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A SWIFT EMERGENCE OF LATENCY

[First chapter of “Latency / Post-1945”]

June 15, 1948, was a bright yet muggy Tuesday in Bavaria. What

Germany would become appeared utterly uncertain, the nation‟s past

weighed as an immediate but hardly ever mentioned burden, and nobody

seemed to anticipate – perhaps few people even really cared -- that a

week later the future would be determined. The front page of the

Sueddeutsche Zeitung – Muenchner Nachrichten aus Politik, Kultur,

Wirtschaft und Sport looked much like what it looks today, except for the

photograph in black and white [of Carl Zuckmayer, a German-born author

who had become American, with his wife and his daughter] and for the

price per copy, which was twenty Pfennig. Five texts on the top middle of

the page brought together the political key configuration of the moment,

not only for Germany. But they did so in a strangely distant fashion. It was

announced that all preparations for a currency reform

[“Waehrungsreform”] within the three zones occupied by the Western

World War II-allies were now finished, and that the disclosure of an exact

date for the implementation of the new monetary order was depending

entirely on the allied authorities. Another text covered a campaign speech

that President Truman had given at Berkeley, CA, appealing to the Soviet

Union not to withdraw from the constructive efforts of securing a

democratic and united future for Germany [it is an open historical question

whether the Western allies and the Soviet Union were not both opting for

the German partition although, for reasons of political legitimacy, they had

to blame each other for it]. Two short notes referred to the hesitations of

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the French Parliament in ratifying the first political steps towards the

creation of a Western German State that the three Western allies, together

with Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg, had decided thirteen days earlier,

at a summit in London. Finally, General Clay, the American Military

Governor, was quoted, from a press conference, promising that the United

States were making every possible effort to integrate “an East German

representation” into the new State. Four of these five texts had the neutral

style that is typical of press agencies [they indeed came from AP, Dena-

Reuter, and UP] but the one article written by the staff of the

Sueddeutsche, although it dealt with the imminent economic reform as the

one topic of true existential concern, may well have been the most

dispassionate of them all.

Only two other front page texts had a somehow livelier, sometimes even

aggressive tone while they touched upon topics that should have

commanded more tact and reservation from the German side. One of

them was the still famous column on the left side of the Sueddeutsche‟s

cover page, under the title “Das Streiflicht” [“the side-light”]. On June 15,

1948, it criticized the United States‟ world political strategies, especially

their support, through a Foreign Legion whose organization had just been

approved by the Senate, of the Jewish State as it had been founded in the

former British protectorate a month and one day earlier. With

unembarrassed anti-semitic undertones, Streiflicht made fun of sixty-four

non-Jewish Germans who had volunteered to fight for the new Jewish

cause but were rejected by the Israeli authorities: “we Germans could not

have wished better than to rid ourselves of this surviving layer of military

aggression in our society.” The broadest, most enthusiastic and most self-

complacent coverage, however, was dedicated to the “Second

International Youth Manifestitation” taking place at Munich, with 1400

participants from twenty-one countries. Among the guests of honor were

thirty former German prisoners of war who had been released for this

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occasion by the French authorities. Carl Zuckmayer received thundering

applause for his pledge that the German youth could not be held

responsible for what had happened in the most recent chapter of the

national past. On the following day, as part of the “Manifestation,” the

University of Munich would bestow, with full and meticulous academic

decorum, an honorary doctorate upon the French novelist Jules Romains.

Surprisingly, a delegation from Spain arrived, although belatedly, that is a

delegation from a country under military government that was completely

isolated in the political order emerging from the War as it has been Hitler‟s

official ally. This delegation was welcomed with particularly intense

emotion.

The international youth assembled at Munich, thus the newspaper

reported, “spoke with great respect of their German friends,” they wanted

to be “good neighbors” for them -- and were “even impressed by the

quality of the rationed food supply.” Where and under which conditions to

acquire food was quite naturally of primary concern to the Sueddeutsche

Zeitung and its readers. A long article on the third of four pages spoke

about the legally sanctioned possibility of receiving meet from animals that

had been slaughtered because of diseases [“Freibank”] but it did so as if

playing down the physical need implied, and described, with ironic

undertones, the long line of more than three thousand persons waiting for

this possibility. Culture, like food, mainly appeared to be a matter of supply

and quantity. Three programs of political cabaret at Munich were written

up under the title “High Tide for Cabarets,” together with multiple new

productions of classic dramas, for example by Lope de Vega and by Henri

de Montherlant [without any doubt, French culture enjoyed the single

highest prestige, just as it always had in Germany before the 1930s].

There also was a report on a show, opened by General Clay at Haus der

Kunst, of paintings by Renaissance masters, now restored to the State of

Bavaria by the American authorities.

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Even for a paper of just four pages, the sports section was very small, if

compared to present-day expectations. It opened with the program for a

boxing contest boxing must then have been the most popular sport in

Germany) between the cities of Zuerich and Muenchen, which was

interpreted and celebrated as a friendly gesture of the Swiss to end the

exclusion of German athletes from international events. By contrast, the

soccer coverage almost had a tone of elegy in the light of decadence:

“The team from Mannheim, despite its more mature playing style, did not

manage to score a single goal; Munich 1860 scored one. This fact should

inspire our hope that, one day, their offensive players, who left so much to

be desired, may find back to better shape.” The entire bottm half of the

same page was filled with ads for vacant positions: most sought for were

men and women with a competence in business, administration, and

typewriting, beside “girls” for jobs as housekeepers [“Alleinmaedchen”].

That day there were no ads of people searching for employment.

