After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present

CHAPTER 1

EMERGENCE OF LATENCY?

A Generation’s Beginning

June 15, 1948, was a bright yet muggy Tuesday in Bavaria. What would become of Germany appeared altogether uncertain: the nation’s immediate past weighed heavily, even if people hardly talked about it. Nobody seemed aware—perhaps no one really cared—that just one week later the future would be determined. The front page of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung—Muenchner Nachrichten aus Politik, Kultur, Wirtschaft und Sport looked much the same then as it does now, except that on this day it featured a black-and-white photograph of Carl Zuckmayer (a German-born author who had become American) with his wife and his daughter, and the price was just twenty Pfennig. At the top of the page, five articles presented the key political news of the moment, in Germany and abroad, in a strangely detached fashion. It was announced that preparations for currency reform (Waehrungsreform) in the three zones occupied by Allied forces had now been finished; all that remained was to wait for official word about the exact date the new monetary order would go into effect. Another article covered a campaign speech President Truman had delivered in Berkeley, California, where he appealed to the Soviet Union not to abandon the collective effort to secure the democratic future of a united Germany. (In all likelihood, the Western allies and Soviet Union were equally inclined to partition the country, even though, for reasons of political gamesmanship, each side had to impute the plan to the other one.) Two brief items reported that the French Parliament was hesitant to ratify the initial political steps necessary to establish a West German state, despite the decision reached thirteen days earlier in London by the other Western allies and Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg. Finally, the American Military Governor, General Clay, was quoted in a press conference promising that the United States would make every effort to assure East German representation in the new state. Four of these five articles were composed in the neutral style typical of press agencies—indeed, they came from AP, Dena-Reuter, and UP. The sole item to be written by newspaper staff, although it discussed imminent economic reform—and therefore a matter of vital existential concern—may well have struck the most dispassionate tone of all. Elsewhere on the page, two other features adopted a somewhat livelier—and occasionally aggressive—style, even though they addressed topics warranting greater tact and reserve from the German editors. The first was the well-known column on the left (which still runs today) entitled Das Streiflicht [the side-light]. On June 15, 1948, the column voiced criticism of American geopolitical strategy; in particular, it objected to the fact that the U.S., through a Foreign Legion approved by the Senate, was lending support to the Jewish State, which had been founded in the former British protectorate one month and one day earlier. With unabashed anti-Semitism concealed by a pacifistic veneer, Streiflicht mocked sixty-four non-Jewish Germans who had volunteered to fight for the cause and been rejected by Israeli authorities: We Germans could not have wished for a better way to rid ourselves of the lingering element of military aggression in our society. The most space—and self-congratulatory enthusiasm—was devoted to the Second International Youth Manifestation taking place in Munich, where fourteen hundred participants had gathered from twenty-one countries. The guests of honor included thirty German prisoners of war the French authorities had released for the occasion. Carl Zuckmayer received thundering applause when he declared that the youngest generation of Germans could not be held responsible for the most recent chapter of the nation’s past. The following day, as part of the Manifestation, the University of Munich was scheduled to confer, with full academic pomp and ceremony, an honorary doctorate upon the French novelist Jules Romains. Surprisingly, a belated delegation was announced from Spain—from a country, that is, where the military government (which had supported Hitler) was completely isolated from the emergent political order in Western Europe. This delegation received a particularly emotional welcome.

The young people gathered in Munich, the newspaper reported, spoke of their German friends with great respect; they wanted to be good neighbors, and they were even impressed by the quality of the rationed food supply. The matter of obtaining food—where and how to do so—was a concern of the first order for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and its readers. A lengthy article on page three (of the four pages comprising that day’s edition) discussed the legally sanctioned opportunity to buy meat from diseased animals [Freibank]; it made light of the physical needs the measure implied by describing, with ironic undertones, more than three thousand persons waiting in line. Culture, like food, received attention in terms of supply and quantity. Under the rubric, High Tide for Cabarets, three evenings of political cabaret in Munich were written up. The paper also reported on several new productions of classical dramas—plays by Lope de Vega and Henri de Montherlant, whose works were ubiquitous at the time. (Without a doubt, French culture enjoyed unrivaled prestige, as had always been the case in Germany before 1933.) The newspaper also ran a story on the exhibition at Haus der Kunst—opened by none other than General Clay—featuring works by Renaissance masters that American authorities had returned to the State of Bavaria. Even for a paper of just four pages, the sports section occupied little space, at least by today’s standards. It opened with the program of a boxing contest—boxing was probably the most popular sport in Germany then—that involved the cities of Zurich and Munich; the article applauded the event as a generous gesture on the part of the Swiss to end the ban on German athletes at international events. In contrast, a strangely elegaic tone permeated the soccer coverage: The team from Mannheim, despite a more mature style, did not manage a single goal; Munich 1860 scored once. One hopes that their offense, which left so much to be desired, will return to form one day. The bottom half of the same page was completely filled by ads for vacant positions. The most sought-after parties were men and women competent in business, administration, and typewriting, and girls to work as housekeepers (Alleinmaedchen). That day, the paper ran no ads from people seeking employment.

