Category Archives: Teutschtümelei

A Forgotten Generation

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“‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’  If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?  Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

 So spoke Abraham Lincoln in March, 1865.

Not quite two years ago I had occasion to visit Freiburg im Breisgau, on the edge of the Black Forest, and where 27 years ago I got to spend what’s still the single most enjoyable year of my life. On those few occasions when I am able to visit Germany I always make a point to stop in for at least a day or so. Yes, I am something like a dog and his vomit in that respect. This last time I popped into the principal bookstore downtown. While studying there in the mid-1980s I did most of my shopping there. Granted, Freiburg is a university town (and has been since a couple of centuries before Columbus blundered ashore; in fact it was Martin Waldseemüller, a Freiburg cartographer, who named “America” after Brer Vespucci), but even by those standards it’s an exceedingly fine bookstore.

That visit I picked up Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, a history of the German Foreign Office during and after the Third Reich. It was commissioned by the government and published in 2006, I think, and was written by four authors collaborating. For a book ordered and written by committee, it’s a very useful read. I propose one day to blog it as well, but for the moment I want to concentrate on two books I bought for an aunt of mine. 

She’s an aunt by marriage. She and her four sisters were born in East Prussia; in fact they were so far in East Prussia that their hometown ended up in the Soviet Union after the war. And therein lies her story. Their father had already been killed on the Eastern Front, leaving the mother with four daughters, the youngest of whom cannot have been older than four or five. A very good friend of their father’s was on the staff of the commanding general in that district, and he came to their mother and told them that the war was lost, and that when the Red Army approached they were Major So-and-So’s wife and children. Understood? Sure enough, the Soviets arrived, and they all piled into the major’s staff car with his driver and adjutant. On the way to the airfield they were strafed by a Soviet fighter, killing the driver and wounding the adjutant. Edith, the oldest, once in my presence related looking back through the rear window of the staff car. The entire horizon was lined with columns of smoke and flames from burning villages and farms. 

They made it onto the last plane out of that airfield. A friend of their mother’s stayed behind. She was raped upwards of twenty times a night. At least, however, she was not shot afterward. 

The family, the youngest violently sick with a raging fever that left her largely deaf, fetched up in Denmark in the refugee camps for a number of years.  At one point they got split up. The oldest sister, who could speak English, got a job working for the Americans and met some ol’ boy from what’s still way on out in the sticks. They married and she moved here, eventually bringing after her the third sister, who met and married my father’s middle brother. I think she’s been back to her hometown once since the Wall came down; there wasn’t much left of the old place. The Soviets have done a decently thorough job of obliterating all traces of the original inhabitants. 

I’ve never heard her say much about “wie es gewesen ist” – how it was – but she’s long had a reflectiveness that seems to me at least to be several orders of magnitude more inward than one would expect, even among her generation of older Americans (one pretty much gives up looking for that trait in younger Americans, which of course makes it all the more pleasantly surprising and pleasurable when one stumbles across it). She got into transcendental meditation decades ago and that seems to have answered some need within her. 

But back to the point at t’issue, as Constable Oates might say.  Among the subjects that over the past decade or so have become less taboo in Germany is the experience of the Germans – ordinary citizens – as victims of their own war. There has since 1945 been what for a better expression I’ll call an exiles’ lobby (Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten is one of the larger groups, I think), but that was always more focused on the politics of the division and the removal of ethnic Germans from what used to be the eastern provinces. They had, after all, to make room for all the Poles whom the Soviets kicked out of eastern Poland. If you imagine two entire populations ripped from their ancestral homes and shoved 100 or more miles west, that’s about what happened immediately the shooting stopped. [In the Deutsches Museum in East Berlin I recall seeing one of the placards that the Soviets just pasted around town. It allowed that within twenty-four hours all Germans were to be gone, taking with them only what they could carry in their own hands. Transportation was not arranged.] 

But the discussion, the engagement, the (and it’s a wonderful German word that captures the sense of grappling with an issue and wrestling it to the ground, there to pull it to shreds) Auseinandersetzung with the civilian German war was either swept under the rug or simply ignored. “We got through it alive somehow and that’s all we need to remember,” seems to have been the parole for the better part of 50 years. There were also enormous guilt feelings, the commonly accepted notion that how in God’s name could you talk about German war victims, with all those pits full of human ash and piles of emaciated corpses underfoot? No, better just to shut up, show up to work, bust ass all day long, save up for retirement, and keep your head down.  If you want to see how it plays out when an entire society takes to heart the divine injunction to “let the dead bury the dead,” then Germany from 1945 through the mid-1990s is a pretty good Exhibit A. 

That is changing. In that bookstore I saw two books both of which I bought for my aunt. The first and shorter is Flucht über die Ostsee – Flight over the Baltic – which is a collection of reminiscences of the refugees who were trapped in the eastern provinces when the Soviets broke through to the Baltic to the west of Danzig in early 1945.  All Prussia, Memel, Pomerania, and several other areas were cut off from the rest of the country. The government began Operation Hannibal in late January, 1945 to evacuate as much of the civilian population, war convalescents, and other mission-critical people as they could. The Wilhelm Gustloff was part of the operations, until she was sunk with anywhere up to 8,000 dead.  They had the evacuees on liners, tugboats, U-boats, freighters, anything that would float and could weather winter navigation.

Where people went to depended, of course, on where they started from. Many made their way to the Baltic shores and then down to Danzig and Gotenhafen, where they took ship for Denmark, Lübeck, Travemünde, and any other port that could berth a ship long enough to unload them. Others went straight to Danzig. It was bitterly cold, and the treks of civilians were frequently under air attack, especially while travelling over the frozen Frishes Haff (the gulf of the Vistula) to the Frische Nehrung, that long spit of land that parallels the mainland, all the way down to Danzig. Entire wagons would drop through the ice, instantly extinguishing the family and all its possessions. Or bombs and strafing would tear family members to shreds (one woman who tells her story saw both parents reduced to bloody piles of flesh by the same bomb), leaving children to depend on the charity of strangers. 

Important to remember is that by and large the only adults of able body were the mothers. The men and older boys were detained, either in the eastern districts themselves or at Danzig/Gotenhafen, not allowed to go onward. The older girls frequently were assigned to military or quasi-military support units, and so not allowed to leave. Only the decrepit and the aged males were allowed to leave. So not infrequently you’d have two or more generations of adult women, trailing multiple children (and not seldom nursing infants), and lumbered down with old men, sick and frail. 

In all, it’s a story that ought to be better known in the U.S.  Our schoolchildren will spend days learning about the Importance of This, That, or the Other Pet Constituency in the Construction of the Western Trading Posts, but they grow up in pristine ignorance of events which to this day shape the political landscape of Europe.  Don’t think that’s a problem?  Our Dear Leader chose September 17, 2009, to share in a telephone call with the Poles that we were craw-fishing on putting them beneath our missile defense shield, a shield which the Poles quite correctly understood to offer them significant protection from resurgent Russian interference.  Anyone less profoundly ignorant of history (and folks, it’s the State Department’s damned job to know these things) would have understood that day to be the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.  For a good, if somewhat brief, look at what happened next, see Janusz Bardach’s Man is Wolf to Man.

The other book I bought my aunt is called Die Vergessene Generation – The Forgotten Generation. It is specifically about the children, and more particularly about the children who were born between roughly 1937 and roughly 1950. Their older siblings had some – not much, to be true, but at least some – seasoning under their belts by the time things got really, truly horrible for the urban German population (and the eastern rural one as well). If you were born in 1934 then you were ten by 1944, when the bombers began to have it pretty much their own way, and when the Soviets crossed the border into Germany proper the next winter. It was their younger siblings who were exposed to all the delights of industrial-scale warfare, and especially the joys of the clash of races on the Eastern Front, with no psychological defenses to speak of. 

After the war they were also the ones most likely to get lost in the emotional shuffle. “Oh, you were too young to remember,” they’d be told. Or, “Just be thankful we’re alive.” Or, “That’s just how the war was,” or “You must remember we didn’t have it all that badly.” But they did remember, in some cases with repressed recollection, but they remembered all right. Being thankful to be alive and being aware of the plight of others are intellectual responses to dealing with one’s own misfortune and emotional trauma. It’s precisely that intellectual/emotional maturity that the 1937ers and younger just did not have when they shot the works. Their war experiences pole-axed them, and after the war their parents and older siblings were too busy re-building the country to notice these seething little masses of emotional wound gazing about them, hungry, cold, and absorbing the terrible lesson that this might well be the new normal. By the time one is an adult one generally forgets how defenseless children can be, how telling a little girl that there is no room on the sledge for her favorite doll will be a memory that will still be with her when she 75 years old, and that she will instantly be able to call up the hurt and the bewilderment of that precise moment. It’s idle to dismiss that experience with the observation that surely a doll is pretty small potatoes when Marshall Zhukov’s boys are coming out of the woods: To that little girl it’s pretty big stuff; more to the point, all the hurt, the bewilderment, the awareness of being Utterly Unprotected — not by mama, not by papa, not by older brother or sister — which children that age cannot articulate, will attach themselves to that moment of I Have to Leave My Doll Behind.  The adult that child becomes may go decades before finding the words to engage, to grapple with that wounding, but the simple memory of that doll will bring all the old trauma back to the surface.

