The German Problem
Our Love Affair with Germany.
by Hans Habe.
Putnam. 247 pp. $3.00.
The Return of Germany: A Tale of two Countries.
by Norbert Muh-Len.
Regnery. 310 pp. $4.50.
Germany Plots with the Kremlin.
by T. H. Tetens.
Schuman. 294 pp. $3.75.
“How old is she?” Socrates asked a parent complaining about his daughter’s disposition. “Four,” said the father. “Alas,” said the philosopher, “she’s too old to change.”
Hans Habe, who tells this tale with approval in another German context, implicitly rejects its application to the larger problem of making Germany safe and sane for the West. So do the writers of two other new books on the same subject. All concur in thinking that the situation can be changed for the better. But they differ on how and, with varying skill and science, they disagree completely on what is wrong.
Mr. Habe and T. H. Tetens, for sometimes opposite reasons, deplore American policy. They advocate revisions which conflict in method and temper. But they do hold in common that it is the Germans, after all, who must be curbed, and that only a stiffer rein can do it. By contrast Norbert Muhlen is much more hopeful about the Germans’ democratic potential. He seems, in fact, to find them very often right and the West nearly always wrong. He, too, wants American policy to change, but in the direction of giving more freedom to the Germans.
Of the three critiques, Mr. Tetens may shock the reader most but should detain him least. The author of Germany Plots with the Kremlin is singularly genial toward the Eastern partner in this alleged conspiracy. For him the villains are the Germans—of all parties and persuasions—who are systematically betraying us by means of our own blind generosity; and certain sinister, unidentified elements in the Pentagon and State Department who secretly reversed Roosevelt’s “sound postwar program for a realistic treatment of Germany and friendly relations with Russia” on the very day FDR was buried.
If I read Mr. Tetens correctly, it must have been we who stopped being “friendly” with the Russians, so that they had to get mad at us in self-defense. No Soviet propagandist could improve on such chronology.
Mr. Tetens offers no proof—except Drew Pearson—for the macabre compact supposedly struck over Roosevelt’s bier. Nor does he substantiate his hydra-headed thesis that the Bonn government is, at one and the same time, planning (1) to bring about peace in Europe between the United States and the USSR îy making Germany a militarily invincible neutral; ¢2) to push the idea of a United Europe long enough to give equality to Germany and then dominion over the Continent and Africa; (3) to quit NATO eventually in exchange for Soviet territorial bribes; (4) to join the Russians outright and rule the world together; and ¢5) to rule the world by herself.
All this is possible. But Mr. Tetens alleges everything and demonstrates nothing. He has simply compiled and stitched together—with great noise and repetition—a mass of news stories, editorial extracts, speeches, “confidential talks,” wartime and postwar scraps from Nazi archives, and similar miscellanies from all over. By this procedure one can prove anything. The “plot” in the very title is a piece of extravaganza, since plotting between Moscow and Bonn requires communication, and he indicates none. Mr. Tetens, advertised as “a naturalized American of German origin, an outstanding authority on geopolitics and pan-Germanism,” may have returned to his native land to prepare his book—but there is no evidence even of that. He could have done just as well by subscribing to a clipping bureau.
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HUNGARIAN-BORN Hans Habe carries better credentials as a first-hand observer: editor-in-chief of eighteen American-sponsored newspapers in occupied Germany, founder of the Neue Zeitung as an American major, editor of two important German weeklies as an American civilian. Claiming to have been frustrated in his labors by Communist-Nazi intrigue and official American obtuseness, he carries a visible ax but grinds it only rarely. In the main, his account of American blunders and German knavery is reasoned and impersonal.
Our ‘love affair,” Mr. Habe contends, was unfortunate when Germany wooed us, and is unfortunate now that we are wooing her. In the first phase, we were absurdly elusive; in the second, we are desperately overeager. Our positive achievements—for example, the economic aid which stopped Communism dead —have been nullified by colossal political ineptitude.
