The new wave of anti-Semitism, which began in Cologne and spread over many German cities, has evoked a profound concern with the German future, and with the youth upon whom that future so largely depends. While Western governments reacted with immediate embarrassment to the incidents, the peoples of the Western world were more deeply disturbed: the incidents had brought to the forefront of their consciousness thoughts which considerations of political expediency had tended to repress. Intuitively, everyone, including the Germans themselves, understood that no social group changes its fundamental attitudes overnight, and that a “re-education” campaign such as that devised for Germany after the war could not radically transform the socio-psychological tendencies of the whole nation. People could not forget that despite Germany’s economic “miracle,” its parliamentary government, and membership in NATO, the postwar decartelization was carried out by the cartels’ technicians, democratization by the bureaucracy that had served Hitler, and re-education by teachers who had previously taught (and who had, at least in part, believed) that the German race was predestined to rule the world, that race was superior to reason, and that authority must be obeyed even where conscience suggests otherwise.

The effect of these memories, renewed by the recent anti-Semitic manifestations, must doubtless be especially disturbing in the United States; Germany, America’s only enemy in both world wars, now presents the most “Americanized” appearance of all the European states. The fact that the swastikas were smeared on walls by young Germans can only serve to intensify anxiety. The juvenile delinquents everywhere—the English “teddy boys,” the French blousons noirs, the “hooligans” of the USSR, the German Halbstarke—horrify and mystify the adult generation. But it is the situation of postwar Germany and its youth that now demands our most serious analysis and reflection. For we are all implicated—victors, vanquished, and victims.

The year 1945 has been called Germany’s “Year Zero.” This is a half-truth. To be sure, Nazism ultimately destroyed Germany as a national state and ruined its economy. The intellectual past, which Hitler had annexed, became suspect. Some felt that it was directly responsible for the catastrophe. The very racism with which the German people had been imbued led it to imagine, after the defeat, that it bore violence and barbarism in its blood, that its soul was at the root evil, and that its existence constituted a permanent menace to the nations. The “Year Zero” meant: all of Germany’s large cities 80 per cent destroyed, seven million military and civilian casualties, four million German refugees expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia, an entire industrial structure wrecked or dismantled for reparations. The “Year Zero” meant unemployment, hunger, the absence of all social security and protection, the schools in ruins, the teachers gone or suspected of Nazism, a black market whose currency was the cigarettes of the occupation troops, the prostitution of minors for a candy bar. It meant, too, the sinister comedy of “denazification,” where everyone played the false innocent before the Allied judges and their German subordinates, who themselves were either guilty or blinded by resentment. The “Year Zero,” therefore, signified the total void into which sixty-five million Germans sank with the thought that they were reaping the consequence of their collective guilt. On the whole, this was the attitude then adopted by German youth, which indeed dates its very existence from 1945. In the long-range historical view, however, the disruption was far less radical within the German of 1945 than it was, for example, in the United States of 1776, the France of 1789, or the Russia of 1917. However dramatic Germany’s political changes may have appeared in 1945, the “Year Zero” did not in fact mark a radical break, a turning point, in the history of the German people—the simple reason being that they suffered its changes passively. The German people submitted as to a catastrophe of nature, finding nothing around them except reasons for abandoning their own history.

If 1945 was indeed to be a “Year Zero”—or a “Year One”—there would have been some large portion of the German people ready to reconstruct society on a fresh foundation, a class or group ready to run the risks of power and to provide new leadership. No such social force appeared. And even if one had appeared (it is true that small groups of resisters, of Protestant and Catholic intellectuals, Marxists and liberals, were coming together), conditions of the occupation and the attitude of the Allies would have frustrated its development by pressing it to administer the opposing programs of Washington and Moscow.

The only controlling ideas that yoked together the disparate, wretched lives of the Germans in the years 1945—50 were those imposed by the Allies. Every German was obsessed by two cares: how to prolong his physical existence, and how to rid himself as quickly as possible of political restraint. Ideology figured little. If Berlin welcomed the Allies while meeting the Russians with resistance, this was not owing to any significant conscious adherence of the German masses to the ideal of living democracy; it was largely because the Western powers offered hope of a quicker material recovery and because the idea of Western democracy generally limits the intrusion of the state into private affairs. Poverty and politics were what everyone wanted to escape.

