Jeremy Varon (46 page)

Deadly Abstraction

into the intergenerational conflicts of the 1960s and the broader psychopolitical landscape of postwar Germany.

Historians generally concur that postwar Germany avoided systematically confronting its fascist past. Germans in the Western zones, standard narratives run, invested immense energy in rebuilding their country and in establishing West Germany as a bulwark against communism. These commitments, which served the imperatives of the present, encouraged the evasion of the past. Moreover, Germans tended to view themselves as among the war’s victims, either of the avenging armies of the Allied powers (especially the USSR), or of Nazi demagogues, or both. Summing up the postwar mood, one historian wrote, “Like burned children, the majority turned their backs on an active political engagement after their stint with National Socialism. Instead of confronting the ‘most recent past,’ as the twelve years of Nazi rule were commonly referred to, the Federal Republic was happy to settle into a general amnesia about this time and especially about the Holocaust.”166 The past, in short, necessarily remained “unmastered” because it had never been seriously engaged as a problem.167

The psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, writing in the late 1960s, were among the first to address the issue of German denial. According to the Mitscherlichs, postwar Germans exhibited a striking “inability to mourn” both the victims of Nazi Germany and the collapse of the Reich. At the heart of this inability lay the refusal to accept the loss of National Socialism as a collective fantasy that had given its followers a special sense of power and purpose. To the Mitscherlichs, the identification of Germans with Hitler had been so intense that accepting his defeat and the demise of National Socialism threatened their identity in a radical way. Unable or unwilling to face this traumatic self-devaluation, Germans denied the past outright or adopted the attitude that “bygones are bygones without occasion for remorse.”168 Should Germans continue to repress the past, the Mitscherlichs warned, National Socialist ideals might persist “within the unconscious.”169

Years later, the American scholar Eric Santner redeployed the Mitscherlichs’ thesis in tracing the impact of the past on what he described as the psychopathologies of the postwar (West) German family.170 Santner asserted that the postwar generations had inherited the denial and repression of the past from their parents. Unlike the latter, however, they were conscious of and consciously troubled by that denial. As a result, they experienced qualities of melancholy and depression that their parents had avoided. In addition, because of their compromised pasts, the parents Deadly Abstraction

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were not available to their children as totemic resources for the positive constitution of identity. Yet the parents remained indispensable to the process of identity formation. The postwar generations therefore suffered

“the double-bind of having to identify with figures of power one also at another level needs to disavow.”171 More broadly, they faced the challenge of developing a sense of identity as
Germans
in a context in which the “cultural reservoir” of national symbols and associations had been

“poisoned” and provoked “traumatic ambivalence.”172

Testimonies by Germans born during or shortly after the Nazi era relate feelings of disappointment, demoralization, and disgust consistent with Santner’s model. An especially poignant—and strikingly relevant—

recollection reads:

I am as German as the members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. I belong to their age. We were ashamed of our country. We were told what happened—

the marching—the books . . . the people we loved being driven out—Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann. . . . Other people we had never heard of—those nameless millions who so silently went to the camps where their voices were gassed forever silent. This was no country to be proud of. We were also pained, lonesome kids amid adults who could not, must not ever be trusted. How could I trust my parent who, balancing me on their knees, sang “Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber alles” with me? Who would make me call after a man in the street, a man I didn’t even know, “Jew! Jew!”

Who with my father—once a high-ranking officer—would tell me they’d never heard of any camps. And who, when I asked him about the 6 million Jews that had been put to death, insisted that it was 4.5 million—the figure I had quoted, he said, had been made up by the notoriously deceitful Jewish media—4.5 while my heart was counting—one and one and one . . .173

Santner, while capturing the agony of the postwar family, obscures the efforts of New Leftists to shatter their parents’ silence and force the issue of the past into public consciousness. Young radicals indeed used their parents not as role models but as
negative
icons, from whom one must at all costs differentiate oneself. That desire was acutely felt by those who eventually adopted or endorsed violence. Mahler, who grew up in the early 1950s, confessed that the Nazi past dictated that from an early age, he had to feel “ashamed of being German.” He explained: “The essential, highly personalized problem was this: how did your parents behave [during the Nazi period]. The question also had implications for us, namely, that whenever events occur that even in a distant way recall the twelve years [of Nazi rule], we must actively resist them.”174 As Baader’s lawyer, he described the 1968 Frankfurt department store ar-248

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son as a protest, not only against German silence on the Vietnam War, but also against an entire generation that had tolerated the crimes of the Nazi period.175 Berward Vesper, the son of a mildly famous “Blood and Soil” poet who had extolled National Socialism, defended the arson by declaring that “Vietnam is the Auschwitz of our generation.”176 The Red Cells member Hans-Joachim Klein derisively described the Germans as

“specialists when it came to genocide.” To him, they “should have been the first to start shouting about Vietnam. All the Germans, not merely a few leftists. They did nothing. Arguing didn’t move them, pamphlets didn’t convince them, they got used to broken windows. . . . So there came a point . . . when something new had to be found.”177

The nexus of the fascist past, intergenerational conflict, and New Left protest can be pressed further to help understand the political violence of the 1960s and 1970s. In the mid 1980s, the psychologist Jörg Bopp sought to explain why West German New Leftists turned on their elders and leveled the charge of fascist continuity with such vehemence. His intriguing analysis reveals in the New Left a thicket of competing aspirations, rife with consequences it did not intend.

Bopp identified in German New Leftists a foundational desire to

“prove to themselves and to the world that they had overcome the failure of their parents.”178 They served this desire by sharply reacting against anything they saw as recalling fascism. Yet Bopp contends that behind New Leftists’ revulsion at Nazism and their parents’ involvement in it lay a disquieting fear that they had nonetheless internalized elements of their parents’ experience. Opposition to “fascist continuity” only exacerbated this fear. According to Bopp, New Leftists experienced their radical protest as a liberation from social taboos and internal restraints.

