nurses, prominent conductors and writers, clerics, religiously inspired individuals and atheists.

 

In comparison with the number who shared in committing the crime of the Holocaust, or who simply let it happen, they were a tiny band. But even if they were only 40, or 30, or ten, those of us who have come after them need to tell their stories and to reflect on them. In the end, it isn't the justly admired, death-defying resistance fighters who decide whether a society succumbs to totalitarianism or not. The success of a dictatorship, like the success of the resistance to it, depends not on a few "great leaders," but rather on the civic virtue of the average citizen. Bertolt Brecht famously warned those who were born after the war: "Pity the people that needs heroes!" One might correct this warning by saying instead: a society of conformists and cowards profits nothing from the courage of dead heroes.

 

NY Times

---

 NY Times, May 1, 2001

 

English - The New Latin

 

Peter Schneider: Lingua franca

 

Translated by Philip Boehm

 

A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of English. National identities are shaken, mutual antipathies threaten to spread, the governments of great European nations contemplate increasingly drastic measures as language police sift through newspapers and monitor TV programs for contraband English and threaten to impose fines for linguistic misdemeanors.

 

All this uproar is coming a little late, as the pretender assumed the throne some time ago and is looking richer and rosier with every passing day of its reign. Although the administrative architects of the New Europe evidently refuse to acknowledge this fait accompli, the people of Europe have long since made their decision.

 

The nations most offended by the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy are the larger ones: after all, the new lingua franca is not the speech of Voltaire, Goethe, Dante or Cervantes--it's the language of McDonald's, Disneyland and Hollywood, of Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan and Jerry Springer. But you don't hear the Danes, the Dutch or the Hungarians grumbling-smaller countries are used to learning other languages. And there's little indication that these linguistic "traitors" are complaining to their therapists of acute identity trauma.

 

I myself have come to welcome the English specter as a friendly ghost, who is forcing-no, luring the Europeans back to a common language for the first time in about five hundred years. Establishing a new lingua franca is the most significant milestone on the road to a unified Europe-more important even than the Euro-Dollar. Paradoxically, accepting English would allow Europeans to better compete with the USA in business as well as in the marketplace of ideas.

 

The last common tongue in Europe was Latin, and there's no doubt that 2000 years ago countless Greek and Egyptian scholars, in addition to various Gallic or Germanic sages, decried the Roman anti-culture just as French, German or Italian intellectuals today bemoan the dominance of American English. It's also true that all the great dissidents of Rome as well as the Catholic Church-including Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Luther and Spinoza-used Latin to broadcast their ideas to the world at large.

 

In one crucial point, however, the Anglophobe alarmists see things more clearly than their Anglophile opponents. Linguistic supremacy means much more than the imposition of translated words and thoughts: languages also serve to smuggle values, cultures and philosophical systems. Every translator knows how difficult it is to find exact matches for words even if they appear synonymous. It's silly for the language police to attempt to replace words like "computer" or "marketing" with artificially constructed French, German or Spanish expressions. "My job" is something entirely different than "mon travail" or "mein Beruf." Even everyday phrases such as "take it easy" or "have a good time" are more difficult to render than it would seem. There's the famous example of the German in New York who held up pedestrian traffic for blocks when he stopped to answer a casual "How's it going?"

 

But while they have justifiable causes for concern, Europeans ought to recognize the simple fact that their national languages, regional dialects and even entire cultures have no choice but to change under the onslaught of American English. Next they should ask the very American question: so what? The rise of a new Latin is by no means a signal that their own languages and cultures and worlds are going to disappear: on the contrary, the exchange will help them further delineate their cultures and define themselves.

 

The peoples of Europe will never want to give up their languages-why should they? And in fact a countertrend toward globalization is growing that accentuates individual ethnicity. Within our highly interlinked world nearly everyone harbors inside their breast not just one but many identities or "souls" and by and large they manage fairly well. In Berlin I don't particularly feel that I'm a Berliner or even a German-I just feel at home. But when I'm in Munich I can't deny the fact that I am indeed from Berlin. In Rome or Paris I'm aware that I'm a German. And in the USA I become a European. I don't know why I should give up one or more of these identities in favor of another. Multiple linguistic identities are similarly enriching. So native speakers of the new lingua franca should not feel too smug, since they have fewer and fewer reasons to learn other languages.