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The old ruling class and the masses were both reassured by the fact that the new Federal Republic, which was formed from the American, English, and French occupation zones, turned out to be nothing more than an expedient administrative mechanism; it was neither the heir of any historical tradition nor the blueprint for a new society. Democracy was taken in West Germany to mean a state whose power was so hamstrung that it could not affect private life. The programs and the practice of the ruling and opposition parties were characterized by the absence of any idea that might link them to the German past and its national aspirations. All this reflected the desire to be left in peace at all costs.

The overwhelming majority of Germans simply ignored the most fundamental ideas of democracy—that the life of the community and the state depends on the conscious and considered support of each citizen, that government and laws emanate from the will of a clearly defined majority, and that the opposition must be composed of a no less conscious and determined minority. This indifference continues to be manifested today in the absence of any reaction to the almost arbitrary power Chancellor Adenauer has concentrated in himself. And it is particularly common among the younger generation. Returning from the war and from POW camps in 1945, the young Germans got no assistance from the state—for the state did not yet exist—and they therefore feel no gratitude to the state for their private recovery, which they attribute to their own efforts, and to the efforts of their families. This is clearly reflected in a poll taken in 1955 by the EMNID Institute, which (supported by the Ford Foundation) is Germany’s equivalent of the Gallup poll. Youths between fifteen and twenty-four were asked the question: “If in a conversation, or public discussion, our regime (the form of our state) were attacked, would you defend it?” Seventy-eight per cent of the respondents answered more or less positively, 21 per cent negatively, and 6 per cent were undecided. However, the democratic value of the positive response may be gauged from the response of the same group to another question: “Do you think the following statement is right or wrong: ‘Young people ought to obey regulations and not criticize them.’” Here, 51 per cent agreed with the authoritarian statement, 47 per cent disagreed, and two per cent had no opinion.

Thus the West German regime itself is accepted by 78 per cent of the youth, but more than half of them think that authority ought to prevail over criticism. Clearly, the majority of Germans would accept an authoritarian government if it seemed likely to preserve them from a totalitarian one. And they might even prefer an authoritarian government to a genuinely democratic one, for its political technicians would relieve them of active participation in public affairs, and above all, of responsibility. The older generation shuns the responsibilities of democracy because, having got burned in the Hitler holocaust, it fears the risk of again backing the wrong horse. The younger generation sees no great advantage in assuming responsibility, because it understands the state as a mechanism for dispensing material benefits, security, and order, rather than as an organism deriving from their wills and sustained by their vigilant participation.

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The accountability of the Allies—and the United States in particular—for this situation is considerable. In 1945, the Allies took full charge of Germany’s political future. At that time, the great majority of Germans, young and old alike, had turned away from Nazism with horror. A German anti-Nazi minority conscious of the national necessities could have, and should have, assumed responsibility for social and political purification. But once the Allies had shouldered this burden themselves, the mass of Germans became passive, and indifferent to the experience and lessons of Nazism. It was no longer any business of theirs. Any wish that Germans might have had to emerge politically from the catastrophe, to renew contact with the great democratic traditions of the German and European past, was stifled. The Russians on one side, the Western Allies on the other, took up the task of “denazification” with that rationalistic naivety which supposes that a people will accept any truth so long as it is logically expounded, no matter who the teacher is. We are now facing the consequences of the Allied lack of confidence in the ability of the German people to draw their own right conclusions from the experience of tyranny, nationalist and racist madness, and the will to power.

All the energy and individual initiative of the German people were swallowed up instead in the single activity of economic reconstruction, and with the aid of the Marshall Plan, they set about producing their “economic miracle.” In a period of fifteen years, five million apartments were rebuilt (as against the total of ten million that existed in 1939), and a merchant fleet of four and a half million gross tonnage was constructed by shipyards which also found time to fill foreign orders. The same story can be read in heavy industry, in electrical appliances, textiles, furniture, and every other kind of industry. Per capita national income has almost tripled since 1948. In the course of this dizzying race for material comfort, the Germans repressed their Nazi past and placed themselves in the hands of their leaders.