Without additional knowledge about the local and historical context, it

would be impossible or a reader to imagine, that the Sueddeutsche of

June 15, 1948, was written, printed, and distributed in a city whose

downtown areas lay still devastated from air raids; in a city also that had

been the official home of the German National Socialist Workers‟ Party, of

Adolf Hitler‟s and Heinrich Himmler‟s party, of a party that had brought

over humankind crimes of unprecedented technological perfection. Even

more difficult would it have been for an average reader to find any

indications of the truly miraculous [more than just “dramatic”] turn-around

on whose verge the city of Munich and the country were standing and

would become a part. It seems that people who had survived the War

were still so frantically busy surviving the new everyday of peace that they

could not appreciate their own recent achievements nor gauge their own

blindness. Surrounded by past horror and future success, life on that early

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summer day may have felt as flat and almost deliberately “normal” as

some of the music playing on American Forces Network, for example

Benny Goodman‟s “On a Slow Boat to China.”

*

The distribution of the new money, called “Deutsche Mark,” started under

rainy skies in the American, British, and French zones of Germany on

Sunday, June 20, 1948. Each citizen had the right to change up to forty of

the old Reichsmarks into the same amount of the new currency, with a

further portion of twenty Marks being announced for August. Any larger

amount of cash could be exchanged at a rate of 100 [old] to 5 [new], while

the rate for checking and savings accounts as well as for outstanding

payments was 10 to 1. For more than four hundred types of goods,

rationing restrictions were lifted. Though accompanied by fear and by an

actual rise of unemployment, these measures efficiently disconnected the

country from one dimension of its past implosion and were the kick-off into

the “economic miracle” that provided the dominant existential tone for the

early Federal Republic of Germany.

In its swiftness, the Western Waehrungsreform caught the Soviet

administration of the country‟s other part by surprise and thus produced

the necessity for an Eastern currency reform three days later, in order to

protect the Soviet zone against an inundation with old Reichsmarks from

the West. Trying to implement social justice through better exchange rates

for those who presented smaller amounts of money, the principles behind

Eastern economic transition were significantly different from those of its

Western counterpart. Systematizing occasional previous interventions to

the level of a world-political threat, the Soviet Union retaliated by

interrupting all land, rail, and water traffic between the Western zones of

Germany and the Western sectors of Berlin one day later, on Thursday,

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June 24. General Clay, despite countless logistically, technologically and,

above all, strategically motivated doubts, but supported by the British

authorities, immediately ordered the creation of an air bridge from West

Germany into Berlin. Within a few weeks, two hundred sixty-nine British

and three hundred fourteen American planes performed around five

hundred and fifty flights per day through three corridors [from Frankfurt,

Hannover, and Hamburg] into three West Berlin airports [Tempelhof,

Gatow and, since December 1948, Tegel] keeping control over the former

capital‟s Western sectors and securing the survival of their population.

Within less than a hundred hours, between June 20 and June 24, 1948,

Post-War finished, and the Cold War, as it had already been talked about

as a world-political possibility and nightmare, became the new reality.

Before the end of the same month, the Committee of the Eastern

European Communist Parties under the leadership of the Soviet Union

[Kominform] excluded Yugoslavia‟s Communist Party, based on

accusations of “Anti-Soviet and Anti-Internationalist attitudes.” Less than

two months later, the Prime Ministers of the States within the West

German zones, surprisingly, chose the small university town of Bonn near

Cologne as the sight for their debates towards a new Constitution.

*

If those weeks during which the contours for a new world order shaped up,

were so strangely unimpressed by their own tensions and action

sequences, the final months of the War had been a scene of grotesque

simultaneities and of hysteria. Think, for example, of that chilling

photograph from April 1945, on which Adolf Hitler, looking frail and much

older than fifty-six years, shakes hands with a line of boys in uniform, as if

they were real soldiers, as if he still had a military or even paternal

authority, as if the War was not long lost, and as if those boys could

believe that there was any purpose in sacrificing their lives. Is this “as if”

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just our impression of how certain gestures did not fit, how they

grotesquely did not fit the environment in which they occurred – or is the

“as if” rather an approximate but inadequate formula for the specific

mixture of helplessness and cynicism with which the strange juxtaposition

of that moment was experienced? Is it possible that Hitler still believed in

himself by spring 1945, is it possible that those boys trusted him? Were

those Germans who, a few days after the unconditional surrender, had

been forced to walk through the concentration camps built by their

government and their fellow-citizens, were those Germans sincere when

acted as if they had not known about these slow-execution devices? What

did my parents think when they invited their friends and relatives, on cards

of hand-made paper [“Buettenpapier”] and with Gothic letters, to an

engagement party for April 20, 1945 (Hitler‟s birthday, although they were

not even particularly involved with the Party), at the city of Dortmund, no

less, where one of the fiercest battles of the last War months had been

raging until a few days earlier. Did they see a problem at all? Did it cross

their minds that the damaged houses in which they were sleeping, eating

and having sex belied the very formal invitation cards for their party? Or

were they acting as if nothing was happening because the abyss was too

deep to face it? Was to ignore their condition for survival? Was Hitler – or

anybody in his scarce subterraneous Bunker surroundings – really

convinced, “philosophically” or “religiously” convinced [if one can use

these adverbs], as they did pretend, that it was a just and necessary fate

for the German “race” to go under, to get physically destroyed and

removed from the surface of the planet -- as it had proven to be weaker

than other “races” and therefore unworthy of dominance?

Naturally, those shrill tones coming from the grotesque late-War

encounters vanished from after the unconditional surrender of May 8,

1945, but the “as if” of aggressive ignoring continued to be a habit of the

survivors under life conditions that became worse than anybody had been

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able to anticipate. This at least was the impression that the twenty-three

year old Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman carried away when he came to

the country, during the fall months of 1946, in order to cover its situation –

probably a historically unprecedented situation – in a series of thirteen

chronicles for his newspaper. Dagerman described, in merciless detail, the

everyday of a family living in a ground floor apartment that was

permanently flooded. To say that those humans were living under

“prehistoric conditions” would not have been enough. They were like

people from a modern civilization violently pushed back into cave life.

