Review of Jane Kramer's The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York: Random House, 1994).

Several years ago, my husband and I were unexpectedly offered the chance to spend a weekend in a famous and rather isolated hotel on the island of Madeira. Within a few hours of our arrival, we realized that the only other inhabitants of the famous hotel below retirement age were a German couple from Hamburg. Thrown together by chance, we dined four nights running with two people whom we would otherwise never have met.

He was a miller--that is to say, he owned and ran a factory that produced flour. His wife was plump and beringed and bejeweled: my husband privately nicknamed her Miss Piggy. Extremely hospitable, expensively dressed, intelligent without being intellectual and in their late thirties, they regaled us with stories of provincial German social life, of the activities of the local branch of the Christian Democratic Party, and, most of all, of the world of the Mittelstand, the medium-sized businesses which create most of Germany's wealth. He described the manner in which the bakers and millers in his part of Germany ran an effective cartel, dividing the market up between them; she explained the advantages and disadvantages of life in various Hamburg suburbs. They were fervently in favor of the European Union and NATO, staunchly opposed to German troops being sent abroad, indifferent toward Eastern Europe--including Eastern Germany--and felt deeply embarrassed when my husband, who is Polish, spoke about the war.

It may seem odd to mention this particular couple at the beginning of a review of a somber, elegant book about Germany, entitled The Politics of Memory: after all, they showed no interest whatsoever in the politics of memory, and were neither somber nor elegant. They were interested in hard work, their new Porsche, and Helmut Kohl; they stayed far away from neo-Nazi skinheads, arguments about war monuments, Berlin, and anything else that smacked of revanchism or obsession with Germany's past.

Nevertheless, I think it is important to describe them, because otherwise it is difficult to place in context the material contained within this book, a collection of Jane Kramer's articles about Germany reprinted from The New Yorker. Like most Americans--and most non-Germans--who set out to understand Germany, Kramer is obsessed with Germany's past, and with Germany's attitude to Germany's past, almost to the exclusion of everything else that happens in Germany. She is not particularly interested in the lives led by the wives of flour millers in Hamburg, but prefers (it is clear from the acknowledgments in this book) to surround herself, when in Germany, with the relatively small minority of mostly left-wing German intellectuals who feel the same way as she: the minority who discuss German identity, write books and articles about German identity, think constantly about German identity. That is no surprise either--four dinners with the flour miller and his wife was plenty, and I can quite see that no one would want to write a book about them.

But left-wing German intellectuals do not speak for all of Germany, and the interests and concerns of left-wing German intellectuals do not represent the interests and concerns of all Germans. Nor do the people and subjects of this book--Berlin intellectuals in black jeans and wire-rimmed glasses, East German dissidents, pop musicians, skinheads, radical artists--seem very similar to most Germans. To her credit, Kramer acknowledges that her interests present a skewed picture, that she herself has been infected by the obsessions of her friends. In her introduction, she describes a reading she gave at the Hamburg Literaturhaus, where she read aloud from selections of her work, not only from Germany but also France and Italy. For the latter two countries, she chose light, amusing stories; her German work is naturally "heavier." At the end, a man raised his hand. "In a rather discouraged voice", he asked her, "'Why don't you ever write something funny, something like that, about Germany?'" Kramer writes that "It's a question I have been asking myself since then, but I can't pretend to have an answer."

This is not to say that what Kramer produces is dull. On the contrary: although the stories she chooses to write are not light or funny, they do focus on those aspects of German life that are undoubtedly the most interesting. Her best tale is probably her first: the story of Hartmut Bitomsky, a sixties-era radical who opens a restaurant with famously good food called Maxwell, in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin mostly inhabited by nineties-era radicals. One subset of the nineties-era radicals--the anarchist squatters, a peculiarly Berlin phenomenon known as the Autonomen--determines that Maxwell is too genteel, too expensive for Kreuzberg, too attractive to well-heeled visitors from other parts of Berlin. Beginning with threats, graduating to a bit of window smashing and a "people's trial", they finally enter Maxwell with buckets of shit and empty them all over the floor. Hartmut Bitomsky closes his restaurant and moves away.

