Enzensberger strikes back
For more than seven months now, Germany's intellectual elite has trained its guns on the United States. Aided by a media bent on manufacturing anti-American consensus, the movement has experienced considerable success, but this opportunistic axis of highbrow and lowbrow took a massive hit this week. The attack came from Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Germany's most important poet, and a highly regarded essayist, dramatist and publisher.
Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (subscription required), Enzensberger fired some heavy ordnance in the direction of the peace movement, which depicted President Bush as the dictator of the piece and uttered neither a word about the sufferings of the Iraqis under Saddam nor a syllable about their recent liberation. Enzensberger writes:
"It is not the first disgrace of those who warn and remind; not for the first time have the worry lines, which furrow the German brow, proven to be precipitous. It is not so long ago that East Germany was regarded here as unshakeable; it was seen as one of the most successful industrial nations of the world; the social democracy did everything to co-operate with the SED [the East German communist regime]; Poland's Solidarity movement was, as a result, treated as a dangerous troublemaker. Stability was everything; the Soviet Union was an invincible colossus, which only the Americans and other cold warriors provoked, while the heroic besiegers of Mutlangen [an American military depot] dared challenge the provocative rearmament of the United States. It was astounding, and for many leftists, especially awkward, that the colossus stood on feet of clay."
When it comes to Germans and their relationship with dictators, Enzensberger knows whereof he speaks. In the autumn 1998 issue of Granta, he penned a piece called Coming to America in which he recounted his experiences of fascism and his encounters with democracy. In 1945, the 15-year-old Enzensberger was pressed into defending the rubble of the Third Reich but he quickly saw the futility of trying to repel the oncoming Sherman tanks, so he threw away his bazooka and uniform. By virtue of his schoolbook English, he became the village's point man for mediation with the Americans and this led to post-war experiences that make for uncanny parallels with the state of Iraq today. Here's a sample:
"Reams of worthless old banknotes were traded in for a new currency printed in the US. Empty shop window filled up almost overnight, as if by miracle. With shoes, sausages, screwdrivers and apples. In a frenzy of reconstruction roofs were mended, streets cleared of rubble, railway tracks repaired. At the same time, and with the same amazing speed, millions of Nazis disappeared from sight. Most of them had instantly turned into demure democrats, blithely pursuing their careers in government, business, education law and medicine. Nobody wanted to hear about what were politely, called 'Germany's darkest years'.Within a very short time, the western part of the country had become an American protectorate. True, there were also British and French troops around, but everybody knew that the true winner of the war was the United States. To consider America a 'young nation' is a well-won European cliché® In the event, the alleged adolescent became the guardian of a decrepit and worn-out Germany. The US took on the difficult job of re-socializing our part of the world. This was not, of course, an act of sheer benevolence. Germany's future was determined by the beginning of the Cold War. Never was a defeated nation offered more generous terms, and never were such terms less deserved.
Despite the Allies' feeble efforts at deNazificaiton, there was something murky about our recovery. Many Germans harboured silent resentment about what they saw as disaster rather than a liberation. Amnesia was a common affliction, and the old authoritarian frame of mind was still very much in evidence."
The "silent resentment" Enzensberger identified in 1945 and wrote about every decade since keeps bubbling to the surface and its 2003 manifestation is deeply troubling.
By the way, try to get your hands on issue 63 of Granta from 1998 if you can. The pieces on "The New World" by Enzensberger and Martin Amis are marvellous. Anwar Iqbal, John Barth and Hilary Mantel are in there as well.