---

  

 Peter Schneider

 

The Euro-Human

 

An Attempt to Exorcise a Spirit by Describing It

 

I'm fascinated by a plant called the Euro-banana, or more precisely, by its definition. According to Regulation Nr. 2857/94, the EU standard banana must have a diameter of at least 27 mm, "to be measured in the middle of the fruit between the long sides and across the axis of length". It must also have a length of at least 14 cm, to be measured "over the outer curve from the stem to the tip". The regulation fails to address the only questions that interest the consumer: how good does it taste and how solid is it? Why do officials in Brussels devote such tender attention to this archetypically European fruit, which everyone knows thrives particularly well in Germany, France, and Britain? The answer is: Europe must defend itself against an enemy plant that, disguised as a banana, is decidedly smaller and prettier, costs half as much, and tastes twice as good: the Dollar-banana. Brussels' administrative commission on "Bananas" now employs about forty full-time banana experts from twelve member countries, along with twenty interpreters to translate all the newest developments in the field of bananas. Similar regulations exist for the Euro-fish and the Euro-apple. The Euro-apple, for example, if one of the "large-fruited varieties", must achieve a diameter of 70 mm to comply with Quality Class Extra. In Class III, it must measure at least 50 mm. But nature is obstinate and doesn't always listen to the directives from Brussels, and the Breton or Sardish fishermen have to throw fish back into the sea if they don't fulfill the required specifications. In Werder, near Berlin, many hectares of apple orchards were recently burned down because, despite great pedagogical efforts, the apples that grew there insisted on boycotting the European norm. And all this is just the beginning. We are taking giant strides toward Euro-beer, Euro-spaghetti, Euro-bread, and Euro-coffee. All we know about the bull, Europe's mythological bearer, is that Europe's Agriculture Ministers have recently decided that this notorious grass-eater may continue to be fed ground-up sheep.

 

Europe is a project of the future. It has no legend of foundation, like ancient Athens or the Imperium Romanum or the Aztec empire. Europe's founding myth is the Euro-dollar and the currency union based on it. Little initiative is visible to promote other means of communication, for example the languages, although the citizens of a state system are rumored to have the occasional wish to speak to each other without an interpreter. When my son was to register for school in Germany's capital, I looked for one that began instructing foreign language in the earliest grades. I found two or three schools that punished this admittedly eccentric desire for bilinguality by requiring children to attend for an extremely large number of years before graduation. Citizens of Europe may have a common currency by 1999, but I fear that in twenty years the great majority will still need sign language to speak with each other - doubtless an advantage for the Italians. Ideas about the contours and goals of a European culture haven't sprouted any further than the word's etymological root. Culture? Isn't that primarily agriculture, the Euro-banana? There are no directives regarding any meanings of the term extending beyond "cultivation of the soil", though such usages are documented for as early as the second century, and included "cultura animi", the "cultivation of language", and even "the perfection of the intellect and morality". Early on, Rolf Dahrendorf raised the question of whether a Europe that defines itself primarily by the goal of a common market isn't putting the cart before the bull and whether such a state structure wouldn't lack inner cohesion. The examples of the Euro-apple and the Euro-banana merely underscore the existing paradox of a process of unification based solely on economics. For the sake of a very low common denominator, the Euro-managers are abolishing precisely what constitutes Europe's strength and personality - the variety of its cultures, developed over millenia. There are neither terminology nor myths for the cultural and moral ties that in fact unite this cultural realm. We are in danger of imposing Euro-norms resembling the model of the Euro-banana on some delicate plants that don't grow in a plowed field: Europe's intellectual and spiritual products. Will we have a Euro-freedom? A Euro-equality? And haven't we already begun casting those groups and peoples who don't or won't comply with the Euro-norm back into the sea, like the fish that don't conform to the standard dimensions? So far, we haven't expressly defined the specifications of the Euro-person, we don't yet know exactly what size and what diameter he must evidence, measured "over the outer curve from the stem to the tip", what weight, what religious affiliation, what skin color. But I fear we are already applying such criteria. Concretely: Does a Muslim, native to Europe, 1 meter 80 tall, 70 kilograms in weight, light-skinned and moderately Islamic, living in a region with neither raw materials nor strategic importance, enjoy the same right to freedom from bodily harm as do other Europeans?

