578
PARTISAN REVIEW
they obviously did come from a place where unspeakable dangers seemed
to lurk. The country bound
to
be my home belonged
to
Goethe's Erlking.
Was this supposed
to
become my
Heimat?
I knew many fairy tales; I was familiar with evil. The visible disaster–
the stumps of the houses in the cities, the defiant silence leaping towards
my generation-all this made us inquisitive and, in the end, rebellious.
We didn't grow up with the hopes of becoming bright new democrats;
we grew up, after all, in an exhausted, reluctantly re-educated, trauma–
tized society. Those who were clearing away the rubble on the streets
could hardly find the courage to look inside themselves at the devasta–
tion of morality and of the human spirit. Maybe the exhaustion was
overwhelming. But while strength was slowly restored, courage remained
lost.
Today, we learn about the present by way of the past. Now we can
understand how it may have been when the first SA hordes, Hitler's
SturmabteiLung,
rampaged through the streets, hunting down what had
been declared fair game. Now, statistically speaking, any foreigner in
Germany is at greater risk of being beaten, burned, or hunted to death
than any German anywhere in this not exactly squeamish world.
Can
Heimat
withstand this?
Among the most significant and depressing experiences which I have
lived through are these that make me distrust my country: this distrust
could well be said to characterize my generation.
We were not guilty, but we had to bear the guilt. Who burdened us
with it? Or did it just recoil from the grim expressions of our elders and
find itself placed on our shoulders instead?
In contrast to what has often been maintained, I recall that we did
learn about the Nazi period at school; even if some teachers carried their
personal memories of the war into the classroom.
I remember that when I was thirteen I had to write a term paper in
geography-which was then still called
Heimatkunde-a
paper on the
regions which were simply called the German Eastern Territories
(Deutsche Ostgebiete) .
From start to finish, my report was a revanchist
pamphlet against Poland, sprinkled with romanticism
a
La
Eichendorff.
The emphasis I put on the word
Heimat,
which appeared on every page,
reveals I was trying to deal with a theme I did not really understand.
It
was the time of the Cold War, with its
Heimatfront
(homefront).
But I need to go further back; even before we played cowboys and
Indians, among the ruins, before we first attempted
to
smoke with little
sticks of dried-up knotgrass vines, which the passers-by who saw us
called
Jew's rope.
The fear and hunger of my early childhood got lost in