We demanded “unconditional surrender,” he recalls, and prolonged the war, but then we scrapped the theory of collective guilt on which that demand had been based, and in the end became more lenient than “conquered Germany would ever have dared” to hope. “Non-fraternization” resulted only in 94,000 illegitimate children and a permanent grudge against us. “Re-education” was administered by amateurs who thought it meant remaking Germany in America’s exact image—like the Military Governor who insisted on dressing his local German police in Texan uniforms. In the black market “we sold too many cigarettes to sell democracy at the same time.” Nor did the haughtiness of our Besatzungsweiber (occupation wives) and the luxury of our personnel endear the American Way. “Denazification” punished little culprits, let many a big one go. First we barred Germans from helping in democratization, abjured them to honor the Russians, blocked Germany’s reconstruction in favor of other countries, threatened to “decartelize,” and denounced militarism. Now we have surrendered democratization entirely to the unreformed Germans, made anti-Communism a chief symbol of political virtue, spurred Germany’s recovery at a rate alarming to her neighbors, abetted the revival of old-style capitalism, and pleaded with the generals to belt on their pistols again.
By failing to clean house summarily when the defeated Germans were most susceptible to change, Habe admits, we missed our one great occasion. He also concedes that our violent veerings of tack were due more to final realization of the Soviet threat than to any spontaneous changes of mind. But the results are nonetheless monstrous, he maintains. The Nazis are not just “coming back,” he writes, listing the proofs—they “are back already.” Reactionary Unterwanderung (tunneling) has undermined the democratic parties. The German population has salved its conscience by dismissing Hitler as a “paranoiac idiot,” while exonerating those who made him possible; West Germany is indefensible for some years to come; the Germans don’t want to fight, especially not for us; the nucleus of the future army is anti-American and militarist. Germany rearmed, Habe foresees, will be able to bully Europe, blackmail the United States, dally profitably with East Germany and the Soviets, and soon develop a regime akin to Hitler’s in everything except name.
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MR. Habe may be letting his pessimism outdistance his facts but Norbert Muhlen—born and educated in Germany, frequent commuter there now from New York—is so optimistic that he scarcely halts to consider German rearmament and its awesome potential at all. To be fair, it must be said that Mr. Muhlen’s book is primarily not about the West German menace but “a tale of two countries”—the two current Germanies. He demonstrates that the Western half is a “welfare state” where men are tolerably free, and that the Eastern half is a “workers’ state” where men are slaves. He lays bare the stifling tyranny in the totalitarian East over the “Soviet man of German make”—the fetishism of the party card, which must be worn next to the skin (“this is the most beautiful thing a girl can own; she should be proud of this bulge under her dress,” said one editorial); the portrait of East German President Wilhelm Pieck in maternity wards so that “every patient can know she is protected in her pains”; the sentences of ten and fifteen years at hard labor on sixty-eight high school boys for throwing stink bombs during a Communist festival; the death sentence on Hermann Joseph Flade, aged eighteen, for printing and distributing “treasonable” leaflets (“Die Freïheit ist mix mehr wen als das Leben,“ he told a Red court). In his discussion of the gulf between East and West Germany, Mr. Muhlen is measured and eloquent—more penetrating by far than Mr. Habe in his cursory treatment of the same theme.
Regrettably, the Muhlen analysis of West Germany vis-à-vis the United States lacks an equal degree of persuasiveness. His main concern seems to be the German mind, which he is intent on capturing for America before the Soviets grab it. Habe, who is just as anti-Soviet, is concerned lest the German army and state capture us. Muhlen criticizes our policies as hard as Habe does, but accepts only a small part of Habe’s strictures on the Germans. True, Muhlen denounces the idea of collective German innocence, along with collective German guilt. He chides the Germans for swallowing Red propaganda shibboleths, knuckling down to the authority of their Ohrigkeiten (officialdom), showing small civic interest or democratic spunk, clinging to their narrow national egotism. But his general tendency is to absolve Germans in the mass as “unpolitical,” blame the Americans (whom some Germans regard as “Russians with creased pants”) for many of the German failings, and explain away certain German aberrations which are not so easily dismissable.