 

No one would dispute that something exists that can be called European culture. Many clever people have said noteworthy things about the distinguishing traits of this culture. But today I'm afraid we must speak about something simple, now endangered, that precedes any differentiation: I mean the indispensible prerequisites of not only European but any culture. Among these conditions, to mention the absolute minimum, is the absence and if necessary the uncompromising suppression of barbaric, culture-destroying endeavors such as "ethnic cleansing", ethnically-motivated mass rape and mass murder, or the establishment of concentration camps. In short, I would like to gather information here on how Europe deals with the trauma of its failure in the four-year war in the former Yugoslavia, a war that took place within shouting distance of such core European countries as Italy, Austria, and Greece, and which was finally ended only by a demonstration of power by a very distant overseas ally who doesn't really have anything to do with this region.

 

I want to make the attempt to describe this trauma. I believe it is based in the experience of almost helplessly suffering blackmail at the hands of a challenger of vastly inferior military power. It is based in the experience that, for four years, the fifteen or twenty most powerful states of the world did not see themselves in a position to tie the hands of a few criminal leaders who, cold-bloodedly and solely to retain power, triggered this ethnic frenzy and violated every treaty, every agreement, every written and unwritten rule of international law. It is based in the experience that all the threats of the mightiest nations are of no avail when the blackmailer can gamble that the threats will not be followed by action. Whether admitted or not, Europe is now left with the feeling of being extortable, even though the blackmailers have meanwhile been forced to the negotiating table.

 

The basis for this extortion, successful for four years, was the blackmailer's ability to play upon Europe's disunity, its cynicism, its inability to ante up and call his bluff. It was his recognition - initially only tested, later employed with virtuosity - that the Europeans' willingness to take risks had a limit that could be precisely delineated. Of course the European community of states was stronger, as long as one compared war matériel, the means of reconnaissance, and military punch. But it was weaker as soon as the blackmailers could raise the spectre that, to defend culture in this part of Europe, the Europeans would have to take the supreme risk: the lives of an unpredictable number of soldiers. "The world is not willing to fight for the Muslims," Karadjic noted. His army of only 1500 men then captured the UN-guaranteed safe haven of Srebrenica and carried out what was probably the worst massacre of the war. 2000 soldiers of the Rapid Intervention Forces, which were already in Bosnia, would have sufficed to keep the murdering bands in check. But they had no assignment to intervene. The lesson of this didactic drama is that an unscrupulous and determined blackmailer can neutralize a mighty military machine if he has reason to believe that its operator is only willing to use it and to fulfill promises and guarantees under the condition that it cost him no lives. A culture whose credo when threatened is Baudrillard's phrase "No Deaths" is extortable to the utmost degree.

 

Who would dispute that one of democracy's greatest achievements is the constitutional bars against governments calling for their citizens' ultimate sacrifice by fiat? And perhaps the most repugnant aspect of dictatorships is their rulers' arrogation of the right to dispose of their subjects' lives. But the war in Bosnia has shown that this democratic achievement is also accompanied by a kind of constitutional weakness. We live in a culture that increasingly bans from the realm of thought and action the possibility of existential threat, the possibility of sudden and rapid disintegration and change. Even the question of whether one was prepared to risk one's own skin for the Bosnians was understood and felt to be rhetorical by most Europeans who posed it; and the foregone conclusion was that one cannot expect someone else to take a risk one is not prepared to take oneself. To avoid any misunderstanding: I consider it fully legitimate for a European, in full knowledge of what is happening in Bosnia, to say that he is not willing to go there or to send his son there. But I would also like to clarify why I view this answer as insufficient. If we're sitting in a café and see a horde of armed men coming in, dragging out all the redheads, and loading them in trucks, then we, the blondes or brunettes, may fail to stand up against them blindly and unarmed. But we expect the police or some other institution - the "responsible agencies" - to put a stop to such activity. If the gang is not responsive to negotiations or threats, then we expect the security forces to move against them, at the risk of their lives if necessary. We wouldn't be persuaded to abandon this expectation by the argument that we ourselves have not stood up and taken the same risk. We would answer that our personal intervention would be of little use, since we have not been trained for such tasks, because we have entrusted them to others, because we are afraid. We wouldn't feel perfectly happy about this answer. Asked whether we would take part in a militia defending the redheads against their persecutors if the police weren't around and wouldn't be around in the future, we might hesitate. But we would be hard pressed to answer "no, on principle". Potentially, the mandate to defend democracy and human rights can revert to its clients: the citizens.