Every step was a problem, they had learnt how to sleep without moving

their bodies, and the threat of diseases was lingering everywhere. Instead

of going to school or having a profession, children and grown-ups were

back to hunting for food, to search for burning materials and, occasionally,

to find clothes in a bartering economy. There was no time, no energy, not

even the motivation to think about what the causes of their situation could

have been. Life was only possible by escaping from death every day. The

few Germans who, for short moments, had the privilege of pausing within

this struggle accepted without protest the absolute control of the allies

over what had been “their” country. At the same time, they found it quite

natural to tell Dagerman that they felt unfairly treated. Were they honest

when they asked him questions like whether Hitler and the twelve years of

Nazi rule had really been their fault; or why it was not taken into account

that Germans had never treated other nations with similar harshness after

their own military victories?

Different from the setting of the Nuernberg trial, the Allies let German

lawyers “with a clean record” preside over the legal procedures of De-

Nazification which became an inevitable condition and threshold for the

reentry of the population into professional and civil life. Dagerman

certainly disagreed wit these logistic decisions. While he did not blame

those new (and often also old) civil servants for any acts of blatant

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injustice or of a tendency to favor their cronies, he found that they were

lacking the necessary passion and curiosity to detect and to punish the

crimes of the past, more importantly in order to establish a discontinuity

vis-à-vis the past, comparable to the one later achieved within the

economic system a good year and half later. Finally, Dagerman also

observed a rising tension between two generations of Germans. Those

who were between fifteen and thirty years old quite obviously blamed

those who had the age of their older siblings or of their parents, that is

those who had been in charge of their country between 1933 and 1945,

for having gambled their present and future. Many among the older

Germans, by contrast and more astonishingly, found that the younger

ones had failed to protect or even to free the nation from the Nazi rule.

Above all, Dagerman stated, nobosdy really felt responsible.

One of the cases in question that have long become famous and

emblematic is the life of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. For reasons

that were biographically and intellectually only too plausible, he had joined

Hitler‟s Party on May 1, 1933, ten days after being elected, with the

approval of the same Party, as Rektor of the University of Freiburg. Quite

early, Heidegger‟s Rektorat must have begun to appear problematic in the

eyes of the new rulers who, as far as we can tell, never truly understood

the importance of his philosophical work. Almost exactly a year after his

election, the dimission that Heidegger had asked for was granted. From

this moment on, he kept a certain distance from politics, even from

university politics, and he even occasionally made critical remarks, mildly

critical remarks, one has to say, about actual German politics failing to

fulfill the historical vocation of the National Socialist movement. But he

never had the courage [and most likely: the will] to quit the Party. In early

1947, Heidegger‟s French reader and admirer Jean Beaufret sent a letter

asking him to develop his particular view – and it was implied: his

particular re-vision – of the concept of “Humanism” in the post-war world.

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Clearly, Beaufret‟s initiative was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre‟s then [and

still now] famous lecture under the title “L‟existentialisme est un

humanisme.” Heidegger‟s reaction, in turn, was not just politely negative.

In what would become his first published text after Germany‟s

unconditional surrender, he developed a vision of the contemporary

situation of philosophy [of “thinking,” as he preferred to say] whose

merciless bleakness strikes me as an intellectual equivalent of the

material situation in Germany during the same time.

He begins with a rhetorical question that hardly attenuates the role of

authority that he is assuming in the conversation with Beaufret:

“Sie fragen: Comment redonner un sens au mot “Humanisme”? Diese Frage

kommt aus der Absicht, das Wort “Humanismus” festzuhalten. Ich frage mich, ob das noetig sei. Oder ist das Unheil, das alle Titel dieser Art anrichten, noch nicht offensichtlich genug?” [315 / ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS!].

It had never been Heidegger‟s style to admit that he developed – let alone:

revised – philosophical positions in reaction to changes in his

environment. And yet the words “noch nicht” indicate that this position is

one that he takes due to the influence of the devastasting present. His

“Brief ueber den „Humanismus‟” is, above all, a critique of traditional

anthropocentrism and, more specifically, a critique that wants to underline

that whatever is important about “Dasein,” (“human existence”) can only

be important in relation to the “unconcealment of Being” as a higher

destiny (“Geschick”) in which Dasein has to play a role, without ever being

able to know why and how this role matters. As if he had never wanted to

be be what he programmatically and publicly was, at least during his time

as a Rektor at Freiburg, that is a philosopher of nationhood as decisive

existential frame, Heidegger now rejects both nationalism and

internationalism as inadequate configurations within the history of Being:

Angesichts der wesenhaften Heimatlosigkeit des Menschen zeigt sich dem seinsgeschichtlichen Denken das kuenftige Geschick des Menschen darin, dass er in die Wahrheit des Seins findet und sich zu diesem Finden auf den Weg

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macht. Jeder Nationalismus ist metaphysisch ein Anthropologismus und als solcher Subjektivismus. Der Nationalismus wird durch den blossen Internationalismus nicht ueberwunden, sondern nur erweitert und zum System gebracht. Der Nationalismus wird da durch sowenig zur Humanitas gebracht und aufgehoben, wie der Individualismus durch den geschichtslosen Kollektivismus. Dieser ist die Subjektivitaet des Menschen in der Totalitaet. Er vollzieht ihre unbedingte Selbstbehauptung. Diese laesst sich nicht rueckgaengig machen. Sie laesst sich durch ein halbseitig vermitteltes Denken nicht einmal ausreichend erfahren. Ueberall kreist der Mensch ausgestossen aus der Wahrheit des Seins, um sich selbst als animal rationale. [341f.]