The children in the cities were also dunked, with no preparation and no internal structures to enable them to process the experiences, into the horrors of the first massive aerial war. In “Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch,” (“The Rats Sleep at Night, Though”) a short story by Wolfgang Borchert, the story is told of Jürgen, a boy of nine (significantly he’s the only person in the story with a name; the others are types). He’s lying towards sundown in his hiding place in the pile of rubble that was his home until a few nights ago.  He’s exhausted, but knows he must awaken.  He opens his eyes to see an adult regarding him.  The old man attempts to reach this child in the rubble with an offer to see his rabbits.  Jürgen can’t leave his post. Why?  Well, the teacher at school had told his class about the rats in the rubble, and how they ate whatever they could find, including the victims. And little brother is still down there, the boy says. He was only four. The boy thinks if he stands watch over what was once their home and is now his baby brother’s cairn, the rats won’t get to him. But the rats sleep at night, though, the stranger says. 

Fiction, of course, but you can jolly well be sure that little scenes only marginally less terrible played out daily, hourly, in the big industrial targets. 

Die Vergessene Generation is about those children, now in their 70s, and about their children. Many of them (not all, to be sure; even small children can have remarkable emotional recuperative capacity) have spent their lives with vague but still oppressive feelings of disjointedness, detachment from family, difficulty forming or maintaining friendships, anxieties that wash over them at odd and usually inopportune times . . . in short, all the behavioral and psychological traits of people who have something deep within them with which they’ve never made peace.  In at least some instances they’ve managed to pass along their emotional baggage to their own children.

They’re now beginning to talk, some for the first time.  Ever.  The book  intersperses discussion of the history of the (mis)diagnosis and (mal)treatment of these emotional disorders (short version: keep ’em drugged up), and how these issues fit into the larger psychological exercise of Admitting and Understanding of what Germany exactly did during those twelve awful years, with narratives of specific individuals.  One of them concerns a child of Kriegskinder (war children) who has never heard his parents speak of the war, and whose relationship with his parents has always been missing significant substance at its core.  As an adult, he finally asks his father, who explains to him that when your mother and I met and realized we would remain together, we spent an entire night telling each other everything that we experienced in the war.  We promised each other than what we said that night would never leave that room.  Ever.  It was the end of the discussion for that child.  Imagine being told that a huge — perhaps the major — portion of what makes your parents who they are (and therefore who you are) is and will always remain Forbidden Territory.

Then there’s the old woman who as a child and with her own family unable to feed all the mouths (Europe, particularly Germany, starved for well over a year after the guns fell silent) was put off onto neighboring adults, including one who more or less whored her out to pedophiles in exchange for food and cigarettes (the only current medium of exchange).

I opened this post with that quotation from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural because I think what he was trying to capture, and in a way to prepare the country for, were the same issues, the same prism through which the experiences of the war children must be viewed.  Germany gave vent to urges calling forth the worst human nature can be; that part of the world which had the ability to stop it before it exploded all over everyone failed to do so, consciously averted its eyes, buried the truth in hopes that it would not be called upon to step forward.  And the Almighty gave to the world that terrible war as the woe due those by whom the offense came.  The wealth and cultural heritage piled up by centuries of toil was blown to dust within a matter of months.  Today we study the Holocaust not to identify the perpetrators; they’re dead, mostly, and have finally been delivered over to Justice.  We study it because we need to know what lurks within us, what we are capable of doing when we loosen our grip on those parts of our heritage which trace their roots back to the Sermon on the Mount.

The war children will take to their graves the knowledge — admitted even to themselves or not — of what their parents and grandparents did.  Like it or not, that is a guilt which in fact, as one of the Nuremberg defendants allowed on the gallows, a thousand years will not erase.  And yet these deeply damaged people are just that: wounded innocence.  They are the child in Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” wordless, uncomprehending, capable only of fear and hurt, two of the most elemental, animalistic, de-humanizing sensations which it is given us to know.  As Die Vergessene Generation makes the point:  The first step in whatever healing is possible must be permission to grieve, validation of pain felt on one’s own head.

My aunt read the book twice before she lent it back to me to read for myself.

November 9

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Among my less annoying habits and fascinations is noting odd quirks of historical coincidence.  Like today, November 9.  Let’s take a brief wander across the arc of history as it unfolded on this date.

November 9, 1918:  Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates, ending the Hohenzollern dynasty in Prussia and the experiment of Imperial Germany.  The empire was less than 50 years old.  Just by way of comparison, the U.S. turned 50 in 1826.  Yes, I’m aware the constitution was quite a bit younger, but the U.S. as a single polity was in fact created by the Declaration of Independence, by which the now former colonies declared themselves to be free and united.  In 1826 we were just getting into the second generation of dominant statesmen after the founders had passed from the scene.  Clay, Calhoun, and Webster were just over a decade into Congressional careers that would last until 1850 or later.  Jackson, the first president elected from outside the original states, was two years away from his first election.  So by the 50 year point the U.S. had both fundamentally changed its form of government, peacefully, and had successfully made the peaceful transition from the founding generation and its aspirations to the first generation which didn’t really have any adult recollections of anything other the United States.

November 9, 1923.  The Beer Hall Putsch is suppressed, with gunfire.  Weimar Germany had already weathered the Kapp Putsch in 1920, just barely.  It, too, involved drawn weapons.  While it survived both, each of the two left the nation weaker, not stronger.  The sentences handed out to Hitler and his henchmen were laughable, and served only to give notice that the state was unwilling to fight to preserve itself.  If the state will not so fight, why should the citizens fight for it?

November 9, 1938.  The nightmare truly begins to assume concrete outline.  Some second-tier functionary of the German embassy is shot and killed in Paris, and by nightfall the Nazi party apparatus has been mobilized to take to the streets in a “spontaneous demonstration” of outrage against the Jews.  Thousands of Jewish shops and homes are looted and burned.  Many thousands are beaten, many are killed.  The synagogues go up in flames.  The streets in the cities are so coated in shattered glass the next morning that the evening’s doings have gone down as Kristallnacht (“crystal night”).  Oh sure, the scenes in Austria in March, 1938 have been horrible enough, with Jewish noblewomen forced to crawl on their hands and knees, scrubbing the pavement with their toothbrushes, and politically undesirable people vanishing.  But Europe could kid itself that such scenes can’t always be helped when one nation is swallowed by another.  There will be aches and pains, in other words.  And of course in Munich back in September all that happened was all those Sudeten Germans were finally allowed to go “heim ins Reich,” as they’d so loudly demanded.  But Kristallnacht was different.  It was a government not merely failing to protect an entire segment of its populace; it was that government taking the lead in organizing the attacks on that populace.

November 9, 1940.  Neville Chamberlain dies.  The last man with a clear shot at stopping Hitler in his tracks, who lied and smarmed his country into a position of almost helpless exposure to the Germans, lives long enough to see himself revealed as one of history’s greatest fools and suckers.  The only reason Great Britain survived the pickle Chamberlain left it in was the geographic accident of the English Channel.  We now know that if Chamberlain had stood firm in September, 1938 the generals would have taken Hitler out.  In fact, they would have Taken Hitler Out; the plotters were staged in an apartment building a few blocks from the government headquarters, each with his assignment and armed to the teeth.  The plot was to take Hitler out directly he was caught and shoot him.  But when Chamberlain caved in he jerked the rug from beneath their feet.  Who will flock to support a bunch of renegade officers whose forces were just spared the effort of fighting by the brilliant political machinations of the Führer?  I would observe that, like all the modern American “news” organizations which have diligently squelched any story, any angle, which might reflect poorly on their own chosen Dear Leader, so also Geoffrey Dawson of The Times repeated killed stories filed by his foreign correspondents in Germany, describing in great and very accurate detail exactly what the Nazis were up to, both in terms of rearmament and in terms of political repression.  Dawson killed the stories for the express reason that he didn’t want to annoy or upset “Herr Hitler.”  He decided there were some truths which Britons were just not entitled to know.  His ideological heirs populate the U.S. media industry today.

November 9, 1989.  For the first time since August, 1961, the borders from East to West Germany are opened.  Security at the checkpoints is abandoned, and with it the 45-year monstrosity that was the German Democratic Republic, with its Stasi torture chambers, prisons, and camps, its SED, and all its odious apparatus.  The Germans don’t celebrate the event on the day, though; they won’t give the remaining neo-Nazis the gratification of surreptitiously celebrating the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Odd coincidence, isn’t it, that so much pertinent to a single theme should have come to pass on the same day?

Friede sei mit Euch!

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Seven years ago today, the re-built Frauenkirche in Dresden was reconsecrated.

When I first saw the church it was a very tall (I’d guess thirty or more feet) pile of black-stained rubble, with two hunks of burned stone wall sticking out. It stood all alone in the middle of a very wide open space, the new market. It was February, 1986, and although no one could know it at the time, the whole German Democratic Republic thing had only three-and-a-half more years to run before it got irretrievably stuck in the ditch. 

The church, the second on that site, had been built between 1726 and 1743 and was designed by the city’s municipal master builder, a boy name of George Bähr. He’d been born in 1666, in Füurstenwalde out in the sticks, and then moved to Dresden to make his bones in the city. Augustus the Strong – sufficiently strong that he was rumored to have fathered some 300 children (not by the same woman, I understand) – had become King of Poland (and converted to Catholicism for the occasion, he perhaps agreeing with Henry IV on the point) and wanted a proper residence city. What the people who were going to pay for his building schemes had to say is not well-recorded. Perhaps they weren’t asked (poor old Augustus; he lived before people knew to label that sort of thing “stimulus”). 

The city of Dresden had joined the Reformation. The original Frauenkirche of course pre-dated all that and had thus begun as a Catholic church, but was converted to Protestant use when the city made the jump. It was a municipal church; that is, it belonged to the city and not to any particular organizational unit of the Protestant church. And it was in very, very bad shape. In fact by the second decade of the 1700s it was more or less unusable. 

