"Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung"

It is amazing how more than sixty years on, unexploded bombs from the Second World War are still tilled and blown up with surprising regularity. Last week, Nobel laureate and long-time anit-war author Guenter Grass revealed more details about his record during the war, particularly that he served in the notorious Waffen-SS. There are a host of mitigating factors here: that his unit was a figting one, not one of the ones that ran the death camps, that he originally tried to serve in the submarine service, and that in 1944 young German men hardly had many choices in the desperate waning months of Nazi rule. Every honest writer, journalist, or historian knows is that nothing is black and white.

In the course of cleaning out my old belongings from my parents house before they moved, I came across many of my old books from college. One particularly valuable discovery has been my copy of William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which is really an overlooked classic of the run up to the war from his perch as one of the “Murrow Boys,” covering Germany for CBS radio. He would go on to write the definitive first comprehensive history of the Nazi era – and become a regular columnist for the Berkshire Eagle after he retired to Lenox.

Shirer clearly had little love for the Nazis, and he rightly saw them as cheap thugs and whackos as brutalized and led a once brilliant nation into war. He wrote on the fly, and the book was published even before America got involved in the conflict in 1941. He knew nothing of what was to come, naturally, but his observations are just as valid and are worth remembering as we try to look at that period through the truly horrible knowledge of everything else that happened, and see through the pervasive preconception that Germany was little more than a mob of goose-stepping thugs hell-bent on world domination.

Here is Shirer writing about the Sudeten crisis in autumn 1938, a full year before the war actually broke out, but when Hitler’s increasingly crazed bullying of his neighbors made it seem a repeat of the First World War was imminent (and was only averted by appeasement at Munich)…

“Berlin, September 27…. A motorized division rolled through the city’s streets just at dusk this evening in the direction of the Czech frontier. I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them. The hour was undoubtedly chosen today to catch the hundreds of thousands of Berliners pouring out of their offices at the end of the day’s work. But they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence unable to find a word of cheer for the flower of their youth going away to the glorious war. It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen. Hitler himself reported furious. I had not been standing long at the corner when a policeman came up the Wilhelmstrasse from the direction of the Chancellery and shouted to the few of us standing at the curb that the Fuhrer was on his balcony reviewing the troops. Few moved. I went down to have a look. Hitler stood there, and there weren’t two hundred people in the street or the great square of the Wilhelmsplatz. Hitler looked grim, then angry, and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade by unreviewed. What I’ve seen tonight almost rekindles a little faith in the German people. They are dead set against war.”

And a year later, when war did break out…

“Berlin, September 2… I was standing in the Wilhelmplatz about noon when the loud-speakers suddenly announced that England had declared herself at war with Germany. Some 250 people were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished, there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before. Stunned.The people cannot realize yet that Hitler has led them into a world war.”

Of course, many things happened in the next few years. But it seems hardly worthwhile condemning one of the leading voices of sanity and healing because of this brief and marginal moment. We should be suspicious of those that see this as an opportunity to advance their own agendas, and understanding of those that still can’t see the shades of grey.