“Heimatlosigkeit,” as a metaphor, made the fate of those millions of

Germans who had lost their living and shelter at the former Eastern

periphery of the country -- but also in the destruction of the German cities -

- into a concretization of what Heidegger‟s diagnosis identified as the true

crisis of the moment: it was, for him, the incapacity, perhaps even the

ineptness of the contemporary generations to capture the fate, the “Ge-

Schick,” i.e. the existential place to which unconcealed Being assigned

and sent them. Never must his ontologico-existential premises have

sounded more convincing than in this time of utter humility, also for

philosphy:

Es ist an der Zeit, dass man sich dessen entwoehnt, die Philosophie zu ueberschaetzen und sie deshalb zu ueberfordern. Noetig ist in der jetzigen Weltnot: weniger Philosophie, aber mehr Achtsamkeit des Denkens; weniger Literatur, aber mehr Pflege des Buchstabens. Das kuenftige Denken ist nicht mehr Philosophie, weil es urspuenglicher denkt als die Metaphysik, welcher Name das gleiche sagt. Das kuenftige Denken kann aber auch nicht mehr, wie Hegel verlangte, den Namen der “Liebe zur Weisheit” ablegen und die Weisheit selbst in der Gestalt des absoluten Wissens geworden sein. Das Denken ist auf dem Abstieg in die Armut seines vorlaeufigen Wesens. Das Denken sammelt die Sprache in das einfache Sagen. Die Sprache ist so die Sprache des Seins, wie die Wolken die Wolken des Himmels sind. Das Denken legt mit seinem Sagen unscheinbare Furchen in die Sprache. Sie sind noch unscheinbarer als die Furchen, die der Landmann langsamen Schrittes durch das Feld zieht. [364]

In 1947, when Martin Heidegger wrote these sentences about the “misery

of the world” and the “poverty” of philosophy, using images from the world

of agriculture, the food supply for the German population had become so

low that it was life-threatening. After an unusually cold winter and a

summer of dryness, the average calories per day available for grown-ups

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had dropped to nine hundred, from three thousand before the war – that is

to six hundred below the minimum limit of fifteen hundred that the allies

had set. Meanwhile the divorce rate was rising from 8.9 per ten thousand

people in 1939 to 18 in 1948.

*

Things turned around in the early summer of 1948, but very few Germans

ever spoke about seeing the change coming. Was it because their

situation had become so bad, so permanently bad, as it appeared, that the

capacity was lost to imagine and even to long for a different life? Was it

literally difficult to return from prehistory? In the May 1948-issue of “Die

Wandlung,” an influential monthly journal with impressive intellectual

quality and democratic determination, edited by Dolf Sternberger, Karl

Jaspers, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, and Alfred Weber, some faint glimpses of

hope came through: “With more normal weather and a somewhat better

supply of fertilizers, there is serious hope that the harvest will get better

and may perhaps provide between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred

calories per day, instead of last year‟s thirteen hundred.” At the same time,

it was argued, with a systemic view and a long-term perspective, that a

return into the international community of trade and economy was

necessary for Germany and in the interest of all countries. Dolf

Sternberger observed that the role of the nation state, as key unit in the

play of political power was now vanishing to be replaced by a tension

between what the author called the “two parties,” namely the American

and the Soviet block. Finally, Adolf Arndt, a legal scholar and future

representative in the Bundestag, added the most brilliant and

philosophically complex contribution to that issue of “Die Wandlung”.

Similar to Heidegger, he argued that a traditional “belief in Humankind”

had been lost in the contemporary crisis, together with the conviction that

humans were sufficiently equipped to solve, without any setbacks and

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crises, all problems that they would ever find themselves challenged by.

As one contemporary example that he judged not to be fully completed in

the present he mentioned the double transition from the “sacred State”

[“Sakralstaat”] into the “social State” and from the “national State” into a

universal order. In this situation, Arndt noticed, an intense – and

understandable – desire for substantial religious or ethical “values” was

emerging, a desire for positions to hold on to and to find orientation in. His

own decisive point was, by contrast, that only a legal framework

renouncing such substantial premises would be flexible enough to make a

long-lasting peace likely in an overwhelmingly complex environment. In

other word: renouncing he urge for immediate solutions appeared as the

condition for survival and mid-term success.

*

Less than five years later, the problems that middle class Germans as my

parents were struggling with felt very different. Never did I hear them

speak about their engagement party eighteen days before the

unconditional surrender. My father had been an American prisoner of war

for about a year, in a camp called “Oklahoma,” not far from the French

town of Reims, and if the photographs that he brought home don‟t lie, he

spent this time under almost comfortable conditions. When my father was

released [he sometimes told us that he escaped] the commander of the

camp, astonishingly, wrote for him a letter of recommendation “To Whom

it May Concern,” praising the assistance that he had been able to offer to

his fellow prisoners as a medical student with an almost finished career.

My parents got married in May 1947, a few months before the post-war

famine reached its peak, and not surprisingly most of their memories from

that day were indeed about excessive amounts of food. They were lucky

enough to find employment at the university hospital of my home town,

which allied bomb raids had left as the second most destroyed town in

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Europe [not by coincidence it entertains a city-friendship with Nagasaki in

Japan]. With two salaries of around two hundred Marks, they could afford

the luxury of hiring a nanny for me. Her name was Helgard, she was the

daughter of a railroad worker, and I Istill remember her as very beautiful

and much more tender than my mother. One day, however, my mother

told me that Helgard would not come back again. “She has turned evil”

[“sie ist boese geworden”], she said my mother, not wanting to provide any

further details nor explanations. Helgard was replaced by a nun under a

starchy veil who made me go down on my knees [to pray, I suppose]

before receiving breakfast. The first person whom I ever missed was

Helgard, and one night, in the tiny studio at the hospital where we were

living, I overheard my parents giving away, to a friend, the true reason why

she had been released: “She is hanging out with Existentialists,” they said

[more precisely: “sie verkehrt in Existentialistenkellern”]. Of course I had

no clue what “Existentialists” were and less why they would spend their

lives in cellars [“Kellern”] – and my surgeon parents probably did probably

not know much more about the latest French influence on the German

spirit. But they had quickly and safely returned to a world where it was

understood that one‟s own middle-class lifestyle through needed to be

protected byhigh walls against whatever threatened to be eccentric.

