Death and Rebirth

by Emmett Hogan

German history, particularly that of the 20th Century, is schizophrenic, Janus-like; it vacillates wildly between two personas, each seemingly unaware of the other's existence. The German story of the 1900s reads like a Wagner opera, passing through stages of love, death, and rebirth. The 20th was a very eventful century.

Michael Stuermer, renowned German writer and historian, tackles the titan of German history in The German Century. He belongs to that lucky generation of Germans who made peace with their country's past and thus shuns both extremes of self-indictment and patriotic whitewashing. Few works on German history manage this task; few writers can resist the temptation to drift in one direction or the other.

The German Century has two dimensions to it: one pictorial, one literary. The two are seamlessly joined, each complimenting the other. The subdued intensity of Stuermer's words are mirrored in the deceptively mild photographs that adorn each page.

Stuermer begins his German century not in 1900, but in the 1890s, some twenty years after the creation of the German Empire by Bismarck. And rightfully so: his goal—not to detail the goings-on of the last 100 years—is to capture the peculiarities of each era's specific Zeitgeist. Such things, of course, are never neatly delineated by convenient dates.

Modern Germany began in those twilight years, the start of Germany's political transition and, concurrently, its social transition. A photo on one page of a healthy German peasant girl walking through an idyllic countryside is opposed by a photo of a Baltic fisherman placidly reading his paper as his wife peels potatoes for dinner. Turn the page for a view of the town square of the Bavarian hamlet of Berchtesgaden and a photo of a well-to-do pharmacist with his well-to-do family adjacent to a narrow, crowded city scene, with faces peering from windows on the upper stories. The effect is subtle; yet in these four pages, Stuermer travels through rural, provincial, bourgeois, and urban Germany. The contrasts are there, yet far from obvious.

This was the Germany that, under Kaiser Wilhelm, rode into war in the summer of 1914, the war that ended what one scholar has called that “ornamental dying time” of Europe. Stuermer neglects discussing the alliance system, a central cause of the first German War, making clear that his book is about Germany, not Europe. Stuermer partly attributes the war to the personality of Kaiser Wilhelm II but more to Germany's “material strength and political weakness,” its global ambition and sectional discord. With the author, the reader wanders through the trenches of Flanders—all shelled buildings, weary soldiers, and bloodied torsos. Stuermer does not dwell on these things; he moves on to the chaos at home—the riots, the shortages: the turbulence of a country falling apart.

What emerged from the ashes of the Great War was a doomed construction: the Weimar Republic. Stuermer's analysis of the era's politics is less than complete, focussing his attention instead on society and culture. These years epitomize the anxiety and decadence of post-war Europe, Germany's nervous energy, a nation still searching for its place in the world. His Weimar is that of the Dadaists, the Bauhaus; of Betholt Brecht and Fritz Lang; of Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill; of Leni Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich. The barely-restrained energy of the time reached a fevered pitch during the Great Depression. German society shook with chaotic, almost violent impulses. Stuermer ends his chapter on Germany's failed democracy with a photo of brownshirts pinning a Hitler election poster to a wall: ruthless insanity leering through the trappings of order.

The pre-1930s photos lack any real “German-ness,” pointing to the homogeneity of Europe's upper classes at this time. Many of Stuermer's pictures, not just those of the aristocracy, could have come from any country. Only handlebar mustaches hint at possible German origin. The urban scenes especially have little to distinguish themselves from the inhabitants of any Western city.

The energy of the Weimar years, however, came from a new world, not the outwardly placid and civilized world of before the war. In these days one sees a modern German character distinguishing itself. Stuermer's effect is sinuous and clandestine; the pre-war photos stand in stark contrast to the photos from the Thousand-Year Reich. Ubiquitous brownshirts, book-burnings, Nordic Hitlerjungen, and the chubby, thick-lipped face of Hermann Goering—all these are a far cry from Wilhelmine Germany. All that brook the two is14 short years—the Weimar state.

In his chapters on the Nazis, Stuermer does not equivocate; Hitler was a sinister devil, obsessed with power, and ruthless in his pursuits. He describes well the shaky first years of the 1930s, and—with images of Nazis and Communists marching for bread—shows the extremes to which desperation can drive a society. His historical intuition serves him well when he writes that Hitler's story is “a story of underestimation”—as indeed it was. He is also unambiguous in indicting the German people for the crimes of the Nazis; they knew Hitler's beliefs, many agreed with his views. It was not, after all, Hitler's intent to hide from the Germans: “The regime made a deliberate attempt to make the entire nation an accomplice, before itself and before the world.”

