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| Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst |
When I first went to Europe in 1960, at the age of 20, I was
a country kid who had never been out of his native New England, except for a
summer job in Ohio. I lucked out. My father agreed to finance a year at the
Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, a transformational year which exposed
me to theater and the arts, and to a world beyond my own provincial origins. I cannot imagine a greater opportunity for
any young person than a period of life and study abroad.
Munich in 1960 still had traces of the war. There were lots of people on crutches in the
street, and bombed out blocks with rubble still uncleared.
My roommate still made do with a slice of dark bread smeared with lard,
and maybe a boiled egg for lunch. I felt
obliged to keep hidden my large American income of $80 a month, which enabled
me to sneak out to restaurants for a Wiener Schnitzel now and then. It was, after all, only fifteen years after
the war, and Germany was still getting back on its feet.
Because it was still relatively close to the end of the war,
like the other Americans I befriended, I was curious about how the Germans
would speak of the war years. Would they
speak of it as we did, as a period of shame?
Would they be all "Hitler built the Autobahns" and even try to justify it?
Remain silent about it? I got my
answer soon enough, from little old ladies who moved chocolates around on their
coffee tables and explained how if Hitler had just moved his tanks this way at Stalingrad, and
not that way, things might have turned out differently. Or the old soldiers at the Hofbräuhaus who would, with several liters
of beer under their belt, let loose about the injustices of having to eat
crow. Or the nice folks, like members of
my own German family, who would insist it was a time for looking forward and
not back. For a while, I began to build
a sense of alarm that this period of history might actually be shoved under the
carpet, and a whole new generation might never learn the full extent of the
horror inflicted on the world by the German nation.
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| Geschwister Scholl Plaza, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich |
Fortunately, though, resistance to that will to forget began
to reveal itself. About the time my worst culture
shock hit with full force, and I was getting a bit down on all things German, I
noticed that the area around the fountains in front of the grand main entrance
to the university, which I took a bath in at four o'clock one drunken morning, and dumped laundry detergent in on another, was called the Geschwister
Scholl Platz.
Geschwister is
more an equivalent to the everyday English “brothers and sisters” than to the more scientific sounding “siblings,” as it is commonly translated.
When I asked a German colleague who these people were, he said, “war
resisters. Students here at the
university who were caught and executed.”
They were guillotined, actually, for distributing pamphlets in the Lichthof, the main court just inside the entrance, urging
resistance to the Hitler regime. A
janitor sweeping the main hall saw who it was who had the temerity to oppose the Führer, and turned them in to the Gestapo. At twenty-one I was in this place, horsing around in the fountain; at twenty-two and twenty-five, they were in this same place, headed for the guillotine.
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| the "Lichthof" - main court just inside the entrance |
Here, at long last, some official recognition of what I was
looking for.
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| Die grosse Aula at LM University, Munich |
Once I learned the names of these two students, Hans and
Sophie Scholl, I began to feel differently each time I passed through that courtyard. I had several classes
right off that space. It was a heady feeling knowing what had transpired just a few feet from where I was sitting and trying, in one romantic literature class, to identify which lines from the Outpourings of
the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk” were written by Ludwig Tieck and which
ones were written by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder. Or in another, this time in the "Grosse Aula" back in the days before decent loudspeaker systems, wondering what that guy up on the stage was going on about.
Fast forward a half century.
Germany’s democracy has grown and matured and few who know it well
worry all that much about the fringe group of neo-Nazis.
Fascism is a thing of the past in Germany, and Germans no longer need to
explain to Americans such things as what I had to do when I registered with the police
upon arriving in Munich. One of the questions they asked was “Where were you on
September 1, 1939.” I wish I had had the
courage to give a straight answer: “In my mother’s womb.” What they were after was trying to determine
everybody’s origins for statistical purposes.
Were you a Sudeten German, and Easterner, Westerner, a refugee from
parts of Germany that are now Poland? History was still a living, ever-present challenge.