Without knowledge of local and historical context, a reader would have been hard pressed to imagine that the Sueddeutsche published on June 15, 1948, was written, printed, and distributed in a city whose urban center still lay in ruins from air raids. This city had been the official home of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party—the party of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler—which had unleashed upon humanity crimes of unprecedented technological perfection. It would have been even more difficult for the average reader to find signs of the truly miraculous (more than simply dramatic) turnaround that Munich and the country as a whole were soon to experience. It seems that those who had survived the war were so busy scrambling to survive in the new, everyday reality of peace that they could not appreciate their own achievements. Still less, it seems, could they gauge their own blindness. On that day late in spring, when the horrors of the past stood to one side and future success lay on the other, life likely felt as flat and pointedly featureless as the music broadcast on the American Forces Network—for example, Benny Goodman’s On a Slow Boat to China.

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The new currency, called Deutsche Mark, began to circulate under rainy skies in the American, British, and French zones on Sunday, June 20, 1948. Each citizen had the right to exchange up to forty old Reichsmark for the same amount in new money. A further allocation of twenty marks was scheduled for August. Larger amounts of cash could be traded at the rate of a hundred (old) to five (new); for checking and savings accounts, as well as outstanding payments, the rate stood at ten to one. Rationing restrictions were lifted on more than four hundred kinds of goods. Although the measures were accompanied by fear and a rise in unemployment, they proved effective in cutting ties to a debilitating part of the country’s past and paved the way for the economic miracle that would set the existential tone for the first years of the Federal Republic.

The speed of Waehrungsreform in the West caught the administration of the country’s Eastern half off-guard. Three days later, in order to protect the Soviet zone from being inundated with old—and now worthless—Reichsmarks, currency reform was implemented here, too. Economic transition in the East differed from its Western counterpart inasmuch as the authorities pursued the objective of social justice by offering better exchange rates to people with smaller amounts of money at their disposal. One day later, on Thursday, June 24—intensifying a tendency to intervene politically and militarily in response to world-political threats—the Soviet Union interrupted all land, rail, and water traffic between the Western part of Germany and Berlin. Despite doubts that were logistical, technical, and, above all, strategic in nature, General Clay, with the support of the British authorities, immediately ordered that an air bridge to Berlin be struck. Within a few weeks, two hundred sixty-nine British and three hundred fourteen American aircraft were making some five hundred and fifty flights a day. These missions, which went from Frankfurt, Hannover, and Hamburg to three West Berlin airports (Tempelhof, Gatow, and, beginning in December, Tegel), reestablished control over the former capital’s Western sectors and secured the survival of its population. Within less than a hundred hours between June 20 and June 24, 1948, the postwar had ended, and the Cold War (which had already been discerned as a nightmarish possibility for world affairs) began to materialize as the new reality. Before the end of the month, the Committee of the Eastern European Communist Parties under the leadership of the Soviet Union (Kominform)—seemingly obsessed with drawing sharp divisions on the political landscape—had excluded Yugoslavia’s Communist Party on the grounds that it harbored Anti-Soviet and Anti-Internationalist attitudes. Less than two months later, the countries occupying the West German zones announced the surprising decision that deliberations about the new constitution would take place in Bonn, a small university town near Cologne.

