Wages of Guilt E-Book

Ian Buruma

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 589

Beschreibung

In this highly original and now classic text, Ian Buruma explores and compares how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their violent pasts, and investigates the painful realities of living with guilt, and with its denial.As Buruma travels through both countries, he encounters people whose honesty in confronting their past is strikingly brave, and others who astonish by the ingenuity of their evasions of responsibility. In Auschwitz, Berlin, Hiroshima and Tokyo he explores the contradictory attitudes of scholars, politicians and survivors towards World War II and visits the contrasting monuments that commemorate the atrocities of the war.Buruma allows these opposing voices to reveal how an obsession with the past, especially distorted versions of it, continually causes us to question who should indeed pay the Wages of Guilt.

Leseprobe

THE WAGES OF GUILT

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in New York state. His previous books include Bad Elements, God’s Dust, Anglomania and Murder in Amsterdam, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Current Interest Book and was shortlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize. He was the recipient of the 2008 Shorenstein Journalism Award, which honoured him for his distinguished body of work, and the 2008 Erasmus Prize.

‘Buruma has a particularly sharp ear for subtext. . . he shows clearly how the post-war experience of the two countries and their reaction to their recent history have been markedly different.’ John Gittings, Guardian

‘A profound book’ Hugh Trevor Roper, Sunday Telegraph

‘A fascinating study. . . Buruma’s sensitive account. . . is most disturbing to read. I strongly recommend [this] unusual book.’ Sunday Times

‘A penetrating comparative study’ Michael Howard, TLS

Also by Ian Buruma

Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing

The China Lover

Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

Conversations with John Schlesinger

Occidentalism: A Secret History of Anti-Westernism

Inventing Japan: From Empire to Economic Miracle 1853–1964

Anglomania: A European Love Affair

The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West

A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture

Playing the Game

God’s Dust: A Modern Asian Journey

Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes

The Japanese Tattoo

First published in the United States in 1994 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.

This paperback edition, with a new introduction, published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © 1994 Ian Buruma‘Preface’ copyright © 2009 Ian Buruma

The moral right of Ian Buruma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84354 960 4eISBN 978 1 78239 835 6

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Grove Atlantic LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

FOR MY FATHER

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION TO THE 1995 EDITION: The Enemies

PART ONE

War Against the West

Romance of the Ruins

PART TWO

Auschwitz

Hiroshima

Nanking

PART THREE

History on Trial

Textbook Resistance

Memorials, Museums, and Monuments

PART FOUR

A Normal Country

Two Normal Towns

Clearing Up the Ruins

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Preface

FOOTBALL, ESPECIALLY IN Europe, can be a useful way to gauge the state of nations. In 2006, the World Cup was staged in Germany. Apart from Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt in the final, the occasion was remarkable for the unselfconscious, festive outpouring of German patriotism. Germans, for good reasons, had been hesitant before to wave their national symbols in the face of the world. This time they did so in such a friendly spirit that no one could mistake it for anything sinister. In 2006, even though their team failed to reach the final, people seemed happy to be German.

The other remarkable thing about the cup was the fact that no seemed to mind much when Germany won a game. It used to be, if you were Dutch, French, Czech, or Polish, that losing to Germany was like being invaded all over again. And the rare victories over Germany were celebrated as sweet revenge. More than half a century after the end of the war, this feeling appears at last to have evaporated. And Germany’s two best players were born in Poland to boot.

Changing attitudes come with fading memories, even though some historical memories can be lethally tenacious. But I believe there was more to it in this case. When I wrote The Wages of Guilt in 1994, there was still a good deal of fear and distrust of Germany – the economic powerhouse of Europe – whose recent reunification was celebrated in the streets of Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin with raucous cries of “We are one people.” This sounded ominous to people whose memories had not yet faded, not least to some Germans themselves. But by 2006, Günter Grass’s famous remark that the memory of Auschwitz should have kept Germany divided forever sounded even more absurdly self-flagellating than it did in 1989. Germany had been such a good European, safely embedded for many decades in European institutions and NATO, that it seemed churlish to distrust a generation of Germans, who were not yet alive when their country was at war. But the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbours was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.

In the western half of Germany, at any rate, novelists, historians, journalists, teachers, politicians, and filmmakers, had already considered the monstrosities of recent Germany history, sometimes obsessively, but often with remarkable openness and honesty. Few German schoolchildren were unaware of their country’s horrors. If anything, some had begun to resent the relentless fashion in which they were sometimes pushed down their throats. There were still, in the twenty-first century, instances of public figures making dubious or tactless statements about the war, but they would be very swiftly taken to task by other Germans.

The war was never a laughing matter to Germans, and nor should it have been. But the fact that a comedy film, entitled Mein Führer, made by a Swiss-Jewish director, was a hit in 2008, was probably a healthy sign too. Laughter at their own country’s expense is surely preferable to self-flagellation. To the extent that the darkest chapters in history can be “coped” with, the Germans, on the whole, had coped.

Why can’t the same thing be said with equal confidence about Japan? The Japanese also hosted a world cup, together with Korea, in 2002. And young Japanese celebrated the unexpected victories of their team of hip young players with the same carnival spirit as the Germans did four years later. Yet the distrust of Japan, in Korea and other neighbouring countries, did not go away. For while the flag-waving young looked innocent of bellicose thoughts (or any thoughts about history at all, which is part of the problem), some of their elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative prime ministers still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places have clearly not “coped” with the war.

It should have been easier for the Japanese. The war in Asia was savage. The sackings of Nanking and Manila, the slaves worked to death on the Thai-Burma railroad, the brutal POW camps from Singapore to Sumatra, the millions of dead in China, these have left permanent scars on the history of Asia. But unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic programme to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people who, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.

