THE HANDSTAND

june 2005

By Gunther Grasse.
 Saturday May 7, 2005
 The Guardian books.guardian.co.uk
 
 It is 60 years since the German Reich's unconditional surrender. That is equivalent to a working life with a pension to look forward to. So far back that memory, that wide-meshed sieve, is in danger of forgetting it. Sixty years ago, after being wounded in the chaotic retreat in Lausitz, I lay in hospital with a flesh wound in my right thigh and a bean-sized shell splinter in my right shoulder. The hospital was in Marienbad, a military hospital town that had been occupied by American soldiers a few days
 earlier, at the same time as Soviet forces were occupying the neighbouring town of Karlsbad. In   Marienbad, on May 8, I was a naive 17-year-old, who had believed in the ultimate victory right to the end. Those who had survived the mass murder in the German concentration camps could regard themselves as liberated, although they were in no physical condition to enjoy their freedom. But for me it was not the hour of liberation; rather, I was beset by the empty feeling of humiliation following total defeat. When May 8 comes round again and is celebrated in complacent official speeches as liberation day, this can only be in hindsight, especially as we Germans did little if anything for our liberation. In the initial post-war years our lives were determined by hunger and cold, the misery of refugees, the displaced and bombed-out. In all four zones occupied by the wartime allies, Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union, the only way to manage the ever-increasing crush of the more than 12 million Germans who had fled from, or been driven out of, East and West Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and the Sudentenland, was to force them into our own cramped living
 rooms. Whenever, and especially in a party-political sense, the question is posed, "What can we Germans be proud of?", the first thing we should mention is this essential achievement - even though it was forced on us. We had hardly got used to freedom when compulsion had to be applied. As a result, in both German states, huge long-term camps for refugees and displaced persons were avoided. The risk of building up feelings of hate was thereby diverted, as was the desire for revenge engendered by years of camp life which - as today's world shows - can result in terror and counter-terror.
 
 So, it was an achievement of a special kind. Especially since the compulsory settlement of refugees and displaced persons had more often than not to be carried out in the face of xenophobic resistance from the established local population. The realisation that all Germans, not only those bombed out and now homeless, had lost the war dawned only hesitantly. At this early stage,
 in their dealings with one another, the Germans were practising that virulent attitude towards foreigners which still exists today.
 
 Even then there were spokespersons for the rhetoric of liberation. They appeared individually and in groups. So many self-appointed anti-fascists suddenly set the tone in which one was entitled to ask: how had Hitler been able to make headway against such strong resistance? Dirty linen was quickly
 washed clean, with people being absolved of all responsibility. Counterfeiters were subsequently busy coining new expressions and putting them into circulation. Unconditional surrender was changed to "collapse". Although in business, law and in the rapidly re-emerging schools and
 universities, even the diplomatic service, many former National Socialists maintained their hereditary wealth, stayed in office, continued to hold on to their university chairs and eventually continued their careers in politics, it was claimed that we were starting from "zero hour" or square one. A particularly infamous distortion of facts can be seen even today in speeches and publications, with the crimes perpetrated by Germans described as "misdeeds perpetrated in the name of the German people".
 
 In addition, language was used in two different ways to herald the future division of the country. In the Soviet occupied zone, the Red Army had liberated Germany from the fascist terror all by itself; in the Western occupied zones, the honour of having freed not only Germany but the whole of
 Europe from Nazi domination was shared exclusively by the Americans, the British and the French.
 
 In the Cold War that quickly followed, German states which had existed since 1949 consistently fell to one or other power bloc, whereupon the governments of both national entities sought to present themselves as model pupils of their respective dominating powers. Forty years later, during the Glasnost period it was ironically the Soviet Union that broke up the Democratic Republic, which had by that point become a burden. The Federal Republic's almost unconditional subservience to the US was broken for the first time when the SPD-Green ruling coalition decided to make use of the freedom given to us in sovereign terms 60 years ago, by refusing to allow German soldiers
 to participate in the Iraq war.
 
 "Donated Freedom" was the title of a speech which I gave to the Berlin Academy of Arts on May 8 1985. At the time, the country was still divided, so I compared both states, their need for disassociation, their different dependencies, their own particular brand of dogmatic materialism, their fear of and their longing for unification. The "Donated Freedom" applied only to the West German state, the Eastern one went away empty-handed.
 