Money was the hang-point, as it always is. But they could plan. They invited proposals from Matthäus Pöppelmann, the builder of the Zwinger (a summer palace down by the river), from several others, and from their newly-appointed master carpenter. [N.b. Bähr was appointed municipal master carpenter before he was actually a master carpenter, a pretty high compliment, when you think about it.] Bähr’s proposal, for an enormous stone octagon supporting a stone dome, got the nod. 

Inside the lay-out is very much in tune with the Protestant emphasis on preaching the Gospel, and in baptism as the becoming one of God’s children. The pulpit juts out towards the congregation like the prow of a whaling boat, the baptismal font just behind it, and both well in front of the altar. The main floor for the congregation is arc-shaped in a rounded space formed by the eight pillars which support the 12,000 tons of inner dome and double-shell outer dome. Above the main floor are three galleries in a horseshoe shape. The effect is as nearly as possible to project the central function of the church – preaching – front and center into the physical space occupied by the congregation. 

They’d finally scraped up enough money to start by 1726. During construction the money kept running short, however, prompting Bähr to spend his own money to keep the work going. He ended up impoverishing his family with the effort, and worn down by intrigue and mounting criticism of his church’s stability, he died the day after his birthday in 1738. It wasn’t until five years later that the final touches were added. 

Dresdners promptly fell in love with their church. The loved her magnificent beauty indoors, play of light off copious gilding and the almost luminescent paint of the interior; they loved how she towered above their city, visible for miles around. They loved how people from all over Europe came to marvel at it (it was and remained for over 200 years the largest domed structure north of the Alps). They loved the magnificent pipe organ, designed by the great Gottfried Silbermann and played by no less than Bach himself. Silbermann and Bähr had got cross-ways on the design of the organ case. Silbermann was accustomed to design everything about the organ (which he in fact had done for the church at Forchheim, also built by Bähr), but Bähr decided that the organ was part of the architecture of the space and so insisted on his prerogative. They loved the paintings on the inner dome, four representing the evangelists, alternating with four showing the virtues of faith, hope, love, and mercy (the virtues are represented by females figures, all of which showed the same face; the speculation is that the artist might have used Bähr’s third wife as the model). 

Shortly before midnight on February 13, 1945, the Lancasters of Air Marshal Arthur Harris appeared above the city, in two waves. Dresden had not been bombed yet. Her medieval inner city streets, tightly packed with ancient buildings, was a tinder box. The bomber fleets that night carried almost no high explosives; the British just set out to see how big a fire they could start. The flames were visible to the aircrew over 200 miles away. In the morning the 8th Air Force B-17s showed up and added of their plenty. 

The city was full, and was known to be so, of civilian refugees from points farther east, fleeing from the Red Army. No effort was made, at all, to target the few military or quasi-military targets (thermite bombs will not wreck a railroad switching yard, or drop a stone or steel bridge into the water; the few armaments factories in the area were at the edge of town or completely across the river, well outside the attack’s target zone). Depending on whom you ask, between 35,000 to 150,000+ people died that night. Many of them were so completely incinerated by the firestorm that no trace of them was left to count when the stones had cooled. The firestorm generated winds sufficiently powerful that they sucked streetcars through the air towards the core of the flames. 

The Frauenkirche was not hit by any high explosives, and of course the incendiaries couldn’t penetrate the dome (the outer shell is 30 or more inches thick, depending on precise location). But the thermite lit the fires of hell; the temperature inside the church is estimated at close to 1,000 degrees Celsius. The eight pillars supporting that massive dome glowed bright red, until the sandstone itself disintegrated. 

And the church came down, late morning of February 15, 1945. There she lay for the next 45 years. The locals kicked up enough fuss to prevent the ruins from being cleared off in the immediate aftermath of the war, and eventually the whole site was declared a war memorial. 

By 1985 the city had decided to rebuild, once they finished with the palace and its church (the latter sporting its own Silbermann organ) and the opera building (designed by Gottfried Semper). Reunification caught them first, but the idea had taken hold, and shortly after the Wende (the “turn”) a group of a dozen or so citizens put the word out. What sort of church should they re-build? Being Germans they worried that question half to death, with some designs being suggested that were as hideously ugly as only modern architecture can be. In the end, though, they decided that it should be as it originally was (which was somewhat different, by the way, from how it looked in 1945; for instance the interior pillars had been re-painted a sort of greenish color at some point, while their original was a multi-hued faux marble appearance). 

Reaction started modestly, but boy howdy did it grow. The eventual reconstruction cost €180 million, of which €100 million was raised by public subscription. The Dresdner Bank chipped in €7 million of its own, and raised another 70 or so through sponsoring various fund-raising drives. An American doctor (born in Germany, as a young child he’d been one of the refugees who made it through Dresden before the bombing and had seen the church) gave his entire prize money for his Nobel in medicine to the effort. The British paid to re-build the cross atop the church, and by ironic happenstance the silversmith who got the commission was the son of one of the men at the stick on one of those Lancasters. A Polish survivor of the resistance drummed up the cash to sponsor one of the vase-and-flame structures on an exterior tower. There were charitable trusts set up in Britain, the U.S., Switzerland, and France. Masons and other craftsmen came from all over Germany (and from even further afield; one of the apprentice stone cutters was American). 

Being German, when they began unstacking the rubble, they mapped out exactly where in the pile they found each re-usable stone and measured it, compared it to the original plans (which, being German, they also still had), ran it through a computer simulation in 3-D to see how it would fit, and then, as and when they could, being German, they put it exactly right back where it came from. According to the chief builder Eberhard Burger, of the roughly 21,500 cubic meters of rubble they were able to salvage approximately 7,000 of it for re-use, which when added to the remaining structural components would yield about 40% or so original material in the re-built church.

The original stones are still stained black, and so it lends a curious speckled appearance to the fassade, the balance of which is a sort of light honey colored sandstone. 

On October 30, 2005, they reconsecrated their Frauenkirche. The prime seats on the main floor, other than those reserved for dignitaries, were allocated to surviving members of the congregation, with preference for those baptized or married in the church (two older women participated in the service itself; one had been baptized 81 years before). Ludwig Güttler, the world-famous trumpeter and professor, lead the musicians from the organ loft (I don’t see how he could have the breath to blow; I’d have been too choked up, were I in his place). Eberhard Burger likewise participated, and in places if you watch you can see him choking back tears. The three bishops who had superintended the whole process were the chief celebrants. 

Here’s an excerpt, from immediately after the consecration of the entire church (they had done the pulpit, the baptismal font, the altar, and the organ separately). The chorale is “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr,” one of the very earliest Protestant hymns, dating from the mid-1520s. 

One of the nice things about running a blog is you get to write about stuff that interests you, even if no one else. This day I claim my rights in that regard.

 

At Least Bismarck Labelled it Correctly

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When he called his attempts to suppress the Catholic Church and its related organizations a “Kulturkampf.”  Nowadays we simply require the Roman Church, through its affiliate entities, to underwrite abortion, abortifacients, and birth control, and we call its opposition to being required to vomit up its beliefs a “war on women.”

This op-ed’s references to 1870-80s Imperial Germany is very timely, and the connection between that time and today is one that is not nearly adequately appreciated. Progressivism’s — in fact, “liberalism’s” — roots in fact do lie in a time and place which is most popularly understood as representing the very antithesis of those ideologies’ guiding principles.

Yet it is even so.  As Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 for a British audience, the British public conversations about “planning,” by which everyone understood centralized planning of as much of the economy as could be comprehended by government mandate, eerily mirrored the precise conversations that were current in Germany a generation and more before.  Hayek wrote, so he pointed out, precisely to warn the British public against the dangers of following down the German path.

Closer to home here, in Liberal Fascism, a book which remains interesting today, the introductory chapters, especially on Woodrow Wilson’s actual articulated ideas of government and its proper role in life, are filled with citations to his works and papers and their German antecedents.  Wilson has been sanctified in American history teaching largely for his 14 Points, and for his League of Nations idea.  His 14 Points turned out to be at best pious hogwash and at worst ticking time-bombs (remember it was his principle of “self-determination” that allowed the British and French to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 with a smirk of rationalization).  His League of Nations foundered, we are told, because the U.S. didn’t join.  Forgive me but I can’t see that the U.N. has done much to gloat over.  What has kept the the world from immolating itself for the past 70 years has not been a bunch of guys in New York who won’t pay a parking ticket; it’s been the U.S. military.  But it’s when you move past the Wilson hagiography that you get to some positions that are just well beyond the pale.  A vigorous support for governmental eugenics is only one.  His totalitarian vision of the state and his frustrations with that nasty ol’ Constitution are even more sobering.

[As an aside, Liberal Fascism remains a quaint artifact because it was so obviously written against Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, at a time when everyone just assumed she was the nominee.  I can’t recall that Dear Leader got much more than a collateral mention.]

Bismarck cynically used then-current theorizing about the state, its role, and the citizen’s role, combined with a ruthless divide-and-conquer strategy, for what seems to have been no greater ambition than to retain himself in power.  He threw bones to the socialists, in the form of social security, enacted in 1881, a full half-century-plus before the U.S.  He threw bones to the saber rattlers and imperialists in the form of huffing and shouting until Britain and France allowed Germany to take over a few thousand square miles of God-forsaken territory at the fringe of nowhere.  He threw bones to the officer class in the form of ever-increasing army appropriations.  He threw bones to the industrialists like Krupp in the form of buying up their armaments as fast as they could be produced.  But from a recent biography of him, the conclusion is pretty strong that for Bismarck it was about little more than fracturing the opposition to his personal dominance of European politics.