Perversely, this may actually have made it harder for the Japanese to come to terms with their history. After the fall of the Third Reich, few Germans outside a deranged fringe could condone, let alone be proud of the Holocaust. “We never knew”, a common reaction in the 1950s, had worn shamefully thin in the eyes of a younger generation by the 1960s. The extraordinary criminality of a deliberate genocide was so obvious that it left no room for argument.

The Japanese never reached the same kind of consensus. Rightwing nationalists like to cite the absence of a Japanese Holocaust as proof that Japanese have no reason to feel bad about their war at all. It was, in their eyes, a war like any other; brutal, yes, just as wars fought by all great nations in history have been brutal. In fact, since the Pacific War was fought against Western imperialists, it was a justified – even noble – war of Asian liberation.

Few Japanese would have taken this view in the late 1940s or 1950s, a time when most Germans were still trying hard not to remember. It is in fact extraordinary how honestly Japanese novelists and filmmakers dealt with the horrors of militarism in those early years after the war. Such honesty is less evident in 2009. Popular comic books, aimed at the young, extol the heroics of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots, while the Chinese and their Western allies are depicted as treacherous and belligerent. In 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Self Defense Force stated that Japan had been “tricked” into the war by China and the US.

Why? It has often been assumed that there must be a cultural explanation. Shame, to the Oriental mind, has to be covered in silence, or denial, and so forth. I rather dismissed this claim when I wrote my book, and I still do. The Germans are not a morally superior people, with a keener sense of guilt, or shame, than the Japanese. Evasions, there too, were once the order of the day.

The fact is that Japan is still haunted by historical issues that should have been settled decades ago. The reasons are political rather than cultural, to do with the pacifist constitution – written by American jurists in 1946 – and with the role of the imperial institution, absolved of war guilt by General MacArthur after the war for the sake of expediency.

The end of the Third Reich in Germany was a complete break in history. Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution, after the emperor was made to renounce his divine status. Since there had been no equivalent of the Nazi Party in Japan, and thus no Führer, Japanese militarism was blamed on “feudal” culture and the warrior spirit. Like a reformed alcoholic who cannot be trusted with another sip of the hard stuff, Japan was constitutionally banned from using military force, or indeed maintaining its own armed forces. Henceforth, the US would be responsible for Japanese security.

Even though most Japanese were more than glad to be relieved of martial duties, and the constitution was soon fudged to allow for a Self-Defence Force, a number of conservatives felt humiliated by what they rightly saw as a raid on their national sovereignty. Henceforth, to them, everything from the allied Tokyo War Crimes tribunal, to the denunciations of Japan’s war record by leftwing teachers and intellectuals, would be seen in this light. The more “progressive” Japanese used the history of wartime atrocities as a warning against turning away from pacifism, the more defensive rightwing politicians and pundits became about the Japanese war.

Views of history, in other words, were politicized – and polarized – from the beginning. To take the sting out of this confrontation between constitutional pacifists and revisionists, which had led to political turmoil in the 1950s, mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people’s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.

It largely worked. Japan became increasingly wealthy, and a rather oppressive stability was found under the continuous rule of one large conservative party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP). And yet history refused to go away. Resentment over the postwar deal continues to fester in the nationalist rightwing of the LDP. At a cruder level, it is voiced, or rather shouted, by thuggish young men in khaki uniforms blaring wartime military marches from flag-bearing sound trucks – not at all in the festive spirit of the football fans in 2002.

For several decades, the chauvinistic rightwing, with its reactionary views on everything from high-school education to the emperor’s status, was kept in check by the sometimes equally dogmatic Japanese Left. Marxism was the prevailing ideology of the teachers union, and academics. Like everywhere else in the world, however, the influence of Marxism waned after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, and the brutal records of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot became widely known.

This collapse resulted in the – possibly brief – ascent of neo-conservatism in the US. In Japan, the consequences have been graver. Marginalized in the de facto one-party LDP state, and discredited by its own dogmatism, the Japanese Left did not just wane, it collapsed. This gave a great boost to the war-justifying, rightwing nationalists, who even gained strength in such bastions of progressive learning as Tokyo University. Committees sprang up to “reform” history curriculums by purging textbooks of all facts that might stand in the way of healthy patriotic pride.

The Japanese young, perhaps out of boredom with nothing but materialistic goals, perhaps out of frustration with being made to feel guilty, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, or most probably out of a combination of all three, are not unreceptive to these patriotic blandishments. Anxiety about the rise of China, whose rulers have a habit of using Japan’s historical crimes as a form of political blackmail, has boosted a prickly national pride, even at the expense of facing the truth about the past.

Briefly, just after The Wages of Guilt was first published, I thought that things were moving in a more positive direction. For the first time since 1955, the LDP had been replaced in government by a coalition of liberal-left parties led by the socialist Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi. One of the first things this very decent man did was to apologize unequivocally for Japan’s military atrocities on the fiftieth anniversary of the Pacific War.

Many Japanese were in sympathy with Murayama. His clear repudiation of Japan’s wartime behaviour would surely make it easier to talk about Japanese security and revising the constitution in a rational manner. Alas, expectations of a break with the postwar order proved to be premature. Murayama was not able to change anything in the political landscape. By 1996, the LDP was back in power, the constitutional issue had not been resolved, and historical debates continue to be loaded with political ideology. In fact, they are not really debates at all, but exercises in propaganda, tilted towards the reactionary side.

Given these differences between Germany and Japan, one might have expected my book to have been better received in the former country. In fact, the opposite was true. Not only did the book sell more copies in Japan, but it got a more positive reception. I can only speculate about the reasons. The Japanese quite like their country to be compared to Germany, efficient, clean, industrious, disciplined, and so on. Postwar Germans, bent on being model members of the liberal, progressive Western community, are less keen to be compared to Japan. It smacks too much of prewar admiration for the warrior spirit of “the Germans of the East”.

