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mans to believe in and not question authority, a mentality described
in the figure of
der Untertan
(a person submissive to authority). This
cultural tendency of pliable obedience preceded the Nazis, but at–
tained its poisonous flowering under their cultivation.
The desire to reduce the importance of the Nazi period, to stop
the discussion, to end the guilt, is an insult to groups and nations
who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The tastelessness that this at–
tempt to forget can reach is illustrated by Franz Josef Strauss's re–
cent remark that the era of self-humiliation is over, that the Ger–
mans no longer want to be "permanent sojourners at the Wailing
Wall." The desire to end the discussion is also an insult to the Ger–
man nation . The meaning of twelve disastrous years is to be
minimized so that the conservative parties can get back to business
as usual. A public balancing of accounts, with Hitler's crimes toted
up against Stalin's in some kind of cosmic calculation, is made as a
public exorcism of responsibility.
In Wolfgang Borchert's play
Outside Before the Door
(1946), a
German soldier returns in shock and rags from the Eastern front.
The war is long past, everyone tells him, but the soldier, Beckmann,
wants to know who is responsible for all the murder and misery he
has witnessed. He says, "Responsibility is not only a word, a
chemical formula, by which bright human flesh is transformed into
dark earth .... The dead-don't answer. God-doesn't answer.
But the living, they ask." It has taken forty years, but Beckmann
has his answer, one offered with a straight face for public consump–
tion-it was the fault of the Versailles Treaty, it was the fault of
Churchill and Roosevelt, it was the fault of Stalin.