Occasionally they still mentioned “the War,” but I took it to be some vague

horizon, something that by any means had happened before I was born,

not even necessarily something bad. I associated it with the many ruins in

my hometown, but I didn‟t know cities without ruins, and soon I would

learn that ruins were much fun to play in.

It must have been around 1950 that my father went to Munich for about

half a year, on an internship to acquire the title of a specialist in urology,

which was then the latest branch in medicine, and from there he sent

letters with drawings and filled with picture postcards to his baby son. On

some of them, certain corners of the city look exactly like today, that

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means like a nineteenth century capital of a small monarchy, with an

opulent air of old money, and with large cars, above all meticulously

preserved Mercedes, but even the monumental British and American

sizes. On other photographs, Munich is a gigantic construction site, busy

with much traffic of smaller cars, Volkswagen, above all, and some Opels,

but also trucks with dirt and other building materials. The few people who

are not driving on those pictures seem to rush. I also found a color

postcard, dated 1955, that somehow illustrates the future in relation to the

images in the mail from my father. It is about cars again, proudly showing

an officially “large” gas station [“Gross-Garage Nymphenburg”], at

Nymphenburg, an elegant residential neighborhood, whose name is that

of the summer castle from the early eighteenth century. The “Gross-

Garage” is actually not all that large – but somehow seems to be proud of

itself indeed. Just one car, a black Mercedes limousine, probably the 220

type, is parked there as if pumping gas. It has the more compact, almost

quadrangular body of the first generation of post-War Mercedes models

and the white stripe on its black tires, as it had been adopted from the

United States as sign of distinction and elegance. Outside but right in front

of the garage stands a carefully painted red and black Volkswagen

caravan. On its front, the black and red Volkswagen displays the signs of

a car insurance [it must be “DAS,” that is “Deuscher Automobilschutz”]

and of the notorious ADAC, meaning “Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-

Club.” There are two narrow blends on top of its reflectors, probably meant

to reduce any aggressive effect of the headlights. But as the blends also

look like eyelids they give the Volkswagen van a shy yet friendly face. The

world of the Grossgarage is calm, peaceful, and self-satified. Unless the

photograph was actually shot on a Sunday, it must be from a time when

every day wanted to be a Sunday.

*

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Surprisingly perhaps, this mood of containment in the middle of the

twentieth century, was not exclusively German, it was not even specific –

as one might think – to those countries that had participated in the War. I

have postcards from 1948 that I found at a flea market in Lisbon. They all

are personal photographs in postcard format, to be mailed to friends,

relatives, and beloved ones. Carefully groomed young men sent their

black and white portraits to cousins and friends with female names,

always adding their “greetings” and often saying something like “this is to

remember what they looked like” on a specific day. Charged with desire

and dreams as these pictures must have been, there is never any

ambiguity in their language, let alone a joke or anything risqué.

I also possess a photograph of a young Portuguese family. The mother is

as beautiful as any film star from her time could have been – the Rita

Hayworth type in a darker tonality. She has a perfectly symmetrical face

that is soft although its bones determine the form, except for the arch of

her lips that makes for a remote smile. The father‟s apparel is impeccable

and no doubt expensive. He is not necessarily older than his wife but

seems eager to appear serious, thus producing the effect of a man who

would feel uncomfortable without a tie and a suite. But his body is plump

as either that of an ugly infant or that of an old man who, due to

overweight, does not move anymore. His arms are short, his complexion

is puffed, and the lips are pressed together, as if holding a word that he

cannot give away. While it is hard to imagine that anybody would like him

“at first glance,” the question is whether one could trust him. Or perhaps

more adequately: is he too weak and too unhappy for his status or does

he have a potential of being dangerous? Between the beautiful mother

and the plump, uncanny father stands, on a stool, their daughter who must

be about three years old. She has a fancy checkered dress on, Shirley

Temple-style or even what children in the British aristocracy may have

been wearing then. One day, it is clear, the girl‟s face will be similar to her

17

father‟s -- but this does not prevent her yet from looking what we call

“cute” today, “like a baroque angel,” as one might have said then. Since I

first saw and bought this postcard, I have thought that there is a story in it,

not a story though that one could ever make up. It must be a true, precise

and perhaps painful story story – but a story that will never allow that it be

told.

*

Now is there anything that does [or should] matter to us about that time in

the middle of the previous century, a good sixty years ago, which was so

reticent – in so many ways – about what may have been important then?

A good way to come at least close to an answer is to compare the time

following 1945 to the time, less than thirty years earlier, that followed the

first war called “World War.” Not only for intellectuals the post-war of the

early twentieth century was a moment experienced as a moment of

profound depression. If the days of military mobilization all over Europe in

early August 1914 had been an orgy of patriotic confidence, there was

also a common air of bleak seriousness on the faces of those who, in

November 1918, returned from the trenches, victors and defeated alike.

