The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany

National Interest, The, Spring, 1997 by Anne Applebaum

He was a miller - that is to say, he owned and ran a factory that produced flour. His wife was plump and beringed and bejeweled: my husband privately nicknamed her Miss Piggy. Extremely hospitable, expensively dressed, intelligent without being intellectual and in their late thirties, they regaled us with stories of provincial German social life, of the activities of the local branch of the Christian Democratic Party, and, most of all, of the world of the Mittelstand, the medium-sized businesses which create most of Germany's wealth. He described the manner in which the bakers and millers in his part of Germany ran an effective cartel, dividing the market up between them; she explained the advantages and disadvantages of life in various Hamburg suburbs. They were fervently in favor of the European Union and NATO, staunchly opposed to German troops being sent abroad, indifferent toward Eastern Europe - including Eastern Germany - and felt deeply embarrassed when my husband, who is Polish, spoke about the war.

It may seem odd to mention this particular couple at the beginning of a review of a somber, elegant book about Germany, entitled The Politics of Memory: after all, they showed no interest whatsoever in the politics of memory, and were neither somber nor elegant. They were interested in hard work, their new Porsche, and Helmut Kohl; they stayed far away from neo-Nazi skinheads, arguments about war monuments, Berlin, and anything else that smacked of revanchism or obsession with Germany's past.

Nevertheless, I think it is important to describe them, because otherwise it is difficult to place in context the material contained within this book, a collection of Jane Kramer's articles about Germany reprinted from The New Yorker. Like most Americans - and most non-Germans - who set out to understand Germany, Kramer is obsessed with Germany's past, and with Germany's attitude to Germany's past, almost to the exclusion of everything else that happens in Germany. She is not particularly interested in the lives led by the wives of flour millers in Hamburg, but prefers (it is clear from the acknowledgments in this book) to surround herself, when in Germany, with the relatively small minority of mostly left-wing German intellectuals who feel the same way as she: the minority who discuss German identity, write books and articles about German identity, think constantly about German identity. That is no surprise either - four dinners with the flour miller and his wife was plenty, and I can quite see that no one would want to write a book about them.

But left-wing German intellectuals do not speak for all of Germany, and the interests and concerns of left-wing German intellectuals do not represent the interests and concerns of all Germans. Nor do the people and subjects of this book - Berlin intellectuals in black jeans and wire-rimmed glasses, East German dissidents, pop musicians, skinheads, radical artists - seem very similar to most Germans. To her credit, Kramer acknowledges that her interests present a skewed picture, that she herself has been infected by the obsessions of her friends. In her introduction, she describes a reading she gave at the Hamburg Literaturhaus, where she read aloud from selections of her work, not only from Germany but also France and Italy. For the latter two countries, she chose light, amusing stories; her German work is naturally "heavier." At the end, a man raised his hand. "In a rather discouraged voice", he asked her, "'Why don't you ever write something funny, something like that, about Germany?'" Kramer writes that "It's a question I have been asking myself since then, but I can't pretend to have an answer."

This is not to say that what Kramer produces is dull. On the contrary: although the stories she chooses to write are not light or funny, they do focus on those aspects of German life that are undoubtedly the most interesting. Her best tale is probably her first: the story of Hartmut Bitomsky, a sixties-era radical who opens a restaurant with famously good food called Maxwell, in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin mostly inhabited by nineties-era radicals. One subset of the nineties-era radicals - the anarchist squatters, a peculiarly Berlin phenomenon known as the Autonomen - determines that Maxwell is too genteel, too expensive for Kreuzberg, too attractive to well-heeled visitors from other parts of Berlin. Beginning with threats, graduating to a bit of window smashing and a "people's trial", they finally enter Maxwell with buckets of shit and empty them all over the floor. Hartmut Bitomsky closes his restaurant and moves away.

Kramer does not end the story there, however. She goes on to interview Strumpf, Bitomsky's successor, and proceeds to dissect the delicate code which makes Strumpf's restaurant acceptable to the Autonomen where Maxwell was not. Strumpf opens his restaurant for breakfast, offering a "Day After" (two aspirin and a cup of coffee) as well as an "Existentialist" (Gitanes and coffee). He serves deliberately bad food, encourages leather-clad punks to hang around all day drinking weak coffee, and closes the restaurant on May Day, the day the Autonomen like to riot with the police. Yuppies no longer come for dinner. Strumpf has worked out the code, and the Autonomen accept his restaurant.