Germany’s moral rehabilitation seemed complete when the Allies (headed by the United States) asked her to rearm against the USSR. The Allies then rehired the German generals, officers, and politicians who had been attached to the anti-Soviet services of the Wehrmacht and of the Nazi state. (Who could know better than these people all the intricacies of the anti-Communist struggle?) And the steady influx of German refugees from the Soviet zone—poor, embittered, and deeply opposed to the East German totalitarian regime—reinforced the religious horror all Germans now felt for Communism and for Russia, which came to replace France as the “hereditary foe.” The expulsion of three million Germans from Eastern Europe, moreover, helped to reawaken the hatred so carefully nurtured by the Nazis against Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Soviet Russia. These countries were once again the contemptible enemy. Resurgent nationalism and primitive anti-Communism, then, combined to blur the criminal Nazi past, and to lend it, after the event, a certain measure of justification.

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The opposition within Germany to these developments suffered from a twofold weakness. In the first place, even the slightest criticism of the Adenauer policies was suspect of pro-Sovietism. To oppose rearmament or to call for the purging of Nazi elements within the administration was to lay oneself open to the charge of undermining the strength and security of the Federal Republic. This fate was suffered by liberal intellectuals, by Social Democrats, and even by prominent leaders of Germany’s resurgent Protestantism.

Secondly, every effort to re-think German history and to envisage the national future had to face the cold fact of Germany’s division into two hostile countries, one adhering unconditionally to the U.S. and the other to the USSR. Obviously, German unification could be brought about in only two ways. Either West Germany could reconquer the Eastern territories with the aid of the Western allies; or else a compromise, implying some sort of social and political synthesis, could be worked out that would permit the unification of Germany within a Europe freed of both Russian and American tutelage. Now, even if no one advocates the first course, the fact of rearmament and the resistance by Adenauer’s government to any relaxation in East-West tension have made the second course seem completely chimerical, if not tainted with pro-Communism. The German opposition, therefore, dares not consider a policy which would oppose Nazism and resurgent militarism in the name of a conception of Germany’s historical mission which is derived both from geography and history: the policy that the two Germanies ought to constitute a peaceful bridge between the two worlds, rather than be their most perilous frontier. Moreover, the totalitarian methods of the East German Stalinists are grist to the mill of remilitarization and of an anti-Communism hardly more enlightened than Hitler’s. The mere idea, therefore, of making a social, political, and moral experiment in order to reunify Germany on a basis of relaxed international tension, frightens not only the rulers of both Germanies, but the West German people too, who would then have to assume genuine political responsibilities.

The average West German today is satisfied with things as they are. He has no wish to evoke either the criminal past or the perilous future, and resents those who do. All individual efforts are concentrated on professional work, on economic activity; the management of industry and of the state is, therefore, abandoned to those well-tried technicians who, having served both Hitler and the Allied military administration without the least scruple, are now blooming under Adenauer and quite incapable of understanding why they are suspect in other lands. But this state of affairs leaves the individual, and the nation, unconsciously dissatisfied and uneasy.

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Growing up in such an atmosphere, the young Germans of today have experienced a world in which there is only one stable element, one sphere in which mutual aid, candor, and disinterested love can be expected: the family. A variety of pressures forced the German family to tighten its loosened bonds: the absence of able-bodied men sent to the front; the loss of homes as a result of bombardments and expulsions; famine; the necessity of mothers undertaking factory work and abandoning their children for part of the day. When no official service was able to turn up a lodging, some forgotten old aunt off in the provinces shared her one-room flat with the whole refugee family. And when all the false gods of Nazi propaganda came tumbling down, when it was learned that neighbor had informed on neighbor, that the Ortsgruppenleiter had amassed a fortune administering the poverty of others, that millions of soldiers owed their deaths to the pride and imbecility of the leaders—then only mother, grandmother, uncle, cousin, revealed the lineaments of the human. They became the moral and material refuge of the starved and bewildered child or youth of the postwar years.

