The Wages of Guilt Read online

  Each year, on the afternoon of May 4, we would gather in the assembly hall to hear the headmaster commemorate the war dead. May 4 was Commemoration Day; May 5 was Liberation Day. On the evening of May 4 there would be a slow procession through the sand dunes to the former German execution ground. I watched it on television in black and white. All you heard was the sound of slowly shuffling feet, a church bell ringing in the distance, and wind brushing the microphone. May 4 was also the occasion for youths to smash the windows of German cars or insult German tourists from a safe distance.

  The headmaster, normally a humorous man, would get tearful on May 4. In his long leather coat, he was invariably at the head of the procession through the dunes, with an oddly defiant expression on his face, as though he were facing the enemy once again. He lectured me once after I had been caught drawing swastikas. I was never to draw swastikas, he said, for they were wicked and the sight of them still distressed people. I continued drawing them, of course, but as a secret vice, with the added thrill of breaking a mysterious, adult taboo.

  Comic-book Germans (were there any others?) roughly fell into two categories: the fat, slow-witted, ludicrous type, played to perfection in Hollywood movies by Gert Fröbe, and the thin, sinister type, the torturer with a monocle, the one who always said: “Ve have vays of making you talk.” Conrad Veidt in Casablanca. The enemy was both frightening and ridiculous. Too many Gert Fröbe films and Hitler imitations had made a mockery of the German language itself, which, as a result, we refused to learn properly. The German teacher sounded defensive in his effort to inspire enthusiasm for the language of Goethe and Rilke. Fröbe and Hitler had ruined it for us.

  As we grew up, we heard more stories. Our sense of history was shaped as local stories of German sweethearts and collaborators made way for larger stories, stories about the concentration camps and the destruction of the Jews. My mother was saved from deportation and almost certain death only by the good fortune of having been born in England. Our comic-book prejudices turned into an attitude of moral outrage. This made life easier in a way. It was comforting to know that a border divided us from a nation that personified evil. They were bad, so we must be good. To grow up after the war in a country that had suffered German occupation was to know that one was on the side of the angels.

  We did not spend our holidays in Germany. We had no German friends. And we hardly heard, let alone spoke the language. When I say we, I am generalizing of course, but even in 1989, when I began, for the first time, to travel extensively in Germany, this was considered among my Dutch friends an interesting but slightly eccentric thing to do. To them, London, Paris, even New York felt nearer than Berlin. They felt this way despite the obvious similarities between Holland and Germany, in culture, in language, in food and drink.

  Perhaps that was part of the problem: the Dutch had not suffered as much as the Poles or the Russians; they were classified as a “Nordic race,” after all, so long as they were not Jews. Before the war there had been more sympathy in Holland for National Socialist discipline and the idea of the Herrenvolk, the master race, standing up to Bolshevism than my teachers cared to remember. The German invasion was more than an act of war; it was a betrayal. And it brought to pass the worst fears of a small nation always in danger of being swallowed by its neighbor. Which is why the Dutch turned their backs on Germany after the war. The cultural similarities were embarrassing, even threatening. The borders had to be clearly drawn, geographically and mentally; Germany had to be beyond the pale.

  Christopher Isherwood once described what it was like to grow up after World War I, as the younger brother or son of men who had died in battle. Those who had been too young to fight or die, he said, felt as though they had yet to face a test of manhood, a test which had to be passed again and again, for one could never make up for having missed the slaughter. It was not quite like that for us, the first generation to be born after 1945. But the war cast its shadow nonetheless, to the point that some of us grew obsessed by it. For we too faced an imaginary test. The question that obsessed us was not how we would have acquitted ourselves in uniform, going over the top, running into machine-gun fire or mustard gas, but whether we would have joined the resistance, whether we would have cracked under torture, whether we would have hidden Jews and risked deportation ourselves. Our particular shadow was not war, but occupation.