 

I want to show that the citizens of a community based on a social contract daily and silently assume - and must assume - that the ground rules of this contract are protected, even if this protection requires risking life. The citizens' perfect right to determine for themselves what cases call for such a risk does not negate the possibility of such cases. The question is whether this willingness, which we take for granted within our own community, can be demanded for the defense of a neighboring country.

 

I don't believe the answer to this question is self-evident. It isn't a matter of course that peoples risk their soldiers' lives to rescue a neighboring people from "ethnic cleansing" and mass murder. But the demand is still a desirable and even necessarily considered goal of democratic cultures, and it becomes an obligation when binding agreements and security guarantees have been made, as they were in Bosnia. In such a case, helplessly permitting barbarism in a neighboring country revealing our own culture's susceptibility to infection. The citizens of Europe were never asked what sacrifices they were prepared to make to end the murders in Bosnia. Instead, the crisis managers did everything in their power to veil the trauma of European helplessness and to exalt the policy of watching from the sidelines to a form of political wisdom.

 

The simplest way to deal with a trauma is to deny it exists. Susan Sontag's classic essay described how this century's great diseases - tuberculosis and cancer - were turned into metaphors. The healthy believe they can keep these sicknesses at bay by attributing specific, supposedly predisposing personality traits to those who contract them. Thus arose the image of the "tubercular personality" - allegedly especially "sensitive", "constitutionally weak", "creative", and sought home by a "diseased passion that consumes the body". Complementarily, the "cancerous personality" was invented, characterized by "sexual inhibition", "a lack of spontaneity", and "the inability to express rage". Needless to say, the healthy considered themselves free of the traits they discovered in the diseased: thus they could hope to be immune to these intimidating illnesses. Susan Sontag demonstrated how rapidly the image of the tubercular personality evaporated when scientists discovered and were able to combat the microorganism responsible, and she predicted that the image of the "cancerous personality" would meet with the same fate.

 

Analogously, as soon as the war began, the Europeans construed a "Balkan personality". The peoples living in the Balkans were seen as "tribes" that, every few decades, followed a mysterious, irrestistible urge to attack, slaughter, and torment each other in unimaginable ways. Whoever began the ritual, it followed its own law that all discovered their equal lust to slaughter, so that there was little sense in asking who was perpetrator and who was victim.

 

It seems remarkable to me that this construction of a "Balkan personality" became so popular in Germany, of all places, in a people who, more than any in the world, have demonstrated how human "mad cow disease" can break out, and whose "ethnic cleansing" was expressed to the degree of assembly line genocide. "We won't let our Europe be destroyed," said one of the theoreticians of the Social Democratic Party, peace researcher Egon Bahr, "just because a few tribes in the Balkans can't get along with each other." The advantage of this folkloristic view of the catastrophe in the former Yugoslavia is of course, that one feels immune to it oneself. But this exclusion of ethnic frenzy from the spectrum of European potential was not limited to Germany.

 

The war in the former Yugoslavia became a metaphor, and the measures against it weren't primarily directed toward ending it, but toward calming public opinion at home. They conformed to the needs of the rich European countries' transnational domestic policy: its greatest concern was to mitigate the suffering, not of the attacked, but of the television viewers at home.

