Dialog International

German Left Party Under Surveillance While Nazis Run Free

For years the National Socialist Underground was traveling around Germany and murdering immigrants and the occasional police officer but the German domestic intelligence agency was using taxpayer resources to spy on the freely elected representatives of the Left Party (die LINKE):

Germany's opposition far-left Left Party is under more intense surveillance from domestic intelligence than previously thought, SPIEGEL has learned. Information from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) reveals that 27 Left Party parliamentarians are being observed -- more than one-third of the party's 76-strong parliamentary group.

The BfV is reportedly watching not just radical party members, but also a number of more moderate members, including almost all of the Left Party's leading figures in parliament. Among the targets are leader Gregor Gysi, deputy chairwoman Sahra Wagenknecht, and members of the party's parliamentary committee Dietmar Bartsch and Jan Korte.

Of course the Left Party is a danger to German democracy, since the party espouses such extremist views as the immediate withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan and a national minimum income - both positions supported by an overwhelming majority of Germans. 

Meanwhile, as Mely Kiyak writes in a terrific rant in the Frankfurter Rundschau, the neo-Nazis and their allies in the media such as Thilo Sarrazin and Udo Ulfkotte are living the high life in Germany, "like God in France": 

Kein Kopf ist gerollt, keine Republik erschüttert, nie übernahm ein Minister Verantwortung für Mordopfer von rechter Gewalt, keine Rücktritte. Kein Umdenken, kein Umschreiben der Schulbücher, keine Gesetzesänderung. Die Umerziehung des deutschen Volkes, das sich wie zu besten Nazizeiten als genetisch homogenes Volk begreift und Angst vor seiner Abschaffung hat, ist misslungen. Köstlicher Zustand, dieses Nazi-Sein! Ein bisschen scheinheiliges Gedenkminüteln im Parlament, hin und wieder ein Kerzenmarsch, ansonsten, freies Land für freie Nazis.

(No heads have rolled, no republic has been shaken, no minister ever took responsibility for the murdered victims of right-wing violence, no resignations. No re-thinking, no re-writing of text books, no changes in the law. The reeducation of the German people - who, just as in the Nazi era think of themselves as a genetically homogeneous people and are terrified of being eliminated - has failed. It's a grand time to be a Nazi! A little sanctimonious hand-wringing in the parliament and now and then a candlelight march but otherwise - a free country for free Nazis.)

The Great Standard & Poor's Conspiracy Against the Eurozone

It's funny how anti-Americanism is hard-wired in the mindset of both the Left and the Right in Germany.  The Eurozone is in crisis due to mismanagement and over-borrowing by a number of EU countries.  This leads to a downgrade in the credit rating of debt securities by Standard & Poor's.  But for pundits and demagogues the tail wags the dog and the crisis is deliberately triggered by the rating agency as part of an Anglo-American sonspiracy against the European continent: 

When such political adversaries as European parliamentarian Elmar Brok, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, and German Left Party bigwig Gregor Gysi agree on something, skepticism is warranted. Particularly if the two use almost exactly the same words.We find ourselves, said Brok, after rating agency Standard & Poor's recently downgraded the credit rating of nine euro-zone countries late last week, in a conflict akin to a "currency war." The agencies, he went on, are pursuing "Anglo-American political interests."

Left Party leader Gregor Gysi was even more pointed in his attack:

"Wir haben es gegenwärtig mit einem Krieg der Banken und der amerikanischen Ratingagenturen gegen die europäischen Völker zu tun", wetterte der Chef der deutschen Linksfraktion am Samstag in Berlin.

("We are now dealing with a war of the banks and American rating agencies against the people of Europe" the head of the German Left Party fuliminated on Saturday in Berlin.)

And on the party's Web site, Sahra Wagenknecht, the rising star of the Left Party, rails against the "extortion: (Erpressung) of Standard & Poor's: 

Die LINKE fordert daher, die Macht der Rating-Agenturen zu brechen und die Staatsfinanzierung vom Diktat der Finanzmärkte zu befreien. Statt das Wachstum durch drakonische Kürzungsprogramme abzuwürgen und die Bevölkerung der Krisenländer in die Armut zu treiben, müssen außerdem europaweit Konjunkturprogramme aufgelegt und öffentliche Investitionen getätigt werden.