If I am right, however, and the differences between the two nations, in terms of historical memory, are less cultural than political, then such German sensitivity is misplaced. It would be naive – and it has proved to be dangerous in the past – to assume that culture doesn’t matter, that all human beings can be cast in the same universal mould. To assume, however, that cultural differences are absolute – what academic theorists like to call “essentializing” – is equally wrong, and indeed dangerous.

It was partly to test these grounds, to find out how comparable traumas have affected two very different nations, that I wrote this book. My instinct – call it a prejudice, if you prefer – before embarking on this venture, was that people from distinct cultures still react quite similarly to similar circumstances. The Japanese and the Germans, on the whole, did not behave in the same ways – but then the circumstances, both wartime and postwar, were quite different in the two Germanies and Japan. They still are.

THEWAGESOF GUILT

Introduction

THE ENEMIES

THERE WAS NEVER any doubt, where I grew up, who our enemies were. There was the Soviet Union, of course, but that, from a Dutch schoolboy’s perspective in the 1950s, was rather remote. No, the enemies were the Germans. They were the comic-book villains of my childhood in The Hague. When I say Germans, I mean just that—not Nazis, but Germans. The occupation between 1940 and 1945 and the animosity that followed were seen in national, not political terms. The Germans had conquered our country. They had forced my father to work in their factories. And they had left behind the bunkers along our coast, like great stone toads, squat relics of a recent occupation, dark and damp and smelling of urine. We were not allowed to go inside them. Stories were told of boys who defied this order and were blown up by rusty German hand grenades.

Our teachers told us stories of German wickedness and their own acts of bravery. Every member of the older generation, it appeared, had been in the resistance. That is to say, everybody except for the butcher on the corner of the high street, who had been a collaborator; one didn’t go shopping there. And then there was the woman at the tobacconist; she had had a German lover. One didn’t go there either.

Each year, on the afternoon of May 4, we would gather in the assembly hall to hear the headmaster commemorate the war dead. May 4 was Commemoration Day; May 5 was Liberation Day. On the evening of May 4 there would be a slow procession through the sand dunes to the former German execution ground. I watched it on television in black and white. All you heard was the sound of slowly shuffling feet, a church bell ringing in the distance, and wind brushing the microphone. May 4 was also the occasion for youths to smash the windows of German cars or insult German tourists from a safe distance.

The headmaster, normally a humorous man, would get tearful on May 4. In his long leather coat, he was invariably at the head of the procession through the dunes, with an oddly defiant expression on his face, as though he were facing the enemy once again. He lectured me once after I had been caught drawing swastikas. I was never to draw swastikas, he said, for they were wicked and the sight of them still distressed people. I continued drawing them, of course, but as a secret vice, with the added thrill of breaking a mysterious, adult taboo.

Comic-book Germans (were there any others?) roughly fell into two categories: the fat, slow-witted, ludicrous type, played to perfection in Hollywood movies by Gert Fröbe, and the thin, sinister type, the torturer with a monocle, the one who always said: “Ve have vays of making you talk.” Conrad Veidt in Casablanca. The enemy was both frightening and ridiculous. Too many Gert Fröbe films and Hitler imitations had made a mockery of the German language itself, which, as a result, we refused to learn properly. The German teacher sounded defensive in his effort to inspire enthusiasm for the language of Goethe and Rilke. Fröbe and Hitler had ruined it for us.

As we grew up, we heard more stories. Our sense of history was shaped as local stories of German sweethearts and collaborators made way for larger stories, stories about the concentration camps and the destruction of the Jews. My mother was saved from deportation and almost certain death only by the good fortune of having been born in England. Our comic-book prejudices turned into an attitude of moral outrage. This made life easier in a way. It was comforting to know that a border divided us from a nation that personified evil. They were bad, so we must be good. To grow up after the war in a country that had suffered German occupation was to know that one was on the side of the angels.

We did not spend our holidays in Germany. We had no German friends. And we hardly heard, let alone spoke the language. When I say we, I am generalizing of course, but even in 1989, when I began, for the first time, to travel extensively in Germany, this was considered among my Dutch friends an interesting but slightly eccentric thing to do. To them, London, Paris, even New York felt nearer than Berlin. They felt this way despite the obvious similarities between Holland and Germany, in culture, in language, in food and drink.

Perhaps that was part of the problem: the Dutch had not suffered as much as the Poles or the Russians; they were classified as a “Nordic race,” after all, so long as they were not Jews. Before the war there had been more sympathy in Holland for National Socialist discipline and the idea of the Herrenvolk, the master race, standing up to Bolshevism than my teachers cared to remember. The German invasion was more than an act of war; it was a betrayal. And it brought to pass the worst fears of a small nation always in danger of being swallowed by its neighbor. Which is why the Dutch turned their backs on Germany after the war. The cultural similarities were embarrassing, even threatening. The borders had to be clearly drawn, geographically and mentally; Germany had to be beyond the pale.

Christopher Isherwood once described what it was like to grow up after World War I, as the younger brother or son of men who had died in battle. Those who had been too young to fight or die, he said, felt as though they had yet to face a test of manhood, a test which had to be passed again and again, for one could never make up for having missed the slaughter. It was not quite like that for us, the first generation to be born after 1945. But the war cast its shadow nonetheless, to the point that some of us grew obsessed by it. For we too faced an imaginary test. The question that obsessed us was not how we would have acquitted ourselves in uniform, going over the top, running into machine-gun fire or mustard gas, but whether we would have joined the resistance, whether we would have cracked under torture, whether we would have hidden Jews and risked deportation ourselves. Our particular shadow was not war, but occupation.