 

Now that NATO's massive bombardment and the deployment of 60,000 adequately equipped infantrymen has forced the aggressors to the negotiating table, perhaps it's time to review earlier judgments. Have we heard a single word of reflection or any sign of recognition of error from all the self-styled or credentialed experts on the Balkans who said that 500,000 troops would be necessary or that air strikes would be futile? On the contrary: implicitly trusting their readers' forgetfulness, the same people who were always against intervention now complain that intervention didn't come sooner and accuse the Dayton Agreement of ratifying the results of aggression and of drawing borders along ethnic lines.

 

Another mythology of self-justification seems even more far-reaching to me: the myth of civil war, in which attacker and victim cannot be distinguished. The alibi function of this myth is self-evident. If all participants are in some way involved in the great slaughter as perpetrators and victims at the same time, then there is no basis for taking sides, and one can only let the war "bleed to death". Those who confronted this comfortable theory with clear facts and insisted that this war was one initiated by political criminals, inspired by fascist aggression, and victimizing the civilian populations of all sides were told they were clinging to an oversimplified view of the world. This even though none of the serious spokesmen for the Bosnians ever denied that the Muslims also have massacres to answer for. They merely insisted that one must take an interest in who began the "ethnic cleansing" and massacres and who had what part in these crimes. The facts known thus far are unambiguous: the Serbs are responsible for 85% of the massacres, the Croats for 10%, and the Bosnians for 5%. The true adherents of a Manichean world view are those who place the victims on the same level as the aggressors because the victims also committed crimes while defending themselves and in revenge for crimes suffered. Heaven is probably the only place to find people who can watch their loved ones are tortured, raped, and drawn and quartered without thirsting for vengeance.

 

There is another, perhaps the most unsettling consequence of the long and eloquently tolerated extortion. How were the citizens of Europe to deal with these images on television, these close-ups of atrocities, while being held in paralysis? If one is convinced that one can do nothing against an outrage, one's moral energies are easily diverted against those who depict it and finally against those who suffer it. The media themselves promote this mechanism. The struggle for the viewers' attention fosters the scramble for sensational images of gruesomeness and at the same time desensitizes the viewer. The inextricable intertwining of commercial and moral motives in war reporting provokes a vague and certainly healthy mistrust of the information provided. When the rule of the game is that one watches injustice daily, but can change nothing, then one's indignation seeks substitute arenas and refuge in meta-discourse: one no longer speaks of the war in Bosnia, but of the reporters' montage technique, composition, and camera perspective. Did the crime really happen at all? Are the pictures of it posed? Are we all the victims of a monstrous media manipulation?

 

Thus an Austrian author could stir up a furor with an essay, "Justice for Serbia", that "caught" the world's media in a gigantic manipulation to the Serbs' disadvantage - without refuting a single reported fact. The most important vehicle of his intervention was the tone of voice of authenticity: as if on behalf of the suffering television viewer, the poet Peter Handke travelled in the direction opposite to that of the world media, into the country of the aggressors. He returned with travel impressions whose poetic form and unaccustomed angle of vision built up a contradicting picture. No one noticed that Handke could claim authenticity only for his genre paintings of peaceful Serbia, while in his fundamentalist battle against the world media's reporting he was an armchair general sitting squarely in front of the TV. It's almost the definition of a war of aggression that it is invisible in the aggressor's country, and Peter Handke was never in Bosnia. But his intervention had a large effect, because he offered the surprised viewers a change of perspective after four years of suffering. He said we shouldn't look at the crimes, but the way they are presented. Haven't you ever noticed that the television reporter's camera regularly comes to rest on the vodka bottle when he shows Serb soldiers? Haven't you ever noticed how "photogenically" the martyred and raped look into the camera lens from behind the fences of the (alleged) concentration camps? "Indeed suffering, they were shown in a pose of suffering!"

 

What I find most unsettling about this matter is that both Handke's text and the debate about it eschew the facts, limiting themselves solely to the meta-discourse about their presentation. As if nothing objective existed anymore behind the signs and pictures, composed as they indeed are. As if an intelligent critique of the portrayal of a concentration camp rendered irrelevant the question of whether it actually exists or what really happens there. Must we fear that it's now possible to build concentration camps again under the eye of the television camera, because outrage exhausts itself in mistrust of the images?