Kramer does not end the story there, however. She goes on to interview Strumpf, Bitomsky's successor, and proceeds to dissect the delicate code which makes Strumpf's restaurant acceptable to the Autonomen where Maxwell was not. Strumpf opens his restaurant for breakfast, offering a "Day After" (two aspirin and a cup of coffee) as well as an "Existentialist" (Gitanes and coffee). He serves deliberately bad food, encourages leather-clad punks to hang around all day drinking weak coffee, and closes the restaurant on May Day, the day the Autonomen like to riot with the police. Yuppies no longer come for dinner. Strumpf has worked out the code, and the Autonomen accept his restaurant.

Kramer's thesis, by the end of this story, is clear. She sees the incident as an omen, a reflection of what the "new"--reunited, newly self-confident--Germany might become. No one in power really comes to the defense of Hartmut Bitomsky; everyone appears to be slightly afraid of the Autonomen. In her introduction, Kramer says that this story is "really a story about a new fascism, about the first stirrings of that fascism, in people whom we would now call skinheads but who were posing then, even to themselves, as something radical and revolutionary and free." The story is indeed creepy; Kramer has made her point.

She goes on to elaborate upon that point elsewhere in the book. In each story, she has picked up another aspect of the "new" Germany. She describes an almost ludicrous argument about a project, spearheaded by a talk show hostess, to build a memorial to the Jewish Holocaust in Berlin--an argument that degenerates into a somewhat sinister fight about the "correct" way to interpret Germany's history. She describes another creepily conformist "scene": the East German painters and poets in Prenzlauer Berg, who are tormented by the fact that one of the most famous of their number turns out to have been a Stasi spy--and further tormented by the fact that it appears, years afterwards, as if their underground presses and galleries were in fact funded by the Stasi itself.

Kramer also devotes a chapter to the story of one particularly passive, peculiarly unappealing East German, Peter Schmidt, who appears to have been robbed of the will to live, to work, to think for himself by the East German communist state. East Germany, she writes, "trying to teach Peter about what he was--trying to produce a worker for a workers' state, someone not too smart, not too skeptical, someone cooperative--had neglected to teach him anything about who he was, or how to get to be himself." All of these stories are well told, extensively researched--other reporters must envy Kramer the time she appears to have been allowed to spend on each one of them--and have a brilliantly crafted, almost ambivalent tone. Kramer does not make her points by shouting them: she describes each situation in a way designed to make the reader come to the final conclusion himself.

But if the quality of the writing is unquestionably high, it was difficult, while reading The Politics of Memory, to feel wholly convinced about the main thesis. In particular, my mind kept turning back to the Hamburg couple: Was this the world they lived in? Was this their Germany, this world of Stasi spies and Autonomen? Was their Germany also a world of incipient fascism, newly confident aggression, and falsified history?

I don't think so, and I don't think it's the world of dozens of other Germans I have met either. Step back a moment from Berlin and the skinheads, and look at Germany as a whole. Here is a nation that has been resolutely peaceful, and virtually disarmed, for half a century. Here is a nation that has, at least since the 1960s, discussed its Nazi past with a thoroughness far beyond anything found in any other nation that participated in the Holocaust--there is almost nothing like the German discussion of the Holocaust anywhere else in Europe, certainly not in Austria, not in Hungary, not in France. Here is a nation whose one xenophobic political party, the Republikaner, has failed to make any headway in recent elections, something which cannot be said of France or Austria, where xenophobic parties, both led by men who are actually Holocaust revisionists, are doing extremely well.

Here is also a nation whose western half has had one of the most successful democracies in Western Europe for the past half century, whose eastern half has been incorporated into that democracy with an almost unbelievable speed and smoothness. Kramer, at one point, almost sympathizes with Peter Schmidt's criticism of his mother for voting for the Christian Democrats, a "West" party, and often seems to side with the argument, frequently heard in leftish circles in Germany, that the East somehow "sold out" to West German politics, and failed to create something "new" for itself. But look at it from another angle: Is it not little short of amazing that a woman like Hannelore Schmidt, who lived all of her life in East Germany, could even conceive an enthusiasm for a politician so robustly democratic and capitalist as Helmut Kohl?