Occupation is always a humiliating business—not just because of the loss of sovereignty and political rights but because it dramatically shows up human weakness. Heroes are very few in such times, and only a fool would put himself or herself among the imaginary heroes. It is easier to understand the ugly little compromises people make to save their own skins, the furtive services rendered to the uniformed masters, the looking away when the Gestapo kicks in the neighbor’s door. When I grew up, everything was done to forget the humiliation and to identify with the heroes. I read piles of books about Dutch Maquis and silk-scarfed RAF pilots. And yet the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma, interested me more than the hero. This is no doubt partly because I fear I would be much like that frightened man myself. And partly because, to me, failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism. It is why I wanted to know more about the memories of our former enemies, for theirs was a past of the most terrible failure: moral, political, and, in the end, military too. Which is not to say that the Nazis were more human than their victims, but it would be equally wrong—though no doubt comforting—to assume that they were less so.

The other enemies of World War II, the Japanese, were too far away to have had much of an impact on our imagination. The Dutch East Indies meant nothing to me, even though some of my friends had been born there. Nonetheless, the Japanese too were comic-book villains: short yellow people with buckteeth and spectacles, who shouted “Banzai!” as their Zero fighters attacked the brave American pilots, led in a popular comic book by a dashing blond hero named Buck Danny and his doughty crew. (Buck Danny was definitely “Nordic.”) The Japs, I was told, could not be trusted. They had no regard for human life. They had attacked Pearl Harbor without warning. They pulled out people’s fingernails. They made white women bow to their emperor. One of my high school teachers had worked as a slave on the Burma railroad. My aunt was in a “Jap camp.” Alec Guinness was made to crawl into a hot steel cage.

Much of the 1970s and 1980s I spent in or around Japan, for reasons that had nothing to do with the war. But I was curious to learn how Japanese saw the war, how they remembered it, what they imagined it to have been like, how they saw themselves in view of their past. What I heard and read was often surprising to a European: the treatment of Western POWs was hardly remembered at all, even though The Bridge on the River Kwai had been a popular success in Japan. (I often wondered who the Japanese identified with, the Japanese commandant or Alec Guinness? Neither, said a Japanese friend: “We liked the American hero, William Holden.”) Bataan, the sacking of Manila, the massacres in Singapore, these were barely mentioned. But the suffering of the Japanese, in China, Manchuria, the Philippines, and especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was remembered vividly, as was the imprisonment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia after the war. The Japanese have two days of remembrance: August 6, when Hiroshima was bombed, and August 15, the date of the Japanese surrender.

I wanted to write about Japanese memories of the war, and this led me to the related subject of modern Japanese nationalism. I became fascinated by the writings of various emperor worshippers, historical revisionists, and romantic seekers after the unique essence of Japaneseness. The abstruseness of their ideas didn’t stop them from being widely published in popular Japanese magazines and newspapers or from appearing as guests on television talk shows. I began to notice how the same German names cropped up in their often oblique and florid prose: Spengler, Herder, Fichte, even Wagner. The more Japanese romantics went on about the essence of Japaneseness, the more they sounded like German metaphysicians. This is perhaps true of romantic nationalists everywhere but the nineteenth-century German influence is still particularly striking in Japan. The more I studied Japanese nationalism, the more I wished to turn to the well, so to speak, from which so many modern Japanese ideas had been drawn. Since the late nineteenth century, Japan had often looked to Germany as a model. The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war—Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism—had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany. Why? It was with this question in mind that I decided to expand my original idea, and write about the memories of war in Germany as well as Japan.

In the summer of 1991, a year after the two Germanys had become one, I was in Berlin to write a magazine article. I noticed an announcement in a local newspaper of a lecture at the Jewish Community Center, to be given by the psychologist Margarethe Mitscherlich. The title of her lecture was “The Labor of Remembrance: About the Psychoanalysis of the Inability to Mourn” (“Erinnerungsarbeit: Zur Psychoanalyse der Unfähigkeit zu trauern”). The mourning concerned the Nazi period. I expected a half-empty hall. But I found a huge crowd of mostly young people, casually dressed, rather like a rock concert audience, queuing up to the end of the street. I should not have been surprised. The German war was not only remembered on television, on the radio, in community halls, schools, and museums; it was actively worked on, labored, rehearsed. One sometimes got the impression, especially in Berlin, that German memory was like a massive tongue seeking out, over and over, a sore tooth.

Some Japanese are puzzled by this. An elderly German diplomat recalled to me, rather sorrowfully, how a Japanese colleague told him that Germany’s preoccupation with its past sins, and its willingness to apologize to its former victims, had surely led to a loss of German identity. Another, much younger man told me of his visit to Tokyo, where he was shocked to hear Japanese sing German military marches in a beer hall. I do not wish to exaggerate the contrast. Not every Japanese suffers from historical amnesia, and there are many Germans who would like to forget, just as there are Germans who are only too pleased to hear the old songs echo around the beer hall. It is nonetheless impossible to imagine a Japanese Mitscherlich drawing huge crowds in the center of Tokyo by lecturing on the inability to mourn. Nor has a Japanese politician ever gone down on his knees, as Willy Brandt did in the former Warsaw ghetto, to apologize for historical crimes.

Even during the war the Axis partnership was not an easy one. Hitler could not but feel ambivalent about a yellow Herrenvolk, and the Japanese, after all, wanted to push “the white race” out of Asia. Yet the two peoples saw their own purported virtues reflected in each other: the warrior spirit, racial purity, self-sacrifice, discipline, and so on. After the war, West Germans tried hard to discard this image of themselves. This was less true of the Japanese. Which meant that any residual feelings of nostalgia for the old partnership in Japan were likely to be met with embarrassment in Germany.

