A "new left" in Germany?
Jun 19th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Two things during the past 24 hours have taken me on a backward stroll down my own personal German political Memory Lane. Last night a hard-hitting television documentary (from our classy tri-national German-language satellite network 3sat) took an exceptionally sharp look at the neuralgic issue of old Nazis in positions of power after the postwar establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany with its “provisional” capital almost capriciously established in the quiet little Rhineland university town of Bonn, and today the Anglophone online version of the crackerjack newsmagazine Der Spiegel reports on an evident upsurge of the political left in what some people have begun calling, in allusion to the pre-Hitler Weimar Republic, the Berlin Republic.
Back in ancient times, before speed-of-light electronic journalism crowded old teletype news agencies out of first place, the maxim prevailed “If copy comes in, move it” – i.e., on its way into print on old-fashioned paper. I never worked for a news agency (thank God: the unremitting pressure of that kind of journalism would probably have given me a gastric ulcer) but for about twelve years, starting in 1958, I did work almost exclusively for Time-Life International, where I learned the hard way that if you filed a story early in the editorial week, New York expected you to keep them additionally informed right up to press time. One residuum of that training expresses itself whenever something grabs me as genuine news: whenever I feel that visceral response, I instantaneously become a personification of the old nominally retired fire-horse, reflexively responding to the sound of the fire-bell. As a result of that training – and although I deplored the reactionary political stance of Time Inc. (no comma after the magazine’s name, please – an order from its founder Henry Luce), I have to concede that I did indeed learn some invaluable strictly journalistic lessons there, especially with regard to getting facts as completely straight as humanly possible and also something so many people who communicate in English never do get around to learning: using words with absolutely maximum precision so that what you write says not approximately but exactly what you want to get across.
My TLI years fell within the Cold War, and I found myself repeatedly locking horns with old-guard Luceniks, especially two successive bureau chiefs in Bonn. Covering Berlin plus East Germany (formerly the Soviet Zone of Occupation) required my fairly frequent attendance at press conferences over in East Berlin, where the Moscow-dominated political line missed no opportunity to embarrass and discredit the politics of the Bonn government, most frequently by means of exquisitely documented attacks based on unquestionably legitimate news archives.
Let one example suffice for so many. One such volley from East Berlin drew a bead on West Berlin’s Evangelical (Protestant, more or less Lutheran) Bishop Otto Dibelius after excavating a past publication of his in which he said in so many unequivocal words that he had always considered himself an anti-Semite. In other words: Bishop Dibelius, already a major figure among Germany’s Christians, publicly proclaimed himself in accord with Adolf Hitler’s eventually genocidal policy of anti-Semitism.
To me that startling revelation automatically meant NEWS, so I suggested the story and New York scheduled it – to the considerable discomfiture of my Bonn bureau chief, whose knee-jerk reaction to any news from behind the Iron Curtain dismissed it as almost automatically false. Once it landed on New York’s schedule, though, he had no alternative but to let me run with it. Bishop Dibelius himself declined to receive me, but I did manage a protracted telephone conversation with one of his close associates. I patiently listened to a lengthy recital of unstinted praise for this and that in the crusty old man’s past – most of which I already knew and assuredly in no way discounted – but finally my patience ran out and I cornered him with the question “Now about that quotation – authentic or false?” He paused for several moments before finally, after noticeable hesitation, admitting: “Stimmen tut’s” – meaning the East Berliners did indeed have their facts straight.
I have never lost sight of the fact that Germany’s powerful Communist Party (the KPD) during the late 1920s and early 1930s most militantly opposed the threatening Nazis, for which they paid bitterly not only during Hitler’s Third Reich but even also after the founding of the Bonn government - which eventually actually outlawed the KPD and made its admitted members virtually unemployable. Another German TV documentary this past weekend depicted the plight of anti-Nazi Germans, most of them Jews, who had fled from Nazi Germany to France where they even joined the French Résistance and actually fought side by side with French men and women after Nazi Germany invaded and occupied France. They, too, eventually paid a bitterly humiliating price for their heroism.
From that documentary I learned one fact new to me. When France celebrated some big Résistance anniversary and the French president himself requested the Bonn government to send some of those wartime German members as honored representatives, Chancellor Helmut Kohl himself blocked such a delegation, explaining to his French colleague - as if that explained and excused everything - that his government regarded those German members of the Résistance as “extreme leftists and Communists” and therefore unfit to represent Kohl’s Germany in Paris.
I may well come back to this general topic, for it has long occupied a place close to my heart. Meanwhile you can read that Anglophone Spiegel article by clicking here.