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If, in the few weeks it took for the contours of a new world order to become visible, people seemed strangely unaware of the tensions that shaped their actions, the final months of the war had witnessed scenes of grotesque simultaneities and hysteria. Consider, for example, the chilling photograph from April 1945, in which Adolf Hitler—looking frail and much older than his fifty-six years—shakes hands with a line of boys in uniform, as if they were real soldiers, as if he still had any military (or even paternal) authority, as if the war were not long lost, and as if the youths actually believed there was any point to sacrificing their lives. Does this as if concern our impression, today, that certain gestures seem out of place, unsuited to the environment in which they occurred? Or is the as if an approximate formula (however inadequate) for the combination of helplessness and cynicism that marked the moment itself and the way it was experienced? Is it possible that, by the spring of 1945, Hitler still believed in his calling? Is it possible that the boys trusted him? Were the Germans who—a few days after unconditional surrender—were forced to walk through the concentration camps that their government and fellow citizens had built, actually being sincere when they claimed to have been unaware of these massive engines of death? What were my parents thinking when they sent friends and relatives cards of handmade paper (Buettenpapier) inscribed with Gothic letters to announce their engagement party on April 20, 1945? Even though they were not particularly active in the Party, this was Hitler’s birthday, and festivities were scheduled to take place in Dortmund, where one of the fiercest battles of the war had raged until only a few days before. Did they see any problem at all? Did it cross their minds that the damaged houses where they would be sleeping, eating, and having sex were somehow mismatched with the overly formal invitation cards? Or did they act as if nothing were happening because the abyss was simply too deep—and too near—to confront? Did ignorance enable them to survive? Was Hitler or anyone else in his piteous, subterranean Bunker really convinced, philosophically or religiously (if such adverbs are admissible in this context), when they claimed it was necessary and just for the German race to perish—to be physically destroyed and removed from the face of the planet—because it had proven weaker than other races and therefore unworthy of dominance?

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The grotesque stridency of the final stage of war was fated to disappear after the unconditional surrender of May 8, 1945. However, the as if of aggressively ignoring continued among survivors as the conditions of life grew worse than anyone could have anticipated. Such was the impression that the twenty-three year old Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman (Deutscher Herbst ’46) took away from his visit to Germany. Dagerman came during the autumn of 1946 to report on the situation—in all likelihood, one without historic or existential precedent—in a series of thirteen articles that appeared in Stockholm the following year. In merciless detail, Dagerman described the everyday life of a family inhabiting a ground-floor apartment that was permanently flooded. To say they were living under prehistoric conditions would be insufficient: they were people from a modern civilization who had been violently pushed back into cave life. Every step posed a risk, they had learned how to sleep without moving, and the threat of disease lurked everywhere. Instead of going to school or exercising a profession, children and grown-ups had to hunt for food; they spent their days gathering fuel for fire; occasionally, they bartered what they had found for clothing. No one had the time, energy, or desire to consider what might have caused their situation. Life was simply a matter of escaping death, every day. The few Germans who had the luxury of an occasional pause accepted, without protest, that the Allies held absolute control over what had been their country. At the same time, it must have felt natural for them to tell the foreign observer that they were being treated unfairly. Were they speaking truthfully and in good faith when they asked Dagerman whether they were responsible for Hitler and twelve years of Nazi rule? Were they acting honestly when they observed that the Germans, after their own military victories, had never treated other nations with comparable severity?

With the exception of the Nuremberg Trials, the Allies let German lawyers with a clean record preside over de-nazification—a process that provided the inevitable condition for reentry into professional and civic life. Dagerman took a dim view of this logistical decision. While he did not accuse the new civil servants (who, for the most part, had exercised the same profession before 1945) of blatant injustice or cronyism, he found that they lacked the passion and dedication necessary to detect and punish the crimes of the past; he thought they were failing to make a break comparable to the split that was to occur in the economic system some eighteen months later. Finally, Dagerman noticed mounting tension between two generations of Germans. Those between the ages of fifteen and thirty clearly blamed their older siblings and parents—that is, the people who had been in charge of the country between 1933 and 1945—for jeopardizing the present and future. In contrast—and more surprisingly—many older Germans believed that the younger generation should have protected (or even freed) the nation from Nazi rule. As Dagerman observed, no one really felt responsible.

