The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture

Epilogue: The Patient Lives

Epilogue: The Patient Lives Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection. —Bundespräsident Richard von Weizsäcker, on the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II In December 1956, the illustrated magazine Deutsche Illustrierte published a photo spread with the rather alarming title “Kranke Männer regieren”— “Sick Men Are Governing.”1 It appeared opposite a report on the planned biopic Der Stern von Afrika (The Star of Africa), a heroic retelling of the life of Nazi-era ›ying ace Hans Joachim Marseille. Across the top half of the page, directly beneath its dire banner, the article included pictures of U.S. president Eisenhower, Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev, and U.S. foreign minister John Dulles. Captions beneath each of the photos explained their particular ailments. Eisenhower had collapsed twice within recent months, with coronary vein thrombosis and acute appendicitis the suspected culprits. Bulganin, then premiere of the Soviet Union, had also collapsed on numerous occasions, for which his doctors prescribed a twenty-day stint of medically induced hypothermia “intended to strengthen his nervous system.” The magazine noted that psychologists attributed Khrushchev’s enraged outbursts before Western politicians in part to his acute diabetes. During the critical days of the Hungarian uprising, Dulles was “struck down with a mysterious ailment” eventually diagnosed as cancer of the large intestine. While the article not surprisingly blatantly favors the Americans, whom it describes as stoically persevering despite their pain, it also presents both sides of the Cold War as radically ill. Beneath these pro‹les of sick world leaders, the article inserts a photomontage . The right-hand side shows a coastal highway. The weather is pleasant, a steady stream of cars moves along the road, and beachgoers 198 frolic in the waves. On the left-hand side of the image, we see a photograph of a world at war. A stream of tanks takes the place of passenger cars, and in contrast to the natural beauty of the right-hand photograph, the tanks traverse the alien landscape of a bombed city. Billowing smoke ‹lls the sky—its source, a series of cartoonishly large falling bombs. Occupying the middle ground of the montage is a pyramid of world leaders—including the Russians Bulganin and Khrushchev on the bottom, Eisenhower just above them, Dulles, and at the top of the pile, Mao Tse-tung. A caption explains the signi‹cance of the image: Today these sick men decide matters of war and peace. They cannot escape the burden of responsibility and the relentless unrest, and it has marked their bodies. Their condition is so grave that any doctor would describe them as seriously ill! We follow their political activity on a daily basis, but we forget all too easily that their decisions may be in›uenced by their own medical condition. This raises the question: can seriously ill men even make balanced decisions? And if they are able to do so: Can they withstand the elevated strain of dire world crises? Is there a replacement man behind them, ready to take action in the event that they collapse? Questions of extraordinary world political importance, because they are irresolvable and of serious consequence for the course of history.2 What is striking about this passage is the way in which it highlights the deep shifts in the discourse of the German Patient just eleven years after the end of World War II. Indeed, although we still ‹nd a “patient,” and the issue of illness is still linked to questions of political responsibility and crisis , the “German” seems to have disappeared from the picture altogether. In his place (I will retain the masculine form, since postwar German culture overwhelmingly emphasized male suffering), we ‹nd the leading ‹gures of the Cold War con›ict. The discourse of politicized illness has shifted away from its initial postwar focus on the internal ailments of the nation to questions of world-political well-being. While this surely indicates the extent to which Germans felt vulnerable at the geographic center of Cold War struggles—evidenced by the article’s emphasis on the impact that a weakened physical state might have on the mental capacity of these leaders, and the way in which the montage makes manifest the high stakes of their decisions—it also marks the decline of the German Patient as a conceptual model. Epilogue 199 By the mid-1950s, the...