 

What does it mean when a culture no longer perceives the outbreak of barbarism in its midst as a threat, but declares it a Balkan specialty? It must mean that this culture has forgotten what it itself has brought forth: namely, the defense against, sublimation of, and suppression of just such culture-destroying energies that we now helplessly view and refuse to recognize. The war in Bosnia reminds us that culture is nothing given to us securely and forever, but is based in a highly fragile, constantly threatened agreement that constantly requires renewal.

 

It has been claimed that capitalism emerged as the victor of the Cold War. I prefer to say it survived. But this result is not exclusively advantageous. The fall of the Wall has robbed a system completely dependent upon competition of its most important competitor. In hindsight, it appears as if many of the ethical and social moderating mechanisms that capitalism developed (to the surprise of its opponent) could only be developed due to the competition with the now-failed socialist model. The joke that the only countries who gained anything from socialism were the capitalist ones is not just a laughing matter. Be that as it may, it is clear that the victorious or surviving model must now bring forth its ethical and moral principles out of itself. It is beginning to appear that post-industrial societies can create growth and jobs best without an extensive social net. But the question returns: how far can a society go in the direction of inequality and still preserve democracy? Experience shows that ethics do not emerge from the market, nor can an EU-culture on the model of the EU-banana provide a sufficient basis. We will need a renewed, perhaps even a new social contract.

 

This article was written in the fall of 1999 for Harper’s Magazine but not published.

---

The Slough of Despond

or

In Defense of Fun

 

 

 

by Peter Schneider

 

The last thing I heard about Germany before leaving Washington, D.C. was a statistic from the Financial Times. I was picking up my daughter from a poolside farewell party, and while I waited for her to finish drying her hair, the man of the house, accosted me with the pink-colored newsletter. I watched in amazement as this man, a German manager at the World Bank, turned as pink as the paper itself while he pointed to the precise cause of his excitement--a list of the world's most competitive economies, which showed that Germany had dropped from 9th place to somewhere in the thirties. "If the Germans keep it up," he said, "they'll soon be asking Africa for annexation!"

 

Despite his less-than-rosy prognostication, I had a hard time spotting any looming catastrophes when I walked off the plane in Berlin. Instead I saw freeways jammed with highly polished, multi-cylindered instruments of destruction--most under five years old and impressively undented.

 

Nor did the findings I had stumbled across while on the plane give me particular cause for concern: one government report announced that the summer of 2002 had broken previous records. "Nowadays," declared the president of the German Travel Bureau Association, "you have to justify yourself if you don't travel."

 

The evening I arrived I lay in bed, completely jet-lagged, and watched a live broadcast of an international track meet. A German reporter was interviewing an African champion who had just won the 3000-meter run. Dripping with sweat and panting so hard he could barely speak, the happy man was standing beside the man with the microphone. All of a sudden his victorious smile froze, and it was impossible to tell whether this was due to the tremendous exertion or the reporter's first question. "Tell me," the sportscaster asked the runner, who had just broken that year's record and achieved the third best time ever, "what do you think went wrong? After all, what you were really shooting for was a new world record!"

 

I knew then and there I was back home.

 

A few days later I walked into our local computer store. Because of the early hour there were few customers, and when a group of young men went whizzing by in their Nike running shoes I assumed they were salespeople. I approached one of them to ask for assistance.

 

The man just glowered at me, visibly indignant at my having disturbed him. Undeterred, I inquired about one of the more obscure links in the endless chain of computer accessories--an external CD-Rom drive with a built-in sound card. But before I could finish my request I saw the man's head beginning to shake, as he told me in a reprimanding tone of voice: "We don't got any; they don't even make things like that!"

 

Ah, yes, the good old Berlin charm. I thought of the friendly salespeople at Richard's Computer in Washington D.C. and asked myself: How do these people expect to survive with this mix of arrogance and incompetence? How are they to prosper--or should they?

 

Presumably millions of Germans encounter similar vexations when they return, relaxed, from their vacations in countries which are poorer but better-humored. On the bus, in the U-Bahn or at the supermarket they look into the faces of their fellow citizens (who either stayed behind or returned the previous week) and read nothing but tension. Why is this? Why is honest-to-God curiosity rebuffed as presumption, why is an accidental touch treated as an assault? Whence this sullen disposition? Why is it that a stranger asking for the name of a given street is met with the response: "Are you blind or what? Can't you read?"--and an accompanying gesture pointing to a half-hidden street sign at the other end of the block.