An emblematic and notorious case involves the philosopher Martin Heidegger. For reasons that were biographically and intellectually convenient (that is, the worst possible reasons), Heidegger joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933—ten days after being elected Rektor of the University of Freiburg (with the Party’s approval). Almost from the beginning, Heidegger’s administrative tenure must have been problematic to the new rulers who, as far as we can tell, never even began to understand the importance of his philosophical work. Almost exactly a year after taking office, Heidegger asked to resign, and the request was granted. From that moment on, the philosopher kept distant from politics, even university politics. Occasionally, Heidegger offered critical remarks—albeit mild ones—about how the National Socialist movement was not fulfilling its historical mission. However, he never had the courage (nor, in all likelihood, the will) to quit the Party. In early 1947, Heidegger’s French reader and admirer Jean Beaufret sent a letter in which he asked the philosopher how he viewed—and, by implication, how he might now re-view or re-envision—the notion of Humanism. Clearly, Beaufret had been inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture L’existentialisme est un humanisme, which was very influential at the time. Heidegger’s reaction was less than politely negative. In a text destined to assume great importance after Germany’s unconditional surrender, he presented a vision of the contemporary state of philosophy (or thinking, as he preferred to say) that is unsparingly bleak. Such bleakness, I believe, resonates with the material condition of Germany at this moment in time.

Heidegger begins with a rhetorical question that heightens the position of authority he assumes in his conversation with Beaufret:

(Sie fragen: Comment redonner un sens au mot Humanisme? Diese Frage kommt aus der Absicht, das Wort Humanismus festzuhalten. Ich frage mich, ob das noetig sei. Oder ist das Unheil, das alle Titel dieser Art anrichten, noch nicht offensichtlich genug? (Gesamtausgabe 9, 315))

You ask: Comment redonner un sens au mot Humanisme? The question signifies the intention to hold on the word Humanism. I wonder if this is necessary. Are the ills produced by words of this kind not yet obvious enough?

It was never Heidegger’s style to admit he developed—much less modified—his philosophical positions in response to events in his surroundings. Here, however, the words not yet indicate that he is reacting to the influence of the devastating present. The Letter on Humanism offers a fundamental critique of traditional anthropocentrism. More specifically, this critique emphasizes that whatever importance Dasein (human existence) holds, it assumes this significance in relation to the unconcealment of Being—that is, the event of truth as a higher destiny (Geschick) in which Dasein plays a role without ever knowing why or how this role matters. As if he had never wanted to be what he had become (at least during his time as Rektor at Freiburg)—that is, a philosopher of a new conception of nationhood as a decisive existential frame—Heidegger rejected both nationalism and internationalism as inadequate configurations within the history of Being:

Angesichts der wesenhaften Heimatlosigkeit des Menschen zeigt sich dem seinsgeschichtlichen Denken das kuenftige Geschick des Menschen darin, dass er in die Wahrheit des Seins findet und sich zu diesem Finden auf den Weg macht. Jeder Nationalismus ist metaphysisch ein Anthropologismus und als solcher Subjektivismus. Der Nationalismus wird durch den blossen Internationalismus nicht ueberwunden, sondern nur erweitert und zum System gebracht. Der Nationalismus wird dadurch sowenig zur Humanitas gebracht und aufgehoben, wie der Individualismus durch den geschichtslosen Kollektivismus. Dieser ist die Subjektivitaet des Menschen in der Totalitaet. Er vollzieht ihre unbedingte Selbstbehauptung. Diese laesst sich nicht rueckgaengig machen. Sie laesst sich durch ein halbseitig vermitteltes Denken nicht einmal ausreichend erfahren. Ueberall kreist der Mensch ausgestossen aus der Wahrheit des Seins, um sich selbst als animal rationale. (341ff.)

Facing the essential homelessness of human existence, the future destiny of man reveals itself within history of Being as a finding of the truth of Being and a setting out for this path. In a metaphysical sense, any kind of nationalism is anthropocentric, and as such it is subjectivist. Mere internationalism will not overcome nationalism—on the contrary, it will only broaden it and take it to the level of a system. As collectivism without history will not redeem individualism, internationalism will not bring nationalism closer to humanitas. Collectivism is human subjectivity in its totalitarian form. It gives reality to unconditional human self-affirmation. There is no way of turning things around. It is not even possible to gain a sufficient experience of this situation through our usual, only half-mediated thinking. Everywhere human existence is excluded from the truth of Being as it only concerned with itself as animale rationale.