Bismarck even wrote the Imperial constitution to suit himself.  It was perfectly tailored for himself as Reichskanzler and the aged Wilhelm I, the soldier-king, as Kaiser.  In fact it worked, about as well as anything, while the two of them remained in place.  But it was precisely that point in which Bismarck revealed himself to be no statesman, but rather a megalomaniacal politician.  His constitution overlooked that one day he would no longer be Reichskanzler, and Wilhelm I no longer kaiser.  And sure enough, when his little puppy of a crown prince (whose warped view of the world and his place in it Bismarck had studiously fostered, back when it appeared that his father would be kaiser for a lengthy reign) ascended the throne, it wasn’t a decade before the system began to go off the rails.  Bismarck’s failure is in marked contrast to the wisdom of the men who sweated out the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia.  They wrote for the ages.  Over 225 years later their work endures, for exactly the reason that its strengths do not depend upon the strengths of any particular player, but rather are designed to check the failings of all potential players.

Back in the 1870s they called it an “Obrigkeitsstaat” — an authoritarian state.  Now we call it “hope” and “change.”  But the understanding of where we and our government fit into each other’s existence is vintage 1870s.  All of which highlights how close to the truth came the speaker (don’t have the book in front of me now and so I can’t give the name) who observed that America speaks in English, but it thinks in German.  It is no accident, no accident at all, that the same Dear Leader who on the one hand laments that America’s Founding Fathers didn’t draft a charter for expropriation and re-distribution also wholly accepts, so far as can be told from his actions and pronouncements, the Imperial German notions of the centrality of the state in society.

“Victors’ Justice”; But Was It?

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Today we celebrate – yes, “celebrate” is preciselythe word I want – the hanging of ten as wicked men as humanity has cast up on the shore in the past several hundred years.

They’d been riding high, these lawyers, engineers, architects, doctors of philosophy, journalists, when they had the lives of millions in their filthy hands. They’d erected elaborate administrative structures where memoranda silently wafted through the chancelleries, drifted across desks, being initialed, stamped, counter-signed, and on and on, before a background of towers of smoke belching from the ovens, day in and day out. And through it all the relentless clanking of cattle wagons coupling in the switching yard, the rhythmic beat of steel wheels over rails of even length, each clack! bearing the human cargo within that many meters closer to a yard where those marked for immediate death were sent to one side – the vast majority of them – and those to be preserved for a lingering, gnawing, terrified, starving, vermin-infested, beaten-bloody deathly labor were sent to the other.

These men and their underlings occupied blocks on hell’s own organizational chart, blocks labeled things like “Referat VIIa – Ausland” and similarly bland titles. What they did was set out to slaughter an entire people, to enslave an entire ethnic group, to purge by starvation vast territories that they might be settled by Volksgenossen – racial comrades. 

We caught them, we and our allies did. The big fish, the guys who did shit like decree that a conference would be held at some forgettable suburb called Wannsee to discuss the Endlösung der Judenfrage in Europa, the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe, we carted them to a place called Nuremberg, convened a body called the International Military Tribunal (to all the hyperventilators about Guantanamo Bay and the trials there: yes, Nuremberg was not a civilian tribunal). And we made them answer for what they’d done. At least we made some of them answer, to some extent; some got off with a fraction of what they’d deserved. Some of the most culpable got in effect a walk. The Allies’ objectives were three-fold: (i) to punish behavior which few outside the Soviet Union even understood that humans could be capable of (the Soviets understood it all too well, on which more later); (ii) to document for the world that all this really had happened; and (iii) to establish a principle that such behavior was once and forever more beyond that which civilized humanity was willing to tolerate. All of that was to be accomplished within a framework of law. 

Pretty high-falutin’ stuff, when you think about it. 

I want to poke a couple of holes in what happened at Nuremberg. Not in respect of the bastards we hanged; we should have hanged more of them. In fact, my standard response to the hand-wringers who moan that the death penalty is “inherently” cruel and unusual is to ask them if they are prepared to stand atop their dunghill and crow that the Nuremberg defendants ought to have lived. Ummmmm . . . silence. So shut up, please. Where I beg leave to depart from history, and from the tenets of what I do for a living, is in the effort to characterize what happened at Nuremberg as “justice” in any legal sense, and how mistaken it was to call it “law.” 

Allow me also to make absolutely clear up front that I draw a clear distinction between “justice” and “what happens in a court room.” Sometimes the latter results in the former, but generally not. It’s why I do not refer to “the justice system,” but rather to “the legal system.” It’s why I want to throw up in my mouth when I hear the Learned Colleagues or our judiciary bloviating about “administering justice.” Bullshit, with all due respect. Your task, if you’d bother reading the constitutional documents which create you, is to determine cases and controversies according to law. You can leave justice to those cosmic wheels which were grinding slowly before your grandfather’s grandfather was a gleam in his daddy’s eye. 

It was the IMT’s tragic flaw that it conflated “justice” with “law.” The main trial defendants were charged with four counts, for each of which the penalty of death was sought: 

(i) engaging in a common plan or conspiracy to commit a crime against peace; 

(ii) planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; 

(iii) war crimes; and, 

(iv) crimes against humanity. 

We had in the dock everyone from the guy who ran the Reichsbank until he was fired well before war ever broke out (Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht; he ended the war in a concentration camp himself) to the guy whose voice sounded sufficiently like Joseph Goebbels’s that he was used as a radio stand-in (Hans Fritzsche) to the guy who ran the Hitlerjugend (Baldur von Schirach). We had Fritz Sauckel, who was the Germans’ chief slave-catcher, and Albert Speer, who allocated the slaves so caught among the manpower-starved war industries, and Robert Ley, who was in actual charge of employing the slaves allocated. We had Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister who flew to Moscow on a warm summer evening in August, 1939 and with his Soviet counterpart Molotov carved up Poland and consigned Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to decades of Soviet depredation and slaughter. We had Wilhelm Keitel, the “nodding donkey” as he was known around the Führer’s headquarters, who had signed the Kommissarbefehl, under which party commissars attached to every Red Army unit were to be summarily shot upon capture – and were; we had Alfred Jodl, under whose command that order was implemented. We also had men of almost truly psychotic sadism, such as Julius Streicher, who stalked his bailiwick literally carrying a riding whip in his hand, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who ran the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) of the SS, to the lunatic fringe element like Alfred Rosenberg, the national socialist chief ideologue, to the actually driveling lunatic, like Rudolf Heß, once the Number 2 man in the party, but who’d been pretty much emasculated as a power player well before fighting broke out. We had Admiral Erich Raeder, commanding admiral of the bastard step-sister of the German military, and his immediate subordinate, Karl Dönitz, who came within an ace of starving a country into submission, then got fleeted up to command the navy and eventually, in the mad-hatter days of May, 1945 succeeded his dead-and-burned Führer.

 The problem, from a purely legalistic stand-point, is that what these men were accused of doing had never been defined as a crime. Now, from the Soviet stand-point that was no hindrance at all. If they thought you needed to be shot, why, they’d just march you down to the execution cellar (or out to a trench in the woods, as they did with 14,000-odd Polish officers, during that period when they were the Nazis’ allies). But the Americans and British had this curious tradition that without a pre-defined crime there could be no criminal offense. 

When had there ever been a “crime against humanity?” When had there ever been something like the Holocaust? Oh, well, other than the Holodomor, which netted seven million Ukrainians in less than two years, versus six million Jews in twelve; and other than the Red Terror, when anyone with more than two shoelaces was likely to be denounced to a Chekist troika, hauled in by sundown and dead with a bullet hole in the base of the skull by morning; and other than the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” during which hundreds of thousands of “special exiles” were given as little as ten minutes to be gone from their villages with what they could carry in their hands, and then dumped out without any tools, seeds, or shelter north of the Arctic circle. 

“War crimes” was a concept at least not completely foreign to the people in that courtroom. Of course, if by “war crime” you mean the wholesale shooting of prisoners . . . well, you’ve still got that Soviet problem. If you mean the wanton destruction of cities, with no effort even mildly to target genuinely “military” objectives within them, then the fly in your particular ointment is Air Marshall Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who set out to “de-house” the German civilian population. If you mean systematically starving entire peoples, as was done on the Eastern front, well, you’ve got several hundred thousand emaciated corpses from 1914-18 in Germany, victims of a highly successful blockade the principal intent and effect of which was to starve Germany into defeat. Furthermore, the slaughter of civilians in consequence of direct military action was accepted practice as late as the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular War. 

“Conspiring to wage aggressive war”? Huh? Since when was war something that a nation just sort of ambled into, without any planning or coordination among the various officials within its government? Well into the 1930s the United States maintained plans or at least the outlines of plans to invade pretty much every single possible country we might get to, including Britain and western Europe. Were we “conspiring to wage aggressive war?” France in 1914 went to war with Germany because of her treaty obligations with Russia. Germany went to war with Russia because of her treaty obligations with Austria-Hungary. Britain went to war in 1914 because of an 75-odd year-old treaty about Belgium, one of the signatories to which was Prussia. In 1939 Britain and France went to war with Germany by reason of unilateral guaranty given to Poland by those countries, which Poland had not asked for. Was that a “conspiracy” to wage “aggressive war”? In any of the foregoing I am not arguing the morality or immorality of what the belligerents did. What I am doing is pointing out how empty of meaning “conspiring to wage aggressive war” is as a specifically legal concept. For that matter, how do you define “aggressive” war? If the answer is that the “people who started the war” are necessarily the “aggressors,” do try to recall that from August, 1914 to this date historians still argue over “who started the war,” or whose “fault” was it that Europe exploded. I’m going to suggest that, again, as a legal concept, something that open to good-faith disagreement cannot form the basis for the definition of a crime, at least not consistently with any Anglo-American legal tradition.

