In Europe

Auschwitz any longer.’
    For this war generation, Elias writes, the reconciliation with the Nazi past was completed with the Nuremberg trials and the rehabilitation of real or alleged party members. ‘Officially, they had nothing to fear and nothing to regret. Their consciences may have bothered them now and then, but in the public life of Germans in positions of leadership, it seemed, the nightmare of the Hitler years could be buried.’ However, their own sons and daughters, in voices which grew louder and louder, were demanding a retrial.
    At home, I found an interview I had once made with Christiane Ensslin, Gudrun's sister. Christiane was the real protagonist of Margarethe von Trotta's film
Die bleierne Zeit
(1981), the woman who had taken in Gudrun's son after the child had been badly wounded by a right-wing fanatic, and who sympathised with her sister but refused to choose the path of violence. When I visited her at her Cologne apartment in 1984, she was unemployed, precisely because her surname was Ensslin. Her boyfriend was not allowed to hold a job in his own professional field, simply because he was her boyfriend. Her father had encountered great difficulty findinga graveyard where her sister could be buried: even in death, Gudrun Ensslin was not to be allowed to repose amid ‘normal’ people.
    Together we looked back briefly at the ‘days of lead’ in the 1970s, but ultimately the discussion focused on her generation and that of her parents. ‘Most older Germans see the war as, well, tough luck,’ she felt. Her own generation refused to see things that way, and was therefore, in her eyes, more frustrated than its contemporaries in other countries. ‘We were the country that applied fascism to the highest degree of perfection. Our most recent history, that of our parents, is so unimaginable for us, their children … And that means something. The greater the wrong you have behind you, the more you must watch out for what you do in the future. To that extent, the historical debt we have to pay is much heavier than that of other European countries.’
    She talked about a scene in
Die bleierne Zeit
which was true to life. When her father, a brave and critical pastor, showed his congregation a film about the concentration camps, she and her sister Gudrun left the room, sick to their stomachs. ‘As a child of course, when you see something like that, you think: What? Did my father know about that? And he just sat at home and ate his dinner? That can't be true, can it? And then you promise yourself: I'm going to pay very close attention, if people start disappearing again or being mistreated or murdered, I'll take up the fight!’
    Christiane Ensslin talked about feelings and frustrations: ‘Our German perfectionism, the concept of power that's behind it, the frustrations it has created and still creates among young people … If you ignore feelings like that you can never understand history. No action ever takes place without a feeling!’ Old Norbert Elias saw it, above all, as a drama: ‘The tragedy was that some members of this young generation, in their attempts to create a better, warmer, more meaningful kind of human life as counterpoint to the National Socialist regime, arrived in turn at increasingly inhumane actions. And perhaps it was not their tragedy alone, but also that of the state, of the society they were trying to transform, and even of the older generation that had all the power firmly in hand.’

Chapter FIFTY-FOUR
Paris
    GO TO THE CAFÉ IN COLOMBEY-LES -DEUX-ÉGLISES AND ASK ABOUT the general, and they all launch into stories right away. About how he sat in church, straight as a ramrod, the seats beside him always empty, ‘it was as if there were a glass cage around him’. How he lowered all his defences for his handicapped daughter Anne, how he danced around and slapped his thighs. How his wife Yvonne, during his period as an unemployed civilian between 1946–58, did her shopping in the village and counted every centime. How he left in summer 1958 to save France once again: this time from the Algerian ultras and the threat of civil war. How he, even as president, always came back to the village, ‘my home and my mistress’.
    Colombey is a simple rural hamlet with one huge eighteenth-century house, La Boisserie. De Gaulle bought it in 1937, especially for Anne. With the many elections and referenda, the term of his presidency was a perpetual propaganda campaign, and