It may be striking, but it is hardly surprising that this younger generation accepts no authority other than that of the family, and that it does not attempt to break free of the family as adolescents in other lands and at other times normally do. So far as the young Germans are concerned, only their relatives have retained any moral credit. This credit extends to the family’s view of whatever the Allies and the German administration pour into the hopper of public opinion—which is why re-education of these youths in the postwar decade necessarily depended on re-educating the family circle. Students believed what their teachers had to say about Nazism only insofar as their families confirmed the lessons.¹ All too many youths were quite unreceptive to the disclosures of the crimes committed by the Third Reich. Teachers, newspapers, the state, had always lied—why should they be listened to now? said the older members of the family. And the young man could not, of course, believe that his relatives had any responsibility for what the documents revealed. The war crimes trials were ignored by the mass of Germans.

There is more to be said. It is difficult for a generation to grow up without receiving any view of life from its elders that it might accept or against which it might define itself. This situation is not peculiar to Germany, for there is a similar moral, social, and political crisis in all the heavily industrialized nations, including the USSR and its satellites. (In underdeveloped countries, fighting for independence or improving material conditions absorbs the energies of young people.) But the crisis is particularly dangerous in the case of Germany. For, in contrast to England and Scandinavia, for example, the historical conditions are missing in Germany that might permit social and technological changes to generate gradually some new view of life, some viable ethic—in other words, a civilization capable of helping youth to find its bearings.

A young German today neither knows what the idea “Germany” means nor what its boundaries are. He still does not know to what degree the war conducted by his parents was a guilty war. Certainly he is convinced, along with the great majority of Germans, that the extermination of the Jews was a crime, but he is unsure of the dimensions of the crime. (“The number of victims is greatly exaggerated.” “A few isolated sadistic beasts were responsible for the brutal treatment.”) And hundreds of thousands of young Germans believe that, crime or no crime, the elimination of Jews from the German community was wholesome. The young German knows that Hitler conducted a war of aggression, but “wherever he went, the German soldier conducted himself chivalrously.” If the young German has ever heard of Lidice and Oradour, they are “the work of a few SS fanatics.” (“Rommel behaved like a knight in North Africa, and so did his soldiers.”) He is told that German militarism has had calamitous results and, simultaneously, that he should enlist in the Bundeswehr. He hears the anti-Hitler conspirators of July 20, 1944, praised, but he also notes that the resistance groups are frequently suspected of “Communist sympathies.” And his teachers gravely inform him that, if there is a limit to obedience, it is a matter for the individual conscience of the soldier to decide. There is, in other words, no distinct idea—not even a false one—by which he can orient himself to the demands made upon him by the fact that he is a young German. Small wonder that a leading German sociologist, Helmut Schelsky, calls his book on German youth, “The Skeptical Generation.”

However, the skepticism of this generation is not a rationalist or philosophical position; it is merely the reflection of mental insecurity. And this promises both good and ill for the future.

On the positive side, the young generation resists vague slogans and ideology, and it does unreservedly wish to collaborate with the peoples of the West, without any ulterior nationalist motives. It is receptive to bold ideas for supra-national entities, and by means of the film, television, travel, and exchanges, it is coming to know neighboring peoples better than any previous generation did. It demands, and obtains, recognition of its desires in education and social security. It does not dream of restoring a glorious past, as did a large and influential portion of the youth of the 20’s; nor does it seek salvation in Utopias. It abhors war, revolution, and everything that might jeopardize its individual comfort.

On the other hand, German youth is, on the whole, unaware of the immensity of the problems it will have to face. It realizes only very vaguely that the dividing line between the two atomically-armed camps passes through its own country, and that any thoughtless actions it may perform could have catastrophic consequences. It has no experience of democracy, nor any great desire to acquire any. It is growing accustomed, as the bourgeoisie did under Bismarck, to trusting the head of the government and abandoning the management of public affairs to those whom it believes technically fitted to conduct them. The problems of justice and injustice, of happiness and unhappiness, do not touch it deeply except as they affect individual lives (a tendency shared by Western youth generally). Extremely concerned with its own material well-being, it lacks any ideal for which it can contemplate the slightest sacrifice—and thus it might be ready to back a new demagogue in a social crisis. Its ability to judge demagogy is, furthermore, very weak, and its sense of its own responsibilities poorly developed.

