German Autumn

The Rivals

The Rivals It is convenient but not necessarily helpful to regard Germany as a patient, Europe's 'sick man', in desperate need of injections of anti-Nazi serum. There is no doubt that in one way or another Germany ought to be cleansed of Nazism, but what is doubtful in this connection is that the patient theory presupposes a mystical unity which simply does not exist in Germany today. It is just not the case that the German people are thus divided into two blocs: a small anti-Nazi victory monument of gravestone dimensions, and a huge Nazi memorial of vast proportions ready to tip over at the least puff of opposition and bury all the little barricades of freedom under its threatening weight of marble. Anyone who has spent some time with Germans from different levels of society soon discovers that what appeared upon a brief acquaintance with current German thinking as an unbroken unity is in fact a mesh of diagonal, vertical and horizontal cracks. What was assumed to be unshakeable unity is only a superficial agreement on certain elementary opinions: all Germans think that the seven million POWs should come home and that those who come home 59 should weigh more - quite physically - than those Germans who return from Russian arsenals and French mines. All Germans agree that the zone boundaries should be abolished and that the dismantling of industrial plant, if it is really necessary, should not mean for example that expensive machine-parts confiscated by the Russians are left to lie rusting away on barges in Hamburg's docks. Further, all Germans in the Western Zone agree, albeit on the basis of differing premisses, that the huge consignments of refugees from the east to the west are a form of invisible pressure exerted by the Russians on the Allies; by pumping the Allied zones full of destitute people the Russians would be able to create quickly a situation of Verelendigung which at a given moment of maximum stress must give vent to an explosion of a kind devastating for the Western occupying powers. Opinions with regard to the Allies are unanimous only in the sense that a certain feeling of restriction is common to all Germans. Still, it is felt even in strongly reactionary circles that there is no objective basis for any sort of resistance, including the passive sort. In reality the Germans regard themselves as occupied in a different way, for instance, from how the French regarded themselves as occupied: one finds no public contempt for the occupying power, hardly even for the occupier's girl-friends, and the only kind of democratic education which the Allies have so far attempted - the efforts made by the Americans to turn German youngsters into good baseball players - has in its way met with a lively interest on the part of the youngsters. It is not difficult then to identify common views 60 cutting like highways through all the different social classes, just as here at home it is not difficult to identify the lack of divided opinions on modernist poetry or certain aspects of tax law. But what is important is that these shared views do not in anyway contribute to the erosion of the bitter frontiers between the rival groups within the population. The hatred between the farmers and the city people has already been mentioned, and the even greater hatred between the poor city people evacuated to the country, whose distress is every bit as acute as that of the people left in the cities, and the farmers, who this autumn were still bartering food for clothes and linen but when inflation in the value of clothes and linen set in, even in the countryside, then wanted gold, silver and watches in return for potatoes, eggs and butter. The class divisions between the poor and the least poor have also been mentioned, the rising irritation between refugees and residents, and the reckless rivalry between competing political parties. But there is another antagonism which is perhaps more fateful than any other: antagonism between the generations, the mutual contempt between youth and middle-age, excluding youth from the trade union leadership, from party leadership, and from executive ranks of the democratic institutions. The absence of young people from political, labour and cultural life cannot be attributed simply to the inability of Nazified youth to interest itself in democratic undertakings. Within the parties and...