World Policy Journal
Volume XVII, No 1, Spring 2000

 

The Importance of "Why"
By Fritz Stern

 

What follows is an abridged version of the acceptance speech I gave on October 17, on receiving the 1999 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The prize, first given in 1950, a year after the founding of the Federal Republic, is meant to honor diverse efforts on behalf of peace and understanding; earlier recipients have included Paul Tillich, Bishop Desmond Tutu, George Kennan, and Václav Havel. Bronislaw Geremek, the Polish foreign minister and a fellow historian, gave the laudatio, or justification, for this year's choice. The ceremony at the historic Paulskirche in Frankfurt, always attended by the president of the Federal Republic, is nationally televised and hence an occasion to speak to a very large audience. The prize was given to me as an American historian, and thus it seemed appropriate to dwell on questions of the German past and on lessons to be learned from it for all of us.

Almost a year has passed since the beginning of a war in Kosovo that was brought on not by national selfishness or economic interests, but by the decision of a democratic alliance that it was unwilling to tolerate brutal inhumanity. The military defense of human rights is a new phenomenon, but in a time of newly emerging nationalism (which has taken the place of communism as Europe's dominant ideology), similar cases are sure to arise. Such decisions cannot be dealt with ad hoc; at the very least the Western democratic nations need unambiguous guidelines for fruitful cooperation. Responsibility should not rest solely with the world's only superpower.

Eternal peace remains an unattainable utopia; as Immanuel Kant recognized, we need international institutions capable of holding "the evil nature of human beings" in check. Our international institutions are still too feeble for such a task. But peace begins within nations, as it does within individuals. The commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself" presupposes a self-love whose actual existence or justification cannot simply be assumed. Peace requires a certain minimum of inner strength. In a country riven by internal dissatisfaction or that believes itself to be afflicted by a latent civil war, the temptation is to displace the conflict onto something else or flee from it into the future.

The First World War—the first great catastrophe of the twentieth century—erupted in part because of internal fissures within the great powers of the time, especially within the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, a fragmented nation where a paranoid fear of so-called domestic enemies heightened the fear of enemies abroad. Yet now, as then, peace within a country constitutes the basis for a judicious foreign policy. Hence my oft-expressed hope that the new Germany will be able to make peace with itself. There should be no room in this Germany for second-class citizens, or even for people who think of themselves as such. There have been enough second-class citizens in history; I was one of them.

Custodians of the Past

We are standing at the end of the bloodiest century in Europe's history, and such a past will not simply go away. It is present in all our countries, most especially in Germany. Germans are rightly told not to forget, but such admonitions do not place guilt at the door of today's generation. They demand responsibility, reinforced by a knowledge of past mistakes and crimes. For instance, we can learn from the past that the direction of history is uncharted and that people shape it. The belief in historical inevitability is a dangerous mistake, and it leads to passivity.

In earlier times, the study of history was considered a cornerstone of a liberal education. Great playwrights brought history to the stage, but historians enjoyed something like a monopoly on the task of researching and narrating the past. On one point the dramatic poets and the historians were in full agreement: history is a human drama, and knowledge of the past should both enrich life and help explain it.

Most historians and dramatists bowed down to power and were expected to create a positive, indeed glorious, account of their nation's past. One dramatist stands as a notable exception: Georg Büchner, born on this day in 1813, portrayed in Danton's Death the great tragedy of the French Revolution, when so much blood was shed with a clear conscience. Danton's relentless question to Robespierre should be engraved in our hearts: "Isn't there a voice inside you that, every so often, whispers in secret—you're lying, you're lying?" Such skepticism as his was suspect and often unwelcome.

Historians are no longer the chief custodians of the past. They now share that responsibility with influential television and movie directors, who represent the past often in unavoidably abbreviated form, often in inexcusably distorted form. Professional historians have meanwhile withdrawn into more and more specialized research and are often unwilling to cultivate the stylistic elegance and narrative power that have marked the works of some earlier writers.

But German historians have done remarkable work in the last 40 years of critical scrutiny of their nation's past. Today, more than ever before, we have a much more nuanced image of German history. There has been, and always will be, strife among historians. But their achievements—and their participation in international research, the harmonious cooperation with colleagues abroad—will not fade away.

Today we live in a culture of remembrance where individual memories as well as publicly celebrated collective memories are given an increasingly important place. In the 1980s, a wave of commemorations began to recall the terrors of the German past. On May 8, 1985, President Richard von Weizsäcker offered a compelling plea for Germany to remember—and to mourn—the victims of German oppression. As he said, "It is useless to spare our feelings, whether we do so or others do so." The change in generations has affected the task of remembrance, too. The people who experienced firsthand the full intensity of German terror are leaving the scene, but they still want to bear witness, in part on behalf of the silenced victims. The 100 million Europeans who died unnatural deaths in this century remain on the conscience of all of us.