  Occupation is always a humiliating business—not just because of the loss of sovereignty and political rights but because it dramatically shows up human weakness. Heroes are very few in such times, and only a fool would put himself or herself among the imaginary heroes. It is easier to understand the ugly little compromises people make to save their own skins, the furtive services rendered to the uniformed masters, the looking away when the Gestapo kicks in the neighbor’s door. When I grew up, everything was done to forget the humiliation and to identify with the heroes. I read piles of books about Dutch Maquis and silk-scarfed RAF pilots. And yet the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma, interested me more than the hero. This is no doubt partly because I fear I would be much like that frightened man myself. And partly because, to me, failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism. It is why I wanted to know more about the memories of our former enemies, for theirs was a past of the most terrible failure: moral, political, and, in the end, military too. Which is not to say that the Nazis were more human than their victims, but it would be equally wrong—though no doubt comforting—to assume that they were less so.

  The other enemies of World War II, the Japanese, were too far away to have had much of an impact on our imagination. The Dutch East Indies meant nothing to me, even though some of my friends had been born there. Nonetheless, the Japanese too were comic-book villains: short yellow people with buckteeth and spectacles, who shouted “Banzai!” as their Zero fighters attacked the brave American pilots, led in a popular comic book by a dashing blond hero named Buck Danny and his doughty crew. (Buck Danny was definitely “Nordic.”) The Japs, I was told, could not be trusted. They had no regard for human life. They had attacked Pearl Harbor without warning. They pulled out people’s fingernails. They made white women bow to their emperor. One of my high school teachers had worked as a slave on the Burma railroad. My aunt was in a “Jap camp.” Alec Guinness was made to crawl into a hot steel cage.

  Much of the 1970s and 1980s I spent in or around Japan, for reasons that had nothing to do with the war. But I was curious to learn how Japanese saw the war, how they remembered it, what they imagined it to have been like, how they saw themselves in view of their past. What I heard and read was often surprising to a European: the treatment of Western POWs was hardly remembered at all, even though The Bridge on the River Kwai had been a popular success in Japan. (I often wondered who the Japanese identified with, the Japanese commandant or Alec Guinness? Neither, said a Japanese friend: “We liked the American hero, William Holden.”) Bataan, the sacking of Manila, the massacres in Singapore, these were barely mentioned. But the suffering of the Japanese, in China, Manchuria, the Philippines, and especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was remembered vividly, as was the imprisonment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia after the war. The Japanese have two days of remembrance: August 6, when Hiroshima was bombed, and August 15, the date of the Japanese surrender.

  I wanted to write about Japanese memories of the war, and this led me to the related subject of modern Japanese nationalism. I became fascinated by the writings of various emperor worshippers, historical revisionists, and romantic seekers after the unique essence of Japaneseness. The abstruseness of their ideas didn’t stop them from being widely published in popular Japanese magazines and newspapers or from appearing as guests on television talk shows. I began to notice how the same German names cropped up in their often oblique and florid prose: Spengler, Herder, Fichte, even Wagner. The more Japanese romantics went on about the essence of Japaneseness, the more they sounded like
German metaphysicians. This is perhaps true of romantic nationalists everywhere but the nineteenth-century German influence is still particularly striking in Japan. The more I studied Japanese nationalism, the more I wished to turn to the well, so to speak, from which so many modern Japanese ideas had been drawn. Since the late nineteenth century, Japan had often looked to Germany as a model. The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war—Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism—had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany. Why? It was with this question in mind that I decided to expand my original idea, and write about the memories of war in Germany as well as Japan.

  In the summer of 1991, a year after the two Germanys had become one, I was in Berlin to write a magazine article. I noticed an announcement in a local newspaper of a lecture at the Jewish Community Center, to be given by the psychologist Margarethe Mitscherlich. The title of her lecture was “The Labor of Remembrance: About the Psychoanalysis of the Inability to Mourn” (“Erinnerungsarbeit: Zur Psychoanalyse der Unfähigkeit zu trauern”). The mourning concerned the Nazi period. I expected a half-empty hall. But I found a huge crowd of mostly young people, casually dressed, rather like a rock concert audience, queuing up to the end of the street. I should not have been surprised. The German war was not only remembered on television, on the radio, in community halls, schools, and museums; it was actively worked on, labored, rehearsed. One sometimes got the impression, especially in Berlin, that German memory was like a massive tongue seeking out, over and over, a sore tooth.

