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11 Is There Forgiveness in Politics? Germany, Vietnam, and America Donald W. Shriver, fr. World War I was grinding to a halt when Thomas Mann remarked ruefully: "The Germans will never become democratic, for they do not love politics." In those same grim months, Max Weber (1958, 1968) advised a Munich audience that a vocation for politics requires "trained relentlessness in viewing the realities oflife" (1958, pp. 126-127). But ten years later, Erich Maria Remarque (1929-30) reminded the world, on behalfof millions of war veterans on both sides, that the realities oflife, in politics, encompass the reality of massive death. If Clausewitz was right that "war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with the admixture of different means,"1 who could "love" politics? The hero of Remarque's great novel visits an army hospital, views the shattered bodies, declares that "a hospital alone shows what war is," and then poses these questions to the "fathers" who sent him and his generation off to the western front: "What would our fathers do ifwe suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?" (pp. 228-229) We know what came out: Versailles, Weimar, Hitler, and a second round of "great war," greater than the first. In the fourth year of that subsequent war, the Scottish poet Edwin Muir offered up his own version of Remarque's despairing questions in a poem entitled "The Whee!." "Long since rusted" knives stab us from behind, he mused. "Revengeful dust" rises up to haunt us. History plagues us like a relentless whee!. Who can "set a new mark" or "circumvent history?" (Muir 1960). No wonder that, as that second round came to its gruesome end, millions ofyoung people in devastated countries across the earth accepted 1. From On War [Yom Kriegel, as translated in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. "Clausewitz, Karl von." 131 132 SHRIVER: Is There F01;giveness in Politics? for themselves a revulsion from politics epitomized by German youth in the crisp phrase ohne mich. In early February of 1995, I stood in a place where that motto had been historically, decisively reversed to democratic forms ofmit mich. It was Berlin, where now, these fifty years later, unprecedented, hopeful answers have emerged among Germans and with their war enemies ofthe twentieth century. "What shall come out of us?" A democratic Germany has come, along with the dawn of new hope that, in its new global connectedness, humanity may yet learn not to live by nuclear terror alone. Edwin Muir's question has an answer, "How can I ... set a new mark? Circumvent history?" The answer was spread out that day around Humboldt University in the former East Berlin: We set new marks in politics by repenting of old sins that will continue to haunt us if we try to forget them or deny that they were sins. Clausewitz's famous axiom has an empirical corollary: For skeptics politics may be war by other means; but the politics of speechmaking, as the Greeks well knew, is a vast improvement on the politics of warmaking. In human conflict carried out chiefly in speech, a democratic political philosophy has a deep investment. Politics is the negotiation of conflicting interests and conflictual humans. Even if it is a radical form of negotiation, violence is always on the edge of the degeneration ofreal politics into pseudopolitics. If we are to celebrate rightly these momentous "circumventions" of previous grim history, however, our present generation of citizens would do well to ponder equally momentous, too-rarely asked questions: To the extent that some of the world's peoples have really pulled away from the dead weight, the vortex traps, oftheir earlier history, how have they done so? What are the right names ofthis achievement? Who was responsible for it? And ofwhat ingredients has it consisted? The answers are complex: Among the ingredients of change in modern Germany (and German-American relations) have been the coercions of victors in war, new constructions of domestic law, the irresistible promises of economic reconstruction, the threats ofpower politics just short ofwar, surges ofpeaceful human resistance to outworn political orders, and cultural roots older than ideology. All these...

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