Nevertheless, Stuermer exonerates the Germans: if they were not deceived, they were bewitched, lulled into convincing themselves that all was well. The Third Reich, for Stuermer, is evidence of neither German evil nor Nazi disguise but of German self-delusion—for which the Germans have been atoning ever since.

Stuermer quickly cuts to the causes of the second German War. Germany did not suddenly become a behemoth unbeknownst to everyone, and the totalitarian nature of Nazi Germany did not make the country a ruthless war machine. Stuermer faults Western laziness and fear in confronting Germany for making the war necessary.

Most notable in The German Century is a certain omission. A reader accostomed to any treatment of the period would expect to hear some mention of the Holocaust. Stuermer, curiously, avoids this issue. This omission is the most puzzling element of his book. Not to mention the Shoah at all—indeed, to make no reference to any of the groups involved—should seem suspicious to any reader. Perhaps it has to do with the Holocaust's messy naked humanity; perhaps it is too embedded out of context to confront objectively in a popular history book; maybe the Holocaust just isn't good fodder for a coffee table overview of German history. It becomes clear to the reader that, whatever his intentions and whatever his explanation, Stuermer has committed a serious, possibly discrediting, faux pas.

After the war, West Germany continued its cultural and political development, eventually flowering into a strong and stable democracy. The American guarantee of security against the Soviets was crucial for a nation cursed with poor geography trying to decide its role on the world stage. Germany, like Japan, was fortunate to emerge from its own ashes a secure and stable nation.

This part of the book focuses on the development of West Germany and the Wirschaftwunder—the economic miracle—that churned out Volkswagen Beatles as well as the social awakening of the German people. Yet Stuermer is sober about the student activism of the 1960s. True, as in America, this student unrest turned out to be mere bluff with little lasting consequence, but Stuermer nevertheless believes that it revealed a defining characteristic of the post-war German people. Student aggression was directed at the nation's past to exorcise the country's ghosts and cleanse a guilty national consciousness. Stuermer's tone leads one to believe that such hand-wringing was unnecessary by the 1960s. He veers close to condemning the students in the name of national pride; only his good sense and moderation prevent him from doing so.

While West Germany was freed from the shackles of its past, however, East Germany was mired in them. A Soviet puppet state, the “German Democratic Republic” merely replaced a Nazi Big Brother with a Communist one. The East Germans were beaten with their own history. The “Ossies” yearned for freedoms enjoyed of the “Wessies,” showing that the Germans were ultimately not a people given to dictatorship.

Stuermer's story begins its denouement with the deterioration of this rotten state in 1989. His is the unmistakable tone of national redemption. The flood of East German émigrés to West Germany via Hungary and Austria is cathartic. There is a spirit to this chapter—a sense of homecoming, that Germany has returned to the family of nations.

It is with this sense of hope that The German Century ends.

The German Century is more than just a story of knights and battles; it is substantive history. Yet, for all his level-headed sense, Stuermer's approach to history seems too mathematical. He is very careful to avoid discussing what he does not think is directly relevant—such as the alliance system that caused the first World War. He knows his boundaries, but perhaps too well. Stuermer decided early on to restrict the scope of his history to the Germans alone at the expense, unfortunately, of veracity. Stuermer's biggest failing, as far as this work is concerned, was miscalculating the spatial and temporal parameters on which the book is based.

History is not made in a vacuum; it is a tapestry, with connections linking all corners in myriad ways. One cannot propose a Grand Unified Theory for history—few serious historians even have the audacity to call their work a social “science.”

Stuermer recognizes the holistic nature of history when he hunts for a period's Zeitgeist. At the same time, though, he runs into trouble. There are holes in his fabric; Stuermer's history of Germany is very good but incomplete.

For a coffee table book, The German Century is excellent. The central fact is that Stuermer succeeds in encapsulating the essence of modern Germany. He presents a sensitivity to the peculiarity, the fundamental awkwardness, of German history. Stuermer's prospects for the future of Germany are positive, but still hesitant. Has Germany passed through its death, only to be reborn, to win its rebirth, as Mahler once said, “with wings that I wrested for myself “?

So much time has passed, not enough to tell. If Germany truly is home, if it has lost its awkward impulses and self-conscious anxieties, then Germany is to be forgiven, and welcomed back; for the German people will have earned their own redemption.