Following half a century of moral isolation, Germans are finally starting to forge a new national identity for themselves, writes Hugo Hamilton.
Hitler is dead. The war is over. It is 60 years ago, five times the duration of the Third Reich, since the greatest disaster of Europe came to an end with the capitulation of the German command on May 8th, 1945. The world has moved on, Europe has come together as never before, and yet there is something about the events of the Nazi era which makes time stand still. The Holocaust is always yesterday. We are no distance from history.
Perhaps no other country has ever dealt with its own past as comprehensively as they have done in Germany. They have been on trial for 60 years. They have rebuilt the German conscience and their collective memory. In Berlin, you are never far away from a monument commemorating the victims and now there are signs that this conscience has matured enough to allow Germans to think differently about themselves without fear of forgetting.
Up to now, Germans have believed the stereotypes of themselves as the world's bad guys. It's the Fawlty Towers version of "don't mention the war". Either that or the Germans as a bunch of nihilist cry-babies who "believe in nothing", portrayed in the Coen brothers' cult classic The Big Lebowski as self-mutilating ransom-hunters who cannot even get the ground rules of kidnapping right and cut the little toe off one of their own gang members to send in the post. The Germans as people who love the sound of tables being dragged across the floor by the band Einstuerzende Neubauten and sit through an hour-long CD of the artist Joseph Beuys saying nothing but "Ja, Ja, Ja" and "Nein, Nein, Nein".
Germans' self-image is a complex, painful mess of contradictions which is often misunderstood, even by themselves. While everyone is permitted to make jokes about them, they have never been allowed to laugh at themselves. The irony is that these cliches may have begun to work to their own advantage. The penitential culture and the rejection of traditional values has led to a resurgence of creativity. The explosion of new German writing and film-making would indicate that they have started exploring versions of themselves that have been suppressed before.
This is no longer a post-war German society. The fallout of reunification and the recent economic downturn, as well as the perception that the world is now governed by a single superpower, have brought about a profound shift in thinking. Germany has become more like other countries - perhaps never normal, but with its own vulnerability and its issues of multiculturalism and integration.
German politicians have begun to speak cautiously about the ingredients of national self-awareness, such as language and belonging. The chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, can even be heard saying "I love my country" and testing out words such as "values" and "pride".
One of the problems for Germans has always been the perception of the past as a weakness, a threat, a source of internal mistrust. It is understandable that the people who invented the most demonised corporate logo of all time, the swastika, find it hard to laugh when Prince Harry wears it to a fancy dress party, a crime for which he would be jailed in Germany. Of course they are profoundly embarrassed when the right-wing German nationalist party NPD stage a walkout from an Auschwitz commemoration in the German Parliament. But it is a misunderstanding of history to equate the Germans of today with their forefathers. Wake up, they will tell you in Berlin. The desire for world supremacy has jumped continents.
In Ireland, we have our own cliches of the Germans as the people in yellow oilskins who are always ready for the rain, the people who kneel at the feet of Christy Moore because they have no traditional culture of their own to go back to. In 1957, the German writer Heinrich Böll published his Irisches Tagebuch, an Irish journal which was rejected by Irish readers but embraced by millions of Germans. In spite of poverty and emigration, Ireland held a kind of utopian magnetism for Germans, who found something on the Cliffs of Moher which had gone missing in their own country. They could feel uplifted by the sun going down over the Aran Islands, while the forests and mountains of Germany cast deep shadows of self-doubt.
At that time, Ireland still had an uncomplicated connection to land and people which had been replaced in Germany by stark materialism. The sense of place was so abused by Nazism that it was substituted after the war by low-fat versions offered by Ikea and by surrogate homing instincts leading to places like Connemara. In a recent competition, Germany's chosen favourite word was fernweh - a longing for far away.
Since the war, Germans tried to prove that they are benign, non-aggressive imitators rather than instigators. In the dysfunctional 1970s, they placed their parents on trial. They could not love their mothers. Even less their fathers. They had no dream-life, and, in the process of exorcising the Nazi crimes, Germans have paid a heavy price in denying their own heritage, an emotional discontinuity which has given them a strangely homeless, orphaned status.
What we regard as fundamental to our national wellbeing in Ireland, the attachment to home found in Irish writing and singing, is unthinkable in Germany where the novelist Wilhelm Genazino describes the post-war society as "a mass grave of feelings" and where, even after unification, Günther Grass found it difficult to utter the word "Germany" because it gave him a "furry feeling" in his mouth.
Another German writer, Wolfgang Büscher, describes a ceremony in Auschwitz where people of all nationalities were asked to sing a lullaby in their own language. When it came to the Germans, there was a deep intake of breath, until a nun finally sang Guten Abend, Gute Nacht. What could be more innocent than a lullaby? And yet, there are Germans who are still afraid even to sing to their own children.
With the lowest birth rate in Europe, Germany still lives under the shadow of the Mutterkreuz, a badge of honour awarded to mothers during Nazi times for producing what became known as Hitler's cannon fodder. In the 1970s, the Green Party was roundly condemned for trying to introduce family support systems such as national creche facilities because it was seen as resembling Nazi interference in family politics. The result is that Germany still lacks the support for working mothers that other European countries take for granted.
There is a loneliness in being German which has never been fully acknowledged. They have lived with a forbidden identity and prefer to say they come from Berlin or Bavaria. They have been forced
to live beyond any collective self-awareness other than their perpetrator status. All this has contributed to the new German conscience, but it has also given them the cold, undead features of a people in fear of making mistakes, an excommunicated people who could never trust themselves again.
Perhaps this is also the German strength, something that will contribute to the 21st century and a new global conscience. Generation Berlin, the energetic, upbeat, post-reunification Germans from east and west, may have found new ways of living with the past without ideological attachments to home. Is it possible that they have formed a new, post-belonging consciousness, that they are ahead of other societies where nationalism and homeland are still seen as virtues? Could their sense of Weltoffenheit or openness to the world have made national dreaming obsolete?
What is clear is that Germans have begun to look at their own history with a more self-confident eye. The film Downfall, which was seen by more than five million Germans, is proof of this. Even though it was controversial for showing the human side of Hitler and called an "infuriating film" in the New Yorker magazine, the idea that millions of young Germans might somehow cosyup to the fuehrer as a cake-eating maniac, not to speak of the fuehrer as a human wreck in his final suicidal days in the bunker, is absurd.
The German historian, Joachim Fest, on whose book the film was based, reminds us that perpetrators make better subjects than victims. De-mythologising Hitler has been a key feature of German understanding of the past, because they have rejected the iconic status which Hitler has gained internationally as the superstar of evil and internalised their history instead of pointing the finger. In a provocative new book, another historian, Götz Aly, has examined the financial structures of the
Third Reich to discover that national socialism was based on mass robbery and that the Holocaust profited all Germans. The theory has uncomfortable resonance for all of us today because it portrays Hitler as the "feel-good dictator" who instituted Kristallnacht in order to bridge a budget deficit in 1938 and kept his stranglehold on the Germans by a variety of means, including free medical care and tax cuts.
We are no distance from German history. But the past should not be a weakness. As long as it is acknowledged and remembered, it should be a source of strength which prevents us from repeating the same mistakes, something that helps us to examine the ground rules of our present society and create a true global conscience.
•Hugo Hamilton is the author of The Speckled People (Fourth Estate). He will be chairing a debate on 'The Loneliness of Being German' at the Goethe Institute, Merrion Square, Dublin, at 5pm on Sun, May 8. Speakers will include Ulla Hahn (poet/novelist), Thomas Medicus (journalist/memoir writer) and Matthias Matussek (journalist, Der Spiegel)