A “crime against peace”? When the hell exactly did “peace” become something injurable by an individual’s action? A crime against peace must necessarily occur during peace, for during war there is no peace which may be disturbed. How do you know when a particular act of state crosses the line from recourse to violence, which so far as I’m aware no sovereign state has ever abjured in any enforceable sense, to a “crime against peace”? Either a sovereign reserves to itself every mechanism of compulsion on which it can lay hands, or it does not. War is of course the ultimate mechanism of compulsion. The United States had recourse to it in 1846 to enforce a somewhat dubious claim, inherited from Texas, to a boundary located on the Rio Grande. Britain had recourse to it in the 1820s when it desired that Turkey should no longer rule Greece. Prussia had recourse to it in 1866 when it desired to exclude Austria-Hungary from further involvement in northern European German politics. Russia had recourse when the Ottomans were alleged to have misbehaved themselves in Jerusalem, a place which then lay within their domains. Were all these “crimes against peace”? The situations from which they grew sure as billy-o had no implications for the several nations’ national security or other vital interests. 

All of which is to illustrate a principle that is fairly well-established in Anglo-American law, viz. unless you can plainly point to a specific behavior and say up front whether that is or is not within the scope of a criminal proscription, then you cannot, consistently with due process of law, make a crime of that behavior. Every person is entitled to know whether his conduct in any particular respect does or does not constitute a crime; ergo, the constitutional bar on ex post facto criminal laws. 

With all possible condemnation of the depravity of what the Nuremberg defendants (and millions more like them, every one of whom likewise deserved to hang) did, the charges of the IMT were brazenly ex post facto. And hopelessly vague. And let’s not forget that little matter of hypocrisy. The elephant in the room in that respect was of course the Soviet Union, which had waged absolutely unprovoked, undeniably aggressive wars of conquest against Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland. In the former Baltic republics they immediately upon winning them embarked on their trademark bloodshed, in exactly the same fashion as Stalin had attempted to decapitate Polish society from September, 1939 through June, 1941. But it gets better. We charged Karl Dönitz with war crimes for waging unrestricted submarine warfare. Which he had. But then he offered the affidavit of Fleet Admiral Nimitz, who informed the IMT that the U.S. submarine fleet had operated under orders substantially identical to those of the U-boats. Oh. We convicted him anyway. 

I must say that I’m certainly not the first person to notice the above “discrepancies,” as Twain would call them. No less a personage than the then chief justice of the United States, Harlan Fiske Stone, termed the IMT proceedings a “high-grade lynching party.” “I don’t mind what he [chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson, a colleague on the Supreme Court] does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”  Jackson himself observed to Truman in 1945 that the Allies “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.” 

But here’s where things really went off the rails with the whole concept of legalistic punishment for what Nazi Germany did, and why I say it was above all a mistake to call it “law”: We stopped. Way too soon. Every hack of a district attorney general knows that you either enforce a law whenever someone breaks it, or that law in fact does not exist, and everyone knows it. There were trials after the major war criminals’ trial. There were trials of the concentration camp doctors and commandants. There were trials of military commanders. There was a mish-mash of a trial starring Ernst von Weiszäcker and a couple of others from the Foreign Office, and a gaggle of other functionaries. The later trials were catch-as-catch-can affairs in large measure because the prosecution by that time was pretty much starved for staff and resources. They even had trouble rustling up enough judges to hear the later cases. 

The inevitable result was that in the western zones at least, trials subsequent to the main IMT trial became farcical in their outcomes. Just for example, we tried the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and their immediate subordinates, the commanders of the Einsatzkommandos. There were four Gruppen, lettered A through D. Each Gruppe had several Kommandos beneath it. They were roving death squads. They were what the Germans did before they hit on the notion of the gas chambers. They killed retail, by gunfire, which means that a specific person had to point a tangible object – a muzzle – at each individual, and squeeze the trigger. Thousands upon thousands of times. At Babi Yar outside Kiev, from September 29-30, 1941, they shot not quite 34,000 Jews in this fashion. Other Aktionen were smaller, but likewise just as individualized. 

The Soviets, bless their blood-thirsty little hearts, shot everyone they could find who had anything to do with the Einsatzgruppen. The western Allies had a separate trial; no defendant was more junior than commander of an Einsatzkommando. Apparently all those guns went off at the command of some officer but without other human intervention. There were fourteen death sentences handed down (not even every defendant got one). Only four actually danced at the rope’s end. The others all had their sentences commuted in 1951 to terms of varying lengths. By 1958 all had been released. Let’s be absolutely clear about this: This were the bastards who actually gave orders to aim and shoot at mothers holding their infant children, cooing to them so their last moments on earth would not be fearful, to see one last time their baby’s smile just before the machine guns barked. And by 13 years after the war they were all free. All. 

The Foreign Office was hip-deep in the Final Solution. Its emissaries, ambassadors, and bureaucrats knew what was going on, volunteered to assist the SS, the SD, and the military authorities, and enthusiastically pitched in when it came to compiling the lists of places from which deportations were to be made and the people to be deported. They hectored, cajoled, and threatened nominal allies, nominal neutrals, and of course the authorities of whatever stripe existed in occupied lands. In Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik, a book written and published in 2010 pursuant to a 2004 mandate from the German government, the history of the ideological penetration of the Amt before the war and its seamier activities during the war are spelled out in painstaking detail. But most of the book deals with the largely successful whitewashing operation of the post-war period. Numerous – I mean numerous – men with blood up to their shoulders retired, with full pensions, honors, and dignities. Oh sure, there were certain places where certain officials could not be posted, but that was a comparatively small inconvenience. 

Which is to say that for the most part, the bastards got away with it. Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, better known just as Alfried Krupp, so abused his slave laborers in Essen that even the SS complained about it. William Manchester’s damning book, The Arms of Krupp, contain descriptions of Krupp’s activities during the war that are beyond sickening. We attempted to try his father, Gustav, at the main IMT trial, but by that time daddy was too gibbering even by comparison with Heß. The only problem is that as of 1943 little Alfried was the legal owner of the whole cheese and been in actual command of running it for some time before then. He was the one who ought to have stood in the dock with Fritz Sauckel, Robert Ley, and Albert Speer. Oh, we tried him, eventually, and even nominally took all his property away. That lasted until the mid-1950s, by which time we needed him and his cannons again, and so by 1957 Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was once again free as the wind and the wealthiest private person in Europe. 

By trying to shoe-horn “justice” into “law,” all we did was make a mockery of both. We hadn’t the time, the people, the money, or the psychic energy left to dispense justice to all who needed it through the mechanism of legalistic procedures. So we laid down and let them get away with it. Churchill had wanted simply to shoot them as and when found. That would have been more honest, and less morally ambiguous. Certainly, we could have and ought to have put them in a setting in which we could spread before the world the documentary, film, and living evidence of their actions. And then taken them out and hanged them, not bothering to characterize what they did as a “crime” against anything. We would have saved ourselves having to go through the repeated theatrics of the subsequent trials. Tie the prisoner to actions x, y, and z, and if the supervising officer finds it has been done, stretch that boy’s neck a few inches for him. 

In the end we come back to the point that if you march a column of defenseless people, including literally babies in arms, to the edge of a trench in the forest, and give or follow the order to fire, you deserve to die of a broken neck occasioned by your plummeting from a scaffold with a rope knotted about it. Basta! 

Nuremberg’s unfortunate precedent endures to this day, with International Courts for this-that-and-the-other dotting the landscape, none of them capable of dealing with a monster. Will anyone dance on a rope for what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s? For all those mass graves, which they’re still digging up from time to time? Nope. How about the Iraqis who worked for Saddam? They’re still alive, most of them. For the men who organized the genocide in Rwanda in 1994? Don’t count on it. For the Khmer Rouge? Not a chance; Pol Pot himself died peacefully in bed, decades after he killed almost 25% of the population of his country. An impartial observer is entitled to ask exactly what the hell good is law if it cannot mete out any sort of “punishment” other that confinement in pleasant conditions, with “three hots and a cot,” and that only after decades of grinding procedure? If law is not feared, it is not worthy of respect. If it is unworthy of respect, it is not respected, in small things as well as large. We did the law no favor at all when we so over-tasked it at Nuremberg in 1946.

And this is where I depart from the tenets of my occupation: There are potentialities for wickedness, for depravity, for barbarity, within the human heart and mind and which are simply beyond the law’s ability to define them, to address them, to bound them with comprehensible intellectual frameworks, and to achieve justice commensurate with their nature. Those actions – so monstrous that their only claim to human status is that humans commit them – are in every meaningful sense outside the law. Those who actualize those potentialities place themselves beyond the law’s protection. They make themselves enemies of the human race, as pirates were once recognized to be, and liable to public justice upon sight. So ought the Allies have proceeded after the war. It would have entailed many thousands of executions, but in the end justice might have been done, and the commanding officers of the Einsatzkommandos would not have died free men.

 

Don’t Worry Dad; That Won’t Happen to Me: Uninventing Government

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Which is the short version of the speech that pretty much every lead-footed teenager gives his parent when it is suggested that driving like a bat out of hell is a good way to end up on a slab.  I’m a better driver than those guys in the paper last week.