The story of the former Japanese embassy in Berlin is a case in point. Built in 1936, the old embassy is a neoclassicist monument of the Nazi style, conceived as part of Hitler’s new capital, Germania. The embassy was one of the few buildings in Hitler’s and Speer’s grand plan that actually got built. After the war it was abandoned, a ruined hulk, left to Autonomen, the black-clad bands of young people seeking an anarchistic lifestyle, who squatted among piles of useless diplomatic mail. But in 1984 the Japanese Prime Minister, Nakasone Yasuhiro, and the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, decided to rebuild the embassy as a Japanese-German center for scholars. The Germans, wary of the Japanese weakness for nationalist nostalgia, wanted the center to reflect how times had changed since the days of the Axis. It was opened officially in 1987. To celebrate the occasion, the Japanese had proposed a seminar examining the parallels between Shintoist emperor worship and the myths of the German Volk. No criticism or irony was intended: the idea had come from the priests of a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. The Germans politely declined.

All this points to a gap between Japanese views of the war and German ones, leaving aside, for now, the differences between the Federal Republic and the GDR. The question is why this should be so, why the collective German memory should appear to be so different from the Japanese. Is it cultural? Is it political? Is the explanation to be found in postwar history, or in the history of the war itself? Do Germans perhaps have more reason to mourn? Is it because Japan has an Asian “shame culture,” to quote Ruth Benedict’s phrase, and Germany a Christian “guilt culture”?

These questions effectively narrowed my scope. Since I was interested in those aspects of the past that continue to excite the greatest controversy in Germany and Japan, I have left out many historic events. The battle of Nomonhan, between the Japanese Imperial Army and General Zhukov’s tank brigades, was of enormous military importance. And so were the Imphal campaign and the Normandy landing. But I have not mentioned any of these. Instead, in the case of Japan, I have emphasized the war in China and the bombing of Hiroshima, for these episodes, more than others, have lodged themselves, often in highly symbolic ways, in Japanese public life. Likewise, I have concentrated on the war against the Jews in the case of Germany, since it was that parallel war, rather than, say, the U-boat battles in the Atlantic, or even the battle of Stalingrad, that left the most sensitive scar on the collective memory of (West) Germany.

I could not have known when I started on the book how much current news events would form an increasingly dramatic backdrop to my story. First came the end of the Cold War, then German unification, then the Gulf War, and finally, in 1993, the first election in Japan to break the political monopoly of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. I decided to begin my book with the Gulf War, as I experienced it in Germany and Japan. For those few weeks dramatized the traumas and memories of the last world war more vividly than any other event since 1945, more so even than the war in Vietnam, in which neither country was asked to take part. Both Japan and Germany were constitutionally unable to play a military role in the war, which resulted in a great deal of argument: could they or could they not be trusted, or indeed trust themselves, to take part in future conflicts? Now, as I write, German airmen are patrolling the skies above the former Yugoslavia, and Japanese troops are trying to keep the peace in Cambodia, though still without the legal right to use force.

One of the clichés of our time is that two of the old Axis powers lost the war but won the peace. Many people fear Japanese and German power. Europeans are afraid of German domination. Some Americans have already described their economic difficulties with Japan in terms of war. But if other people are disturbed by German and Japanese power, so are many Germans and Japanese. If the two peoples still have anything in common after the war, it is a residual distrust of themselves.

The official unification of Germany came without much fuss or celebration in the week of the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1990. Every year, the Book Fair pays special attention to the literature of a particular country. The focus that year was on Japan. As part of the festivities, a public discussion took place between Günter Grass and Oe Kenzaburo, the Japanese novelist. Both men grew up during the war—that is, both were indoctrinated at school with militarist propaganda—and both became literary advocates of the antifascist cause, even though Oe, unlike Grass, had not said much about politics of late. Both, in any event, were committed liberals. (I use the word throughout this book in the American sense.)

It was a remarkable event. Grass began by lamenting German unification. Auschwitz, he said, should have made reunification impossible. A unified Germany was a danger to itself and to the world. Oe nodded gravely and added that Japan was a great danger too. The Japanese, he said, had never faced up to their crimes. Japan was a racist country. Yes, but so was Germany, said Grass, not to be outdone, so was Germany; in fact, Germany was worse: what about the hatred of Poles, Turks, and foreigners in general? Ah, said Oe, but what about Japanese discrimination against Koreans and Ainu? No, the Japanese must surely be worse.

These litanies of German and Japanese flaws went on for some time. Then there was a lull in the conversation. Both men tried to think of something else to say. The lull became an uncomfortable silence. People began to shift in their seats, waiting to disperse. But then, as a fitting conclusion to the meeting of minds, common ground was found. I forget whether it was Grass or Oe who brought it up, but Mitsubishi and Daimler-Benz had announced a new “cooperative relationship.” Journalists had dubbed it the Daimler-Mitsubishi Axis. Grass and Oe looked solemn and agreed that this was just the beginning of a dangerous friendship. Then Grass rose from his chair and wrapped Oe in a bear hug, which Oe, a small man not much used to this kind of thing, tried to reciprocate as best he could.

PART ONE

WAR AGAINST THE WEST

BONN

IT WAS NIGHT, and still some years before the war, when Konrad Adenauer crossed the river Elbe. He was on his way to Berlin, dozing in his wagon-lit. As the train moved into the east, Adenauer opened one eye and muttered to himself: “Asien, Asien” (“Asia, Asia”).

The story may, of course, be untrue. But as chairman of the Christian Democratic Party in the British zone, Adenauer did write in 1946 to a friend in the United States: “The danger is grave. Asia stands at the river Elbe. Only an economically and politically healthy Europe under the guidance of England and France, a Western Europe to which as an essential part the free part of Germany belongs, can stop further advancement of Asian ideology and power.”

Adenauer meant the advancement of Soviet Communism. His use of the word Asia was interesting, however. To the politician from Cologne, the old Roman city on the western border of Germany, barbarism lay in the east, where neither the civilized Romans nor the empire of Charlemagne had penetrated. Freedom and democracy defined the civilized Roman, Christian, Enlightened West; Asia meant orthodoxy, tyranny, and war. The Third Reich was Asia. Adenauer’s mission was to bring his Germany, western Germany, to the West, to cut out, as though it were a cancerous growth, the vestiges of Asia.