Memory and History

New research into moral and legal questions in previously unsuspected areas of German and European life has sharpened our critical engagement with the past. Many countries find themselves caught in the current of historical revisionism; the darker pages of their histories are being scrutinized in order to correct the conventional, usually apologetic views. But each form of revisionism brings with it a new source of division. It is not easy to achieve a balanced judgment of one's own past. On the eve of the Swiss national holiday I heard President Ruth Dreifuss say that she always thinks of her country "with gratitude and pain." I felt those words struck a new and convincing tone in the political language of Europe; they attest to a difficult but necessary ambivalence of feeling.

Germany, burdened with the greatest weight, was the first to begin this process of revisionism, and one must hope it will continue to cultivate its hard-won culture of transparency. The German past will always remain controversial—in its entirety, especially the history of the Third Reich, which was neither an accident nor a historical inevitability, neither the exception in nor the goal of German history.

Memory and history are linked together, yet they are very distinct. Memory holds on to symbol-laden events, to images from the past that survive within us. Memory may be powerful, but it can be imprecise. It keeps us vigilant, but it can lead us only to the threshold of historical understanding. Memory is not an actively examined and researched reconstruction of the past, and a past that is merely remembered can function as a replacement for the true past, casting its spell over an ahistorical culture.

I have my own memories: the times of Nazi rule are etched in my mind more sharply than the events of peaceful times. As a seven-year-old, I experienced the weeks of Hitler's seizure of power and the first arrests of the enemies of the new regime, friends of my parents. The first victims of National Socialism and the torture methods it had newly reintroduced were so-called Aryans.

A cynical sadism accompanied Hitler's regime from the very beginning. The name of Dachau was a synonym of horror for me, and I remember the fear inspired by this terror, the ongoing persecution of Jews, their ever greater exclusion from German life. But I also remember the decency of friends who remained loyal, the pastors of the dissident wing of the Protestant Church who repeatedly disappeared into jail—at a time when the majority of Germans were enthusiastically applauding Hitler's regime and its successes.

It was a time of renewal and the appearance of normalcy; state and party enjoyed a monopoly on criminality. I can still see the gleaming parades of Nazis marching proudly in their uniforms and truncheons, radiating power and danger. As a student in the gymnasium in Breslau, I experienced acts of vileness and decency; I knew pain and gratitude. I remember family friends driven into exile, and our own efforts to emigrate. Millions of Germans had freely left their land in the nineteenth century to seek a better life in America, and unconsciously their word "Aus-wanderung" was transferred to this new kind of enforced extrusion, although only now do I realize how inappropriate the word "wander" was to our situation.

My family arrived in the United States four weeks before Kristallnacht, the pogrom of November 1938; for me it was a joyful new beginning. I remember the letters from friends and relatives who had remained behind in Germany; the first reports of suicide in order to avoid deportation; and, later, the news that close relatives had been deported to Theresienstadt and then murdered in Auschwitz. German cattle cars still make me shudder today. But I also remember how deeply my parents were attached to their native country, and how naturally they considered themselves Germans—until 1933.

After the war, they visited Western Europe, but not Germany; love disappointed is hard to overcome. They sent CARE packages to their German friends. Recently, I came across a letter from a former colleague of my father's, Mortimer von Falkenhausen, who wrote to him in February 1948: "What I will never be able to fathom is the fact that countless Germans, without a word of protest, let themselves descend to the level of sadistic criminals who murdered and raged like wild animals—and found such behavior perfectly normal. This mark of criminality will cling to the German nation, and for this reason you will understand why I feel ashamed, all the more so because I see no improvement on the horizon." Yet improvement came.

These are personal examples, memories, fragments from a time long ago. But these voices and moods are actually only milestones on the path toward understanding. To use a concept developed by Hegel: one has to "gather" (aufheben) memories, that is, preserve them while enhancing their value by elucidating their context and the complexity of events. Only then can one approach true historical understanding. Every judgment we make must take into account what the people of a given time knew, and we must never forget that they certainly did not know their own future, which we know. They inhabited another world, with another mentality, another political culture.