From the pictures and the footage that we know it looks as if the world had

aged by decades within only four years. The desperate search for a stable

ground to base a new life on, a search that has an affinity with the traces

of despair that we have seen in Martin Heidegger‟s text from 1947, had

been an urge that permeated every social group after 1918. Ludwig

Wittgenstein‟s biography is a particularly dramatic yet very typical case.

Quite literally, he wanted to start a new life after the defeat and the end of

the Austro-Hungarian Empire by giving away his large fortune and by

shifting the focus of his intellectual interest from engineering to philosophy.

18

But what had been the incisive experience made in the War to account for

such a widespread feeling that any simple continuation of existence would

be impossible? It was, during the first months of the military conflict, the

surprise, on both sides, that an easy triumph in the former, somehow

chivalric [or at least Napoleonic] style was no longer available. The

paralysis of a trench war of small but always costly advances had become

the new horizon of warfare. With the accelerated development of military

technology, however, with machine gun fire, aviation, and gas attacks, a

much deeper existential frustration began to sink in. This war was no

longer an existential situation where individual bravery or genius could

make a difference. It was a war to be decided by the quantity and

efficiency of the “material,” by who could afford to sacrifice more hundreds

of thousands of lives, and by the industrial output of each home front. In

reaction, new ideologies, above all Communism and Fascism, established

themselves in the public sphere, to affirm and to define the meaning of

collective and individual life on the ground of values that claimed to be

new.

In the depth and extension of its destructive power, World War II would

make the first World War appear small – but, astonishingly and by

contrast, it hardly triggered any initiative, perhaps not even the need to

rethink human existence. Of course there were some intellectual

reactions, only they did not seem to fit the mood of the years after 1945,

so that some important books as, for example, Max Horkheimer‟s and

Theodor W. Adorno‟s “Dialectics of Enlightenment,” made their true impact

several decades later. As I said before, this contrast between the post-

1945 and the post-1918 resonance to the Wars turned upside down the

different degrees of devastation they had brought about. Only the second

war was a “world war” referring to the geography of its military action. The

estimates for the total numbers of casualties that the War immediately

caused are quite variable but one comparison, displayed at the “Musée de

19

l‟armée” in Paris, provides a strong impression of the proportion: the most

affected nation during World War I was France with 1.37 million victims,

against 26.6. million of Soviet citizens who died through World War II.

There is no World War I equivalent to the more than six million

livesslaughtered in German concentration camps between 1939 and 1945

and to the unknown but definitely even larger number of women, children,

and men who died under similar circumstances in the Soviet Union, in

Japan, and in some other countries.

The essential difference, however, the difference that makes both Wars

truly incomparable, anthropologically, so to speak, cannot be expressed

quantitatively. It is the cold perfection in the industrialization of execution

developed by the German SS, and it is the threshold that was crossed by

the imagination of national self-extinction and even the self-extinction of

humankind that the Japanese and the German etats majors played with

when they realized that the War was lost for them. Since August 6, 1945,

since the first detonation of a nuclear bomb over a city, this imagination

has become a concrete and always available technical possibility, which

we will never be able to forget. We know, more from their faces

eternalized in a handful of photographs than from their words, that those

women and men who were present and survived the moment of Hiroshima

believed that it was the beginning of the end of the world, and there will

never again be enough future to prove them wrong.

*

But, again, what is it that has not been said about these years, what is the

urgency to write yet another book about them? I think it is about the

impact of irreversible destruction, after having been silently present for a

short while after the War, swiftly disappeared. And it is about the

impression that the impact of irreversible destruction had been present

20

and then swiftly disappeared. It had been present not only in those nations

that participated in the War but probably all over the world. The issue of

“Life”-magazine dated December 24, 1945, makes me think that

Christmas of that year may have been the comparatively early moment

when the impact of irreversible destruction disappeared in the United

States. The pages of “Life” are filled with features and pictures that show a

world returned to what it was supposed to always have always been.

“Japanese Farmer: He Comes Back from the War to the Ancient Pattern

of Life in his Village” is the title of a long story, and it continues with

subtitles like: “Soldier finds fat and crops fairly good despite bad rice

failure;” “He still observes the ingrained Shinto rites; “ and “The village of

Harada is frugal, hard-working and unmarked by war.” The disaster and

the wounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not appear. Instead, there is an

advertisement for “Graflex prize-winning cameras” with a photograph,

made by a U.S. Navy soldier, of an explosion of Vesuvius that shows a

mushroom-shaped cloud similar to the one we have come to associate,

since Hiroshima, with nuclear weapons. Another photograph, filling half a

page, shows three gorgeous looking young woman, in the latest fashion,

sitting on a couch next to each other with their babies, like a strangely

symmetrical sculpture. They all look to their left side and have the left leg

crossed over the right leg. The caption says:

Three oldest daughters give bottles to their three infant children. Left to right: Jeanne, 22, with son Joe; Myrra Lee, 23, with son John; and Betty, 25, with daughter Julia. Jeanne‟s and Myrra Lee‟s husbands are out of service and attended the Christmas party. Jeanne‟s husband was an Eighth Air Force radio operator with 27 missions. Myrra Lee‟s was a shipfitter second class with 26 months‟ overseas duty. Betty‟s husband is missing in action.

The spatial symmetry of these three beautiful young women with their

babies absorbs the existential asymmetry between, on the one side,

Jeanne and Myrrha Lee whose husbands are back and, on the other side,

Betty whose husband is missing in action. Some specialists have argued

that in Japan a similar stage of full absorption was not reached before

21

1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics. As for the effects of this falling into

latency, Peter Sloterdijk has argued, for the French/German post-World

War II-period, that an obsessive mutual fascination between those two

countries then finally began to disappear, after producing both excessive

admiration and wars full of cruelty for two centuries. As a cornerstone of

the European Union, the so-called French German “friendship” would rely

on the emergence of mutual disinterest as a condition.