 Twenty years later, in view of the condition of the Federal Republic, now enlarged through reunification, we question how this gift was used. Have we dealt carefully with the freedom which we did not win, but was given to us? Have the citizens of West Germany properly compensated the citizens of the former Democratic republic who, after all, had to bear the main burden of
 the war begun and lost by all Germans? And a further question: is our parliamentary democracy as a guarantor of freedom of action, still sufficiently sovereign to take action on the problems facing us in the 21st century?
 
 Fifteen years after signing the Treaty of Unity, we can no longer conceal or gloss over the fact that, despite the financial achievements, German unity has essentially been a failure. And was right from the start. Petty calculation prevented the government of the time from pursuing an objective grounded in the Constitutional Act by way of precaution, namely to submit to the citizens of both states a new constitution relevant to the endeavours of Germany as a whole. It is therefore hardly surprising that people in the former East Germany should regard themselves as second-class Germans. As far as the ownership of manufacturing establishments, the energy supply, newspapers and publishing are concerned, this formerly "nationally owned" fabric of the departed state has been wound up with the occasionally criminal collusion of the privatisation agency and ultimately expropriated. The jobless rate is twice as high as in the former West Germany. West German
 arrogance had no respect for people with East German cv's. The formerly feared migration of the population - which led to the over-hasty introduction of the West German Deutschmark into East Germany - is happening now, daily. Whole areas of the country, its cities and its villages, are
 being emptied. After the privatisation agency had completed its bargain sales, West German industry and similarly the banks withheld the necessary investment and loans and, consequently, no jobs were created. Here, fine exhortations are of little use. In view of this skewed situation, only
 parliament, the lawmakers, can help. Which brings us back to the question of whether parliamentary democracy is able to act.
 
 Now, I believe that our freely elected members of parliament are no longer free to decide. The customary party pressures, for which there may well be reasons, are not critical here; it is, rather, the ring of lobbyists with their multifarious interests that constricts and influences the Federal
 parliament and its democratically elected members, placing them under pressure and forcing them into disharmony, even when framing and deciding the content of laws. Favours minor and major smooth the way. Reprehensible scams are dismissed as sorry misdemeanours. No one any longer takes serious exception to what is now a sophisticated system, operating on the basis of reciprocal backhanders.
 
 Consequently, parliament is no longer sovereign in its decisions. It depends on powerful pressure groups - the banks and multinationals - which are not subject to any democratic control. Parliament has thereby become an object of ridicule. It is degenerating into a subsidiary of the stock exchange.
 Democracy has become a pawn to the dictates of globally volatile capital. So can we really be surprised when more and more citizens turn away from such blatant scams, indignant, antagonised and ultimately resigned and regard elections as a simple farce and decline to vote? What is needed is a democratic desire to protect Parliament against the pressures of the lobbyists by making it inviolable. But are our parliamentarians still sufficiently free for a decision that would bring radical democratic constraint? Once again the question arises, what has become of the freedom presented to us sixty years ago? Is it now no more than a stock market profit? Our highest constitutional value no longer protects civil rights as a priority, and has rather been wasted at cut prices, so that it now only serves the so-called free-market economy in line with the neoliberal Zeitgeist. Yet this concept, which has become a fetish, barely conceals the asocial conduct of the banks, industrial associations and market speculators. We all are witnesses to the fact that production is being destroyed worldwide, that so-called hostile and friendly takeovers are destroying thousands of jobs, that the mere announcement of rationalisation measures, such as the dismissal of workers and employees, makes share prices rise, and this is regarded unthinkingly as the price to be paid for "living in freedom".
 
 The consequences of this development disguised as globalisation are clearly coming to light and can be read from the statistics. With the consistently high number of jobless, which in Germany has now reached five million, and the equally constant refusal of industry to create new jobs, despite demonstrably higher earnings, especially in the export area, the hope of full employment has evaporated. Older employees, who still had years of work left in them, are pushed into early retirement. Young people are denied the skills for entering the world of work. Even worse, with simultaneous complaints that an ageing population is a threat and the demand, repeated parrot-fashion, to do more for young people and education, the Federal Republic - still a rich country - is permitting, to a shameful extent, the growth of what is called "child poverty".
 
 All this is now accepted as if divinely ordained, accompanied at most by the customary national grumbles. Questions as to responsibility are sent straight to the shunting department. Here, they are shunted first to one siding, then then to the other. Yet the future of more than a million children growing up in impoverished families remains in the balance. Those who point to this state of affairs and to the people forced into social oblivion are at best ridiculed by slick young journalists as "social
 romantics", but usually vilified as "Do-gooders". Questions asked as to the reasons for the growing gap between rich and poor are dismissed as "the politics of envy". The desire for justice is ridiculed as utopian. The concept of "solidarity" is relegated to the dictionary's list of "foreign words".
 