(Therefore the Left Party demands that we break the power of the ratings agencies and the free the national budget from the dictates of the financial markets. Instead of choking off growth with draconian cuts and forcing the populations of the countries in crisis into poverty, we need to establish a growth program and make public sector investments.)

It is instructive to read some of the comments on the official site of the neo-Nazi NPD: 

Nach erfolgter Abwertung sanken die Zinsen für US-Anleihen!
Die Rating-Argenturen sind Amerikaner! Ein Schelm, wer Böses dabei denkt!

(After the downgrade the interest rate fell for US Treasury Bonds! The ratings agencies are American! Only a scoundrel would think there's something fishy here!)

Bei Rating-Agenturen wie Standard & Poor’s handelt es sich ...um die Flugzeugträger im Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrieg der Anglo-Amerikaner gegen Kontinentaleuropa!

(Ratings agencies like Standard & Poor's are the aircraft carriers in the financial and economic war of the Anglo-Americans against continental Europe!)

Another commenter asks the rhetorical question: "Who controls the wealth in the US?  And the institutions of wealth?"  Well, the answer can be found on several related Web sites:

Derzeit verschärfen, welch ein Zufall zeitlicher Übereinstimmung, die amerikanischen Ratingagenturen, angeführt von der Firma Standart&Poors, durch die Herabsetzung der Kreditwürdigkeit von EU - Staaten die Krise im EURO - Raum. Und natürlich ist auch diese Firma eine große jüdische Gesellschaft in Amerika. Und besonders die jüdischen Chef Analysten David Zuber und Standard & Poor's Chief Economist David Wyss werden von den jüdischen S&P Chefs von der Leine gelassen wenn es darum geht, gute Gründe gerade JETZT zu finden, dem EU - Raum seine Kreditwürdigkeit zu entziehen...

(What a coincidence that the American ratings agencies, led by Standard & Poor's, have exacerbated the crisis in the Eurozone with credit downgrades. And, of course, this is a big Jewish company in America.  In particular, the Jewish chief analyst David Zuber and S&P's Jewish chief economist David Wyss are let loose by the Jewish S&P bosses when it's time find good reasons to destroy creditworthiness of the Eurozone...)

It's amazing how little conspiracy theories have changed through the ages.  But everyone wants to avoid speaking about the real conspiracy: the conspiracy of Eurozone governments and the people to borrow like there's no tomorrow.

US Professor: Germans had no knowledge of Holocaust

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, where senior officials of the NS-regime met to decide on the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". To mark the occasion, an American professor of political science - Dr. Paul Gottfried - has published a piece absolving Germans of any guilt in the Holocaust.  According to Gottfried, the notion that the German people were complicit in carrying out the "Final Solution" is a "leftist" myth that has been used to demoralize Germans and force them to turn away from their national identity:

Basic to this self-flagellation is having Auschwitz serve, in a former German foreign minister’s words, as the “founding myth for the German Federal Republic.” One must believe that not only did the Third Reich murder millions of Jews, but that Germans of all classes and regions happily cooperated.

This borders on Holocaust denial.  And Gottfried goes on to accuse "leftists" of lying about the role of the Wehrmacht in participating in the mass murder of Jews and other ethnic groups.  Gottfried repeats the claim made by right-wing nationalists that the Wehrmacht is blameless and was simply fighting a war for national honor. Professor Gottfried bases his conclusions on the work of a single historian:

It is against this background of lunacy that Alfred de Zayas, a retired high official from the UN Commission for Human Rights, has released Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis (Genocide as a State Secret, 2011). Zayas has authored other controversial works that go against the prevalent leftist grain. Among his earlier studies are heavily documented examinations of Eastern Europeans’ organized murders of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) after the Second World War, as well as the postwar agreements that greased the skids for these crimes. Zayas’s works are all painstakingly documented, and his latest study is based on thirty-five years of interviews and a laborious sifting of sources. The author fine-combed the records and testimonies of the Nuremberg Trials in 1946-47 and interviewed surviving “war criminals” including Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, the Nuremberg prosecutors, and former war prisoners of the Nazis.

