The German Genius

of adulthood in 1945, had been socialized by National Socialism, knew almost nothing of Germany before that time, and did not feel in any way responsible for the atrocities because they were too young. Nonetheless they formed a “silent majority,” at least until 1968, helping Germany on its road to becoming a Federal Democracy and to achieving a stability which, they judged, involved shielding their parents, who were responsible for the atrocities. This is why, as the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich argued in their study Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern ( The Inability to Mourn ; 1967), this generation of Germans was frozen in “psychic immobilism” as regards the past. Moses divided the Forty-Fivers into “non–German-Germans” and “German-Germans,” the former wanting to hurry Germany into becoming a Western democracy on the American/British/French model, and the latter wanting to retain much of the traditional flavor of the pre-1933 Germany. This division, Moses said, formed a kind of “culture war” in Germany throughout the post–World War II period, further delaying its “long road west.” The generation of 1968 certainly attacked the Forty-Fivers, German-German and non–German-German alike, and this too formed part of the culture wars. But even Moses found, at the end of his study—and this is an important point—that the “fourth generation of Germans after the Holocaust” had at last begun to place trust in the country’s institutions, that the memories of the atrocities “are of increasingly less existential significance for the youth of the twenty-first century,” and the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe “less a stigma or stigmata than a lucrative tourist attraction, an object of in-difference, or a de facto playground for children.” A parallel point was made by Max Hastings about the study by the Potsdam Institute of Military History, German Wartime Society 1939–1945 , published only in July 2008 (and referred to in the Introduction), when he observed that its young scholars, all born well after the war, have been able at last to face—and tell—the unvarnished truth, “that almost every German was aware” of what happened to the Jews and moreover believed that they “deserved their fate.” As Hastings also said, this study was a tribute to a new generation of Germans ready to pass judgment on their parents with a rigor few others could manage.
    If Moses and Hastings are right, and this fourth generation is ready and able to look about itself without “psychic immobilism,” may that have something—everything—to do with the fact that the whole truth about wartime Germany has at last been admitted?
    P ASTOR , P ROFESSOR , P OPE
     
    On April 19, 2005, Joseph Alois Ratzinger was elected pope, at the age of seventy-eight, in succession to John Paul II. Born in 1927 in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, Ratzinger is the ninth German pope, but the first since the Dutch-German Adrian VI (1522–23). His father was a police officer, but both Joseph and his brother Georg knew they wanted to enter the church from a very early age. In 1939 Joseph enrolled in the seminary at Traunstein and, at more or less the same time, became a member of the Hitler Youth, as all fourteen-year-old boys were required to do. 102 Ratzinger’s family, however, was opposed to Hitler, the more so when, in 1941, one of Joseph’s cousins, also fourteen, who had Down syndrome, was murdered by the Nazis as part of their eugenics program. In 1943, Joseph was drafted into the anti-aircraft corps though poor health kept him from active service. In 1945, as the war was ending, he deserted his post and returned home just as American troops established their local headquarters in the Ratzinger family house. He was interned for a few months as a POW and, on release, re-entered the seminary, again with his brother.
    They were ordained in 1951 and then began Joseph’s glittering academic career, which saw him become a professor first at Freising College, then at the University of Bonn, then at Tübingen, where he was a colleague of Hans Küng’s and locked horns with other leading theologians such as Edward Schillebeeckx and Karl Rahner. 103 During the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) he served as theological consultant to Josef Frings, a reform-minded cardinal of Cologne, afterward, in 1969, helping to found the distinguished theological journal Communio (now published in seventeen