 Here the rich farmer and well-fed, there the nameless who seek refuge in the soup kitchen. Here the cool better-off - there the statistically-recorded social problem cases. In the Federal Republic of Germany the classless society, regarded by all as highly desirable, is changing into a class-based
 society that was long thought to be outdated. No longer a possibility but a hard fact: what is paraded as neo-liberal proves to be on close scrutiny a return to disparaging practices of early capitalism. And the social market economy - formerly a successful model of economic and cohesive action - has degenerated into the free market economy for which the constitutional obligation of employers to contribute to workers' pensions is an irritation and the striving for profit is sacrosanct.
 
 When we were given freedom 60 years ago and, defeated, initially did not know what to do with it, we gradually made use of this gift. We learned democracy and in doing so proved star pupils - because after all we were incontrovertibly German. With the benefit of hindsight, what was crammed into us through lectures was enough to get us a reasonable end-of-term report. We learned the interplay between government and opposition, whereupon lengthy periods of government ultimately proved arid. The much lauded and reviled generation of '68 produced new people and ultimately also tolerance. We had to acknowledge that our burdens could not be cast aside, they are passed by parents to children and our German past, however much we travel and export, comes back to haunt us. Neo-Nazis repeatedly brought us into disrepute. Even so, we felt that democracy was here to stay. It had to withstand several challenges. Another is upon us.
 
 After the debris had been cleared and disposed of in both German states, reconstruction in the East proceeded under the constraints of the Stalinist system; but in the Western state, it took place under favourable conditions. What retrospectively is called the "economic miracle" was not, however, due
 to any individual achievement, but was won by many. Included in that number are displaced persons and refugees, those who had in fact to start at square one in terms of material possessions. We must not forget the contribution of foreign workers, initially politely called "guest workers". In the rebuilding phase businessmen were exemplary in investing every penny of profit into job creation. The trades unions and businesses were clearly aware of the decay of the Weimar Republic, so they were forced to compromise and ensure social equality. However, with so much toil and profit-chasing, the past was in danger of being forgotten.
 
 Only in the sixties were questions asked, firstly by writers then by a youth movement, simply called "student protest", about everything that the older people, the war generation, would sooner forget. The protest movement strove verbally for revolution, but was paid off with reform, for which, often
 unintentionally, it had created the climate. But for it, we would still be living in the claustrophobic fog of the Adenauer years. Without the youth movement, the social-liberal coalition's new Germany policy, as a gradual convergence of the two states, could not have been achieved.
 
 The third challenge arose when the Wall had fallen and, on a larger scale, the division of Europe ended, at least in terms of power politics. The two German states had existed for four decades more against than beside each other. As there was no willingness on the Western side to offer the East equal rights, the unity of the country has so far existed only on paper. It was all done too hastily and without an understanding of what far-reaching consequences this haste would have.
 
 Since then, the expanded country has stagnated. Neither the Kohl government nor the Schröder government has succeeded in correcting the initial errors. Lately, perhaps too late, we have come to recognise that the threat to the state - or what should be regarded as Public Enemy No 1 - comes not from right-wing radicalism but rather, from the impotence of politics, which leaves citizens exposed and unprotected from the dictates of the economy. Workers and employees are increasingly blackmailed by the corporate group. Not parliament but the pharmaceutical industry and the doctors' and chemists' associations dependent on it decide who must profit and reap the
 benefit of health reform. Instead of the social obligation which derives from owning property, maximising profits has become the basic principle. Freely elected MPs submit to both the domestic and global pressure of high  finance. So what is being destroyed is not the state, which survives, but
 democracy.
 
 When the German Reich unconditionally surrendered 60 years ago, a system of power and terror was thereby defeated. This system, which had caused fear throughout Europe for 12 years, still leaves its shadow today. We Germans have repeatedly faced up to this inherited shame and have been forced to do so if we hesitated. The memory of the suffering that we caused others and
 ourselves has been kept alive through the generations. We often had to force ourselves to face this. Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere - I'm thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers - we have not shaken off the burden of our past. It will remain part of our history as an ongoing challenge. We can only hope we will be able to cope with today's risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world's last remaining ideology.
 
 As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces. Those who treat their donated freedom as a stock market profit have failed to understand what May 8 teaches us every year.