Though exhilarating, militant action produced in them a second, largely unconscious fear that they would not be able to control their newly unleashed aggression; with this aggression they compounded the risk of reproducing the violence that they saw as defining both their parents’ past and the current order.

New Leftists dealt with this fear by strengthening in their rhetoric the distinction between themselves and their adversaries. That entailed ratcheting up the
Fascismusvorwurf,
with self-defeating consequences. First, as New Leftists denounced their opponents in even stronger terms, they escalated the intensity—and the violence—of their protests. This escalation only augmented their fear of taking on objectionable attributes of their enemies, resulting in another increase in the severity of their accu-satory rhetoric. The effort to gain distance from the failures of the past Deadly Abstraction

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thus turned against itself in a closed and vicious circle. Second, New Leftists made increasingly reckless comparisons of the past and present. To Bopp, by “slapping the label of fascism on any contemporary phenomenon to which they objected, they robbed fascism . . . of its historical meaning” and “veiled . . . the suffering of its countless victims.” By indicting their parents’ current failures through reference to the past, New Leftists actually minimized the importance of that past.

According to Bopp, this dynamic had its own psychological motive.

Bopp discerned in New Leftists a second desire that competed with their need to differentiate themselves from their parents. To Bopp, “they wanted parents without guilt so they could be children without shame.”

Here he echoes Santner’s notion of the double bind wherein members of the postwar generation had the dual need to disidentify with
and
to affirm their parents.179 Bopp argues that New Leftists’ condemnation of the current political failures of their parents thus went hand in hand with their covert wish to absolve their parents of complicity with Nazism. The
Faschismusvorwurf,
by extension, complemented their parents’ desire to deny or avoid confrontation with the past.

Bopp certainly paints with a broad brush. He ascribes universally held desires to West Germany’s postwar generation and suggests implausibly that all New Leftists made irresponsible comparisons between the present and the past. He also betrays little appreciation of how infuriating it may have been for young Germans to see their parents endorse a war of mass destruction in Vietnam, or of how militant opposition to the war may have represented a valid response to the Nazi legacy. Nonetheless, he exposes clear abuses of antifascist rhetoric by at least some activists, while providing a compelling complement to analyses of the psychopolitical currents of America’s New Left.

The RAF’s armed struggle, as an extreme form of “antifascism,” deepened the ironies and contradictions experienced by the West German New Left as a whole. If the New Left sought to avoid repetition of the failures of the past, the RAF sought more aggressively to correct for and even redeem those failures. The RAF implicitly held that armed struggle against forces it deemed fascist would make up for the near-total absence of armed resistance by Germans to the Nazis. Within this compensatory logic, the RAF placed its victims in the roles of Nazi perpetrators. The RAF gave itself a dual image. In one guise, its members were figures of redemption, whose violence would not only relieve
them
of the burden of the past, but also break the larger chain of German guilt. They would prove, in their refusal to be “good Germans,” that
Germany
had over-250

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come the failures of the past, insofar as at least a subset of Germans courageously responded to an enduring moral imperative to resist oppressive power. The RAF’s armed struggle, in this light, appears a convoluted attempt to purify the nation as a whole. Its effort entailed, or even demanded, violence, rendering it also a psychologically complex form of blood sacrifice. In a second guise, the RAF assumed the role of the Nazis’

victims. This elision was evident in the false equation of Stammheim with Auschwitz, of the abuse in prison of a few dozen ideological rebels with genocide. Jews and the other victims of Nazism thus functioned as the

“absent others,” whom the RAF claimed as the ultimate source of the legitimacy of its actions. With this misguided empathy, the RAF appropriated and even exploited the suffering of the victims of Nazism it meant to honor.

In both of these guises, the RAF and other violent German groups mirrored qualities they opposed not only in the German present but also in the German past. The danger of assuming the likeness of one’s enemy—

a danger hovering over all rebel movements—was far greater for German guerrillas than for their American counterparts, whose protest lacked this historical dimension. As agents of redemptive violence, German guerrillas engaged in acts striking for their cruelty. Cruelty and the demonization of the enemy are hardly specific to Nazism; to describe the RAF

as “Hitler’s children” is to invert RAF’s “antifascist” discourse in another reductive comparison. A better understanding comes by way of Santner’s assertion that the postwar generations “inherited the psychic structures that impeded mourning in the generations of their parents and grandparents. Foremost among such structures is a thinking in rigid binary oppositions which forms the socio-psychological basis of all search for scapegoats.”180 This inheritance took place despite New Leftists’

strenuous efforts to avoid the repression and repetition of the past. No
direct
lineage, therefore, runs from Hitler to the RAF. Rather, the RAF

unselfconsciously repeated tendencies in the past, largely as a result of its efforts to confront and atone for that past.

At times, the repetition was transparent. The West German armed struggle is punctuated by chilling evocations, beyond generic brutality, of the Nazis’ own aggression. These include the fire-bombing by German leftists in 1969 of a Berlin synagogue on the anniversary of Kristall-nacht in protest of Israeli policies; Meinhof’s exultation in the massacre by Palestinian commandos of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics; and the separation of Jewish from non-Jewish hostages for Deadly Abstraction

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the purpose of execution by the Palestinian and German Red Cells hijackers of a French airliner in 1976 (the hijacking ended when Israeli paratroopers raided the plane in Entebbe, Uganda, with the raid’s commander, three hostages, all seven hijackers, and twenty Ugandan soldiers losing their lives).181

Palestinian hostility to Israel—however one may judge it—is connected to historically grounded political grievances. It is, therefore, one thing for Palestinians to engage in acts of “aggression,” “terror,” or “war”