Reading the two books side by side is almost like listening to a debate. Where Habe criticizes the American press for sluggish reporting about Nazi resurgence, Muhlen rebukes the same press for scare-mongering. (My own two visits to postwar Germany give me no reason to share Muhlen’s confidence that neo-Nazism “seemed destined to failure”—and recent dispatches about arrests of sub-Fuehrers are not entirely reassuring.) There has indeed been scare-mongering on occasion, and much out-of-hand damnation of all the Germans as unredeemed and unredeemable. But in his essentially commendable desire to provide a corrective, Muhlen comes dangerously close to alighting on the opposite pole. Straining to project the very real democratic potential of the “decent” Germany, he regrettably lapses into near obliviousness—at least in this book— of the equally real German potential for evil. Thus, he notes only that the Freie Deutsche Parte¡ contains some “conservative, if not reactionary, elements”: he is quite angry with the Socialists’ late Kurt Schumacher hut passes over the Deutsche Parte¡ in silence. habe finds it more pertinent to describe the sub rosa Nazi proclivities ol the FDP and the open pro-Fascism of the DP both ol them forming part ol the “democratic” Bonn coalition). Muhlen glides over a/.¡s in the administration while habe nails them down. There is little or nothing in Muhlen`s book, much in I la he’s, about the power and prestige of /?/itlcr`s generals to day. the existence of a secret General Staff. the possible havoc ol a German military Fran kenstein.
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Which emphasis is better placed? The reader may perhaps judge for himself from the two approaches to the Jewish problem. I labe finds the reparations agreement with Israel an impressive proof of the Adenauer group’s sincerity. but notes the pact’s unpopularity in Germany, the German readiness to call all black-marketeers Jews although most are not Jews, and the German desire “to sec as many Jews as possible on our Autobahnen [as tourists from abroad] and as few as possible in our universities.” The Germans of today, Habe Quotes another observer, “don’t want to burn those Jews who are already dead.”
Muhlen characteristically presents documents to argue that the German population was not really anti-Semitic even in /?/itler’s day -when presumably not all of them were will ing to cooperate in mass murder. I le makes the suggestion that the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life was partly motivated by feeling against Jewish persecution. By stressing the coldness of the Jews and the dignity of the Bonn represcntatives in the reparations affair. he seems to he losing sight of the unforgettable brute realities that lie behind Jewish emotion.
Philip Auerbach Jewish State Commissioner for the Persecutees ol Hitler, committed suicide after conviction for embezzlement and accepting bribes. Muhlen calls him “an ambitious, impressive, perhaps mentally disturbed adventurer,” dwells on the fact that the man who arrested him had a good anti-Nazi record; says that “while many charges against Auerbach could not be substantiated, he was found guilty on several counts”; denies aloofly that he was “either a victim of new persecutions [or] the great super-criminal.” He leaves no room for Habe’s assertions—is Habe wrong?— that Auerbach did not take a penny for himself, that the testimony was manipulated, that three of his five judges were ex-Nazis, that one of the chief prosecution witnesses has since been jailed for perjury, that Schumacher expressed his horror over the case to Auerbach’s widow, and that Adenauer contributed to the fund for a monument in Auerbach’s memory. And if the Germans tended to think of thieving, black-marketing, gangster-like DP’s as Jews, Muhlen argues, this may not have been residual Nazi anti-Semitism but “the old stereotype of the Jew as an economically and socially dangerous outsider to society.”
What to do about the Germans? Tetens, after 205 pages of “expose,” recommends in one final paragraph that we should try to persuade the Rusians—in 1953!—to agree to severe quadriparite control; failing that, we must keep the country occupied indefinitely. For Muhlen, the one catastrophe to be avoided is Russian total victory in Germany through failure of the West German “democratic test.” Therefore we “must not interfere with . . . the German proponents and friends of freedom.” He cautions that “only by an attitude of understanding and brotherhood” can we win Germany as an ally. Maybe so, but Habe thinks it also desirable to have the Germans help the process of fraternity by giving a few guarantees of their own. He offers Bonn the choice of arming or not arming. If they elect the latter, we should apply intelligent control measures to head off their “neutral” interference with our own European defense efforts. If the former, we should take out stringent measures of insurance against the army’s re-Nazification and against underground or above-ground flirtation with any species of totalitarianism. For this he makes some specific proposals. One may differ with Habe on details and question whether we have the requisite skill to apply his principles effectively, but, in view of the past and present German record, his stress on reasoned firmness will seem to many friends of a democratic Germany to be the more prudent policy.
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