I do not want to use the word “repression” for what was happening in the

decade following 1945. After all, what could have been easier for “Life”-

magazine than simply not to document – to “repress” -- Betty‟s fate?

Rather than being “repressed,” the impact of the War time‟s irreversible

destruction disappeared as it was entering the new quiet world. Not the

facts disappeared but their impact and resonance. And as the impact of

irreversible destruction fell into oblivion, a feeling of latency swiftly

emerged to establish itself (there is a light impression of paradox attached

to the double movement of an effect disappearing into latency and, at the

same time, a certain mood emerging). By “latency” I mean the kind of

situation that the Dutch historian Eelco Runia defines as “presence.”

Runia illustrates he concept by using the stowaway as a metaphor. Above

all, in a situation of latency and in presence of a stowaway, we are certain

that something is there that we cannot grasp -- and that this “something”

has a material articulation; it therefore requires space. Obviously, we do

not know where that which is latent might be. As we do not only not know

where the latent is but do also not know what or who is latent, we have no

guarantee that we could ever recognize the latent if it showed itself. Of

course what is latent may well undergo changes while it remains

ungraspable. For example, stowaways are not exempt from aging. Most

importantly, we have no reason to believe – at least no systematic reason

– that what has once become latent will either show itself or become

completely forgotten one day.

22

No “method” or standard procedure exists, let alone any kind of

“interpretation, that can help us retrieve what has once fallen into latency.

For in order to be accessible to interpretation, i.e. to the identification of a

meaning that seems to lie under a surface, the latent would have to adopt

the form of a “propositional content,” which may be possible sometimes --

but is unlikely in general. Only, how can we be so certain that something

latent is “there” if it is not available to us? When I go through those

demonstratively peaceful and orderly post-War magazines, I am struck by

the violence that often comes through in their advertising. Like the

explosion of the Vesuvius, with the mushroom-shaped cloud on top.

Showing how they smoothly go over the soft skin of a baby‟s cheek

highlights the supreme quality of razor blades. In cartoon-style

representations of married life husbands joyfully beat up their wives

because they have failed to brew a strong enough morning coffee or

because they have forgotten to wake them up. There also seems to have

been an obsession with pathologically agitated old men who urgently need

some medication.

Something like a violent nervousness irritates the post-War worlds of

latency. I want to use the German word “Stimmung” to characterize how

we may perceive that which has fallen into latency. “Stimmung” is normally

and correctly translated by “mood” or, with a metaphor, by “climate” or

“atmosphere.” “What the metaphors “climate” and “atmosphere” share

with the word “Stimmung,” whose root is “Stimme” [German for “voice”], is

that they suggest the presence of a material touch, perhaps the lightest

possible material touch, on the body of whoever perceives a mood, a

climate, an atmosphere, or a “Stimmung.” Weather, voices, and music

have each a physical yet invisible impact on us. It is a physical touch that

we associate with certain “inner” feelings. Toni Morrison has described

this inner side of Stimmung as a paradox, i.e. as “being touched like from

23

inside.” The images of the razor blade on the baby‟s cheek, of the violent

husbands, or of the agitated grandfathers in psot-1945 advertising, make

us physically uncomfortable as they awake inner feelings of discomfort for

which we have no concepts. No “method,” however, will “lead” us from a

specific Stimmung to the latent thing of whose presence we are certain

without knowing its identity; there is no way to “tease out” the latent. But

why then focus on Stimmungen of the past at all? One reason is that it

allows us to immerse ourselves, with our imagination, into situations of the

past, almost materially [for example while we listen to old music or watch

old pictures], bringing us close – quite literally – to the past. At the same

time, to capture Stimmungen may encourage us to leap, so to speak, may

inspire us to venture – under the impression of a Stimmung – hypotheses

about what the latent may be.

*

Less than two years ago, when I talked with a good friend about the urge,

then almost strange me, to write about the years after 1945, he said, without

any hesitation, doubt, or even intonation of a question, that Samuel Beckett‟s

tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot,” produced for the first time at the Théàtre de

Babylone at Paris during the 1952/1953 season, needed to be the center of

such a book. I had never thought about this necessity, but it immediately

became one of those certainties that make it difficult to believe,

retrospectively, that there ever was a moment without them. “Waiting for

Godot” is not a representation of the post-World War II latency; the play is its

maximum condensation as it emerges from the ocean of latency. For it does

not cross Estragon‟s and Vladimir‟s mind that Godot, whom they have never

seen, could be a phantom or just inexistent. As their world appears, Godot‟s

existence is a certainty of which they sometimes remind each other and

whose consequences they occasionally mention. Above all, the latent Godot

obliges them to stay where they are:

24

ESTRAGON: Charming spot. [He turns, advances to front, halts, facing auditorium.] Inspiring prospects. [He turns to Vladimir.] Let‟s go. VLADIMIR: We can‟t. ESTRAGON: Why not? VLADIMIR: We‟re waiting for Godot. ESTRAGON: [despairingly]. Ah! [Pause.] You are sure it was here?

It is with “big God” Godot [English with a French suffix: “God-ot”] as with

the God of the Middle Ages whose real presence nobody called into

question although one could never be fully certain about where it would

manifest itself. This does not change until the end of the tragicomedy:

ESTRAGON: Oh yes, let‟s go far away from here. VLADIMIR: We can‟t. ESTRAGON: Why not? VLADIMIR: We have to come back tomorrow. ESTRAGON: What for? VLADIMIR: To wait for Godot. ESTRAGON: Ah! [Silence.] He didn‟t come?

As they never saw him, Vladimir and Estragon have no assurance that,

like with everything latent, they would recognize Godot if they faced him.

