My colleague and correspondent Doyle Quiggle, who has lived in Germany for many years, has written a lengthy response to my article in the Tablet, which deserves its own post.
This outlandishly sane moral analysis of the European soul is Dr. Landes writing and thinking at his best. He lands well-deserved welting slaps to the souls of those Germans whose response to the Shoah has become preposterously morally disoriented, the kind of slaps Jack Nicholson gives Faye Dunaway in Chinatown to free her from the spell of her own moral mendacity.
However, far many more Germans today are either morally indifferent or morally arrogant (downright hubristic) than morally confused. In this regard, I worry about the rhetorical effectiveness of this piece.
Understanding German arrogance today as a rhetorical problem requires us to first understand that most Germans are devout, radical social constructivists who zealously believe that a human being is the sum total of the society in which he or she was socialized. If you are socialized in a more just society, so runs the enabling premise of their argument, then you are a more just person.
German arrogance today is rooted in a profound sense of their belonging to a social state that is far more superior (in their eyes) than the USA and Israel, and to most other European nations. They sincerely, almost naively believe that Germany has achieved, by dint of its own efforts, an order of magnitude greater social and economic justice than other countries, especially Israel and the United States.
Because they’ve been socialized in the more or less socialist state of a united Germany, they themselves are more just, more moral, certainly more politically correct citizens than Americans, Israelis, and most other Europeans (with the possible exception of Swedes whom Germans tend to revere as the archangels of social justice and egalitarianism). When they do provide a consciously worked-through argument for their moral arrogance today, it is from de facto grounds. Often, that argument goes no further than, “Germans save money, while Greeks and Spaniards and Americans buy everything with credit cards.”
In German, the terms for debt and guilt are cognate and are near homonyms, schuld/schulden. So wealth equates to today’s arrogant German, to moral superiority, or, at least, to lack of guilt. To be debt-free is to be guilt free. Money is the measure of all things, especially among today’s German social constructivists. (This attitude explains the schoolmarm tone that German chancellor Merkel assumes whenever she address Greeks about the continuing but forgotten Euro crisis.) But the mentality extends way beyond household economics.
Regarding Germans and the Shoah, the rhetorical problem is one of disabusing smug Germans of their moral arrogance. After all, they quickly point to overwhelming and undeniable social evidence in Germany of the superiority of the German social system, from family care to affordable education to health care to unemployment insurance to retirement programs. German arrogance today is rooted in the media-backed perception of their country’s superior social justice as evidenced in clear measures of social quality.
They point to some of the lowest levels of poverty in Europe, to a comparatively just distribution of wealth, to crime statistics that are infinitesimal by comparison to the US or Israel. And now that they’ve graciously received, housed, cared for millions of Syrian war refugees, where the USA and Israel have, in their eyes, not only not received any refugees but, on the contrary, caused the refugee crisis in the first place, most Germans feel that their nation has exculpated itself once and for all of NAZI crimes against humanity. Even Obama is cited as evidence here, when he failed to stop Assad from using chemical bombs, the famous line in the stand that Obama backed away from.
Factual history teaches us that German prosperity today is not the result of past German effort, per se. It’s chiefly the long-term consequence of the Marshall Plan and the NATO defense umbrella, which, for 70 years has relieved Germany from paying for its own defenses and access to foreign resources (in Africa and the Middle East especially), thereby freeing the government to spend that money on social programs not only during the Cold War but even today, which is why most German politicians do not support Germany upping its NATO payments.
Perversely, the equitable distribution of German prosperity, a key measure of social justice (which is now crumbling like a sugar cookie in milk), is the long-term consequence of WWII, as Walter Scheidel explains in his “Great Leveler Thesis,” in which catastrophes like WWII eliminate elite power-holders in affluent societies, leveling the playing field for following generations. That’s exactly what happened in Germany. Germany’s power-holders, its cliques and official and unofficial Big Money organizations were decimated during WWII. Except for a handful of survivors (whose progeny are currently reasserting themselves, such as Family Wehrhahn in Düsseldorf), Germany’s powerful pre-war oligarchy ceased to exist.
