Hugo Hamilton : Germany Has Europe's Lowest Birth Rate ... Are They Ashamed to Have Children?

: Hugo Hamilton, in the Irish Times (4-30-05):

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. ...

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, Gunther Grass found it difficult to utter the word "Germany" because it gave him a "furry feeling" in his mouth.

Another German writer, Wolfgang Buscher, 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, Gotz 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.