Evidently Gottfried doesn't believe that Speer - who used slave labor on a massive scale to carry out his grandiose projects - was a war criminal.  But it is completely absurd that de Zayas (and Gottfried) absolve the Wehrmacht of all guilt based on the findings of the Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle für Verletzungen des Völkerrechts (Wehrmacht Office for the Investigation of Violations of International Law) which German historians have long since unmasked as nothing more than a Nazi public relations unit.  Anyone interested in the true role of Wehrmacht in carrying out the Nazi criminal enterprise should read Wolfram Wette's book on the subject: The Wehrmacht: History, Myth and Reality ( 2006), Wette explodes the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity. 

But Gottfried's (and de Zayas') larger thesis - that the Holocaust was the work of just a small circle of SS officers and kept secret from the German population - is even more disturbing.  For a crime of this scale required the active cooperation and participation of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens.  From the workers who produced and packaged Zyklon B, to the engineers who designed the gas chambers and crematoria, to the credit committees of Dresdner Bank who approved the project financing for Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Of course people knew what was going on.  Surveys conducted in the 1950s and 1960s by the Americans and the Allensbacher Meinungsforschungsinstitut revealed that between 25% and 40% of Germans were aware of the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich.  But none of that matters, of course, to Professor Gottfried whose only goal is to attack historical research as a "leftist plot".  Gottfried's sole source of information is Alfred de Zayas' 2011 book Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis which was deemed worthless by most historians (typical review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine -pdf warning). A much better - an meticulously documented - book on the subject is  Bernward Dörner's 2007 study Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte. 

What is Professor Gottfried's motivation in promoting historical-revisionist junk to an American audience?  Gottfried is senior editor of the Webzine Alternative Right, which, as I've written elsewhere is the American cousin of the völkisch-national weekly Junge Freiheit. 

GOP Europe-Bashing Intensifies

When did Europe join Iran and North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil?  If you listen to the Republican Party candidates for president, Europe is is the model for Barack Obama's plan to enslave Americans with social welfare program.  Mitt Romney has been the most vocal Republican in using Europe to attack the president: 

"He (Obama) wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society," he said in his victory speech after winning the New Hampshire primary. "We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity. This president takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America."

I can understand criticism of the fiscal practices of Eurozone countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain, but why does Romney paint Europe as antithetical to American values? Is it the fact that EU countries are committed to universal health care? That Europeans are healthier and live longer?  That Europe has better public schools that produce skilled knowledge workers for the 21st century economy? Is it the high-speed trains and superior transportation infrastructure?

Ever since Barack Obama took office in 2005 he has been portrayed by his right-wing detractors as the alien "other" - he's the Kenyan-born Muslim or an effete Harvard-educated socialist who goes around the world "apologizing" for America or the "food stamp president" who spits on "American exceptionalism".  There is a racist subtext to much of this, which Romney wisely wants to tone down, so painting Obama as a "European socialist" is a more acceptable way to say "he's not one of us''. 

The Atlantic Review takes note of Romney's Europe-bashing and doesn't believe it will gain much traction: 

Romney and the others won't succeed. Americans are smarter than these guys think. American voters know that bashing Europe will not fix US problems. Americans will vote for the person with the best plan to solve their economic problems.

I wish I could be as sanguine.

See also Lee Siegel's piece in the New York TImes:  What's Race Got to Do With It?

Review: Christa Wolf's Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud

In Thomas Brussig's funny 1995 novel Helden wie wir (English version: Heroes Like Us) about the collapse of East Germany the narrator pokes fun at Christa Wolf and calls her the "Super Mother" of East German literature („Übermutter“ der DDR Literatur). And that is precisely the persona she assumes in her last novel Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud). 

