Red Germany

Germany is one screwed up place. For obvious reasons. But I watched The Baeder-Meinhof Complex last night, two and a half hours of extreme leftist idiocy. Yet I was bothered by the lack of a local context for their actions. Their commitment to world revolution--their identification with the Vietnamese communists, the Palestinians, and so forth--was made clear. But exactly what motivated them in Germany itself was less clear. For the most part, people don't become murderous just because everyone else is wrapped up in a mindless consumerism. Still, Germany was, after all, a country that had within recent memory started a war that consumed millions of people, especially in death camps and by roving bands of soldiers who mowed down hundreds of thousands. All of which was enabled (and, at times, even committed) by a compliant public. But apparently they imagined that, after such actions, everything could just go back to normal--whatever normal might be. The movie also didn't make it clear that many of the bureaucrats and judges in West Germany and many of the policemen served under the Nazis and made a seamless transition to the same positions in the new, U.S.-occupied state. The delusion of normality must have seemed farcical to those who imagined themselves as having even a small amount of social consciousness.

I was in Germany in 1974, another idiot simply travelling through the country. It was, in essence, between Venice and Holland, and so I made my way north through Salzburg, Munich, and then Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, I was sitting on the grass in a park and decided to go into the bushes to take a leak. When I emerged, two cops came up to me and asked for identification. I acted as if I didn't understand them, showed them my US pasport, and that was that. I always felt a sense of trepidation in Germany--the same sort of feeling one might feel walking across a battlefield or a massacre site. Bad things had occurred there. But I was oblivious to the sickness that pervaded the country. The guilt. The resentment. The unwillingnees to acknowledge what had happened or the fierce desire to move beyond it. The parents have a deep, dark secret, and their children are acting out. Is it so surprising?