Kohl himself is clearly not to Kramer's taste, and no wonder. He isn't interesting in the way that a deconstructionist East German poet is interesting: He is truly a politician of what is already being called the "Bonn Republic", the postwar German federal state, as opposed to the "Berlin Republic" now taking shape. But it was precisely Kohl's bull-headedness and lack of grace, Kohl's willingness to "buy" East Germany from Gorbachev right at the only moment when it was possible, that made the reunification of Germany possible. Another, more sensitive man would have dithered and worried about the implications, which were and are immense. But Kohl succeeded, in the same way that the Bonn Republic succeeded: through stolidness, hard work, and the refusal to spend too much time on extraneous thought.

The same can be said of Kohl's frequently stated desire to emphasize the "positive" in Germany's past, to find things for Germany to be proud of. That is not a desire designed to appeal to Kramer or to her German friends. But reading her chapter on skinheads, I began to wonder whether there might not be a case for a positive form of German nationalism. Unless there is something for young Germans to be proud of, their reaction against the German establishment might get even worse. After all, other nations are allowed shows of patriotism, and a bit of flag-waving now and then. Certainly Americans allow themselves to indulge in it without ever thinking of themselves as "nationalist" or "fascist." With his plodding realism, Kohl appears to have grasped that as well.

Kramer also focuses on the less appealing side of reunification. But here her work, completed in November 1991, is already somewhat out of date. She was right, at the time, to focus on the many mistakes that were made during the reunification process: many West German companies were greedy, many East German companies were unnecessarily dismantled, many unsavory deals were made with unsavory people, the culture of the East, such as it was, was overwhelmed by bananas, McDonalds, and billboards.

But in comparison to the chaos and hardship that took place in many other countries escaping communism, East Germany already seems to have escaped relatively easily. By comparison even to Warsaw and Budapest, the speed with which things are changing in Berlin is spectacular. On my last visit to the city in December, tourists who once filed up a special tower to get a good view of the Wall were filing up another special tower to get the best view of what is now the largest building site in Europe. By comparison to Russia, where the crimes of the former communist state are still virtually a public secret, East Germany has also dealt very well with its spies and informers, opening its secret police files to everyone who wants to see them. By comparison to other countries, the whole process has been highly civilized. Kramer regrets the ongoing misunderstandings: the truth, she writes, "is that East and West Berlin may not have much to say to each other for a couple of generations." But it will take far more generations than that for Russians and Bulgarians to live in anything resembling a liberal Western culture, or for Poles and Hungarians to come to terms with communism, or for Slovaks to enjoy a democracy as healthy as that in eastern Germany.

The other question--and this too is one Kramer puts to herself--is how "German" these stories are. Anyone who has spent much time in Eastern Europe will recognize the story of Peter Schmidt, the passive East German. To me, he sounded exactly like two Russian-Jewish friends of mine who managed to wangle permission to emigrate to Germany, where they now sit, waiting for other people to help them. Anyone who has spent any time in an American university will recognize the story of the Berlin restaurant as a classic case of political correctness run wild. I too can remember my university colleagues making quite harsh and hurtful distinctions between one another based on clothes and personal style. Indeed, anyone who has paid any attention to the news stories about the militia men in the United States ought to recognize Kramer's skinheads. After all, German skinheads get their neo-Nazi literature from the United States. We are the country that is the largest producer of such material: Who are we to point fingers at Germany?

German reviewers of The Politics of Memory have judged it rather harshly: the review in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was entitled "Landing at Tegelhof", poking fun at the name Kramer--or, one hopes, her copy editor--gives the Berlin airport (there are in fact three Berlin airports, including Tegel and Tempelhof). The reviewer concluded that the book seemed like an interesting account of a place to which he had never been. I would put it differently: a book that relies on chic leftish intellectuals for analysis, and chooses Berlin artists and skinheads for its subject matter, is no more representative of Germany than a book about Harlem ghettos, as explained by left-wing sociologists, would be representative of the United States. But perhaps it doesn't matter. There are many Germans who would argue the same things as she: there are many Germans who also worry about Germany slipping, once again, into a new form of fascism. One doesn't have to agree to find the argument interesting. The best sort of journalism is the journalism that makes the debates and discussions of other countries seem relevant to us, and The Politics of Memory succeeds brilliantly in doing that.