I'm sorry to say that Stadt der Engel doesn't really succeed as a novel.  It might of worked better as a notebook or personal memoir of an emotional crisis in the vein of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, but even that is questionable since the nameless narrator of Stadt der Engel - who is clearly the author herself - is too guarded to connect with the reader: we learn nothing about her as a woman, a mother, a wife.  Instead, we get the Übermutter of East Germany and are left with 400 pages of socialist navel-gazing.

Stadt der Engel covers the nine months that Christa Wolf' spent at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in the early 1990s.  The invitation from the Center came at an opportune time, since things were getting hot for Christa Wolf in Germany following the collapse of the GDR.  She arrives with the passport of the GDR - a country that no longer exists.  She is in mourning for the loss of her beloved country: throughout the book she refers to the collapse of East Germany as an Untergang (downfall) instead of Wende (turning point) which is the usual word.  Furthermore, the writer is still in shock that her fellow citizens in East Germany had rejected her call for a socialist renewal; they wanted to nothing more to do with utopian experiments.

But the sojourn in Los Angeles coincides with the revelation back home that Christa Wolf had briefly collaborated with the Stasi as IM Margarete ("informant Margaret") and spied on fellow writers.  Soon after her arrival in the US, the fax machine is humming with articles and essays from former colleagues, friends, and admirers who now treat her as an object of scorn.  This leads, midway through the book, to a nervous breakdown. What is devastating to the writer is not so much the act of collaboration, but the fact that she has no memory of it.  How ironic this selective amnesia is for Christa Wolf, whose novels explore how the past is always intruding on the present.  Her motto, which opens her 1976 novel Kindheitsmuster -

"Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen." (The past is not dead. It's not even past")

 - was lifted without attribution from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (perhaps she forgot these are not her words?).  In Stadt der Engel Christa Wolf employs the same narrative strategy as in KIndheitsmuster, using the first person for the present, and the addressing herself in the second person "Du" in recounting the past. 

The problem in Stadt der Engel is that not much happens.  The narrator has little interest in learning about America and spends much of her time holed up in her hotel room watching Star Trek episodes or having tiresome phone conversations with a German scholar staying in a room next door who also suffers from a deep depression.  A subplot involving the letters of a woman psychoanalyst, known only as L., who was forced to flee Nazi Germany, goes nowhere.  From time to time the narrator ventures forth to meet with other Germans staying in LA, or with aging Jewish refugees.  On these trips she sees homeless people and unemployed African Americans which gives her insight into awful injustice of (capitalist) American society and allows her to feel superior in her commitment the socialist utopia. 

Only in the last 20 pages does Stadt der Engel arouse some interest when the narrator leaves Los Angeles and travels through the desert in Arizona and Colorado to discover "the soul of America".  The impressions of the Hopi reservation are interesting, but then she ends up in the casinos of Las Vegas where she can smell the Untergang of the American empire. Finally this sense of impending doom sparks a momentary flash of insight - or at least questioning:

Das kleine Land aus dem ich kam, wa es zu unbedeutend, um Anteilenahme zu verdienen? Stand über ihm con Anfang an nicht das Menetekel des Untergangs: Ins Nichts mit ihm? Wäre es möglich, dass ich um einen banalen Irrtum so sollte gelitten haben?

(The small country I come from - was it too insignificant to deserve my sympathy? Didn't it exist from the beginning under the sign of downfall?  Is it possible that I suffered so because of a banal mistake?)

Christa Wolf joins that long list of émigré German writers, artists and composers who have nothing but disdain for America - the country that gave them sanctuary.  In this connection I highly recommend Michael Lentz's 2007 novel Pazifik Exil about the German exile community in Los Angeles.  Of course there are exceptions:  the great playwright Carl Zuckmayer fled the hothouse of the Los Angeles to raise sheep on a farm in Vermont, where he did discover "the soul of America" and wrote the charming Vermonter Roman.  Finally, for a very funny novel about a German writer lost in the vast expanse of America, I recommend Walter Kempowski's Letzte Grüße.

