Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History

362 Pages·1999·6.317 MB·English

by  Fritz Stern

DREAMS
and
DELUSIONS
ALSO BY FRITZ STERN
The Federal Republic of Germany and the United States:
Changing Political, Social, and Economic Relations
(co-editor), 1984
Gold and Iron:
Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the
German Empire, 1977
The Failure of Illiberalism:
Essays on the Political Culture of Modem Germany, 1972
The Responsibility of Power:
Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn (edited with
Leonard Krieger), 1968
The Politics of Cultural Despair:
A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology,
1974
The Varieties of History:
From Voltaire to the Present (editor),
1956, 1973
DREAMS
and
DELUSIONS
The Drama
of
German History
FRITZ STERN
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
Published in 1987 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Published in 198g by Random House, Ina, New
York, and by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Published in 1999 by Yale University Press with a new preface.
Copyright © 1987 by Fritz Stem.
Preface copyright © 1999 by Fritz Stem.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustra­
tions, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except
by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Number.
98-83185
EBN 0-300-07622-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
10 987654321
To Felix Gilbert
in affection and admiration

CONTENTS
Preface i x
Introduction 3
I. THE DREAM OF PEACE 23
i. Einstein’s Germany 25
2. Fritz Haber: The Scientist in Power and in 51
Exile
3. Ernst Reuter: The Making of a Democratic 77
Socialist
4. The Burden of Success: Reflections on 9 7
German Jewry
II. THE LURE OF POWER 115
5. Germany 1933: Fifty Years Later 119
6. National Socialism as Temptation 147
viii Contents
III. PEACE AND THE RELEASE FROM I95
GREATNESS
7. Germany in a Semi-Gaullist Europe 197
8. Germany and the United States: Visions of 219
Declining Virtue
IV. HISTORIANS AND THE GERMAN PAST 241
9. Americans and the German Past: A Century 245
of American Scholarship
10. Capitalism and the Cultural Historian 274
11. The Speech to the Bundestag, June 17, 1987 291
Notes 309
Acknowledgments 329
Index 331
PREFACE
History erupts at times, when all at once or in quick
succession the darns of custom break, streamlets coalesce, and
great tides sweep forward, or when some dramatic surge brings
forth a celebratory moment, an event that captures the spirit and
reality of a world-historical upheaval. We call such times revolu­
tion. The drama of German history never included a successful
revolution, such as has marked American history or British and
French. But in 1989—a uniquely joyous year in our tormented cen­
tury—the Germans of the old East Germany, the German Demo­
cratic Republic (G.D.R.), staged such a revolution: successful,
peaceful, and, it would seem, destined to be quickly forgotten. In
a matter of weeks, the symbols and rulers of oppression through­
out Eastern Europe came tumbling down. On November 9, a fate­
ful date in German history for a number of reasons, the Berlin
Wall was breached, and for a brief moment, at first encounter,
Germans embraced Germans from either side of the Wall; then,
on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in West and East Berlin,
Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony, with its triumphant concluding Ode to Joy,
Schiller’s celebration of peace and fraternity.
The revolution of 1989 occurred during the bicentennial of the
great French Revolution, when, according to a long-held view, the
democratic age first dawned; it was also 150 years after the failed
revolutions of 1848, that short, glorious springtime of nations. Ger­
many’s day of unanticipated freedom was November 9: on that day
in 1918, Germany’s imperial regime had been overthrown and a
republic proclaimed, amidst the anguish of the nation’s defeat in
the Great War; on that day in 1923, Hitler had attempted his first
PREFACE
X
bid for power in the so-called Munich Beer Hall Putsch, a failure
that nonetheless transformed him into a national figure; and on
that day in 1938, the Nazis had unleashed their full violence
against Jews, burning their synagogues, smashing their remaining ;
property, herding male Jews into concentration camps. The1
ambiguous overtones of November 9 forbade the commemoration
of a people’s peacefill victory on that same date: the very past that
in some measure had emboldened East Germans to reach out for
freedom made it impossible; it was a gratuitous coincidence that
the burden of the past should fall on the day of jubilation. And yet
how prophetic: that burden was to weigh on the new Germany to
come.
To explain the success of activist groups opposing the regime
of the German Democratic Republic requires at least brief men­
tion of connected events that occurred all over Europe, indeed in
the world. For once, German developments had the benefit of a
propitious international context. The peoples of the so-called
satellite countries of the Soviet Union had been in thrall to Soviet­
type regimes that increasingly took on native hues. Many adapted
to this repression in passivity, many colluded, some stood out as
dissidents, pitting their wits against the censors of the government,
risking their lives against uniformed thugs. This of course had
been true in the Soviet Union from its very beginning. The Com­
munist regimes at the periphery of the Soviet empire lacked legiti­
macy, even as they staged their great parades of Socialist promise.
Then, in 1978, the election of a Polish pope emboldened the
Poles, already the most restive of the peoples of the Eastern bloc.
Yet the greatest upheaval occurred at the very center, in the Soviet
Union itself, with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, who
realized that the regime was mired in decrepitude and corruption
and needed its aggiomamento, which he thought could be achieved
through glasnost and perestroika, through the controlled opening of
the Soviet economy and culture to needed change. In the end,
Gorbachev the reformer became an unwilling revolutionary. He
sought to manage both domestic reform and international
détente; it was not, therefore, a time for Soviet tanks to crush satel­
lite deviations, as they had in 1956 and 1968. And so—to conclude
in risible compression—by 1989 the Poles had negotiated a peace­
ful transition to a non-Communist regime; the Hungarian govern­
ment, which for some time had been liberal in this illiberal con­