NORMAN MANEA
395
If it had been a German politician giving expression to these patriotic
concerns, I'd likely have been more understanding. In the case of a
writer-above all one of Walser's standing-whose calling it is to scruti–
nize the ambigui ties, the dark side of human nature, such a view of the
historical "Gennan shame" (and guilt) seems strange to me. It would have
been inconceivable for a politician to write a text like "Brother Hitler," in
which the great author and great German Thomas Mann displayed, as in
Doktor Faustus
or in the "Novel of a Novel," not only the good side of
Germany and the Germans, of which he was so glowing an example, but
also its bad side, which he debated with exemplary lucidity during the last
decades of lils life. I have difficulty believing that Martin Walser reads this
text any differently than I do.
Assigning an individual to the permanent role of victim or perpetrator
certainly entails alienation. As we know from the case of the Jews, who have
always been the world's scapegoats, the assignment of such a role is unbear–
able. Even more grotesque is the situation in other countries. Unlike
Germany,Japan has never engaged in a critical reassessment of its past, but
rather has continued to hold up the terrible symbol of Hiroshima, with no
mention whatever of the barbaric massacre of Chinese ci tizens in Nanking,
where the Japanese Army engaged in horrifying acts of bestiality.
But don't we
still
have to ask ourselves whether the Holocaust has
rightly come to serve as a sort of moral cudgel, regardless of what Miss
Media, this frivolous, cynical, omnipresent concubine of modernity, has to
say about it? And do we not have to ask ourselves where exactly the dan–
ger of "monumentalizing the shame" would lie, whether or not the guilt
in question is German?
Baudelaire says that the devil's most clever trick is
to
convince man that
he, the devil, does not exist. In our case, one alight say that memory may
constitute a trap if the evil in man is forgotten, the "shame" (and guilt) that
ought to accompany mankind's many demonic acts. Should we just go on
filling the world with monuments to "heroism," that is, with glorifying
conU11emorations of deeds wlilch, seen from the "other side," from the point
of view of other nations (or even one's own) meant defeat, death, loss of
honor and home? What does a monument in honor of a Germany victory
over France mean to a Frenchman, and vice versa? And what is the meaning,
for a German, of a monument to a peasant revolution in wlilch thousands of
German lives were lost at German hands? Would not tlils, too, be a "monu–
mentalizing of German shame" (and guilt)? Not to mention the countless
massacres that have been carried out between and witliln various peoples in
the name of brotherly or neighborly love.
Would not, then, these "Monuments of Shame" be at least as instruc–
tive, if not even more so? Ought not the people of all nations be renlinded