I arrived in Adenauer’s chosen, western capital, Bonn, during the second week of the Gulf War—that is to say, the last week of January 1991. It was snowing heavily. Bonn was an interesting place to be for the conflict constantly released memories of the last world war. At times the old wounds looked so fresh, it was as though Germany were still in ruins.

I had spent the previous week, like most people in the world, watching the war on television. British television, in my case. The mood on British TV was almost cheerful. Retired air marshals and naval commodores in double-breasted blazers appeared every day and night to point out battle lines on maps. They spoke with a sense of professional as well as patriotic pride. Behind the technical talk and the speculation of journalists was the feeling that Britain was reliving, in a small but heartening way, a little bit of her finest hour. It was as though decades of economic humiliation, the loss of empire, and general decline had been but a bad dream. It was war: finally the men would be sorted from the boys.

Foreigners might be better at making cars or computers, wrote a British newspaper columnist, famous for his provocative jingoism, but when there is fighting to be done, when the defense of the West, our way of life, freedom, and so forth, was at stake, the British could be counted on to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Yanks. Could the same be said of the Germans? When the German government hesitated about lending its full support to the war, doubts were cast on its reliability as a Western ally. Once again the timid continentals would look up to England as their savior. At this time of peril (such words were back in fashion: peril, valor, honor), Common Market policies were but trifling affairs, the bickering of merchants: at this time of peril, British was best again.

There was something both touching and pathetic about England then. Less than a year before Saddam Hussein’s war broke out, a fleet of Spitfires, Hurricanes, and a Lancaster bomber had flown over London to commemorate the Battle of Britain. It was a sunny day and the planes glinted as they dipped their wings over Buckingham Palace. I watched from the top of a hill in North London. The hill was blanketed with people, young people, old people, children, peering at the vintage machines in the sky. There was no shouting or cheering or laughter. There was, rather, an atmosphere of quiet pride and sadness, a sadness that was almost painful, the way nostalgia always is.

The spirit in Bonn was quite different. The first thing I noticed as the airport bus drove into town were bedsheets hanging from the windows of old town houses, with slogans painted in red and black: “No blood for oil!” “We are too young to die.” “There can be no just war.” “Our hope crashes with every bomb.” There had been a massive antiwar demonstration in Bonn the week before. Posters saying “We are frightened!” or “Never another war!” or “Bush is a war criminal!” were still pasted to windows and walls. There was a barely contained hysteria in the air, an atmosphere of impending apocalypse, of Weltuntergang, of a world brought down by military as well as ecological disaster.

The simple eighteenth-century architecture of Bonn reflects the classicism of the Enlightenment. Bonn lacks the pompous grandeur of Wilhelmine Berlin. On the central market square, covered with a grubby blanket of snow, stood a bronze statue of Beethoven. In his icy hand was a white flag with the ban-the-bomb sign. In front of the statue were several tents, decorated with banners, and outside the tents boards had been set up to display various images and texts. The banners were the same ones I had seen before: “No blood for oil!” and so on. One of the boards said: “Remember these images.” Underneath was a series of photographs, newspaper clippings, and drawings: of soldiers in the trenches during World War I, of cities being bombed in World War II, of Nazi soldiers marching through the Ukraine, of the naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack, of Israeli troops in Lebanon, and of U.S. bombers taking off for Baghdad. “There can be no just war,” it said.

A bearded man in his early forties, wearing an anorak, handed out pamphlets. I took one and he began to explain his views: “This war is fought for purely materialistic reasons. When Iraq gassed the Kurds, we didn’t do anything. Now we are starting a war. We must stop it at once.” He did not speak in a hectoring manner; more like a prophet who was used to being misunderstood, a man who had seen the truth to which others were still blind.

I then did what foreigners in Germany are so often tempted to do, with varying degrees of self-righteousness. I reminded him of the Nazis: “We did nothing after the Kristallnacht in 1938. Was that a reason not to fight in 1939?” “Well,” he said, “I wasn’t born then, so I wouldn’t know about that. But I do know that Israel massacred Palestinians in 1948. And now our own Foreign Minister, Genscher, goes to Israel to give them money and weapons—all because of our guilt complex. Do you think that’s right?”

This reference to a German “guilt complex” was unexpected. For he was a peace activist, a member of the Green Party, by age a “68er,” a child of the radical sixties. The rhetoric about Israel and the German guilt complex is something one expects to see in extreme right-wing publications such as the Deutsche National-Zeitung, published in Munich by Gerhard Frey, a veteran of the far right fringe, an enemy of Adenauer’s West. In the latest edition of that paper German politicians were ridiculed for going to Israel to offer help and consolation. The war was condemned as an example of American genocide: “Genocide in the Gulf,” it said, “a typical crime against humanity.” Other articles in the paper included “the Holocaust of American Indians” and “Israel’s war of terror.” Not that the National-Zeitung is a pacifist paper. The virtues of the German Wehrmacht and even the Waffen SS are proudly saluted. Calendars with pictures of German soldiers in uniform are on offer to readers at discount prices. Videotapes of the Blitzkrieg are advertised.

Yet these advertisements hardly reflected the same air of pride that made those retired air marshals glow on British television. They were defensive, as though something had to be covered up. It was as though German guilt was eased, even negated, by writing about Israeli terror or American Holocausts. It is here—perhaps only here—that the two extremes of German politics meet. On one side the National-Zeitung, on the other a spokesman for the peace movement in Berlin, who called the air attacks on Iraq “the greatest war crime since Hitler.”

