Bad German, Good German

The experience of collective shame in an otherwise friendly land | By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Our correspondent has reported from the United States for nearly half a century and encountered the most varied reactions to his German identity, ranging from rank prejudice and nuttiness to heart-warming welcome.

TV host Glenn Beck’s last name sounds more German than mine and he looks it, too. Recently, his colleague Bill O’Reilly interviewed him, which is the sort of thing TV moderators do in today’s perplexing media landscape. O’Reilly said, “I am Irish-American and you are German-American.” Beck waved his hands in a gesture of rejection: “Oh no, no, no, I am just an American.”

There are 49 million German-Americans. They constitute 17 percent of the U.S. population, outnumbering their compatriots of Irish and English ancestry. Irish-Americans are not ashamed of their heritage, neither are Anglo- or Italian-Americans of theirs. Yet while many U.S. citizens are taking a renewed interest in their German roots, Beck’s dismissal of his origins on the air was by no means atypical. In fact, it was quite German.

Sixty years ago, when the Federal Republic of (West) Germany was founded, I was in boarding school. I remember listening on the radio to our first president, Theodor Heuss, presenting a formula of how to deal with our nation’s Nazi past. Those uninvolved with Hitler’s crimes – I was not even born when he came to power – should not feel collective guilt but a sense of collective shame, he said.

Of course even this would not apply to Beck who came into this world in Mount Vernon, Washington, in 1964. But, strangely, he rejected “his” German background in the way many Germans of my generation once first tried to hide their identity. Today, I am embarrassed to admit that when we began hitchhiking around Europe in the 1950s, we sometimes pretended to be Swiss or Dutch, Luxembourgers or even Austrians, disregarding the heavy Austrian contribution to our shared legacy, starting with Hitler himself.

Ever since arriving in America as a foreign correspondent in 1962, I have experienced regular reminders, some saddening and some maddening, of the collective shame Heuss spoke about. The day after I moved into my New York apartment, I went to a newsagent on First Avenue to order my “Times.” Thinking I was British, another customer asked, “Where in England are you from?” I answered, “I am German, born in Leipzig.” He said, “I was in Leipzig, too, as a bombardier in 1944. Sorry I missed you.” He was sorry not to have killed a seven-year-old child.

A little later, I interviewed an official of a Jewish restitution agency. I believe his name was Hans Müller, one decidedly more German than mine. “Before you ask questions, let me show you something,” he said, opening his desk drawer. Then he handed me his “Pour le Mérite.” It was the highest military medal Germany awarded in World War I. “I was a first lieutenant then and very patriotic,” Müller explained.

Müller exuded that aura of elegiac incomprehension that was most wrenching to this young reporter when encountering Jewish refugees. Why, he seemed to ask, was he, a wounded German veteran decorated for his bravery, hounded out of his homeland? He did not point an accusing finger at me. He wanted rather to befriend me – me, a fellow German. In moments like this, I was overcome by the most profound sense of shame.

In those days, the Washington Heights section of New York City was teeming with survivors of concentration camps. I befriended many of them. They eagerly asked about the Old Country. As they fed me German and Austrian dishes, they told me of their sadness over the derailment of the culture they and I shared and loved.

There were other times, though, when my sense of shame was challenged. Once a reporter of a leading U.S. newspaper with whom I shared office space accused me of “still being a Nazi.” We were both working on a story about American racial issues. He looked over my shoulders trying to make sense of my German manuscript and spotted the word, “schwarz.”

“Don’t you idiot know that schwarz is a derogatory term in this country?” he shouted. “But I am writing for Germans and ‘schwarz’ is the German word for black,” I replied. “I don’t give a s…., change it!” he commanded. “You have no right to use racist language in this country.” He was serious and sober: It was too early in the day for him to have had his first drink. (“Schwarz” is also the Yiddish word for black but sometimes used in a negative sense in American jargon).

On occasion, the opposite of anti-German prejudice ticked me off just as much as this incident. While covering the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, I was often told, “We chose the wrong allies in World War II,” meaning that the United States should have sided with Hitler. When I shook my head, I was accused of being a “Commie,” although this has never been my political preference: I was a refugee from Communist East Germany.

Then again, anti-German bias had light moments. Once I overheard the following argument between a husband and his wife:

He: “Our Audi is a lemon, I am going to get a Mercedes.”

She: “I would never get into a German car.”

He: “Well, what about the Audi, then?”

She: “I have nothing against Italians.”

He: “O.K. let’s get a BMW.”

She: “Fine, I like the British.”

This happened in the early 1980s around the time when former President Ronald Reagan caused much media stir by meeting then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the German military cemetery at Bitburg. It was meant to be a gesture of reconciliation. But Reagan’s statement that some of the young German soldiers buried there were “just as surely” – Reagan took care not to say, “just as much” – victims of an evil regime caused uproar. Over and over again, American television kept showing the grave of a fallen soldier who was barely 17 by the time he died.

One day during a party at my apartment, the discussion about Reagan’s remark became a screaming match until my friend Emil Landau, a Holocaust survivor with a thick German accent, shouted: “Stop it! I am the only one here who can speak about this subject with authority.” He rolled up his sleeve to show us the concentration camp number tattooed to his lower arm. Then he told us the following story:

He was an inmate in Auschwitz-Birkenau, young and strong enough to be “selected out,” as the Nazi jargon went, to work in a field rather than be murdered straight away in the gas chamber. The guard leading Landau to his workplace was a young Waffen SS (combat SS) conscript. He had been severely wounded at the Russian front and seconded temporarily to concentration camp duties while recovering from his injuries. According to Landau, they discovered that they were both 17 and hailed from the industrial city of Witten.

“So we are from the same town, what are you doing in this place?” the soldier wanted to know.

“I am here because I am Jewish,” Landau replied.

“But that’s no reason…”

At that point the soldier’s sergeant noticed that the SS man and the inmate were engaged in a personal conversation, which was forbidden. “The sergeant beat the soldier up and had him led away,” Landau recalled. “I never saw him again. I am sure that he was immediately returned to the front to die. To think that he was just a kid like I. Don’t tell me he was not a victim of an evil regime.”

This ended the party. Silently, the guests filed out of the apartment. In the years that followed, Landau spent much of his time working for the reconciliation between Germans and Jews, and telling young Germans about their country’s Nazi past. He died in 2007. He too rejected the idea of collective guilt. But in his presence, it was easy for his German contemporaries to comprehend the concept of collective shame.