Crying Nazi

[Dave Monroe]

05/07/2007

Crying Nazi

Franziska Augstein takes a critical look at media muckraking that's
uncovered the Nazi pasts of a new group of leftist intellectuals.

After the spectacular revelation last summer that Günter Grass was in
the Waffen SS, the headlines are full again with the names of
prominent intellectuals. Documents have surfaced in the Berlin Federal
Archive which show that the writers Martin Walser and Siegfried Lenz
as well as the cabaret artist Dieter Hildebrandt were all members of
the Nazi Party. All three deny any knowledge of their membership. It
is well known that the party mass recruited from Hitler Youth groups,
but historians cannot agree on whether or not teenage Nazi Party
members were signed up without their consent or signatures.

In the autumn and winter of 2003, the files left behind by the Nazis
sparked a lot of German shop-talking about whether Walter Jens and
others were aware of having been signed up to the party as teenagers.
Today we are watching a remake of this theatre piece. The main acts
are identical to those staged in Possen in 2003, only that the newly
incriminated intellectuals were younger at the time of their alleged
recruitment than the academics named back then.

Jens was 19 when he was registered as a party member, Dieter
Hildebrandt was only 16, Martin Walser and Siegfried Lenz were 17. The
rest of the ensemble - historians, archivists, journalists – is
essentially the same.

And the circumstances are identical as well. In one respect, though,
all experts are agreed: the files are too full of holes to clear up
this ominous business once and for all. Some see this as an invitation
to point the finger at Walser, Hildebrandt and Lenz, saying that they
"probably" lied about the past. Oscar Wilde would have adored to see
how right he was when he wrote: "There is much to be said in favour of
modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it
keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

It remains only to ask why the media is interested in the central Nazi
file at the Federal Archives. The Germans have a weakness for Nazi
stories. This is certainly one reason. Every feuilleton editor knows
that few things provoke a letter to the editor more than an article on
National Socialism.

The more time that passes between now and the Third Reich, the more
garish the spectrum of revelations becomes. From questions surrounding
Hitler's generals, Hitler's women or Hitler's Wehrmacht, journalism
has long since moved on to other topics. Hitler has been outed as a
homosexual and the Nazis have been credited wtih having had the atom
bomb. Unfortunately, almost 120 years after his birth, it's impossible
to sell stories that "the Führer" is still alive.

So these days things centre around Hitler's party comrades. Walser,
Hildebrandt and Lenz may have Günter Grass to thank for the attention
they're now getting: not a single journalist researched the young
Grass' early years, everyone waited for the Nobel Prize winner to come
out himself and declare he'd been in the Waffen SS. This omission
could only to be made up for by producing the names of other prominent
people. No more could be dug up than a supposition of party
membership, but that was better than nothing at all.

In itself, media effort to seek out the black sheep of the Federal
Republic of Germany is a welcome thing: opportunists who voluntarily
strode through the Nazi dung and then later appeared in pearly white
democratic outfits deserve to be shown for who they are. However the
three delinquents' age at the time speaks against them being lumped
into this category. That goes, by the way, for every citizen of this
country. After growing up under the ideological hood pulled over
society by the Nazi regime, many teenagers were bound to join the
party without being aware of the consequences.

Some of these youths were still practically children, and one can't
expect such an awareness of them under those circumstances. For
today's society it's irrelevant whether these youths were party
members or not. More interesting is the question of how they behaved
at the time and what use they made of the freedom they had under the
dictatorship. As far as this is concerned, no new knowledge has been
uncovered regarding Walser, Hildebrandt and Lenz. Consequently, this
whole thing is a storm in a teacup, which once again raises the
question of why it was necessary at all.

It's worth noting that all those outed as party comrades in recent
years are intellectuals who throughout their lives have represented
predominantly left-liberal views. Historian Ulrich Herbert sums up the
debate with the pithy phrase: "It's the return match." In holding fast
to filing cards from the Federal Archive that in themselves are of
little importance, certain strands of the media are echoing the motto
circulated years ago by the "New Frankfurt School": "The biggest
critics of the elves were previously elves themselves."

The thing now is to show that those who rendered outstanding services
establishing a free democracy in the Federal Republic had dirt on the
fingers they pointed at others, even if these others, the Filbingers
and the Globkes, participated in the Nazi regime as mature adults and
continued their careers without interruption after 1945.

What remains is to comprehensively research how many illustrious
citizens of the Federal Republic pleaded as children with their
stubborn parents to be allowed to join the Hitler Youth or the League
of German Girls. And there's a lot of work to be done there.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1426.html