Sarrazin: Mixing German and Muslim Blood Creates a "Plow Horse"

Best-selling author and wannabe genetic scientist Thilo Sarrazin sounded the alarm about contaminating German blood with that of inferior races.  Speaking before an enthusiastic audience in Döbeln  Sarrazin compared Germans to the Lipizzaner stallions among horse breeds:

"Stellen sie sich vor, dies sei ein Gestüt mit Lipizzanerpferden. Und irgendwie wird in jeder Generation ein belgischer Ackergaul eingekreuzt. Völlig klar, die genetisch bedingte Fähigkeit zum Laufen sinkt", doziert Sarrazin mit vor der Brust verschränkten Armen. "Gleichzeitig steigt die genetisch bedingte Fähigkeit, einen Karren durch den Lehm zu ziehen. So ist das auch mit Menschen."

("Imagine that this is a stable of Lipizzaner stallions. And somehow in each generation they become crossed with a Belgian plow horse. It goes without saying: the genetic ability to run diminishes over time," Sarrazin lectures with his arms folded across his chest. "At the same time the genetically-determined ability to pull a cart through the mud only increases. That's how it is with human beings as well.")

Sarrazin is right.  What Germany needs immediately are new Nuremberg Laws that would criminalize the contamination of German blood with inferior genes from Turkey or "Arabia".  Otherwise Germany risks becoming a nation of plow horses like America, where we all have some Creole, African, French, American Indian, and God knows what other kind of blood running through our veins.  Hitler had nothing but contempt for this nation of "Mongrels"; he knew the Master (Aryan) Race could easily defeat us.  Oops!

Should Gauck Replace Wulff as President? Not so fast...

Americans are so wrapped up in the Republican presidential primaries that they most likely haven't noticed that Germany has a juicy presidential scandal of its own.  Germany's president, Christian Wullf, has come under attack for lying aboug taking a private loan from disreputable sources while he was premier of Lower Saxony.  Like most political scandals, its not so much the lies but the cover-up that's the issue here.  Wulff made threats against Germany's powerful tabloid Bild-Zeitung , which up to that point had always been his biggest champion, in a stupid effort to suppress the story about his financial dealings.

Now, according to the New York TImes, there is a growing chorus demanding that Wulff resign and be replaced by Joachim Gauck, a favorite of the SPD and the Green Party: 

“Mr. Wulff has long since been denigrated to a laughingstock,” Vera Lengsfeld, a member of Mrs. Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, wrote on her Web site. “Mr. Wulff’s credibility is now so damaged that he is only a caricature of that which he tried to be but apparently never was.”

Mrs. Lengsfeld called for Mr. Wulff to be replaced by Joachim Gauck, who ran against him in 2010. Mr. Gauck consistently trumped Mr. Wulff in public opinion polls at that time and was dubbed “the President of our Hearts” by the German news media.

But Gauck has some baggage of his own, which can only be a distraction if he becomes president:  he is a champion of Thilo Sarrazin, who made millions of euros from his best-selling book that claims Muslims are genetically inferior to "Germans": 

Der Sozialdemokrat Thilo Sarrazin wurde im Jahr 2010 von Gauck als mutig bezeichnet. Sarrazin habe “über ein Problem, das in der Gesellschaft besteht, offener gesprochen als die Politik”, sagte Gauck. Die politische Klasse könne aus dem Erfolg von Sarrazins Buch lernen, dass “ihre Sprache der politischen Korrektheit bei den Menschen das Gefühl weckt, dass die wirklichen Probleme verschleiert werden sollen”

(In 2010 Gauck characterized Thilo Sarrazin as "courageous".  Sarrazin "spoke openly about a real social problem," Gauck said.  The political class could learn something from Sarrazin's book, namely that "their language of political correctness raises suspiciouns that real problems are being obscured'.)

