)
Stanley Kauffmann
GERMANY:
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
1.
I returned to Germany in 1971 with four tracks running in my
head. I was the man who had gone there for the first time in 1967 and been
surprised and not surprised. I was the writer who had, since then, written
often for a German weekly and who hoped now to meet Germans who had
read my articles. Beneath, there was the youth and young man who had
seen the rise and lall of Hitler. At bottom was the child, of German-Jewish
family , who had grown up in New York in the 1920s under twin impera–
tives: America was a miracle, but Germany in some ways was better. My
parents were native New Yorkers, but their fathers came from Germany
and from German-speaking Bohemia, and their mothers were the daughters
of immigrants h'om those places. German phrases, German cooking, various
German prides, allected my earliest memories. From those beginnings I had
moved into the black 1930s, through the war, through the numbed and
shaking years alter the war, to my first German visit and now my second.
This time Laura was willing
to
come with me, which gave this visit an
even sharper edge. She is the daughter of Eastern European Jews, and such
Jews had been looked down on by my parents, by my whole Germanic
family, during my childhood. When I first brought Laura home, early in
1939, my father and mother had been immediately warm. I knew this was,
first, because of Laura but also because Hitler's actions in that decade had
shrunken old Jewish snobberies. Ten years earlier the meeting might have
been different, might have made this German trip even more difficult for her.
Still
I
knew there was some strain in her, and it was odd because this
was not the first German-speaking country she had visited. In 1960 we had
spent a week in Austria, mostly in Vienna, with little apprehension or
discomfort. We were almost personally aware of what had happened in
Austria after 1938 because our dearest friend in New York was a Jewish
actress who had fled fi'om Vienna in that year. But it was she who had urged
us to see Vienna, who had written to friends to make us welcome, exiles who
had returned. Vienna had seemed almost an extension of her apartment, the
Editor's
Note:
This essay was written befol'e the radical changes now taking
place in German),.