Most Germans today were not even
born at that time, so the question is no longer relevant. Today the Germans are asking some equally embarrassing questions of the
Americans. Where were you during the
sit-ins at the lunch counters in the South during the Civil Rights
movement? Which side were you on? What is your stand on whether the genocide of
the natives of the North American continent by European invaders was equivalent
to the Holocaust? Do you think the
Washington Redskins ought to change their name?
Why, or why not? Are you with the
59% of black Americans who believe Darren Wilson should have been charged with
murder? Or the 15% of whites with
similar beliefs? If not, why not? And why the discrepancy, by the way? Do you believe Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz should be tried in an international court for war crimes for their
invasion of Iraq? Do you believe the
United States of America is a proto-fascist nation?
And not just the Germans, but progressives from around the
world, including many in the United States, are answering this last question in
the affirmative. Just how far away from
“full blown” this proto-fascism is, is anybody’s guess. The good thing about
“proto-fascism” as opposed to full-blown fascism, is that there is time to turn
the tide. That, I think, is what the
bestowers* of the Geschwister Scholl Prize are doing today in the Grosse Aula at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. They are awarding the prize this year to
Glenn Greenwald, for his past work, and particularly for his book, No Place to Hide.
Previous winners of the award include the playwright Rolf
Hochhut, whose play, The Deputy,
charged Pius XII with being a willing enabler of the Nazi regime; German
philosopher Jürgen Habermas;
historian and political scientist Peter Gay, known for his many books on
Voltaire, the Enlightenment, Freud, and Weimar; and Anna Politkovskaya, the
courageous Russian journalist and Putin opponent who covered the Chechen War
and was assassinated in 2006, just to
mention a few.
To some, this may seem like a local Munich event, but its
consequences go far beyond progressive circles in one German city. Just as, with time, our consciousness has
been raised about slavery and genocide in American history, we may hope it will
be raised again by the dark events in Ferguson, Missouri.
And again, by a group of literati in a far off land called
Bavaria, who are drawing a direct line from a couple of their own local heroes
in the fight against fascism, a horror still alive in their cultural
consciousness, to an American journalist making waves.
Should you want to call me an alarmist for throwing around a
word as loaded as fascism, let me explain how I am defining it. Fascism is a political philosophy originally
limited to the authoritarian style of Benito Mussolini which today may be
generalized to apply to a system of government led by a dictator or to dictatorial
forces who exercise power for its own sake, reach readily for military solutions to conflict, for the good of a few, generally at
the expense of the many, without regard to such civil rights as the freedom of
expression and a free and open press, or respect for transparency or diversity
of opinion, and without regard for truth.
I have found an English language news source from the Deutsche Welle (no American sources yet!) on the event, but I have been unable to find an English version of the award
committee’s explanation for the award, so I have translated a portion of a
version from the German press report:
Glenn Greenwald is a dedicated lawyer and passionate journalist who has sounded a warning about a powerful surveillance apparatus which promises to destroy the private sphere and threatens to undermine the foundations of democracy. He embodies by this act a compelling contemporary example of a courageous citizen who, along with others and without regard to personal risk, advocates for the right to unrestricted reporting, free speech, individual liberty and the necessity of control over the power of the state. With his articles and now also with his book No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald has provided us with a prime example of what a free and independent press can and should accomplish.
Only through the enlightened work of Glenn Greenwald and others of evaluating the documents made available by Edward Snowden and the revelation of the activities of the secret service which have damaged our foundational liberties in the name of security, have we gained a clearer insight into the threats of our time. This has given us the opportunity to correct mistakes and prevent the abuse of power. This accomplishment, which furthers civil freedoms and moral and intellectual courage and provokes strong impulses to a responsible contemporary consciousness, bears witness to the intellectual independence of Glenn Greenwald.
*the recognition for excellence and service comes with a 10,000 euro grant from the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels), the Bavarian State Association and the city of Munich.
photo credits:
1 comment:
Thoughts and reactions very much like mine! I was in Munich a few years later and had very similar experiences. Today I am much more optimistic about Germany's future than I am about that of the US.
B
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