This is the same speech we’re getting from our political class, with its refusal to address the spending avalanche.  Right now the Fed is the purchaser for over 90% of new issues of long-term treasury debt.  Our left pocket is the only source of borrowed money for our right pocket, and our right pocket is shelling the stuff out as fast as the left pocket tops it off.  At that fund-raiser where dear ol’ Mittens was so crass as to suggest that having 47% of your adult population not paying any money into the game was not a good idea, he also observed out that when a government is buying over 90% of its own debt, “at that point you’re just making it up.”

Almost no one’s really picked up on that comment; certainly no one is making an issue of the fact that we’re just making up our economy.

We’re assured by all the Deep Thinkers that this is not really a problem.  The Fed will stop in time; the economy is just about really to take off.  We’re going to grow our way out of this mess.  No, really; we mean it, this time.  And again and again, the numbers keep coming back — unexpectedly!!, as Instapundit would drily note — short of anywhere near what they would need to be for that to occur.  And so we keep firing up the presses and printing off another run.

Math, of course, operates as it will, irrespective of person, party, or country.  That we’re the U.S., or that we’re so diverse a society, or that we have a flashy military, or lots of television shows, or whatever won’t insulate us.  That either party is in or out of power, or partly-in and partly-out won’t help.  All the Learned Cogitations of our judiciary won’t stop it.  The solemn assurances of our chattering classes (of which I am now to some degree a member, I suppose) that Everything Will Be OK can’t stave it off.  Two plus two will never equal anything other than four.

As long as the federal government continues to spend not only more money that it raises in tax revenue, but vastly more than it can ever raise in tax evenue, even by expropriating not just the “1%” but the next 49% as well, the avalanche will not pull up short.  It will reach the bottom of the hill, where we are standing, absorbed in the most recent doings of Big Bird, or the Kardashian sisters and their lady parts, or whatever “reality” show is currently up in the ratings.

This is what it looks like when the avalanche hits bottom.

Germany’s hyper-inflation destroyed its middle classes.  The poor were already poor and generally on some form of relief.  The wealthy either had their wealth in hard assets or abroad.  The middle class, the ones who got up in the morning, went to work, came home and played with the kids, or with the kids’ mommy, went to church, listened to concerts, and generally pursued that inward self-development that is summed up in the uniquely German concept of Bildung — they were wiped out.  For almost 150 years Germany had consciously, aggressively pursued the creation of a society based on Bildung, a notion that is quite a bit broader and deeper than what English-speakers would think of as “education,” or “learning,” or even “cultivation.”  It is, to be sure, all those, but it is also quite a bit more.  That segment of the society that Germany knew as the Bildungsbürgertum was its sea anchor.  It was what kept the ship pointing into the waves.

Within a matter of months the Bildungsbürgertum was largely wiped out, their inward Bildung unable to heat the apartment or even rent one.  The wealthy industrialists, merchant princes, bankers, and landed aristocracy took a lick, of course, but they survived.  The proletariat, the Pöbel, was not to be considered sortable.  And so the Bildungsbürgertum looked about them for a mode of existence, a form of organizing their world and their understanding of themselves in it, that would validate them, elevate them, show them a way forward.

Recently Peter Watson, an English author, published a book, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, a social, cultural, and intellectual history of German from 1750 to right about now.  His point in doing so was to demonstrate that there was a German culture before1933, and that to view Germany and its history exclusively through the prism of the Nazi era was not only to do it a disservice but also to abandon a rich trove of human insight.  I am of course over-simplifying his argument, but Watson identifies the shattered Bildungsbürgertum of the 1920s as forming a large constituent of the fertile soil where sprouted the plants whose fruits were the mountains of corpses shown on the newsreels of the camps’ liberation.

There is only one sure way to keep a teenager from driving to his own death.  You take away the keys.  There is only one sure way to take away the ability of the political class to drive us over the cliff.  You take away their power.  Kicking out Set A of them and replacing them, temporarily, with Set B will not do the trick.  We must get over the notion of “reinventing government” as a deus ex machina.  What is wanted is not “reinventing”; it is uninventing government that will save us, if we are to be saved.

Dave Carter — Here They Are!

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The arts, that is.  Over at Ricochet, Dave Carter asks, “Whither the Arts?” in the context of his visit some years ago to the Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral) and in response to an article by Camille Paglia.  It seems as though he was quite simply gob-smacked, like many people when first confronted with the tangible evidence of a piety that we modern Americans have been . . . well, “indoctrinated” is about the only fitting word, to believe not only ought not exist but cannot exist in polite society.

Been there, done that; know exactly what he’s talking about.  Cologne was a city in Roman times.  It has always been important.  As impressive as the cathedral there is, and as true as is every word in Carter’s post, what has impressed me every bit as much, if not on a purely aesthetic level, is the same piety expressed in the churches in small towns all over Europe.  Cologne has been an archbishopric for centuries (you can tell because the cathedral has two spires; a mere bishop got only one, although sometimes when a bishopric got fleeted up while the cathedral was under construction, they left it with one, as with the Münster in Freiburg).  As an archbishopric it could access comparatively vast wealth.  Smaller towns, not so much.  The admittedly lesser artistic treasures to be found there came from the locals.

There are still craftsmen, and piety, and selfless devotion out there.  Oddly enough, so I read recently, church membership and attendance is highest in the former East Germany.  It’s as if, you know, having lived under religion’s sworn enemy for 45 years, they know to appreciate what the rest of us, in our oh-so-jaded worldly sophistication, view as being quaint at best, per sé offensive at worst.

In February, 1986 I visited Dresden in company with a passel of other college students.  They’d already re-built some of the baroque show-pieces, such as the Zwinger.  But the Frauenkirche was still a 40-odd foot tall pile of rubble, with two chunks of charred, gouged wall sticking up.

It had been built between 1726 and 1743, and at the time was the largest domed structure north of the Alps.  Its architect, George Bähr, was among the very first in the central European area to self-identify as an “architect.”  The church was built as a municipal church, by the city.  The court of August the Strong (sufficiently “strong” that he was rumored to have fathered some <ahem!> 300 children) was Roman Catholic, he having been elected King of Poland in 1697.  He warmly supported the church’s building, and granted concessions where he could afford them, but in the end it was the people of Dresden, through their city fathers, who built it.  It was considered the crown jewel of the city known as Florence on the Elbe.

We fire-bombed it during the night of 13-14 February, 1945.  No one really knows how many people, nearly all civilians and refugees from the Red Army’s onslaught, were incinerated.  The Frauenkirche was not actually destroyed by the bombs.  What brought her down was the heat of the flames, which caused the stones in the supporting columns to collapse under the 12,000 tons of the double-shell dome.  And there she lay for another 45 years.

Right around the time that East Germany was packing it in, a group of prominent citizens decided it was time to re-build, and to use as much original material as possible.  Being German, after all, they’d saved the plans.  And so as they unstacked the rubble, one stone at a time, they mapped out in 3-D exactly where they found each usable original stone, and used a computer program to determine as exactly as possible where in the original structure that stone came from.  And then, being German, they put it right back where it belonged.  They re-built the altar from over 2,000 separate pieces they dug out.  The result on the outside, by the way, is an intriguingly speckled appearance, the originals being stained nearly black with 200 years of soot as well as the residue of the 1945 fires, and the new stone being a light honey color.  Being German, they also decided to re-build it as exactly like the original as possible, using materials identical to the original as well.

The reconstruction cost roughly €180 million.  Approximately €100 million of it was raised through private subscription, from all over the world.  The largest individual donor was an American who won the Nobel for medicine and donated his entire prize money.  The British ponied up for the new cross, and by wonderful irony the smith who actually fashioned it was the son of one of Arthur Harris’s bomber pilots who flew that mission in 1945.  A survivor of the Polish resistance movement organized his town to sponsor one of the vase-and-flame thingies on a corner tower.  The local taxi drivers contributed through each fare they got called from central.  The organ builder was a French firm from Strasbourg.

And being German, they made an astounding documentary of it.  I stumbled across this on YouTube and ran the DVD to ground from the publisher in Leipzig.  Shipping, handling, and purchase price it cost me just over $50, but thanks to the wonders of PayPal she’s mine (the second disc in the set has a biographical documentary on Bähr, showing some of his other surviving works, mostly churches, including some in those tiny towns I described above). 

One needn’t understand a word of German to get this documentary, because there is zero narrative, and almost no question-and-answer.  It’s just the people doing what they’re doing, with camera men standing by.  Man-on-the-street commentary here and there, but by and large the work, and the workers, speak for themselves.  And of course baroque music as the score. Settle back; it’s just over three hours and twenty minutes, but it’s worth every moment of watching: 

So Dave Carter and Camille Paglia, here are your artists.  Here is your simple piety, expressed in stone.  They’re alive and well, just driven into a sort of quasi-hiding.

What did JFK Have to say About the Future?

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That he’d seen it in Germany, and “it works,” if memory serves. 

Well, ol’ JFK certainly got the first half of it right.  If by “future” he meant a universe in which the state asserts and is conceded the right and power to control every last little penny-ante detail of the citizen’s life.  In Germany of course the party then in power simply asserted that it was going to do so, and then did.  Here in the U.S. we’ve arrived at a point where the government just taxes you to death if you don’t do what the government can’t constitutionally force you to do directly.  Tomato, tomahto.  Whatever.

But here’s the point of this post.  In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung we read an article over a forthcoming new law and accompanying regulations which are going, allegedly, to accelerate the Germans’ drive towards “minimum energy buildings.”  The first such round of Fiat Lux! legislation came in 2009, apparently.  The next two steps are mandated for 2014 and 2016 respectively, and they’re supposed to reduce energy consumption per newly-built structure by 12.5% per step.