To read this passage in the bluntest terms, the philosophical metaphor of Heimatlosigkeit (homelessness) transformed the fate of the millions of Germans who had lost their familiar conditions of existence—to say nothing of the physical destruction that had occurred in German cities—into a concretization of what, according to Heidegger, represented the true crisis of the moment: the incapacity, perhaps even the ineptitude, of the current generation to apprehend its fate (Ge-Schick), i.e., the place-in-the-world to which unconcealed Being had assigned and sent them. Never before, I suspect, had his views of ontology and existence sounded more convincing than now, in a time of utter humility. The same held true for philosophy itself:

Es ist an der Zeit, dass man sich dessen entwoehnt, die Philosophie zu ueberschaetzen und sie deshalb zu ueberfordern. Noetig ist in der jetzigen Weltnot: weniger Philosophie, aber mehr Achtsamkeit des Denkens; weniger Literatur, aber mehr Pflege des Buchstabens.

Das kuenftige Denken ist nicht mehr Philosophie, weil es urspuenglicher denkt als die Metaphysik, welcher Name das gleiche sagt. Das kuenftige Denken kann aber auch nicht mehr, wie Hegel verlangte, den Namen der Liebe zur Weisheit ablegen und die Weisheit selbst in der Gestalt des absoluten Wissens geworden sein. Das Denken ist auf dem Abstieg in die Armut seines vorlaeufigen Wesens. Das Denken sammelt die Sprache in das einfache Sagen. Die Sprache ist so die Sprache des Seins, wie die Wolken die Wolken des Himmels sind. Das Denken legt mit seinem Sagen unscheinbare Furchen in die Sprache. Sie sind noch unscheinbarer als die Furchen, die der Landmann langsamen Schrittes durch das Feld zieht. (364)

It is time to stop overestimating philosophy and, thereby, burdening it with expectations it cannot fulfill. What we most need in the present misery of our world is less philosophy, and greater attention to thinking; less literature, and greater care for the letter.

In the future, thinking will no longer be philosophy because it will think in a more authentic way than metaphysics did (and metaphysics is synonymous with philosophy). Nor will future thinking fulfill Hegel’s promise that, abandoning its name of love of wisdom, it will become wisdom in the form of absolute knowledge. Thinking now finds itself in a state of decline relative to its initial essence. Thinking now gathers language into simply-saying. Thus, language becomes the language of Being as clouds are the clouds in the sky. Through the simplicity of what it says, thinking traces humble furrows within language. They are humbler, even, than the furrows the peasant slowly makes on the field.

In 1947, when Heidegger wrote these words about the misery of the world and the poverty of philosophy and employed images from the world of agriculture, the food supply in Germany had reached a level so low that it was life-threatening. After an unusually cold winter and a parched summer, the average daily caloric intake for adults had dropped to nine hundred—that is, to six hundred calories below the minimum limit determined by occupying Allied forces. Before the war, the figure had stood at three thousand. In the same period, the divorce rate rose from 8.9 per ten thousand people (1939) to eighteen (1948).

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In the early summer of 1948, things improved, yet very few Germans seemed to see the great change that was approaching. Was it because their situation had been so wretched for so long—for all time, as they thought—that they had lost the ability to imagine, or even to dream of, a different life? Did it seem impossible to return from their prehistoric state? In the May 1948 issue of Die Wandlung—an influential monthly journal of impressive intellectual quality and strongly democratic convictions edited by Dolf Sternberger, Karl Jaspers, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, and Alfred Weber—there shone faint glimpses of optimism: With more normal weather and a somewhat better supply of fertilizers, one hopes that the harvest will improve and perhaps provide between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred calories per day, instead of last year’s eight hundred. On the same pages, the editors affirmed, with an eye to the whole and a long-term perspective, Germany must rejoin the international community of trade and commerce, which would benefit all countries. Dolf Sternberger observed that the role of the nation state in international politics was on the wane, to be replaced by a tension between the two parties (as he called them): the American and Soviet blocs. The legal scholar and future Bundestag representative Adolf Arndt made the most brilliant and philosophically complex contribution to that particular issue. Like Heidegger, Arndt argued that a traditional belief in mankind had gone missing in the contemporary crisis, along with the conviction that humans possessed the means to resolve the problems they would continue to face. One example he mentioned, which involved a process that was not yet complete, concerned the twofold transition from the sacred State [Sakralstaat] to the social State, and the change from the national State to a universal order.