But can Austrians and Germans still rejoice? And are they even allowed to?
Due to the inexorability of statistical laws, it is safe to assume that every family tree around the world contains a murderer or other criminal. You only need to go back far enough in time to encounter one with 100% certainty.
How do people deal with this inevitability? One option is to hang a portrait of the man — more rarely the woman — in the entrance hall of one’s home for all to see. The intention is to prove to oneself and one’s guests that one is honest about one’s past, concealing nothing and embellishing nothing. To dispel any suspicion from the outset, every guest is shown the picture as soon as they arrive. Yes, to complete the ritual of this clear-sighted self-awareness, one also demonstratively beats one’s breast with the words “Nostra Culpa, nostra maxima Culpa.” Everyone should see that we are forever aware that there is a criminal in our family history. We insist on declaring this memory to be a part, perhaps even the most important part, of our identity.
It will hardly escape the reader that this attitude describes the relationship of Austrians and Germans to their history in a somewhat depressing but fairly accurate way. After the mass murder of their fellow citizens during the Nazi regime, they committed themselves to this ritual before the entire world. They present their criminal past to themselves and to every guest in the reception room as an ever-present part of their self-definition. But is this an honest and therefore indispensable way of “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) – is it the only way to do justice to the innocent victims after the fact?
If the history of Germany and Austria consisted of nothing more than the thirteen ill-fated years of the Nazi era, then the answer would have to be yes. Then there would be no more days of joy, because such an identity would be synonymous with an eternally festering wound. But does our history really consist only of these thirteen years? Are we not committing a horrendous distortion of history? Shouldn’t there be at least a hundred, if not a thousand, pictures of people with smiling faces hanging next to the murderer’s image, people who were decent, honest, perhaps even great role models for others? Why do we see nothing but the monster’s grimace in the reception room? Why does no one raise the obvious objection that we are committing a new injustice when we close our eyes to those numerous people we could admire? Shouldn’t they, since they are the vast majority, be the ones who define our true identity? Germans and Austrians would only have the duty never to forget the dark times in their history if they were at least equally prepared to honor everything their ancestors achieved in politics, sacrifice, art, and culture, and to value it at least as much. But they have done exactly the opposite. The murderer hangs in the reception room and within their heads, and they want nothing more to do with the role models of the past, as if the latter had never existed.
This false equation of national identity with crime contradicts the basic laws of biology and psychology. Every normal mother is anxious to bring only joy to her child, the new citizen of the world, and above all to protect him from anything that brings him into contact with evil and ugliness. She knows that her child will encounter evil at some point anyway, but as long as it is within her power, she will protect her child from it. A mother would never hang the murderer’s portrait in the living room, let alone in the nursery, even if she knows that he is an undeniable part of her family history. Have reason and insight ever protested against this motherly protection?
Every child, every generation, every year, and even every day is a new beginning, and it should be — only under this condition can we survive. We do not need to deceive ourselves, as the Austrians did for so long when they portrayed themselves as victims of National Socialism. Evil is as much a part of a nation’s history as it is of every individual’s, but the same is true of goodness. A new beginning is only possible if we value one part at least as much as we condemn the other. The Thirty Years‘ War of the 17th century unleashed an incredible degree of most inhuman brutality. Simplicissimus Teutsch has left a lasting testimony to this horror. And yet, surprisingly quickly, it was possible to make a fresh start. In the works of Telemann, Bach, and Handel—the great names in music history—we hear, barely half a century after the horror, the rebirth of a joie de vivre that seems almost impossible to us today. At the end of the eighteenth century, this ability culminates in Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Did these great figures of our history forget to hang the murderer in their reception rooms?
There is hardly a people in the world that has suffered as much at the hands of their fellow humans as the Jews. They would have had every reason to define their identity solely through suffering. Instead, in their celebrations, they invoke the overcoming of suffering through the great deeds of their ancestors – and they always invoke the joy associated with these deeds. Jewish humor and wit are its specific expressions. The incredible ability not to despair of existence despite all the suffering is the reason why this people, scattered across all continents, has survived for three millennia.
The murderer in one’s reception room, whom one presents to oneself and one’s guests as an essential part of identity, while ignoring the vast part of history that could give courage for a new beginning, evokes in simple minds an equally simple defense – even malicious protest. If young people are denied real role models because the past is dismissed as worthless or is simply forgotten, then, knowing nothing else, they will take the murderer himself as their role model. They will reinterpret his brutality as strength, understand his fantasies of extermination as a doctrine of salvation in order to put an end to a corrupt system, and his inhumanity will appear to them as the essential mark of superman.
It’s a sad fact that the murderer has firmly established himself in the reception room of German and Austrian mentality. He has spread there like a creeping poison that corrodes all joy in existence. One sometimes gets the impression that the Germans — with the exception, of course, of the eternal reactionaries — would prefer to abolish themselves. Their language was spoken by Hitler, so their language has become worthless. Hitler turned homeland and fatherland into battle cries, so we are no longer allowed to talk about homeland and fatherland. Hitler’s youth had to sing all those folk songs that were part of a great tradition in Germany and Austria. But after Hitler, Germans and Austrians forgot how to sing. No, they didn’t forget, they became embarrassed because singing expresses a joy that they forbid themselves.
In Germany and Austria, people wanted to “come to terms” with the past by inflicting violence on themselves. But violence always leads back to evil, even if it is done with good intentions. Reflecting on crimes is essential if it helps us to better understand their causes. But on its own, the rejection of evil is not a life-sustaining force; it can only become so if it goes hand in hand with love and training in life-affirming thinking and action. In this context, what counts are living role models or interaction with the great figures of the past who were once embodying such models. Our attempts to come to terms with the past have had little effect because they lack this life-affirming dimension. They presented few role models in the present, discarding all those from the past. We have become obsessed with constantly conjuring up evil – the murderer who hangs in the reception room for all to see. In this way, we have not overcome the past but rather abolished it. We are now being presented with the consequences of our ill-considered approach. It consists of the threatening rise of political extremes on both the right and the left. This gives us even less reason to rejoice, but perhaps a reason to search anew for our history and identity.