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banishment of a foreign past (Stalinism)," he argues, "are the two faces of
the illusion ... Our misery, need, guilt and powerlessness are not real,
because everything is either going to get better or will be left behind us.
By denouncing a few Stalinists now (a few Nazis in the' 40s and '50s),
we're home free." That is why the psychoanalysts and psychologists
maintain that "the Nazi is still within us." They debate whether he is
only within the Ossies' psyche, and whether the Wessies, in view of their
unbrotherly and profiteering behavior toward the Ossies, are similarly
aillicted. Given the credibility of psychoanalytic notions in the former
West, and the wish by the profession to "heal" the former East, it should
not surprise us that the media accepts psychological categories to explain
political ones.
On May 15th,
The International Herald Tribune
reported , that "The
New Hitler Youth are Troubling Germany": leftist squatters had been
physically attacked and slandered by rightist skinheads, and anti-Semitic
graffiti and posters had appeared overnight. Some explain the mix of
Nazi slogans and street crime in terms of bias against Poles, Turks, and
other former "Easterners" who, it is said, by invading Berlin in droves,
"take away jobs, drive up rents, and encourage speculation." Others
claim that these biases were there but had not been allowed to surface
under the previously repressive regime. "None of this would have
happened if we had taken a few years to educate the Ossies before
unification," argues the left. "The government has to be moved to
Berlin, and has to invest, and industry has to train the Ossie work force,"
argues the right. They did manage to agree, at least on the television
program, that ruilled feelings and deep vexations have to be aired; that
Wessies have
to
stop acting superior to Ossies who, contrary to the lore,
did
work - though ineffectively and unprofitably - and who have to
make
all
the adjustments and adaptations which the Wessies will have to
pay for through heavy taxation.
In the midst of these upheavals, Germans had to respond to the
Gulf War. Aside from the comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Hitler,
which inevitably triggered conscious and unconscious memories along
with realistic fears, and the practical considerations favoring
nonparticipation, the right was afraid to support America and the United
Nations forces lest it be deemed fascist, although Chancellor Kohl
reluctantly backed the war. By then, Iraqi Scuds were coming down on
Israeli civilians, and the world was wondering if, once again, the Jews
would be gassed.
The left, however, was caught in its ideology: after years of spon–
soring peace movements and actively fighting so-called imperialism
around the world, leftists felt honor-bound to condemn the war. So,
after the beginning of the hostilities, they organized massive demonstra-
