Germany's Illiberal Fictions

National Interest, The, Summer, 2000 by Jacob Heilbrunn

WHEN THE Nobel committee awarded G[ddot{u}]nter Grass its literature prize earlier this year, it recognized his stature not only as a novelist but as Germany's leading polemicist. Whether it was hitting the campaign trail for socialist Chancellor Willy Brandt in the late 1960s or condemning German reunification, the gloomy, walrus-moustached Grass has made a career of battling the German conservatives he refers to as "skinheads in neckties." Today, the newly minted Nobel laureate appears on talk shows to celebrate the meltdown of the Christian Democratic Union.

Like Heinrich B[ddot{o}]ll, the first German postwar novelist to win the Nobel, Grass exemplifies the decisive influence the Left has had in shaping contemporary German political culture. Germany's intelligentsia spent much of the Cold War banging its tin drums against consumer capitalism, American imperialism and an imminent resurgence of fascism. Its poets, novelists and critics viewed themselves as the first line of defense against a return to the Third Reich and insisted that it was their fundamental duty to marry literature with politics. To an extent inconceivable in the United States, the German literary class has functioned as the nation's self-appointed moral and political conscience.

But to the dismay of Grass & Co., with reunification an intellectual advance guard composed of former leftists such as the novelist Martin Walser has emerged to champion German national pride. Among other things, this new literary Right maintains that the Holocaust has been wielded as a "moral cudgel" by foreign powers to shame Germany. Dismissing as guilt-ridden humbug the summons of the influential political philosopher J[ddot{u}]rgen Habermas for a "constitutional patriotism", it decries the literary Left and its long-held taboos. For much of the history of the Federal Republic, leftist writers espoused an anti-American nationalism that argued for a German Sonderweg, or special path, which in practice meant neutrality in the superpower conflict. Now the literary Right, emboldened by reunification, is arguing for its own version of a special path.

Politics of the Unpolitical

IN FACT, the anti-Western sentiments espoused by the German literati transcend political categories. For much of its history, Germany famously saw itself as a land of Dichter und Denker, of poets and thinkers who disdained politics as an insufferable intrusion into the artistic sphere. It was jolted out of this complacency by Napoleon's crushing defeat of Prussia in 1806. A cadre of writers and philosophers promptly emerged to defend German traditions against the degenerate Enlightenment values embodied by France and England, prompting Lord Palmerston to refer to Germany as "that damned land of professors."

No one was to epitomize this contempt for the West more faithfully than Thomas Mann. As Germany went down to defeat in World War I, Mann penned a defense of German values in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man. He insisted that democratic politics was foreign, not just to German writers, but to the country as a whole. "German humanity", he wrote, "basically resists politicization." Mann elaborated:

I don't want the trafficking of Parliament and parties that leads to the infection of the whole body of the nation with the virus of politics.... I want impartiality, order, and propriety. If that is philistine, then I want to be a philistine. If it is German, then I want in God's name to be called a German.

Mann's greatest novel, The Magic Mountain (1924), expressed these sentiments somewhat more cautiously in the form of debates between the hopelessly naive humanist Settembrini, who believes that rationalism and socialism will lead to the brotherhood of man, and the totalitarian Jesuit priest Naphta, who argues that true freedom can only be achieved through obedience and slavery.

If Mann's Reflections placed him squarely on the Right, his later denunciations of the Nazis made it appear as if he had subsequently moved leftward. His transition from foe of the West to fervent democrat was acclaimed as nothing less than a symbol of Germany's own postwar evolution. But as the historian Joachim Fest has argued, there is something more than a little facile about this view: the truth is that Mann, who described him-self as "the master of contradictions", continued to harbor deep doubts about Western democracy long after the Second World War. These doubts, Fest maintains, provide the key to understanding Mann. They offer a clue as well to understanding the path that an entire generation of German writers would follow after World War II. For while the postwar generation of German scribes lacked the irony and sophistication of Mann's writings, it had faithfully imbibed his suspicions of the West.

During the postwar era, the Left borrowed extensively from Mann's Reflections to attack the Americanization of Germany. Its members argued that, in its zeal to confront the Soviet Union, the United States had installed in Bonn a puppet, Konrad Adenauer, who had relied on Nazi industrialists to finance the Cold War militarization of West Germany. Far from repudiating its Nazi past, West Germany was merely an extension and continuation of the Third Reich. By contrast, East Germany, which had enshrined anti-fascism as its state dogma, represented a conclusive break with that past.