580
PARTISAN REVIEW
No, we did not know that much. But young people like to judge the
whole by a few details, and they aren't necessarily wrong. That young
generation among whom I had grown up lived with the visible conse–
quences of militaristic insanity, and then was confronted by new fears
of war: Korea; Berlin,
1953;
Hungary,
1956.
We had stared at the tele–
vision screen and watched Russian and American ships on a collision
course off Cuba; we saw the slaughter in Vietnam.
The times were ripe for this youth to be on the offensive against the
expectations of older people. At German universities
the dust of a thou–
sand years
had to be shaken from the academic robes
(Unter den
Talaren der Muff von Tausend Jahren) .
Since the Nuremberg trials, we
had learned how strongly the past was still there, particularly in the aca–
demic community. One of the most important results of the '68 revolt
was a new, enlightened approach to German history. Enthusiastically we
had taken it upon ourselves to make this, our country, intellectually
habitable for the young.
The whole symbolism of the revolt indicates appropriation. And the
Establishment obviously realized they had to defend their claims-be it
against their own children. To tell the truth, the first time I really felt at
home in Germany was when, surrounded by a deafening concert of
hoots, I was seated among a crowd of young people in the middle of the
Karlsplatz in Munich to protest against the proposed emergency legisla–
tion. Looking back, I think I have never been closer to a sense of
Heimat,
for the very asphalt then was carrying a message through the
bottom of my trousers. The message was:
this country is yours, too.
Everything has changed since then. Little is left of our idealism
besides speculation; our dream of salvation has moved to the stock mar–
ket scene.
Heimat,
home, has won a new name:
Standort
(location). But
who wants to belong to a business location?
The experience following the unexpected unification of Germany has
not increased the inclination to belong. The snooping and informing
came as no surprise: that writers are no better than other people is no
discovery. It was their bigotry that was flabbergasting. No one with the
faintest idea of the
krummholz
of humanity,
to
use Immanuel Kant's
metaphor, will point his finger at the twists and turns of a life story
under dictatorship. But if the twisted one pretends to be upright and
expects praise for holding on to his principles, one would prefer to
awaken out of unification.
Heimat
is a process in which, at one point or another, the decisive
question is bound
to
pop up: how much trust can you grant your home?
