FORMER WEST GERMANS AND THEIR PAST
531
caust must not be forgotten. But we cannot deny that since reunification
there has been a reemergence of primitive nationalism and a resurgence
of anti-Semitism. Sixteen percent of those responding to a survey on the
situation in Germany, conducted by the news magazine
Der Spiegel
in
January 1993, professed themselves to be anti-Semites. In the former
GDR, the figure is only four percent, although dictatorship in one form
or another had been a permanent fixture there since 1933. Embracing,
conforming to, or actively espousing the form of socialism realized in
East Germany was a sure-fire way of being allowed to forget the Nazi
past.
When the Cold War set in, thinking in terms of "them and us,"
"friends and enemies," became the order of the day. Although the break
with the National Socialist past was more radical in East Germany than
in the FRG, the citizens of the former GDR did not inwardly divest
themselves of the Nazi past as outward appearances might suggest. To an
even greater degree than their cousins in West Germany, they regarded
themselves as the major victims of National Socialism. Under the surface,
Nazi thinking retained its vitality in both Germanies. This became appar–
ent with the revival of nationalism and violent xenophobia after the fall
of the Wall.
It
would be a betrayal of the campaign for a better Germany if we
were to renounce the caring solidarity and the identification with the
victims of past atrocities that are the prerequisite for compassion and em–
pathy as sustaining elements of our political civilization. To do so would
be to destroy an ideal of communal culture to which the best minds in
the country once committed themselves. A humane and intellectually ac–
ceptable national identity can thrive only on a way of thinking that has
submitted itself to a process of collective remembrance, that has learned
to mistrust and eschew primitive hostility and infantile national self-ideal–
ization. And this way of thinking is the fruit of facing up to guilt and
thus achieving liberation from compulsive reenactment, self-hatred, and
emotional paralysis.
As we know, a degree of self-respect is a necessary precondition for
respecting others. The refusal to mourn meant not only the inability to
sympathize with the victims, but it also meant losing the capacity to es–
tablish a direct and sincere relationship with coming generations. This
enables us to understand why in Germany the contact between older
people and subsequent generations is frequently disturbed, why today so
many young people appear to be lost and confused, why they have made
absence of feeling and fellow-feeling a guiding principle. They are repeat–
ing what they saw happening to themselves, their vision of their parents.