My efforts to situate the memories of the past into a broader, European understanding of history are meant to do justice to the reality of the past and, at the same time, to the needs of our future. The wish for a comparative history of Europe has been with us for some time, and it has little to do with Brussels and the European Union, although one of its first advocates was the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne. The Nestor of German historiography, Leopold von Ranke, began to write a universal history at the age of 85. Historians, so the claim goes, get better with age and experience—consolation, perhaps, for their slow development. But we should set about our new tasks sooner than Ranke did.

"There Is No Why Here"

National Socialism weighs heavily on us all. It will not go away, and in some dark corners one can see that the attraction of a pure Volksgemeinschaft or, as we would now say, ethnic community, still exercises its charms. The crimes are fresh in our memory. The question, "How was it possible?" will never fade away, and every attempt to escape into normalcy will remain futile. The unfettered sadism with which European Jews were destroyed is rightfully described as a fall from civilization into barbarism. It occurred in the long night of organized bestiality.

I have often said that every trivialization of the Holocaust, every failure to remember the millions of other victims, is a crime against the victims themselves. Unavoidably, and for all time, Auschwitz will remain a symbol of German inhumanity and unimaginable evil. In what I consider the most convincing and harrowing account of this evil, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz—composed as a warning that what happened once could happen again—the author recalls an episode from his first day in the camp that might well stand as a memorial for future generations. Describing his horrifying voyage by cattle car, with nothing to eat or drink, Levi recounts: "Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand's reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. `Warum?' I asked him in my poor German. `Hier ist kein warum' (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove."

This "hier ist kein warum" stands against everything that is human and constitutes a form of verbal annihilation. "Why?" is the existential question that every individual directs to his God or to fate. If the question is denied, so is the answer, and then an individual's lack of existence, his absolute lack of basic rights, is given a kind of official certification. Job entreats his God with questions: "How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? Why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I am a burden to myself?"

For me, this denial of "why" is the authentic expression of totalitarianism and reveals its deepest meaning: a negation of Western civilization, in which human beings are exposed to absolute arbitrariness. "Why?" is not just a basic existential question; it is also the foundation for every system of justice. It marks the beginning of thought, the impulse toward knowledge and science, toward fruitful argument. The West has survived struggles against intolerant orthodoxy, has freed itself from the Inquisition; its openness and freedom, which begin with the unrestricted asking of the question "why?" have made possible our progress in intellectual and political life. It was precisely this rock of humanity that totalitarianism wished to shatter.

The denial of "why" has an even greater, more general significance for us. We have conquered totalitarianism and thereby lost the enemy who, as it were, automatically assured us of our own virtue. Previously we could be contented with the feeling, "We're not like them." Today we need other standards. Do we take the obligation of "why" seriously enough, that is, as the basis for human dignity, as the mature citizen's right to free expression? To question something, to put something into question, is an exercise that should begin in the family (for instance, by encouraging children to be curious), continue into one's professional life, and reach a high point in the political life of the nation. But precisely on this score our democratic nations register a disturbing deficit.

Do politicians today really think their decisions through? Do they lead the public, or mislead it? Do they follow a general consensus or do they work to build one? Here political institutions, the press, and other media are key. Until recently, the word "accountability" was on everybody's tongue; today, its practice is neglected. To substitute public relations for public reasoning and public debate is a regrettable trend. And a political system that is boring by design can alienate the public. When the res publica is degraded into triviality or obscured in technical hocus-pocus, the final result is disappointed and weary citizens. Worse, the dumbing down of the public into apathetic indifference can lead to a new authoritarianism.

Yet true remembrance of the past can bring present achievements into sharper relief. We have learned from the past; the fascist dictatorships provided the initial impetus for the 1948 Declaration of Universal Human Rights—which, however, went unheeded for many years, and only now, and only in a few regions of the world, do people seem willing to protect these rights with the requisite determination. And the long and difficult integration of Western Europe—which one hopes will be very soon extended to all of Europe—was a response to the murderous civil wars that had led Europe to the edge of the abyss.

Another lesson comes to mind. The great German physicist Max von Laue, who behaved with exemplary decency during the years of the National Socialist regime, wrote after the war: "We all knew that injustice was being done, but we didn't want to see it. We deceived ourselves and shouldn't be surprised if now we have to pay a heavy price." The phrase "we didn't want to see it" strikes me as the most appalling and characteristic failure of our century; less than a decade ago we tried to ignore the brutal dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, reassuring ourselves with the excuse that "those people" have always fallen prey to hatred and murder, that they are irremediably different from us. Turning a blind eye is not just a moral fault, it also has practical, destructive consequences. Our task in the first years of the next century will be to establish an international legal basis for intervention against the government-ordered abuse of human rights. In many respects the past has taught us how not to act; how we should act remains a task for the future.

