In the New World by Lawrence Wright

Author:Lawrence Wright [Wright, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-80296-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

I began reading The Tin Drum in Dublin and read it as I traveled past the graveyards of Holland and the battlefields of Belgium. I was reading it in a pension in Amsterdam near Anne Frank’s house. I was putting off Germany. All over Europe there was testimony of the evil that the Nazis had let loose on the world. Were the Germans peculiarly capable of evil? Or were they merely victims of a political culture they couldn’t control? These were the questions Günter Grass was asking in The Tin Drum. I was asking myself the same questions, because I was also a product of political cultures widely regarded as evil—the Dallas of 1963, and the United States of 1968.

I recalled the puzzlement in my father’s voice when he spoke of the Germans. He had admired them as an enemy. They were civilized in their approach to combat—not like the fanatical, suicidal Japanese, or the half-savage Chinese in Korea—and their skill was unsurpassed. They would have won the war, my father believed, if it hadn’t been for Hitler’s frequent stupid meddling. One of his most vivid memories of the war is the day he entered a village near Cologne and came across the body of a dead German child, a victim of artillery fire. German children are, of course, famously beautiful, like porcelain dolls, and the sight of this dead boy stopped my father in his tracks. Why? What caused the Germans to begin this war, which would cost so many lives, including twenty million civilians such as this boy in the street? Were the Germans evil? A stupid question—but how else can it be framed? Was this dead child evil? My father remembered seeing the slave girls in the German homes, who had been torn away from their families in Czechoslovakia and Poland. “How could a great religious, cultured people do this kind of thing?” my father asked himself. Was this the destiny of civilization, to destroy itself in some fantastic barbaric urge?

There is a moral transfer that takes place between the victor and the vanquished, which George Bailey writes about in his splendid book, Germans. The loss of German dignity after the war was followed by “a collateral loss of shame” on the part of the victors. We can see this, as Bailey points out, in the expulsion of nearly three million Czechs of German ancestry from the Sudeten portion of Czechoslovakia immediately after the war, and the renewed persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, for reasons that were substantially the same as the Nazi persecution. “For me the most disgusting and dismaying result of World War II and its aftermath is this: that the exposure and universal condemnation of the moral insanity of the Nazis ministered to the reinforcement of the moral insanity of the Communists,” writes Bailey. But wasn’t there also a similar if not identical loss of shame in our own country? Not immediately after the war—the rebuilding of Europe was all to our

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