HOW CAN WE "RECONCILE" COMMUNIST AND NAZI LEGACIES?
595
the East Germans, could not and would not go along with the anti–
Semitic campaigns.
In
East Germany, the outcome of the purge of the
cosmopolitans was never fundamentally challenged. Speaking the lan–
guage of anti-fascism, a second German dictatorship attacked the Jews.
Carnes Lord:
Thank you very much. Our last speaker will be Gaspar
Tamas.
Gaspar Tatnas:
Unlike the excellent speakers before me, I am neither
an historian nor a sociologist, just a philosopher. Therefore, my remarks
will be a bit duller because I won't talk about events but about theories
and ideas, about new developments in German nationalism. I want to
make some preliminary remarks. The time is gone, and I think that it's
good that it's gone, in which foreigners such as myself could patronize
Germans and tell them what's what. Germans can perfectly well look af–
ter themselves. I think that Germany is one of the most stable liberal
democracies in Europe today, with fewer structural troubles than either
England or Italy or even France. Compared to the xenophobia experi–
enced in some East European countries or in France, or in other parts of
the world, German xenophobia is relatively harmless, insofar as xeno–
phobia can be harmless at all.
Secondly, developments within the new German nationalism, which
I will undertake to criticize briefly, are to be considered as the back–
ground of a stable, prosperous democracy that indeed has peculiar prob–
lems, the first of which is the problem of the German past, psychological
difficulties resulting from the Nazi period and from the division of Ger–
many into two states, one of which was under Russian occupation and
was a Communist, anti-democratic, indeed, tyrannical state. But other
democracies are beset with sirniliar problems of guilt and bad conscience,
to which they respond with a questionable and strange stream of self-ac–
cusation such as, for example, the British do when they think about their
colonial past. When German nationalists criticize the tendency of the
Germans toward a national masochism, there is great revulsion, among
the German youth especially, against this self-criticism, rightly or wrongly
perceived as an exaggeration of guilt. Germany is to be considered now,
I think, as a normal European country. Therefore, it shouldn't be ac–
cused too much and shouldn't be excused too much either. The stan–
dards of a democracy are on the whole comprehensible and clear, and
Gennany doesn't want to be subjected to criticisms other than those
which start from the usual criteria of decency and liberal democratic
ethic that other countries are subjected to.
I think that the new German nationalism, indeed a strange and not