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When the anti-Semitic outbreak of December 1959 is viewed in this context, certain lessons may be drawn. To begin with, the motives of the youths involved were only vaguely political. Certainly, the Cologne wall-daubers and the Berlin students belonged to extreme right-wing organizations. But the majority seem to have acted out of a need to shock. Their motives, therefore, were similar to those that drive a minority of dissatisfied youths in all the countries of the West to shocking or criminal acts. But it is noteworthy that the German youths took up the swastika when they wanted to make a stir.

They know that this symbol is officially opprobrious, and that it is good form to pity the Jews and to assure them of the compassion of the German people. The anonymous enemy at whom these youths were aiming was not the Jews—it was the world in which they themselves live. But nothing could have served so well to attract public attention and instill fear as the swastika. This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that Catholic and Protestant churches were likewise desecrated.

It is probable that some of the anti-Semitic youths were acting on orders from an organization of former Nazis, whose center might as likely be found in Cairo or Latin America as in Germany itself. Nor can there be any doubt that the idea of employing the symbols of Nazism occurred to these youths largely because of their trust in their relatives (hundreds of thousands of whom must retain a nostalgia for Nazism), and because of their own distrust of the ineffectual efforts made by the schools and the government to disseminate the truth about the Hitler past. But in contrast to what took place before 1933, this anti-Semitic campaign neither had definite goals nor derived from a coalescence of poverty, unemployment, wounded national pride, and social despair. It did not express powerful hatred for a visible and concrete Jewish scapegoat. It was anti-Semitism without a Jewish object, and it sprang from a profound malaise which affects a great many more Germans than the small number of street bums who actually took part in the campaign. This malaise may be defined as the widespread feeling of inferiority at being German.

“You Germans murdered the Jews, you unleashed a war, you acted inhumanly in it. You Germans. . . .” This is what the young people hear, finding themselves charged with a guilt that no one explains. Graver still, no one tells them how this guilt can be expiated—how, as Germans, they can rehabilitate themselves. And yet the need for such rehabilitation is to be observed in all one’s conversations with Germans. The Diary of Anne Frank has become a pocketbook best-seller and has drawn two million Germans to the theater. Hundreds of thousands of youths have taken part both in pilgrimages to monuments commemorating the Jews and in voluntary reconstruction work in all the countries of Europe. But the feelings of inferiority and bewilderment remain.

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Young Germans know enough of the past to feel burdened by it, but not enough to handle the burden properly. Their experience has been sufficient to turn them against nationalism, but not to permit them to feel themselves members of a nation. They are grateful to the Allies for having destroyed Hitler, but secretly young Germans feel guilty toward the Jews, and therefore bear them ill will. The more they are told of their guilt, the greater their resentment grows against those whom they consciously believe to be right. There are few feelings so dangerous as that of a well-established inferiority which cannot be removed by some appropriate course of action.

Moreover, nothing seems to me so psychologically inept—if factually justified—as the continued giving of advice to the Germans on how to conduct themselves, for example, toward the Jews. Certainly the Germans must be made to know the feelings inspired throughout the world by the slightest trace of anti-Semitism in Germany. Yet it is the Germans themselves who must be encouraged to take the initiative in wiping out whatever anti-Semitism remains in their midst. They must understand that they are fighting against racism in order to safeguard their own liberty—not just to placate foreign critics. And having suffered most from Germany’s madness, the Jews, it seems to me, ought to be in the front ranks of those who speak out for the trust that must be placed in the forces of reason, still groping to find themselves, in the new Germany.

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¹ To be sure, the picture is different for today's teen-agers, who are acquiring some faith in their teachers and in the instruments of mass communication. We are analyzing here, however, the generation that was between ten and fifteen years old in 1945 and is now coming to manhood.