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Once again, Germans have to turn to foreign sources through which to understand their own history. The theater for Ein traumhafter Tag im vernünftigen Lebensraum Zone of Interest, the new British-Polish film about Auschwitz boss Rudolf Höss and his family, was packed on Sunday. The film delivered on its promise to serve up a subtle snapshot of the Holocaust that was more like The Sound of Music without all the pesky singing. At a merciful 100 minutes, the filmmakers told us what they wanted to say and got out.
Auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye.
As a timely bonus, the story and its telling are a fine reminder of how gay life can still be even as lives are industriously snuffed out of existence next to you. And these days, the internet means that said destruction doesn’t have to be happening literally over the wall for you to notice, though it’s unclear how many moviegoers picked up on the parallel.
It’s too early to know what place such a film will take in the cannon [sic] of German memory culture. Yet a long history of film and television has sparked the Teutonic Imaginaration [sic], and most of it isn’t native. Where would Germany be now, after all, if not for NBC’s Holocaust finally making it OK to pop the nationwide question to Opa: Where were you back then again?
Unfortunately for most, there was only so much room at the Stauffenberg Inn.
Not that Germans haven’t tried. To take some more recent examples, there was The Reader, a co-production with the United States, about a camp guard whose most pressing moral dilemma is she can’t read. That’s a bit like running down a person with your car and then getting fined for failing to signal as you speed away, but illiteracy is a pretty good defense at your war crimes trial. How was I supposed to know what all those directives said?
In 2013, ZDF spent a healthy chunk of public money on the miniseries, Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter. It told the sappy story of a group of German friends — a Jew among them, woke! — dealing with the war, each in his or her own special way. Only one of them actually enjoys being a Nazi, of course, but at the end he wants his Jewish friend, miraculously still alive, to know he felt really bad about it. The only real evildoers portrayed are the one-dimensional characters — small-time Poles and grumpy old men.
Some credit due to Der Untergang, but the filmmakers made Hitler human and we can’t be having that. It challenges the comforting theory that the Nazis came from the Moon, their crimes exist therefore outside of human history, making them neither relatable nor comparable to any other earth-dwelling endeavor, nor attributable to any earth-dwelling group. This is the true meaning of Never again, because a singular event, by definition, can’t be repeated.
Fortunately, by the time the novel Er ist wieder da got made into a movie, critics and audiences could almost laugh at the man with the funny mustache. They just might not have picked up on the storyline’s real message: It’s not him; it’s us.
Now, you don’t need a film to reveal how incapable German culture is at grappling with its foundational rupture. A festival for films is enough. On this point this year’s Berlinale proved exemplary, as celebrities and interlocutors crossed German Officialdom’s only real red line: Making it feel bad. Of all the protest against Israel’s ongoing campaign of death and destruction in Gaza, the one that got the most attention was by a Jewish Israeli who used the A-word on a German stage.
So it is only logical that a bunch of goyim called him an antisemite — and I, for one, appreciate this predictability because consistency is an underrated virtue. The Besserwisser are out in force and they are insatiable.
It’s moments like these that make one wonder if Germany doesn’t understand there is a world beyond itself, or just doesn’t care. The “debate” is so provincial and inward looking that it begs the question why Germany bothers holding “international” events at all, when the only perspective that matters is a very particular type of German one for a very particular type of German audience. Since that is one in the same, it’s a monologue with itself. There are nearly 85 million people in this country, including some of the world’s largest Middle East diaspora communities, yet national identity remains so exclusively defined and citizenship has for so long been so difficult to get that these voices hardly register.
No wonder that political rhetoric seems wildly out of sync with public opinion.
Thankfully, war crimes know war crimes. It turns out that international law, the “rules-based order,” and the institutions established to undergird it all are not only tools to further entrench the global dominance of the West. Occasionally, the Rest strikes back. So now Germany has to respond to at least two lawsuits — one in its own courts and the other in the International Court of Justice in the Hague — alleging the state’s complicity in crimes against humanity.
It’s important not to exaggerate the potential impact of these litigious undertakings. Probably very little and extremely late. It is also legitimate to question the fairness of singling out Germany’s accountability in Israeli excesses when the United States, among others, is the bigger and more important backer.
The thing is, though, going after the U.S. is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. It’s difficult to demand accountability from someone who picks and chooses what rules to follow, and barely tries to appear otherwise. The U.S. isn’t even party to some of the norms and institutions it advocates, and still finds a way to come out on top. In this regard, American foreign policy is a bit like Donald Trump. Accusations of rape kinda fall flat when the guy you’re accusing boasts about “grabbing them by the pussy.” Guilt only works if there is the capacity to feel shame.
Germany, on the other hand, can’t get enough of both — at least as a performative device. As a result, Germany projects an image of earnestly caring about what the world thinks, which until recently (and to some extent, still) many people assume is real. How easy it can be to forget you are sitting in a theater watching a staged production, but at least you can use the drama as leverage.
Somewhere in its twisted logic is the keen awareness that Germany only exists because the world order as it is exists. The two are locked in symbiosis. For most of human history the winning side would not be liberators, but conquerors, and the losing side would be enslaved, not rebuilt, to serve them. Lucky for Germany, the period after 1945 presented an improbably brief window in which practical interests and higher-minded values converged. Germany is the product of that convergence.
The decoupling has been long since underway, and Germany has a choice to make. Keep insisting that the rules are real and matter, but that would put it — again — on the wrong side of history; or, reject them and in so doing pull out the foundation on which its own existence depends. Such is the bind a political system puts itself in when it chooses to use universalist principles for particularist aims.
To German Officialdom’s great relief, there is currently no shortage of ways to look foolish on the world stage. Tangible threats to regional security can overshadow any existential insecurity, and as Germany laments the latter it appears to be contributing to the former.
Allies abroad and (in fairness) almost everyone else at home are increasingly bewildered that Chancellor Olaf Scholz won’t budge on his refusal to send Ukraine Taurus cruise missiles. He has issued many explanations for his steadfast position. When neither the red-line scare nor divulging secrets seemed to satisfy, he went the parenting route: “Because I said so.”
Right on cue, Russia inserted itself into the feud by mic-dropping a 38-minute recording of top German air force officers discussing Western support for Ukraine and, specifically, theoretical uses of the Taurus. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius was quick to try to contain the damage by calling the leak a “hybrid disinformation attack,” which is hard to follow since the recording is authentic and it was obtained through no more “insidious” methods than an insecure line.
No doubt, it’s a propaganda win for Russia, but one that says more about German mediocrity than Russian prowess. Notably, unlike the tanks spat that Scholz dragged President Joe Biden into, you will register the dominant absence of U.S. comment on the latest allied acrimony. That may be partly due to re-election efforts sucking up the bandwidth, but also suggests the U.S. has just “taken the blade out” so Germany can play grownup with the shaving cream.
At least this Russia spy scandal is distracting from the other one we all kinda already knew about. Everyone’s erstwhile fintech darling, Jan Marsalek, is not only a white-collar fraudster but a Russian agent. The Wirecard ruse probably could have been uncovered far sooner, but such is the price you pay for looking the other way so you can sit at the cool-kids tech table with the rest of the unicorns.
It’s an ideal time for lingering traumas to return to the fore. Manhunting Boomer terrorists seems like the perfect matter of lesser import for Germany to occupy itself with right now. If nothing else, it should help clarify the difference between the RAF and the climate kids.
Don’t ever say Germany isn’t good at jokes. They’re just not very funny.