EDITH KURZWEIL
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tions, especially against America and Israel. Blind pacifism reigned, and
the extreme factions of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the
Greens went so far as to advocate denying Israel weapons for self-defense.
Yet, a few courageous leftists publicly supported this war. Wolf Bierman,
for instance, asked ironically whether one should let a Hitler stay in
power just
to
keep peace and whether it was progress, forty-five years
after Auschwitz,
to
have Jews sit in their little gas chambers in Tel Aviv
and Jerusalem, with German gas masks over their noses, awaiting the
moment when the poisonous gas would seep in. Hans Magnus Enzens–
berger depicted Saddam Hussein as the same type of enemy of mankind as
Hitler, as yet another dictator for whom lives are meaningless and who
knows no limits or rules. Wolfram Schutte asked whether Germans had
not anticipated this war because they had been drunk on peace and
called upon his countrymen to stop their habit of "irrationally funda–
mentalizing rationalism." And some German historians signed a declara–
tion of solidarity with Israel. But they were a tiny, and brave, minority.
In the meantime, entrepreneurs kept maneuvering in order to even–
tually make profits (and profiteer?) in the "Eastern markets." Ossies kept
losing jobs as their antiquated plants closed down. Wessies kept debating
the pros and cons of making Berlin the capital of the new, united Ger–
many, and the handful of German Jews, whose close friends, of course,
had belonged to the left, now felt ostracized and betrayed - to the point
of considering emigration. For philo-Semitism had turned into anti–
Semitism.
No wonder, I concluded as I boarded my plane for Paris, that
Germans, who traditionally are addicted to order and predictability, in
this quagmire of politics, in this topsy-turvy and uncontrollable situation,
seek solutions in their psychology - the only domain where ambiguity
and ambivalence are considered normal even when close to intolerable.
With all these daunting and unresolvable problems, what else could the
Germans do but psychologize them?
E. K.