Germany's Second Chance

We can intuit what challenges lie before Europe in the coming years; the challenge for the new Germany, as the most powerful European nation, will be especially great. The times when the Federal Republic could be described as an economic giant and a political dwarf are long gone—although I am not sure whether this political dwarf was not rather a clever juggler in disguise. Ten years ago I spoke of the events of 1989 as having given Germany a second chance: at the end of the century, as at its beginning, it occupied the leading position in Europe. In 1900, Europe ruled the world; two German wars have meant that the Europe of 2000 is weak in comparison to what it was then, though internally it is free of the civil wars that once marked its history. Today, a war between the leading European powers is inconceivable—for the first time. The belief in peace has altered much in the outlook of Europeans. Old virtues—such as the willingness for self-sacrifice, often exploited by a senseless militarism—have faded from the scene. Now what Germany needs is a sense of community (what the French call civisme) as well as civil courage. Whether and how it makes use of this second chance remains to be seen. Here I will content myself with a brief wish list, desiderata of my own, that might help this new opportunity to reach fruition.

First and foremost is Germany's internal reunification, the precondition for political stability in the new Federal Republic. From an outsider's perspective, one sometimes has the impression that Germany has made better progress in reconciling itself with other nations than with parts of its own once-divided self. One fears a continued, perhaps even increased, estrangement between the citizens of the former East Germany and the former West Germany—despite impressive economic gains that, however, have not essentially diminished the discrepancies in their standards of living. Is it enough to claim that the psychological reunification of the two Germanys is "only" a question of time? Historical reflection may be useful here. The citizens of the former West Germany no doubt recall their own difficult beginnings in the late 1940s, which American assistance, however, quickly helped them to overcome, whereas the citizens of the German Democratic Republic were forced to bear the full burden of the war's devastation; they had a much harder time of it. The understanding of the past was radically different in East and West: that also deepens the divide today. Do the former West Germans have too little understanding for the self-image of the East Germans, whom they presumed were their brothers and sisters and therefore supposedly resembled them in many ways?

One may well be reminded of family quarrels, and to me a literary comparison springs to mind. In Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, the brothers Thomas and Christian are depicted as profoundly different from one another. Repugnance and fear of "contagion" drive them further apart and lead them to accentuate their peculiarities. Finally Thomas cries out to his brother: "I became what I am because I loathed becoming like you. If I avoided you internally it was because I had to guard myself against you, for your very way of being is dangerous for me.... I'm telling the truth."

The estrangement continues to grow. Of course Wolfgang Thierse, president of the Bundestag, was right in saying that many East Germans had led proper lives in the wrong system. They practiced certain virtues, were perhaps more German than the Germans in the West, who were so quick and zealous in their eagerness to be Americanized. But this should not lead so far as allowing them—out of repugnance for a superficially understood Western style—to indulge in nostalgic transfigurations of their own way of life: a simple, unfree existence contrasted to the free but hectic lifestyle of Western capitalism. And it must absolutely not lead to their forgetting once again the value of Western democratic freedom. Jens Reich was also right when, in A Farewell to Life-Long Delusions, he wrote: "We must give up the niches where we comfortably complain; we must get out of our hammocks of cynicism."

It has often been said that the West Germans might have learned something from the experiences of the former GDR, that reunification might have awakened a new consciousness in them. Also, the new eastern states have provided outstanding, indeed enviable, examples of political leadership. We hope those leaders find understanding and solidarity in the fight against criminality and antidemocratic currents of whatever political stripe. (I am well aware that the United States also has its share of fascist political criminals, and that Nazi racial propaganda has become an American export to Germany. That the very word "skinhead" is used in all languages points to the international nature of the phenomenon.)

I would also hope that the new Germany, for all its difficulties and disappointments, might feel a greater sense of joyful gratitude, and not just for manifest achievements such as the establishment of a political culture based on liberty and protected by a constitution (Grundgesetz) that has won general popular acceptance. It also has reason to feel gratitude for a reunification that took place under exceptionally favorable conditions.

Grateful recognition is also due to those who maintained their decency during the Nazi terror, and to those who gave their lives in desperate, heroic acts of resistance—in order to bequeath to their nation a great moral legacy. And finally, though not least, recognition should go to the hundreds of thousands of former East Germans who took to the streets in the call for freedom—not knowing whether Erich Honecker would adopt a hard-line stance against them and repeat the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in their own country.

The Privilege of Citizenship

I welcome the newly proclaimed "Berlin Republic" but regret the name. Why do German democracies have to be confined or identified by cities—Weimar, Bonn, Berlin? The result is simply to underline undesirable discontinuity. Why cannot we finally have the German democracy that the delegates to this church, the Paulskirche, in 1848, wanted and for which so many have since fought?

