AMERICA AND THE EMERGING EUROPE
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deeply by Germans' exclusive concentration on their own woes.
There were, however, two sides to this story. When Arendt de–
scribed the murder of the Jews and the sufferings of Jewish exiles as
"what really happened," she created a hierarchy in which these facts rep–
resented, indeed embodied, Nazi Germany's fundamental break with
human civilization. Justified as this was, Arendt did not recognize that
the experiences of Nazism's intended victims could hardly have been as
personally immediate for Germans as the bombings of Hamburg and
Dresden, the rape of tens of thousands of women by Soviet soldiers or
the forced repatriation of millions of Germans after 1945. This gulf is
central to grasping the difficulties still in the way of mutual understand–
ing between Germans and other peoples. What Germans ought to re–
member - in the opinions of others - has differed from what Germans
actually remember.
Despite this basic discrepancy, many emigres tried to bring the fruits
of their reflections back to what they hoped would be a Germany they
could change for the better. The tragic fates of some of the emigres
who returned to the Soviet occupation zone and later to the German
Democratic Republic have been described by Jeffrey Herf.
It
is hardly surprising that emigre observations of the Bonn Republic
were deeply skeptical. Franz Neumann, for example, saw in the Federal
Republic's Basic Law, the most liberal constitution Germany had ever
had, a sign of "constitutional fetishism" at work. He perceptively diag–
nosed the problematic belief that the forms of the legal state alone guar–
antee democratic government. Only rarely do Germans acknowledge
that there might be a tension between the formal administration of jus–
tice and personal loyalty to democratically legitimated institutions. That
tension has come to the fore since unification, expressed pithily in Barbel
Bohley's comment on the varied efforts to put the former East German
leadership on trial: "We wanted justice," she said, "but got the rule of
the law."
Neumann was especially skeptical of the social basis of German
democracy. He did not see how the traditionally anti-democratic and il–
liberal middle classes would suddenly become committed democrats, or
how a defensive and state-oriented union movement would compensate
for the lack of commitment to democracy among the elites. He thus saw
the only guarantee of a democratic future in the continued presence of
the Americans. Later on, he modified his skepticism, noting that the
strong position of the Federal Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had be–
come an important stabilizing factor. But he continued to believe,
rightly, that the price of stability - the increasing power of the bureau–
cracy in the West German "social state" - had been high.