Also, Gauck was a signatory of the Prague Declaration which equates the crimes of Nazi fascism with Soviet communism.  The declaration has been criticized by many for relativizing - or minimizing - the horror of the Holocaust.

In general, however, I go along with Spiegel commentator Georg Diez, who recommends doing away with the largely ceremonial post of president altogether:

Ich würde zum Beispiel gern das Amt des Bundespräsidenten abschaffen, das ja eh nur eine Art Blinddarm der Politik ist: Wenn alles gut läuft, spürt man nichts, nur wenn er sich entzündet, merkt man, dass es ihn gibt.

(For example, I'd like to eliminate the office of the Federal President, since for a long time it's been a kind of "political appendix": when things are going well, you don't realize it's there.  But when it gets infected you know you have one.)

The presidency is relic from the early years of the Federal Republic recovering from the trauma of the Third Reich.  As an institution, it's usefulness has long since passed. 

Mitt Romney: Eine Heuschrecke im Weißen Haus? / A Locust in the White House?

US private equity groups are known in Germany as Heuschrecke ("Locust") for their standard business practice of acquiring cash-generating businesses, loading them with unsustainable levels of debt, paying themselves lavish dividends and "management fees" and then allowing the business to fall into insolvency, and finally bankruptcy and liquidation.  In the United States, these private equity investors are paradoxically called "job creators"; in fact, they are job destroyers. (Read my blog post on the sad story of Honsel AG). 

DIe Welt has a pessimistic 2012 scenario where Mitt ("Mittens") Romney - locust extraordinaire - takes the White House:  Eine Heuschrecke im Weißen Haus? Mitt Romney wird Präsident.

Romney, Jahrgang 1947, ist der erste Mormone im Weißen Haus. Der starke evangelikale Flügel der Republikaner überwand seine tiefen Vorbehalte gegen den einstigen Bischof der "Heiligen der Letzten Tage" in Boston, als alle alternativen Kandidaten, zuletzt Newt Gingrich, implodierten und das alte Parteiestablishment sich verzweifelt hinter Romney scharrte. Ungeliebt, hölzern mit dem einfachen Wahlvolk, gewann der Multimillionär genug Vertrauen bei parteiungebundenen Wählern, die zu den Verlierern der Wirtschaftskrise zählen und in Scharen aus Obamas Lager überliefen.

(Romney, born in 1947, is the first mormon in the White House.  The strong evangelical wing of the Republican Party overcame its deep reservations abou the one-time bishop of the "Latter Day Saints" in Boston, after all other candidates imploded, including, finally, Newt Gingrich, and the old party establishment stood behind Romney in desperation.  Unloved, wooden in his interaction with everyday voters, the multi-millionaire won enough support from independent voters, who saw themselves as victims of the economic crisis and defected in droves from Obama's camp.)

We will be hearing much about "Romney the Job Creator" but in fact, during his Bain Capital years he was a classic locust, enriching himself while destroying jobs in the US, outsourcing others to China, and leveraging Bain's portfolio companies with enormous amounts of debt. 

For a glimpse of what America might look like with a locust at the helm, read this article from the New York Times:  After Romney Deal, Profits and then Layoffs. 

Review: W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction

W.G.Sebald died ten years ago last month in a tragic accident - a terrible loss for both German and English letters.  To mark the anniversary of his death I picked up his last book: On the Natural History of Destruction (1999) (Anthea Bell's translation of Luftkrieg und Literatur). In this extended essay Sebald picks up the taboo topic of the Allied aerial bombing of Germany in World War II that reduced the great historic cities to rubble and killed more than 600,000 civilians.

Sebald's central thesis is that the terrible destruction and death from the bombings induced a kind of collective amnesia in the postwar population as evidenced by the near-complete absence of any treatment of the subject in German literature. 

"There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described.  The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could nt even be privately acknowledged."