Tellingly the statute and regulations are proposed in order to implement an EU policy.

Oh sure, one may qualify for an exemption from the new standards, if one can demonstrate that the cost-benefit analysis over the expected life span of the new building produces a negative number.  Of course, every time one looks up from one’s breakfast burrito it turns out that the “renewable energy,” which Germany has embraced with a faith so touching one is tempted to overlook how closely it comes to problems with the First Commandment, is going to get vastly more expensive — unexpectedly! — as Instapundit is fond of observing; the most recent numbers quoted show increases by 50% more than previously estimated.  So all we have to do is artificially crank up the cost of the energy one is saving and hey presto! the cost-benefit analysis goes positive.  Right now they estimate (and let’s not forget how unfailingly accurate government estimates of cost are) the extra costs for the 2014 step-up at €1.2 billion per year over the construction industry; the 2016 mandates will (sure you can take this to the bank) come in at only €2.5 billion per year.

The government estimates that each percent of consumption reduction will add 1.7% to the cost of building.  The article unfortunately does not mention whether the novel concept of diminishing marginal returns has been taken into account in calculating that number.  Anyone want to bet it hasn’t?  Anyone want to bet that the last 5% reduction in energy consumption will cost exactly what the first 5% cost? 

Let’s run this through the Countrylawyer Patented Economic Translation Machine.  I bought my house back in the mid 1990s for roughly $180,000 (yeah, I over-paid, and yes, I understand that what I paid wasn’t the builder’s cost, and the German numbers are builder’s cost figures).  Let’s just assume though that my builder made $45,000 on the sale, for a GP% of 25%.  The BLS shows a cumulative consumer price index increase from my month of purchase to now of 45.25%, so that makes my builder’s cost to build my house right now $196,000.  Each percentage of that cost works out to be $1,960.  We have gas heat and hot water, and electric everything else.  Over the past twelve months we spent $604.90 on gas (I keep the thermostat on 61 during the winter) and $2,254.08 on electricity, or $184.84 per month average.  Our local utilities in fact do charge on a linear scale above the monthly minimum bill, so each percent total energy reduction will net me out $22.54 per annum savings.  Let’s get real optimistic and assume that my house has a useful service life of 75 years.  Per Revenue Ruling 2012-28, the § 7520 interest rate for October, 2012 is 1.2%.  An extra $22.54 per year, ignoring inflation and at a 1.2% discount rate, will be worth $1,110.56 over the house’s 75 year useful life span.  That is, of course, if I were paying cash for the house and expected to live in it for the full 75 years.  But my service life in this house, as of now, is more in the range of 30 years (if that).  In contrast I’m paying the full cost of the percentage reduction in consumption up front, and I have no way of ensuring that I will get my money back out of the house (it will experience economic depreciation and functional obsolescence over time).  Recall also that we’re ignoring the additional cost of energy-efficient maintenance and repair as well.  My net present value of that extra $2,254 over 30 years is $565.03, for which I would be paying $1,960.  I’m upside down to the extent of 71% of the out-of-pocket cash cost of each additional 1% efficiency.

But here’s where the Germans have really gone off the rails.  It has to do with New York City, and the lethal combination of insane building codes and rent control.  The expense of upgrading to new building codes, and the restricted ability to pass along those increasing costs to renters, has ensured a steadily diminishing stock of housing in the city, with the result that costs for halfway decent housing have skyrocketed and the city is crowded with places like Bedford-Stuyvesant.  If you remove the economic incentive to keep the place up, the owner has no incentive to do so, at the risk of pointing out the obvious.  If you force him to upgrade what happens is you run capital out of the housing market.  Who will pump his money into a place where he’s exposed to unknowable future expense which he can be reasonably assured he won’t be able to pass on to his customer?  The only option left is housing projects, which coincidentally sprawl all over the city.  For a description of what public housing looks like, I refer you to P. J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores.

The new law in Germany exempts existing buildings from the new statute and regulations.  So let’s see where that leaves us:  We’ve made new construction vastly more expensive and less economically attractive.  We’ve built in an incentive to go with the old existing building.  Although for the moment there are no upgrade mandates, we can’t be sure of that, so we trade the possibility of expense with the old building for the guaranty of expense with the new.  They’ve also written in a mandate for sellers and landlords to document their building’s energy consumption (O! for a plaintiffs’ bar in Germany).  And finally, this being Germany, after all, they’re looking at establishing an Energiepolizei.  Yep, you heard right:  Around here you hear lines like, “What are you gonna do?  Call the energy police on me?”  See, that’s a joke here. 

The premise of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was that the path Germany had followed to get where it was in 1944 was the same road that Britain was on, only with a 20-30 year time-lag.  He observes in the book’s opening that that is precisely the point of his concern for his adoptive country.  Where Germany had been, Britain was; where Germany was, Britain was heading.

I can’t recall the number of times that I’ve been reading a narrative by someone who survived 1933-45 Germany, in which a person’s having to travel from Point A to B is referenced.  And almost invariably the phrase will come up that the narrator, or the traveller, or the prospective traveller has “excellent papers.”  You see, without “excellent papers” you might be detained underway and invited in to chat with your friendly neighborhood Staatspolizei official.  I guess soon we’ll hear people talking about their house or apartment, and how so-and-so had “ausgezeichnete Papiere” for the place.

So in a very real sense dear ol’ JFK in fact had seen the future.  My question concern is, are we still seeing the future in Germany?

329 Jahre deutscher Einwanderung

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Heute feiert man in Germantown, Pennsylvania Gründungstag.  Obwohl sich die ersten Siedler (z.T. Mennoniter auch aus deutschem Raum) schon 1681 dort niederlassen hatten, wurde an diesem Tag in 1683 die Stadt durch deutsche Einwanderer gegründet.  Damit haben eine riesige Bevölkerungswelle und eine kulturreiche Tradition angefangen, deren Vorteile man in den USA bis heute noch genießt.  Noch in den 1980er Jahren war gut 40% der amerikanischen Bevölkerung mindestens teilweise deutscher Abstammung.  Reist man in Bundestaate wie Indiana bzw. Wisconsin, so sieht man woimmer auch man schaut das Schwarz-Rot-Gold der Ahnen; es blicken dem Pilger lauter Adler auf Schildern, Ladenfenstern, usw. entgegen.

Meine Mutter, deren Familie aus Mutterstadt westlich von Ludwigshafen am Rhein etwa 1845 eingewandert ist, ist in südöstlichem Indiana geboren und aufgewachsen.  Die Landschaft ist von Dörfern, Bauernhöfen, Kirchen (immer mit Friedhof, normalerweise auf der anderen Seite der Straße), aber vor allem sich weiterstreckenden Ackerfeldern (d.h. hektarenmäßig groß) geprägt.  Sommer 1985 hat sie, als Englischlehrerin, sechs Wochen an einem Seminar im Norden ihres Heimatstaates teilgenommen.  Sie ist mit einem anderen Lehrer aus dieser Gegend (also ihrem heutigen Lebensort) dorthin gefahren; ich habe sie am Ende abgeholt.  Sie hat sich ein paar Tage auf der Heimfahrt gegönnt, um wieder einmal die Orte ihrer Vorfahren und Kindheit zu besuchen.  Ihre Eltern waren schon längst verstorben, ihre Geschwister in andere Bundestaate hingezogen, und sie konnte es gar nicht mehr annehmen, wieder einmal Anlaß dazu zu haben.

Eines, worauf sie mich während unsrer Reise aufmerksam gemacht hat, waren die Bauernhäuser, die riesig aus den Ackerfeldern ragen.  Hölzern gebaut, mit vielen und auch großen Fenstern (3 bis 5 Quadratmeter Umfang, auch im Obergeschoß, ist gar nicht außerordentlich) versehen, sie sind wo möglich auf kleinen Hügeln gebaut worden, die über das von dem Gutsinhaber mit eigenen Händen gepflegten Land Blick bieten. 

Obwohl sie seit fast 60 Jahren im Süden lebt, hat meine Mutter nie ihren Stolz auf ihren Geburtsstaat und dessen Volk vergessen.  Diese Häuser seien keine Ehrenmale auf Sklavenarbeit, wies sie darauf hin; sie seien dem selben Schweiß entsprungen, der buchstäblich von den Gesichtern der Bauernfamilie auf die Erde unter ihren Füßen gefallen ist, und womit sie sich ein neues Leben in einer neuen Welt geschaffen haben.  Deswegen ist man hierhergeflohen, egal ob vor oder nach 1848.

Man möge auch nicht vergessen, daß es im Bürgerkrieg ganze Regimenter Deutsche gegeben hat, die — nicht einmal schon Bundesbürger zum größten Teil — der Sklavenmacht ins Feld gezogen sind, und sich mit Herz und Leib für die Freiheit auch in ihrer neuen Heimat eingesetzt haben.  Ihre Toten Ruhen noch heute in stillen Soldatenfriedhöfen, die an ihnen vorher unvorstellbaren Orten liegen, die fremde Namen wie Shiloh, Chickamauga, und Vicksburg aufweisen.

Im Südwesten von Illinois, entlang dem Mississippi-Fluß, zieht sich eine Reihe Dörfer hin, mit Namen wie New Baden usw.  Fast ausnahmslos steht am Rand des Dorfes mindestens eine Schule, die meist schon älter aussieht, aber doch wohlbehalten wirkt.  Es ist noch dem gelegentlichen Reisenden ohne Zweifel klar, man ist stolz auf “seine” Schule, nimmt Anteil daran, was drin vor sich geht.  In dem Dorf steht auch eine Kirche, mal katholisch, mal evangelisch, je nach dem Auswanderungsort der ursprünglichen Siedler.  Bis vor einem Jahrzehnt ist es in etlichen der Kirchen noch ein Gottesdienst bzw. Messe auf deutsch abgehalten worden.

