The German Genius

of any great love.” As Roger Cohen has said, in a sense, Pope John Paul II overcame Europe’s physical division. “It could be that Pope Benedict XVI overcomes the continent’s historical wound.” 109

Café Deutschland: “A Germany Not Seen Before”
     
    I n 1967, two German psychoanalysts, Alexander and Margarete
    Mitscherlich, published Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern ( The Inability to Mourn ), an investigation into Germany’s collective long-term reaction to the collapse of the Third Reich and the subsequent horrific revelations about the Holocaust. They concluded, controversially, that Germany was still gripped by a “psychic immobilism.” It was frozen emotionally, having “deliberately forgotten” its excesses. The enormity of the collective crime, they argued, was such that, for the Germans to admit culpability, and their “narcissistic attachment” to Hitler and his ideology, would entail guilt and shame on a scale so overwhelming that “the self-esteem needed for continued living” would be simply unattainable. Instead, they concluded, Germans needed to view themselves as victims, especially those known as “Forty-fivers,” who achieved maturity “between fascism and democracy,” and had become known, in a book by Helmut Schelsky, as Die skeptische Generation ( The Sceptical Generation ). 1 The Mitscherliches also insisted that the problem of psychic immobilism had persisted right through the 1950s and into the 1960s. 2
    Their study was important in itself (we explored in Chapter 41 how it fits in with other analyses of Germany’s post–World War II intellectual life). Those conclusions do, however, help inform us about the pattern of German literature since World War II, an art form that is, arguably, the most articulate aspect of Germany’s intellectual and moral life in the contemporary world.
    We find that new elements we shall identify are underpinned by two traditional, all too familiar, concerns. To begin with, we may say that whereas the main body of English literature can best be described as “elegant entertainment” (Keith Bullivant’s phrase), modern German literature, as in the United States, has had a much closer relationship with contemporary political and social developments, it has been engagé in the best sense, or has tried to be. This raises once more the specter of Henry Sidgwick reaching for the term “prig” but, as we shall presently see, it hardly applies here. Second, we may say also that contemporary German literature is marked (bedeviled?) by that familiar clash, already encountered far more than once, between realism and “inwardness,” an insistence that Innerlichkeit is the true realm of literature, that it is the “intuitive wisdom” of the poet or novelist, as opposed to knowledge derived from rational thought processes, that really matters, and that everything else, especially realism, is trivial ( Trivialliteratur in German). 3
     
     
    For some time after 1945, the sheer ubiquity of the physical rubble ( Trümmer in German) imposed itself on the imagination of writers, although Trümmerliteratur , as it is called, did not produce much in the way of lasting achievement. Beyond this, is it a surprising thing to say that there was no immediate radical break in German literary life after 1945, no innovative explosion or brilliant caesura? One might have expected such a watershed until one remembers that the great books about World War I took years to appear (see Chapter 31). The delay after World War II was even greater. Careful literary reconstruction in the 1960s showed that even the achievements of the so-called Gruppe 47 (Group 47), founded in 1947 and supposed to be representative of young German writers, were much overrated.
    There was really no such thing as Stunde Null , or a zero hour, as the phrase implied, and the untidy truth is that writers like Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn were still alive after 1945 and still rejecting the modernist movement as a “false straitjacket” imposed on man by the Enlightenment—false because “it took no account of human nature.” Those authors still focused on that “inner world” that we have chronicled throughout modern German history. This wasn’t the only factor militating against change, however. Many other writers who tried to work out their individual responses to the new circumstances in which they found themselves in the immediate aftermath of war, and who were often ex-soldiers