 

Foreign visitors are inclined to view this as evidence of xenophobia. But how are they to understand they're being treated no differently than the natives?

 

I used to attribute this ethnological curiosity--which is particularly evident in Berlin--to the presence of the Wall. But these days I am inclined to explain this peculiar behavior by the absence of the same.

 

Evidently every new arrival is inoculated with a dose of mistrust. Nothing shocks people here as much as hearing a cheerful "Wonderful!" in response to "How are you?" Even if it is no more than a foolhardy assertion, a reply like that is viewed almost as an impropriety or even an insult. How do you tell a German?--ask him how he's doing and he stops and broods about it.

 

Inhabitants of almost every other country answer the same question with a smiling "I'm fine" or a laughing "Non c'è male" or else with the thumbs-up found in the worst conditions in Latin America. These responses have little or nothing to do with the true state of affairs; they are a bet on the future, a proclamation to the world and to one's self that one will resolve whatever problems admittedly exist.

 

I confess that during my first days back I felt an unaccustomed feeling of pity--for the Germans and probably myself as well. Their disregard for kindness as a virtue is amazing; they seem to go out of their way not to be liked, either by foreigners or themselves. There seems to be an utter lack of self-love. Is this a consequence of Hitler, or was Hitler a result of this lack?

 

Whatever the source of their prickly personality, what the Berliners are actually doing is quite impressive. Since the Wall has fallen, the cold heart of the city has been surgically removed and the wound has become the site of feverish activity. Without a doubt, Berlin is building its pyramids.

 

This is an unprecedented undertaking. The visible changes in the cityscape suggest great forces are at work. The movement is momentous: but where is the accompanying mood? The mood of a new beginning, the will and courage for a fundamental change?

 

When my daughter registered in a Charlottenburg high school I attended a public meeting held by the principal. He came straight to the point: Never in his 30 years of service, he told the gathered parents, had he ever had to make such an announcement. It turned out that while English language instruction was most assuredly on the books, the books themselves were not available because the funding had yet to go through. Moreover, a math teacher had yet to be appointed.

 

A less than balmy breeze straight from the third world came blowing through the auditorium of the venerable Gymnasium. One mother asked what the books cost, and whether the parents couldn't advance or even pay the 24.50 marks in order to guarantee the instruction. The answer was a bitter silence.

 

Further discussion was thwarted not so much by miserliness as by the principal's clinging to what is essentially a wonderful idea, namely, that school books are provided by the state. The notion that parents might have to step in now and then when the state fails to deliver somehow did not arise.

 

The problem is primarily a mental one. The response to the real loss in buying power and the rise in unemployment is not so much a redoubling of effort but a loosening of the grip on reality. A vicious cycle ensues; the panicked clinging to a social status which can no longer be supported brings a further loss of perspective and that in turn leads to even greater fears and greater paralysis. It is not that the problems themselves are unsolvable; they become that way because they are denied so long they begin to multiply, until they truly are impossible to overcome.

 

Now there's a big difference between a society with two or three million citizens without jobs trying to adapt to market globalization--which is bound to create higher unemployment-- and one which puts off this transformation until it has to worry about six million unemployed. For years the papers have been full of articles demonstrating that the cost of a working hour in Germany is about a third as much as in comparable industrialized nations: even in East Germany, where productivity is 40 percent lower, the cost of labor is still higher than almost anywhere else in the world. All the experts point to this as one of the main causes for job flight out of Germany.

 

Perhaps nothing has so prevented the Germans from taking on the necessary structural changes than the government's failure to prepare the nation for the enormous possibilities and tremendous sacrifices posed by reunification. I remember a poll which followed the introduction of the first "solidarity" surtax. When asked how much more they were prepared to sacrifice for reunification, the West Germans answered that they'd already reached their limit: they simply couldn't give any more than that first installment. And while the costs of reunification have by now well exceeded one billion marks, the citizens have yet to be informed of the true dimensions. On the contrary, they have been subjected to a never-ending barrage of tiny surcharges and prettily packaged taxes. Instead of simplification there is complication, instead of a proper diagnosis there is a series of band-aids profferred as a cure.