Echoes of the last world war were everywhere, but they were loudest at the political extremes. The fear that American materialism would bring down the world had long been part of the rhetoric of both right and left. In the Gulf War, these fears appeared to be coming true. But there was an older resentment, which one would expect of the right, but which emerged on the left as well. In November 1991, an unofficial war crimes tribunal was staged in Stuttgart, where “ecological war crimes” committed by the Americans as well as their “genocide” in Iraq were judged. Alfred Mechtersheimer, a prominent peace activist, reminded his audience that the Nuremberg war crimes trials were a case of victors’ justice. And a socialist politician criticized West German slavishness toward the United States. But if the shared animosity of right and left toward the United States was relatively straightforward, attitudes toward Israel could never be simple. America evoked memories of bombers destroying German cities, of battles fought in Normandy or the Ardennes, of black markets and of black GIs seducing German girls with chocolate and silk stockings. Israel could not be dissociated from the Holocaust.

I had been introduced to an Israeli living in Bonn. I shall call him Michael, since he did not want to be mentioned by his real name. Michael was an embittered expert on German guilt. I met him at the Israeli embassy, a well-defended villa in a suburb of Bonn. We talked in a room without windows, with a bare desk and posters of Israeli landscapes on the wall. He was a stocky man with curly hair, in his early thirties, a post-68er. He was born in Russia, but had come to West Germany as a child. He grew up near Cologne, the only Jewish boy in his school. It had been an unhappy experience. For he was singled out as a special case. Teachers would ask him to talk to the class about Auschwitz. He got away with mischief for which the other boys were punished.

I was reminded of Michael when, a few months later, I read a novel by Peter Schneider, entitled Vati (Daddy), about the son of a Nazi war criminal, based on the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele. The son complains about the way he was treated at school: “It was their consideration which oppressed me. My biology teacher actually apologized for giving me a bad mark: I was by no means to regard this as punishment for what some relative of mine had done. When I neglected my homework, I was not called lazy. It was, they said, because of ‘difficult family circumstances.’”

Germany, said Michael, was sick. “I believe that if you were to do a heart test on a German, any German, young or old, you would see the adrenaline surge at the mention of the word Jew.”

Which is why, he said, the Gulf War had caused such panic in Germany. People had been calling the Israeli embassy in tears, at all hours. Some asked whether they might help Israeli children if something terrible happened, and whether they could return the children once the war was over. These Germans had to be calmed down, he said. Then he shrugged. “Ach,” he said, with the hint of a smile, “it is hard to be a German.”

Michael despised young pacifists as much as he did the older generation, the fathers, the guilty ones (Täter in German). The older generation, he said, were almost all philosemitic after the war. Pastors, mayors, teachers, priests, all would go to Israel at the first opportunity. An odd reversal of roles had taken place. Before the war, Michael said, Jews were seen as gentle, bookish pacifists. The Germans, on the other hand, had Prussian discipline. They were “hard as Krupp steel,” and so on. But now the Israelis had become the disciplined, hardworking warriors. Many older Germans admired them for this, as much as they despised the Arabs for being lazy and dirty. Now it was the Germans who had become the pacifists. “We Israelis laugh at German soldiers now,” said Michael.

In the late sixties, particularly after the Six-Day War in 1967, attitudes began to change. Many young Germans rejected everything their parents stood for. They sat in judgment over their past, hated them for their silence, and despised their philosemitism too. The student radicals claimed to be on the side of the victims, especially the Palestinians. They would never associate with the guilty, the Täter, not in Germany, not in Vietnam, not in Israel. They would make up for their parents’ cowardice. They would resist. They were idealists. They would fight to save the world from ecological disaster. They would resist American consumerism and Israeli militarism. Michael said: “They believed that being on the left was a vaccination against being antisemitic.” So when Michael sees thousands of German peace demonstrators, he does not see thousands of gentle people who have learned their lesson from the past; he sees “100 percent German Protestant rigorism, aggressive, intolerant, hard.”

In February 1991, the Israeli writer Amos Oz was interviewed about the Gulf War in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Oz is a liberal. The FAZ is a conservative newspaper, with little sympathy for peace movements, Greens, leftists, or 68ers. The editors were in favor of German participation in the Gulf War, or at the very least a firm German commitment to support the allied cause. The FAZ is anti-Communist, pro-NATO, and liberal (more in the nineteenth-century European than in the twentieth-century American sense). One of the editors is Joachim Fest, who wrote a famous biography of Hitler. A film was made of the book, which made Fest a wealthy man. The Hitler period, especially in the film, is shown as a form of collective madness, a murderous opéra bouffe, a demented aberration in the history of a great nation.

Fest was agitated that week, for, in his view, Germany had shown itself to be a prisoner of its past once again, by its display of nervous pacifism instead of political and military resolve. Germany, Fest often argued, should be a normal, responsible power again. By which he meant what Adenauer meant: a normal Western power. This aim was blocked by what he saw as an instinctive guilty cringe, which resulted, perversely, in a feeling of moral superiority: we who committed terrible sins will now heal the ills of the world. This prevented Germany from doing its duty as a Western ally. As a German patriot, Fest was embarrassed, even humiliated that Britain, France, and the United States should be fighting a war without active German support. When I mentioned the antiwar demonstrations, he sighed and said: “All because of Hitler.”

Amos Oz was not really an FAZ type, for his liberalism is left of center, but in his interview he spoke critically of romanticism about the Third World in leftist European and especially German circles. He saw traces of Rousseau’s worship of the noble savage—an almost theological celebration of those who are doomed to suffer. “Perhaps,” he said, “this is the result of a highly simplified and sentimental image of Christianity, according to which the victim is purified by his suffering.”

The Jews, then, were “purified” by the Holocaust, “as though the showers in the gas chambers had sprayed the victims with a moral detergent.” They have to be purer and better than other people. But how did this purity rub off on the children and grandchildren of the Täter? Could it be that they had a secret wish to be among the suffering too?