  Some Japanese are puzzled by this. An elderly German diplomat recalled to me, rather sorrowfully, how a Japanese colleague told him that Germany’s preoccupation with its past sins, and its willingness to apologize to its former victims, had surely led to a loss of German identity. Another, much younger man told me of his visit to Tokyo, where he was shocked to hear Japanese sing German military marches in a beer hall. I do not wish to exaggerate the contrast. Not every Japanese suffers from historical amnesia, and there are many Germans who would like to forget, just as there are Germans who are only too pleased to hear the old songs echo around the beer hall. It is nonetheless impossible to imagine a Japanese Mitscherlich drawing huge crowds in the center of Tokyo by lecturing on the inability to mourn. Nor has a Japanese politician ever gone down on his knees, as Willy Brandt did in the former Warsaw ghetto, to apologize for historical crimes.

  Even during the war the Axis partnership was not an easy one. Hitler could not but feel ambivalent about a yellow Herrenvolk, and the Japanese, after all, wanted to push “the white race” out of Asia. Yet the two peoples saw their own purported virtues reflected in each other: the warrior spirit, racial purity, self-sacrifice, discipline, and so on. After the war, West Germans tried hard to discard this image of themselves. This was less true of the Japanese. Which meant that any residual feelings of nostalgia for the old partnership in Japan were likely to be met with embarrassment in Germany.

  The story of the former Japanese embassy in Berlin is a case in point. Built in 1936, the old embassy is a neoclassicist monument of the Nazi style, conceived as part of Hitler’s new capital, Germania. The embassy was one of the few buildings in Hitler’s and Speer’s grand plan that actually got built. After the war it was abandoned, a ruined hulk, left to Autonomen, the black-clad bands of young people seeking an anarchistic lifestyle, who squatted among piles of useless diplomatic mail. But in 1984 the Japanese Prime Minister, Nakasone Yasuhiro, and the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, decided to rebuild the embassy as a Japanese-German center for scholars. The Germans, wary of the Japanese weakness for nationalist nostalgia, wanted the center to reflect how times had changed since the days of the Axis. It was opened officially in 1987. To celebrate the occasion, the Japanese had proposed a seminar examining the parallels between Shintoist emperor worship and the myths of the German Volk. No criticism or irony was intended: the idea had come from the priests of a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. The Germans politely declined.

  All this points to a gap between Japanese views of the war and German ones, leaving aside, for now, the differences between the Federal Republic and the GDR. The question is why this should be so, why the collective German memory should appear to be so different from the Japanese. Is it cultural? Is it political? Is the explanation to be found in postwar history, or in the history of the war itself? Do Germans perhaps have more reason to mourn? Is it because Japan has an Asian “shame culture,” to quote Ruth Benedict’s phrase, and Germany a Christian “guilt culture”?

  These questions effectively narrowed my scope. Since I was interested in those aspects of the past that continue to excite the greatest controversy in Germany and Japan, I have left out many historic events. The battle of Nomonhan, between the Japanese Imperial Army and General Zhukov’s tank brigades, was of enormous military importance. And so were the Imphal campaign and the Normandy landing. But I have not mentioned any of these. Instead, in the case of Japan, I have emphasized the war in China and the bombing of Hiroshima, for these episodes, more than others, have lodged themselves, often in highly symbolic ways, in Japanese public life. Likewise, I have concentrated on the war against the Jews in the case of Germany, since it was that parallel war, rather than, say, the U-boat battles in the Atlantic, or even the battle of Stalingrad, that left the most sensitive scar on the collective memory of (West) Germany.