 

Why doesn't the government simply tell the Germans what they have long suspected: that the upcoming years will be more difficult than the past ones, and that the real reason is not reunification, but the longstanding failure to enact structural reforms which were introduced elsewhere ten years ago. Instead of blaming all possible scapegoats for the growing crisis, why don't the politicians come out and say that all Germans, not just those in the East, are facing a fundamental, material and spiritual change?

 

But it is not enough to criticize the politicans. After all, the voter is the new god, to whom all bow down, even, incidentally, the voters themselves. But who is going to vote for a politician who talks frankly of the cuts and costs which would be demanded of all social groups? Even assuming the same politician devised as equitable a plan as possible--would the citizenry allow such a person to rule even for a day? Maybe the most important quality in a politician is the willingness to risk not being elected. Maybe that willingness would actually bolster his or her chances at the polls.

 

For the moment it seems as if the Germans have been abandoned by many good spirits. The intellectuals seem to be mainly concerned with defending themselves. Many had once been advocates of utopias which did not stand the test of history--although that is no disgrace. But now instead of examining why they were proven wrong, they continue to advance their moribund opinions in slightly modified form, in an attempt to prove that they were right and history was wrong.

 

While this may lead to remarkable feats of intellectual gamesmanship, it seldom produces any spiritual revelations. The focus on revising the past seems to preclude thinking about the future. German society is in upheaval, and German intellectuals are more concerned with questions of orthography than the demise of the social-democratic state or intervention in Bosnia or massive unemployment.

 

The immediate result of all this is that the epochal transformation from a communist system into a capitalist one is taking place practically without intellectual guidance or encouragement.

 

This doesn't mean the capitalist victory is history's last answer. Nor am I saying that everything the USA does is worthy of emulation. It's just that we should be willing to give credit where credit is due, instead of focusing only on the negative aspects of the recent American prosperity. Our newpapers typically compile reports which serve more to indict than inform: whatever we decide to do, let's do it differently than the Americans. Of course American reports on Germany also serve primarily to reaffirm the American self-esteem and reinforce American stereotypes about Germany.

 

In general, reports about other countries are designed less to satisfy the readers' curiosity and more to reassure their own sense of self and reassert their pride. Americans feel a sense of historic justification whenver they encounter a blond, blue-eyed German running across the screen shouting "Heil Hitler!", and Germans seek edification in documentaries showing how the US government constructed "regular concentration camps" for the Indians at the turn of the century. Moreover, it is illusory to expect the electronic highway will speed any real understanding between nations.

 

On a recent evening in what once was East Berlin, I saw a sign from the heavens. Where one a famous socialist restaurant had advertised its "Dinner from the Sea",--in an unforgettable neon blue--I discovered a new message: "Pioneer". After a while I realized it was just a new company name, but for a second it seemed that that neon sign inscribed in the evening sky was a manifestation of something whose absence was overwhelming, and an almost forbidden thought came to my mind. Whatever happened to the vaunted German genius? What happened to their courage, their intrepidity, their bold spirit of discovery and invention? Have the Germans forgotten how they helped invent the car, the telephone, the fax, the TV, and--perish the thought--rockets and computers? Have they forgotten that this nation brought forth scientific explorers like Alexander von Humboldt and that so many sons and daughters helped build that "land of the future", the USA? Should these positive energies and talents of the Germans continue to be branded as Nazi virtues, in the name of a program designed to confront the past, and that more in letter than in spirit?

 

I for one can't believe in a nation that refuses to permit itself even a few role models.

 

Anyone who takes on an enormous task--even if he or she is forced to do so--must be willing to take enormous risks. And the construction of a new capitol is a tremendous undertaking indeed. It doesn't need pride or megalomania, but something far simpler, which may be the most difficult thing of all. It requires a willingness to play, a sense of beauty and at least a tolerable amount of self-love. After all, if you can't love yourself, you can't love someone else.

 

This article was first published in “Der Spiegel”, 1998