Moral purity was cruelly tested during the Gulf War by the news that poison gas sold by German firms was about to be unleashed on Israel by Iraqi Scud missiles. There can be no just war, yet Jews were threatened by German gas. It was not a pretty dilemma. It split the ranks of the peace movement. The poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann, who had demonstrated in the past against American missile bases in Germany and whose politics were far to the left of the FAZ, outraged many former comrades by voicing his support for the war. “No blood for oil,” he wrote in the weekly Die Zeit, “that’s the latest anti-American slogan. Dear me! Of course the Americans are also concerned about oil . . . And thank God for that, I say . . . Yes, I am happy that there are such lousy interests. Otherwise Israel would stand alone.” Biermann’s father died at Auschwitz.

There is a German word which is hard to translate into English but which sums up the mood of many Germans during the Gulf War: betroffen. Dictionaries offer the following translations: “stricken (with), affected (by) . . . shock, dismay, consternation, bewilderment.” None of these quite hits the right tone. Perhaps the French word bouleversé comes closest. Betroffen is much used by pacifists, liberals, and socialists, as often as the term “normal nation” is heard from German conservatives. To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment. To be betroffen is to be speechless. But it also implies an idea of moral purity. To be betroffen is one way to “master the past,” to show contriteness, to confess, and to be absolved and purified.

The frequent admonishments in West Germany to “mourn” the past, to do “the labor of mourning” (Trauerarbeit), are part of this act of purification. In their famous book, written in the sixties, entitled The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich analyzed the moral anesthesia that afflicted postwar Germans who would not face their past. They were numbed by defeat; their memories appeared to be blocked. They would or could not do their labor, and confess. They appeared to have completely forgotten that they had glorified a leader who caused the death of millions. Many Germans had reveled in the operatic self-glorification staged by the Nazi movement. By denying this after the Reich’s collapse, the Mitscherlichs argued, Germans wished to shield themselves not only from punishment or guilt but also from the sense of utter impotence that followed their defeat. Only those who have suffered a loss can mourn. But what exactly had the Germans lost? The Jews, of course, but that was hardly felt to be a German loss. Many Germans had lost their homes, their sons, their absurd ideals, and their Leader. But mourning these was not what the Mitscherlichs meant by Trauerarbeit: mourning Hitler, after 1945, was impossible. Thirty years later, Margarethe Mitscherlich would say that the inability to mourn no longer applied to the younger generations. She was right: the Jews are mourned in Germany, and so, in certain extreme circles, is the loss of Hitler.

There is something religious about the act of being betroffen, something close to Pietism, which has a long and rich tradition in Germany. It began in the seventeenth century with the works of Philipp Jakob Spener. He wanted to reform the Church and bring the Gospel into daily life, as it were, by stressing good works and individual spiritual labor. Gordon Craig wrote: “The heart of Pietism was the moral renovation of the individual, achieved by passing through the anguish of contrition into the overwhelming realization of the assurance of God’s grace.” Pietism served as an antidote to the secular and rational ideas of the French Enlightenment. It inspired the nineteenth-century German middle class as well as Prussian officers and the men around Bismarck. It is this spirit, I think, that Michael, the Israeli in Bonn, was referring to when he spoke about the Protestant rigor of German pacifists.

During the Gulf War, Bonn was betroffen. It was supposed to have been very different, for it was carnival season, time for fancy-dress parties, beer, women, and songs. But this seemed inappropriate at a time of war and impending doom, so carnival committees became crisis committees. The regional government of Rheinland-Pfalz awarded money to all organizations willing to abandon the carnival feast. It proved an effective measure. Only in Cologne did an unofficial street celebration take place, under the motto “We stick to life.”

In Berlin a group of music school students organized an antiwar day, because, so their spokesman said, “all the students feel so sad and betroffen that we felt the need to get together to talk about our fears.” They built an altar and lit candles. And a local radio station broadcast their peace song, with a refrain that went: “We are betroffen and deeply shocked.”

The square outside my hotel was cold and mostly empty. There was one small beer stand where a few young men drank, danced around a bit, and shouted in what was meant to be a festive manner. I could hear their beery songs waft in through the window of my room. The heavy, foot-stamping rhythms brought to mind countless war movies in which German hilarity is meant to serve as an ironic counterpoint to some act of brutality. It is better to learn to resist such associations in Germany, for it is all too easy to become self-righteous and obsessed, even if one’s memories can only be of films.

I watched television and once again marveled at the contrast with Britain. German television is rich in earnest discussion programs where people sit at round tables and debate the issues of the day. The audience sits at smaller tables, sipping drinks as the featured guests hold forth. The tone is generally serious, but sometimes the arguments get heated. It is easy to laugh at the solemnity of these programs, but there is much to admire about them. It is partly through these talk shows that a large number of Germans have become accustomed to political debate.

During the Gulf War, it was hard for a television viewer to avoid the roundtable discussions. There were so many, you could switch channels and follow several debates at once. Pastors were frequent guests. Some wore suits, some wore jeans. Their presence was fitting, for at the center of the debate was the question of conscience. Could one fight in a war with a good conscience? A German fighter pilot said that he found it hard to accept the idea of killing people. He didn’t know whether his conscience would allow it. A young doctor working in a hospital near an American air force base said his conscience was troubled by the idea of treating American pilots wounded in the Gulf War, for this would make him an accomplice.

In one typical show, the discussion group consisted of a man who had resisted the Nazis, an army conscript, an elderly housewife, a working mother, and some high school students. The twenty-seven-year-old mother, Angelika, said that Germany had to help Israel, because of “what we did during the war,” but surely nothing would be gained by fighting this war in the Gulf.

“What about the British and the French?” said the former resistance man. “Should we leave it up to them to do the dirty work while we stay at home?” (There was no mention of the Americans.)