  I could not have known when I started on the book how much current news events would form an increasingly dramatic backdrop to my story. First came the end of the Cold War, then German unification, then the Gulf War, and finally, in 1993, the first election in Japan to break the political monopoly of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. I decided to begin my book with the Gulf War, as I experienced it in Germany and Japan. For those few weeks dramatized the traumas and memories of the last world war more vividly than any other event since 1945, more so even than the war in Vietnam, in which neither country was asked to take part. Both Japan and Germany were constitutionally unable to play a military role in the war, which resulted in a great deal of argument: could they or could they not be trusted, or indeed trust themselves, to take part in future conflicts? Now, as I write, German airmen are patrolling the skies above the former Yugoslavia, and Japanese troops are trying to keep the peace in Cambodia, though still without the legal right to use force.

  One of the clichés of our time is that two of the old Axis powers lost the war but won the peace. Many people fear Japanese and German power. Europeans are afraid of German domination. Some Americans have already described their economic difficulties with Japan in terms of war. But if other people are disturbed by German and Japanese power, so are many Germans and Japanese. If the two peoples still have anything in common after the war, it is a residual distrust of themselves.

  The official unification of Germany came without much fuss or celebration in the week of the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1990. Every year, the Book Fair pays special attention to the literature of a particular country. The focus that year was on Japan. As part of the festivities, a public discussion took place between Günter Grass and Oe Kenzaburo, the Japanese novelist. Both men grew up during the war—that is, both were indoctrinated at school with militarist propaganda—and both became literary advocates of the antifascist cause, even though Oe, unlike Grass, had not said much about politics of late. Both, in any event, were committed liberals. (I use the word throughout this book in the American sense.)

  It was a remarkable event. Grass began by lamenting German unification. Auschwitz, he said, should have made reunification impossible. A unified Germany was a danger to itself and to the world. Oe nodded gravely and added that Japan was a great danger too. The Japanese, he said, had never faced up to their crimes. Japan was a racist country. Yes, but so was Germany, said Grass, not to be outdone, so was Germany; in fact, Germany was worse: what about the hatred of Poles, Turks, and foreigners in general? Ah, said Oe, but what a
bout Japanese discrimination against Koreans and Ainu? No, the Japanese must surely be worse.

  These litanies of German and Japanese flaws went on for some time. Then there was a lull in the conversation. Both men tried to think of something else to say. The lull became an uncomfortable silence. People began to shift in their seats, waiting to disperse. But then, as a fitting conclusion to the meeting of minds, common ground was found. I forget whether it was Grass or Oe who brought it up, but Mitsubishi and Daimler-Benz had announced a new “cooperative relationship.” Journalists had dubbed it the Daimler-Mitsubishi Axis. Grass and Oe looked solemn and agreed that this was just the beginning of a dangerous friendship. Then Grass rose from his chair and wrapped Oe in a bear hug, which Oe, a small man not much used to this kind of thing, tried to reciprocate as best he could.

  PART ONE

  WAR AGAINST THE WEST

  BONN

  IT WAS NIGHT, and still some years before the war, when Konrad Adenauer crossed the river Elbe. He was on his way to Berlin, dozing in his wagon-lit. As the train moved into the east, Adenauer opened one eye and muttered to himself: “Asien, Asien” (“Asia, Asia”).

  The story may, of course, be untrue. But as chairman of the Christian Democratic Party in the British zone, Adenauer did write in 1946 to a friend in the United States: “The danger is grave. Asia stands at the river Elbe. Only an economically and politically healthy Europe under the guidance of England and France, a Western Europe to which as an essential part the free part of Germany belongs, can stop further advancement of Asian ideology and power.”

  Adenauer meant the advancement of Soviet Communism. His use of the word Asia was interesting, however. To the politician from Cologne, the old Roman city on the western border of Germany, barbarism lay in the east, where neither the civilized Romans nor the empire of Charlemagne had penetrated. Freedom and democracy defined the civilized Roman, Christian, Enlightened West; Asia meant orthodoxy, tyranny, and war. The Third Reich was Asia. Adenauer’s mission was to bring his Germany, western Germany, to the West, to cut out, as though it were a cancerous growth, the vestiges of Asia.