Wenn man bei uns “Diversität” zu feiern angibt, heißt das zumeist, daß gefordert wird, mehr Geld, mehr Arbeitsstellen usw. anderen zu schenken, ohne daß man Gegenleistung bzw. Tatkraft vorher gezeigt hat, und nur um die Voraussetzung, sie sehen dem jeweiligen Sprecher ähnlich aus.  Dabei verletzt man aber die Erinnerung derer, die eigentlich diejenige Gesellschaft erschaffen haben, von der jetzt gefordert wird, die angeblichen Reichtümer neu “umzuverteilen,” als ob es solche aus Obstbäumen einfach zu pflücken gegegen hätte.

Also:  Hoch auf die Diversität, und zwar für diesen Tag auf deutsch!!

At Least They’ve Got the “Einigkeit” Part Back, Mostly

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Today is the Day of German Unity, the Tag der deutschen Einheit.  Effective October 3, 1990, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the DDR, or the GDR in its English rendering (but also known among a certain generation of Germans as the “Sowjetische Besatzungszone,” the Soviet Occupation Zone, or sometimes simply “die Zone”) merged with and into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Federal Republic of Germany.  Once again, for better or worse, Europe had a single, compact (much more compact than used to be the case) mass of German united into one social and economic unit.

It would be idle to pretend that this development was welcomed universally outside Germany.  I still recall a college professor of mine, who as an infantry grunt had fought his way into Germany during the war, sort of wistfully (and not without an unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice) observe that, “When I think about a divided Germany I get a very peaceful feeling.”  Even before 1990 West Germany was the economic powerhouse of the continent; what, one could be excused from asking, would be the effect of adding to them the further human and economic resources of a crew that had been conveniently sealed off behind barbed wire (literally) for 45 years?  Still today the notion of Germany as the 400-pound gorilla in the room makes some nervous.  The Italian prime minister as recently as this past week was actually suggesting Germany’s departure from the Euro zone would be desirable.  Too hegemonic.  Too prone to throw its weight about.  Pay attention to the Greeks and you’ll hear much the same thing.  Those dastardly Germans!  You ask them to foot the bill and the next thing they’re telling you that you can’t retire with full pay at age 55!  How dare they!!  And so forth.

What West Germany actually got was the headache of dealing with socialism’s corrosive effects on an entire chunk of their country.  The Ostzone has been at best slightly better than an economic wash for the west for 22 years now; at worst it’s been a sump hole.  For starts the public infrastructure was in a disastrous condition.  In February, 1986 I spent a week or so being herded around East Germany.  We visited Eisenach (home of the Trabant, a two-stroke powered (if that’s the right word to use) econobox piece of crap that was the best the east could do for a “car,” and you still had to get in line for several years for the privilege of hating your very own), Leipzig, Dresden, and finally East Berlin.  I paid attention to things.  Paint peeling, rust icicles hanging down, busted rivets, patchwork everything:  it was obvious that no one had been keeping the joint up since 1945.  Even the places they shepherded us (and you must remember that the commies spared no effort to impress western visitors; they very, very much put their best foot forward, shod as best they were able) were, with the exception of re-built historical structures, distinctly seedy.

You can sand-blast bridge girders (which I paid particular attention to) and paint them.  You can drill out rusted rivets and bolts and replace them.  You can wash the windows.  Etc.  What has proven harder, I will suggest, is undoing the effects of two full generations grown up under socialism, almost three.  The children born in, say, 1938 or later have no practical recollection of anything other than Nazi or Soviet rule.  They would have reached adulthood in 1958; their children would have reached adulthood in 1978; that generation’s children could have been as old as 12 by the time of reunification.  Twelve isn’t too late, but it’s deep into the third quarter of forming a person’s character.

Last year I went back to the former Ostzone for the first time since 1986; specifically, I wanted to visit the re-built Frauenkirche in Dresden (teaser: future blog post coming).  So I grabbed me a train and headed thither.  Ended up staying in a hotel just a couple of blocks from the train station, in a building that was one of the very few in that entire part of the city to survive the bombing intact.  But that’s not germane to this post.

Part of the attraction for me of riding trains is that you get to see folks’ back yards.  Drive down the road and you get to see the fronts of their houses.  There’s something inherently Potemkin village about the fronts of properties.  Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing; it prompts people to cut their grass, after all.  But if you want to see a better reflection of how people actually live, peek around the corner.  And no one who can avoid it builds his house or his business to face out onto the train tracks.

For those who’ve never visited Germany, at least the western part of it, one of the strongest impressions is how well taken care of the place is.  You don’t see broken windows, or boarded up windows, or obviously broken things just left as they are, or stuff left out to rust or rot in the weather.  The overgrown fence line or the barn thirty degrees out of square is a sight you don’t see in Germany (or, by the way, in parts of the U.S. that were settled largely by Germans . . . cultural DNA lasts, folks).  Even in the backs of farm houses you won’t see piles of miscellaneous Stuff lying about.  If they can’t move it indoors they’ll stack it neatly and lash a tarpaulin over it.  If it’s a vehicle or large equipment that can’t be put up they’ll park it, neatly and out of the way.  If something breaks they’ll either jump on it and fix it as good as or better than it was, or if they can’t they’ll tear it down and do something else.

The former border facilities (auf deutsch:  Grenzanlagen) — the watch towers, barbed wire and electric fences, tank traps, mine fields, and so forth — are long gone of course.  But it was still possible to note when one was in the old Ostzone.  Gaping windows with broken glass still in them.  Sheets of metal tacked over holes in roofs.  Roof lines as sway-backed as any broken-down nag.  Obviously vacant buildings surrounded by over-grown weeds.  Stuff and Junk left to lie wherever it fell out of the hands of the last person to drop it.  Things, in other words, that just screamed no one’s taking care of this.  Well, you can write some of that off, surely, to economic depression (but seriously, for 21 years it’s been there?) and the sheer cost of trying to fix things that were built pre-1945 and scarcely modernized since (just ask some university facilities manager what it’s like dealing with that wonderful august building that Joe Alumnus built for the school in 1915).

What you can’t write off is people’s behavior.  There are two market squares in downtown Dresden.  The Neumarkt, or New Market, is where the Frauenkirche towers over everything, and that’s a hustling, bustling, over-run with tourist activity venue.  They’re still building back the streets and buildings destroyed in February, 1945 and so a good portion of it is construction site, fenced off appropriately.  The Altmarkt, or Old Market, is several blocks away (the site of the Frauenkirche was originally outside the city’s walls, and of course the original market square would have been within them; hence the two markets so close together).  It’s much larger than the newer square, probably close to 100 yards on a side; among its features is a rectangular outline in red-colored stones, maybe forty or fifty feet by twenty or so (I didn’t measure it, so don’t hold me to that).  Between some of the pavement stones within the rectangle they poured molten metal, with an inscription: 

“After the attacks of 13 to 14 February 1945 on Dresden the corpses of 6,865 people were burned at this location.”

That location was one of dozens where they burned the corpses, but that’s also not really relevant to the post.  What’s really relevant is that at 7:45 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, on the entire Altmarkt there were a total of six vendors, hawking cooked sausage and similar things.  At that same hour in any sizeable city in western Germany you can’t swing a cat without knocking over someone’s stall of fresh produce, typically from all over Europe, fresh meats, flowers, local crafts, etc.  I mean, even in a city of starveling students like Freiburg you can’t take more than a few steps in a given direction for all the people buying and selling stuff.

Twenty-one years after reunification, in the capital city of Saxony, six measly guys flogging over-cooked sausages is the best they can do?  That can only be attributed to a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, and that lack can only be attributed to 45 years of ruthlessly crushing anyone who dared to climb out of the place where the central planners had shackled him.  Folks, the existence of two Germanies for 45 years is as close to a perfect experiment as you’ll get (the Koreas aren’t even as good because North Korea is a hermit state, sealing itself off even from its fellow commie states, and East Germany was the Warsaw Pact showplace).  Same society, same culture, same history, similar levels of destruction. Two different economic systems for a prolonged period.  How’d it work out?  How is it still working out?

So yes, Virginia, Germany has achieved once more the “Einigkeit” (unity) of the Deutschlandlied that remains their national anthem (one does not sing the first verse any more, of course); however picayunish some of their laws may appear to Americans (particularly the laws relating to freedom of expression and affiliation, which are aftergrowths of the Nazi era), they’ve got their Recht (justice) and their Freiheit (freedom).  But 80 years on they’re still working through the consequences of their embrace of state-controlled collectivism and tyranny.  Cultural DNA lasts, and so does social trauma.  It took America almost exactly 100 years to begin lurching past the living impact of the Civil War and slavery.  A good bit of Germany’s history in the 20th Century has strands tracing back to the Napoleonic conquest and subsequent liberation, and in some cases even further back, to the Thirty Years’ War.

Ideas have consequences.  We should be very careful about which ones we embrace and how quickly we let ourselves be tempted by someone’s promise to “re-forge” us, to “transform” us, to guide (and it’s always guiding us, as if we’re not capable of finding our own way into our future) us to the sunny uplands of some utopian vision.  We should be profoundly skeptical of such as promise those things, lest they mean them, lest our remote descendants spend their lives suffering their effects.