Perhaps today’s Germans should really be feeling guilty about how they have personally profited from the mass bombings of the Allied Forces?
As indicated in a recent study, eighty percent of Germans want the Holocaust past to remain in the past. They no longer see its relevance to today. Germans view any mention of the Shoah today in the context of discussing Israeli politics not only as a cheap shot but as a red herring, as a distraction from the shame and guilt Americans and Israelis ought to be feeling about their own national catastrophes.
Germans today tend to respond with well-studied sardonic smiles to mention of the Shaoh, even outside of political discussions and typically reference the American Indians or Black Lives Matter adjacently to Palestinians whenever the Shoah and Israel are mentioned in the same conversation–knee jerk moral equivocation that proves the enduring wisdom of Alexander Pope’s quip that “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Nation-wide studies have discovered that 80 percent of all Germans under thirty do not even know when, exactly, the Holocaust took place. Around 80 percent believe the USA started and caused WWII, the argument being that US and British imperialism not only bankrupted Germany but made Germans feel threatened about their national security, which left them vulnerable to the rhetorical trickery and socio-psychological ploys of Hitler and Goebbles. This is basically post-colonial theory applied to revise Holocaust history and, thereby, make Germans less guilty for the Shoah. Around 80 percent under age thirty believe that Soviet Russia liberated Jews from the NAZIS. They know almost nothing about Soviet anti-Semitism. Less about Stalin’s psycho-biographical facts.
Among Eastern Germans, I’ve never found guilt about the Holocaust. East Germany never accepted responsibility for the Holocaust; its Marxist ideology blamed western, imperial capitalism for the rise of the NAZI state. That view of the historical past remains unsurprisingly entrenched among East Germans today. Only among a small minority of highly educated Western German elite — some journalists, some academics, and some politicians, some museum directors — have I ever witnessed personal guilt or shame in today’s under-sixty Germans about the Holocaust, and never among “culture makers,” theatricals, creative writers, musicians–universally, truculently leftist and knee-jerk hostile toward Israel.
The reasons for German moral indifference are varied, ranging from excessive love of personal comfort (consumer-driven hedonism) to sheer terror of the outer world (xenophobia, neo-phobia) and the love of ritual for the sake of daily ritual.
Will Dr. Landes’s extravagantly sane, morally oriented argument fall on deaf ears among most Germans? Yes.
Setting aside the comfort-loving hedonists and focusing only on those very, very few Germans today who ever think about Israel or the Shoah, here’s why: Whenever the Holocaust is brought up here at the street level where Germans are not under an international floodlight, this tired but widely accepted equivocation is almost always immediately adduced as if it were the equation by which the Higgs Bosen is described: The carpet bombing of Dresden + the carpet bombing of North Vietnam + the carpet bombing of Iraq I + Iraq II + Israel “paying back Palestinians for what the Nazis did to their forefathers” = Auschwitz/the Shoah.
And recently, due to the rise of far-right movements like Pegida and the AFD, the ludicrous moral equivocation of Dresden = Auschwitz is tipping over into all new German moral equation of the Shoah in which German victims of WWII are given the more moral weight than Jews or Poles or Roma-Sinti or Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Many more Germans gather annually in Dresden and Magdeburg and Leipzig to commemorate the Allied Bombings of Germans than turn out to commemorate the Shoah. During the most recent Holocaust Memorial Day in Magdeburg, a small handful turned out to commemorate, whereas many thousands turned out to commemorate the day of the Allied Bombing.
The first time I heard the Dresden = Auschwitz equivocation I knew that Germans holding to that moral math had become seriously morally and historio-graphically discombobulated, but in all the years I’ve lived and worked among them, I have yet to find a rhetorical tactic capable of disabusing them of their sense of pride in their current moral superiority or their growing collective sense of having been the real victims of WWII, victims of American and British imperialism. Germans were, according to this latest contortion of the German past, pushed into Nazism by Americans. Never mind the fact that the USA had fewer than 10,000 troops in any kind of uniform in 1941.