Sebald feels there is something inherently German in this willful amnesia - this mass Verdrängung in a Freudian sense- which, nevertheless was useful in the rapid rebuilding of the ruined cities.  It was not only the economic support of the Marshall Plan that spurred the Wirtschaftswunder - Germany's postwar Economic Miracle:

"there was also a purely immaterial catalyst: the stream of psychic energy that has not dried up to this day, and which has its source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans todgether in the pastwar years, and indeed still binds them, more closely than any positive goal such as the the realization of democracy ever could."

Sebald acknowledges the few literary works that deal directly with the firebombing - especially Hans Erich Nossack's Der Untergang, which is an eyewitness account of the carpet-bombing of Hamburg.  He also mentions Heinrich Böll's early novel Der Engel schwieg ("The Silent Angel"), which Böll couldn't publish until 1992 due to the (taboo) graphic descriptions of the terrible deaths from the bombings.

Sebald makes only passing reference to the writer Gert Ledig (see my piece: Gert Ledig. Novelist of War) whose 1955 masterpiece Vergeltung ("Payback") is the shocking story of the firebombing of Munich.  The critical reviews of Vergeltung at the time were so negative that Ledig never again found a publisher for his fiction - which only supports Sebald's central thesis of willful amnesia.

But Sebald never extends his thesis to the perpetrators of the firebombing, even though he presents the records of the British High Command who deliberately targeted noncombatant civilians in an effort to demoralize the German populace.  It turns out the firebombings had the opposite effect.  Where are the American or British works of fiction that deal with this moral catastrophe? The only one that comes to mind is Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, written from the perspective of a survivor (Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was firebombed). For that matter, where are the American literary works that deal with Hiroshima (John Hershey's non-fiction book Hiroshima is a huge exception) or the carpet bombing of North Vietnam that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians?  Willful amnesia apparently knows no national boundaries. 

Some other resources for those interested in this topic:

• Volker Hage's Zeugen der Zerstörung: Die Literaten und der Luftkrieg is a response to Sebald's essay. 
• Oliver Lubrich's Berichte aus der Abwurfzone is a collection of eyewitness reports by non-Germans who happened to be in Germany as the cities were bombed.
• Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand (English edition: The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940 - 1945) is unlikely to be surpassed as a history of the Allied aerial bombing campaign.

Happy (Aryan) New Year!

(Via Publikative.org) People all across Germany are wishing each other today "einen guten Rutsch" ("a good slide") into the New Year, but the "linguists" within the neo-Nazi NPD have "discovered" (in horror!) that the word Rutsch has a Yiddish root:

Sie kommt aus dem Hebräischen. Rosch Haschana heißt wörtlich übersetzt “Kopf des Jahres” und bedeutet den Jahresanfang. Die Juden wünschen sich einen “guten Rutsch” nicht in den letzten Dezembertagen, sondern im September oder Oktober, wenn sie das neue Jahr beginnen.

("It comes from the Hebrew. Rosch Haschana means literally "head of the year" and means the start of the new year.  Jews wish each other "guten Rutsch" not in the last days of December, but rather in September or October, the start of their new year.")

Therefore, no honorable German should use the greeting "guten Rutsch"!

But, fortunately, the more intellectually astute cousins of the NPD over at Junge Freiheit have rescued this favorite phrase from the Jews:

Denn im Deutschen ist auch ohne jiddischen Einfluß bereits das Wort „Rutsch“ vorhanden, auch in der Bedeutung „kleine Reise“. Außerdem: Wer denkt eigentlich ans hebräische Neujahrsfest, wenn er einen „guten Rutsch“ wünscht? Hierzulande verbindet jeder damit doch eher den Gedanken an eine „gute Reise“ vom alten Jahr ins neue.

("For the word "Rutsch" already existed in German without the Yiddish influence, meaning "little journey".  Besides, who thinks about the Hebrew new year when he says "guten Rutsch"?  We all make a thought connection of a "good journey" from the old year into the new.")

We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to the "scholars" at the völkisch-national weekly Junge Freiheit for keeping New Years "Judenfrei".  

In diesem Sinne wünsche ich allen Leserinnen und Lesern von Dialog International  einen guten Rutsch in das Jahr 2012 hinein!