The German Genius

possessed the education needed to exercise skepticism and forestall mob action and behavior. Hannah Arendt said, much later, that only educated people can have a private life, and that fits together nicely with Eliot’s argument about skepticism being the great aim of education that we must never forget—it provides people with enough of a private space for them to develop a healthy skepticism. People without a private life soon become a mob, where everything that matters, or seems to matter, takes place on the streets.
     
     
    That is all in the past. I do not mean only that the betrayal of Germany’s Bildung class took place more than seventy years ago. I also mean that such a betrayal could not take place again. How can we be sure? Because for once Germany has fashioned its own democratic revolution, albeit one that—surprising as it may seen—has gone very largely underappreciated by the world outside.
    In 1945 Germany once more had a revolution imposed on it from above, just as it had in 1848 and 1871, only this time it came not just from above but from outside. The occupying powers imposed a political and legal structure on postwar Germany. But, and this is the crucial point, a point that many outside Germany still do not grasp (with the Germans themselves failing to see why outsiders do not appreciate this profound truth): the social revolution of 1968, particularly in West Germany, was a much bigger set of events there than anywhere else .
    Konrad H. Jarausch has chronicled this change, which he describes as nothing short of a “caesura.” 45 He argues that, despite the successful establishment of democratic institutions in Germany after the war, authoritarian thought patterns “tended to persist,” and it was not until the 1960s that the “modernisation deficit” (Ralf Dahrendorf’s phrase) was overcome. A crucial factor here, he says, was the “generational rebellion of 1968,” when the younger cohort turned on its parents for the acquiescence in horror they had shown in the Third Reich (the “Brown Past”) and for their inability to face their guilt; and only then, in 1968, did Germans start to internalize democratic values, develop a “counter-elite” and demand self-government and “democratic counterpower.” 46 Jan-Werner Müller essentially agreed when he described the events of 1968 as a mixture of “Marxism and psychoanalysis.” 47
    The substance of this change was explored in Chapter 41; here we need only add two key points. One, that henceforth Germany had a critical, skeptical public, an entity that had been common enough in, say, Great Britain, France, or the United States for generations, but that had now finally arrived in Germany. And two, that there began a concern with the quality of life, with culture, and with the environment in particular. This would lead in time to the formation of the Green Party and bring about a sea change in the political life of the Federal Republic. 48 The Germans had turned away from an emphasis on inwardness—perhaps no bad thing. In Heinrich Winkler’s words, the country had completed its “long road west.” The studies of Dirk Moses and the Potsdam Institute of Military History, referred to in the Introduction and in Chapter 41, suggest that the above analyses are correct, that the process is maturing, and that the fourth postwar generation has adjusted to the terrible German past and has the courage to face up to the fact that “almost everyone” in the Third Reich knew what was going on.
    It may not be that we shall ever know how Hitler came about, but acknowledging how widespread the knowledge of the crimes was is clearly a significant advance.
    In June 2006, Thomas Kielinger, London correspondent of Die Welt , wrote an article in the London Daily Telegraph in which he took his hosts to task. The constant “harping on” about a “happily extinct” Germany by the British was no longer funny, he said. “The funny side escapes us if the Germany of the Nazis is confused with the Germany of today…There is a distinct fire break in our minds about then and now; between the swastika’d pariahs and the country we have rebuilt, ‘with liberty and justice for all’—including the liberty to mock ourselves for the past descent into hell. By contrast, for too many Britons, the old adversary has become frozen in time, encapsulated in 1945 like an insect in amber…Germany has moved on, with a vengeance.” 49 I would add this: when