Given what Dr. Landes bravely recommends in his argument here — “Perhaps it could understand that the Jews and Israel are their best allies in the struggle for social justice, and, more to the point, in this battle with triumphalist Islam” — I ask, which demographic in Germany could openly and sincerely reach out to Israel (not Israelis who have childishly run away from their homeland to a purportedly utopian Berlin un-threatened until last winter by Islamic terrorism), but to Israel as a national project, to Israel itself as the best hope for democracy in the Middle East that has ever existed.
I cannot find this demographic in Germany. Only German arms & weapons manufacturers have any vested interest in maintaining close ties to Israel. Most politicians do not want to appear Israel-friendly for fear of alienating their anti-Israel constituencies. Charles Peguy’s quip applies with maximum aptness to Germans today, “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” (Notre Patrie, 1905) Progressive in Germany means being hotly critical of Israel as a neo-fascist state.
Street fact, today’s Syrian refugees are Germany’s “new Jews,” as one German colleague put it, “And they exonerate Germans forever from Holocaust crimes.” That’s Merkel’s greatest moral achievement for the German people, the not-so-secret reason she’s so deeply beloved by so many Germans: She found a way to get Germans off the Holocaust shame and guilt hook, for good.
Although I’m personally very grateful for Dr. Landes’s powerfully articulate parsing of collective guilt and shame, for it helps me refine my thinking about how to work effectively with honor-societies in the grey-zone of counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency, I doubt that it will reach many Germans.
Too, too many Germans today feel neither guilt nor shame regarding what their grandparents or great grandparents did to the ancestors of today’s Israelis. They view themselves as the morally and politically correct products of a superior and admirably just society, and they view themselves as untouchably morally superior to any nation they view as being less just than Germany. As long as their media keep feeding their moral egos with daily horror stories about the woeful social, political, economic injustice that plagues the two countries Germans love to hate the most, German self-satisfaction will continue to grow into obesity.
Trump, ‘ell, he’s even tastier ego food for Germans than was Bush. The stupider Trump’s tweets, the smarter and more superior Germans feel to all Americans, to the entire American system, which most Germans now view as an existential threat to world stability and peace. Same goes for negative coverage of Israel/IDF, as Dr. Landes correctly notes in his analysis.
Far too many Germans love to watch Jews in 2017 Israel behaving like NAZIS in 1939 Germany. It is pure moral Schadenfreude. For the scariest exploration of that mentality I know of read Jorge Louis Borges’ short story Deutsches Requiem.
As a former tutor to a grandchild of the first post-war chancellor of Germany (Konrad Adenauer), I learned of Adenauer’s honest, breakfast-table opinion of the formation of the State of Israel in 48/49. Recall, Adenauer’s Germany supported the young Israeli nation with reparation payments–Germany’s first attempt to buy its way out of guilt. My pupil told me that Konrad believed that the Jews would be universally hated within fifty years because of the formation of State of Israel. “They’ve been put into an impossible situation,” my pupil quoted him as saying, “in which the Jews will have to employ NAZI-like tactics simply to survive. That will make them universally hated.”
My pupil never made it clear to me whether Konrad found his own political prophecy saddening or gladdening.
As far as the content of Dr. Landes article goes, it is fantastically level-headed. If rhetoric be truly as George Kennedy defines it — “Rhetoric in the most general sense may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expanded in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message” — then this article should win over every German who reads it. Dr. Landes’s rhetorical energy is infectious and honestly serves sound arguments and evidence.
Unfortunately, Germans today live in what Angela Merkel recently called “a post-factual world,” a world in which Robert Heinlein’s infamous quip is more apt than George Kennedy’s: “You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
Underlying German arrogance today is a deeply entrenched prejudice from yesterday. As former chancellor Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt once noted, “The problem with Germans is that the believe they are better than all other people.” Not even the Holocaust was able to get Germans to revise that opinion of themselves, as Schmidt noted in the 1970s.
What I find most courageous about Dr. Landes article here is that he knows the social-psychological sources of German arrogance and how it blocks them today from honest rhetorical efforts to liberate them from themselves. He, nevertheless, picks up the cudgel, where many of us gave up trying many years ago.
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