FORMER WEST GERMANS AND THEIR PAST
539
the posthumous Hitler figure of the inability to mourn, why would any–
one want to inflict it? For two reasons: to cripple West Gennan demo–
cratic self-confidence and self-assertion in the present, and to detract at–
tention from a sober and proper understanding of the past by dramati–
cally insisting on an unsober and moralistic one. If we now ask
cui bono,
we may come up with answers that have the savor of political reality and
not of artificial indignation. Two cases illustrate the issue.
The first is that of Hans Filbinger, the minister-president of the
Land,
or state, of Baden-Wiirttemberg in southwest Gennany. In 1978, Fil–
binger was a senior politician of the conservative Christian Democratic
Union and the head of government of what was probably West Ger–
many's most prosperous state. Two other facts about him are important
for understanding what happened; in a political party whose upper
reaches were not exactly overflowing with dynamic talent or intellectual
vitality, he was one of the few who could, and did, defeat his opponents
on their own ideological ground. Second, it was in his state and on his
watch that, in 1977, four convicted and imprisoned terrorists, members
of the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang, committed suicide after their
followers failed to secure their release by hijacking a passenger airliner
and kidnapping and killing a prominent hostage.
Such a man had enemies. Some of them, like the remaining terrorists,
were more impotent than dangerous. Others had clout. Some of those
are in East Berlin, others in Hamburg. In spring 1978, the playwright
and essayist Rolf Hochhuth published a story in the liberal Hamburg
weekly newspaper
Die Zeit.
Hochhuth is an interesting character in his
own right whose writings have shaped West Gennan public debate and
self-image at critical moments over the past thirty years. And he is no
radical or left-winger; one of his most interesting essays is an attempt to
prove that the Soviet Union and British intelligence colluded in 1943 to
kill the head of the Polish exile government in London in order to pave
the way for the Communists to take power unopposed in postwar
Poland. I mention this to stress that the ideological front lines in
Vergan–
genheitsbewiiltigung
are neither predictable nor always obvious.
In any event, Hochhuth in th,is story denounced Filbinger as a
"frightful" or "terrifying jurist." This
~ounds
less obscure in Gennan than
in English. Hochhuth was referring to the fact that, in the last months of
the war, Filbinger had been a junior judge with the Gennan Navy in
occupied Norway. Some of his cases concerned deserters, a category that
was not unnaturally growing as the end approached. Somehow or
other, Hochhuth and
Die Zeit
had acquired material about Filbinger's
conduct which they felt showed him to be a last-ditch fanatic who