The privilege of citizenship in Germany is relatively recent. Exactly 100 years ago, Theodor Mommsen, who was the first and (apart from Winston Churchill) the only historian to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, noted in his will: "I have never possessed, nor sought to possess, political office or influence. But in my heart of hearts and, I believe, with what is best in me, I have always been an animal politicum and wanted to be a citizen. That isn't possible in our nation where even the finest individual never gets beyond service in the rank and file and patriotic conformity. This internal split from my own people has made me determined to avoid, as much as was possible, appearing in person before the German public, for which I lack the requisite respect." What sacrifices were required in this century to obtain the basic rights of citizenship! Now they must be exercised.

I would wish that this nation would develop a more just, more liberal culture of public dispute: open debates on the thorniest issues of present and past, discussions without ad hominem attacks, without destructive, vague insinuations, which marred the so-called historians' debate, for example. Repression is dangerous: ressentiment burrows deep into society, and unaired it will burrow deeper still.

A famous German philosopher is said to have complained that his life-partner talked so much that he had no time for thinking. What does she talk about? he was asked. His answer: She doesn't say. This can befall any Sunday preacher. Politicians also talk too much and say too little. The political class has lost credibility. Its members forget that the public is mature, open to and capable of debate, that the peoples of Eastern Europe resisted ideological deception and fought for the right to "live in the truth." A Europe of democracies existed once before, right after the First World War, but it fell apart almost immediately. Today, conditions are far more favorable, but faith in some form of immunity against political dangers would be foolish. Yesterday's utopias—bolshevism and fascism—were politically anesthetizing drugs. Privatizing the drugs has not been a public benefit.

Liberal democracy is always in danger. Even when times are good we stumble from one financial crisis to the next, and no one can guarantee that one day the globalized free market will not fall into a deep depression, spreading new misery and perhaps leading to the false remedies of illiberalism and protectionism. Every kind of instability favors the development of extremism and criminality. Such conditions lead people to believe in the necessity of authoritarian leadership.

The Anglo-German observer Ralf Dahrendorf was right in noting that "our task is to bring competitiveness, social cohesion and political freedom into harmony"—a task, he wrote, that is like squaring the circle. When the need for competitiveness further weakens social cohesiveness, then freedom, too, is in danger.

Unexpected Good Fortune

There are surely moments in life in which the commandment of "why" loses its relevance. In moments of physical danger, obedience may mark the sole path to security. In love there is often no "why." Nor is there upon receipt of a great gift as has been given me today. But today's unexpected good fortune demands some self-scrutiny; how is it that I became more and more involved in the life of postwar Germany? In hindsight, it became clear to me that my childhood had predisposed me. National Socialism was the decisive didactic element in my political education. I owe to this childhood and to an adolescence cut short by historical experiences a large part of my later life. National Socialism stoked the fire of my love for freedom as a human good, as the precondition for all other goods. Heine was right: "The love of freedom is a flower that blooms behind bars." And still I wish it would bloom everywhere.

In the end I could not disassociate myself from the drama of German history, and it has helped determine my work as a historian. My recent engagement with German matters was no simple affair. I had to go through my own sort of "denazification," that is, I had to reach the inner conviction that German history cannot be judged merely from the perspective of 1945. But the memory of people from my childhood, who already at that time had taken an unambiguous stance in favor of a free Germany, came to my assistance. The reconstruction of postwar Germany did not arise from a void. Venerable, if weak, traditions in democracy played their part. In the last decades I have become increasingly occupied with German affairs, but I have also maintained a certain distance—the better to spot danger and, at times, to suggest a warning.

German friends have made this kind of spiritual participation possible, and in this way I have been able to remain faithful to my parents' disappointed dreams. If I may be permitted in this context to name but one, it would be Marion, Countess Dönhoff, editor of the great liberal weekly Die Zeit, whose gift of friendship has been at once liberating and decisive for the course of my life. Initiating reconciliation with Prussian simplicity, she has served as a model for how one can transform personal loss into incalculable profit for others.

For me, German-American understanding remains a dictate of history, politics, and my own life. I am a citizen of one country, but my love belongs to two languages, equally endangered, one common culture, equally neglected. My gratitude belongs to the country in which my children and grandchildren can be raised in liberty. For the fact that I sense this gratitude so keenly and have experienced friendship as so vital a gift—for this I thank the country that once forced me into exile and with which I have forged new ties.

Translated by Mark M. Anderson