So it could be that Pozzo with whom they talk twice is Godot:

ESTRAGON: You dreamt it. [Pause.] Let‟s go. We can‟t. Ah! [Pause.] Are you sure it was not him? VLADIMIR: Who? ESTRAGON: Godot? VLADIMIR: But who? ESTRAGON: Pozzo. VLADIMIR: Not at all! [Less sure]. Not at all! [Still less sure]. Not at all!

There is one effect of latency in “Waiting for Godot” that did not come

into focus yet when I was describing post-World War II latency. To wait

for Godot who does not appear freezes time, and frozen time make all

progress and hence all kind of action impossible – as any “action”

needs future to transform itself from a motivation into a reality.

Beckett‟s play famously ends with the following words: “VLADIMIR:

Well? Shall we go? -- ESTRAGON: Yes, let‟s go. – They do not move.”

In a time that does not unfold, they cannot advance, they cannot act,

25

and they are not even able to kill themselves. Like with an old,

bickering couple, nothing ever changes between Estragon and

Vladimir. In similar fashion, the master/slave-relationship of Pozzo and

Lucky appears to be unchangeable. When Estragon and Vladimir meet

Pozzo and Lucky for the second time, Pozzo seeks a role of

submission in relation to Vladimir and Estragon [“being equal” with

anybody seems to be no choice for him] but this has no consequences

for the power relation between Pozzo und Lucky, who remains his

master‟s animal and slave. To make the effort of thinking does not

change anything either; above all, thinking does help in the process of

getting closer to Godot‟s latency and possible arrival. But when Lucky

“thinks” it makes Estragon and Vladimir switch from boredom to

“violent protest.” For what the play and its protagonists call “thinking” is

a state of high agitation that leads nowhere.

*

I will no jump to the conclusion that the War‟s impact falling into latency

made post-War time freeze. I will only say that the expectation and

hope, carried by subsequent moments during the past six and half

decades, for something latent to come to the fore and to show itself,

thus enabling humankind to finally escape the long shadow of a

Stimmung whose sources have remained unidentified, that this

expectation and hope for one specific kind of change has never been

fulfilled. Ours is a situation like Vladimirs in Beckett‟s play: “Well I

suppose in the end I‟ll get up by myself. [He tries, fails.] In the fullness

of time.” Who has seen the end of Rainer Werner Fassbinder‟s film

“Die Ehe der Maria Braun” knows that the first German post-War

illusion about “the fullness of time having arrived,” ironically, was

related to a soccer game. I was just six years and three weeks old

when, on July 4, 1954, I listened with my parents and some of their

26

friends to the radio coverage of that year‟s Soccer World Cup final in

which, sensationally, Germany beat a clearly superior Hungarian team

by 3:2. In Fassbinder‟s film, the triumphant voice of Herbert (??)

Zimmermann, the radio announcer, shouting “Over, over, over,

Germany World Champion!” [“Aus, aus, aus, Deutschland ist

Weltmeister!) overlaps with the blast of a gas-explosion; and this

explosion destroys the villa that had become a monument of the

fortune and the hope accumulated by Maria Braun during the post-War

years – in order to lead a fulfilled life with her husband.

In my family‟s new two bedroom-apartment, Zimmermann‟s voice, as if

it had been a military order, made the grown-ups stand up and sing a

solemn tune that I had never heard before, probably the first stanza of

the German national anthem whose chauvinistic words [“Deutschland,

Deutschland ueber alles, ueber alles in der Welt”] had been banned by

law from the public sphere. My vague but certain impression that

something important had changed at that moment, was confirmed by

what soon became the self-congratulatory slogan of “We are back to

be respectable” [“Wir sind wieder wer”]. But while soccer-based

respectability, together with the notorious “miracle” of the German

economy during the 1950s, helped the country to forget what it was not

able to remember, it by no means brought the post-War latency to an

end.

A decade and a half later, the intransitive feeling of purposelessness

articulated itself in the face of James Dean and would soon turn into

the more aggressive 1968-style interrogation, accusation and revolt

against the older generations all over [and perhaps not only] the

Western world. In many different countries, my generation believed

that a relentless documentation of all crimes committed during the

earlier decades of the twentieth century, above all of the crimes

27

committed by one‟s own parents and ancestors, that such

transparency would free us from an atmosphere of containment and

hypocrisy. In Europe at least, 1968 may have brought about the mild

surface effect of a cultural revolution that produced greater historical

transparency, a higher degree of social solidarity, and a perhaps overly

generous ideological tolerance vis-à-vis the socialist side of the Cold

War. Perhaps we thus entered into a different period of quietly

peaceful latency, with some interference of nervous violence that,

being a self-complacent and self-ironic generation of good intentions,

we tried to isolate as “terrorism.” Just when the Cold War seemed

ready to turn into a completely “peaceful coexistence,” the implosion of

State Socialism in 1989 caught our good will by surprise and obliged

us to acknowledge that the finishing line of the post-War had moved

yet again. Like Vladimir and Estragon, we had moved all the time

without making real progress. The post-War appeared to be never-

ending.

*

Today (for random reasons, I am writing these lines at Paris on March

20, 2010) my questions are whether it will ever be possible to draw a

line that would definitively distance post-World War II and whether this

difficulty is specific or just a general problem that any culture and any

time are confronted with when they try to leave their past behind. We

are so eminently used to it, but it is remarkable that there are more

than just traces left of World War II, sixty-five years after the Axis

powers‟ unconditional surrender. Russia and the People‟s Republic of

China, for example, are no longer effectively communist but they are

still “the other” of the Western block. If the United States of America

have never fully learnt to play the role of a hegemonic power that they

took over during the final years of the War, they are now struggling to

28

go beyond this very status that they have never really embraced.

French historians and French generals are still debating in what way

their museums and lieux de mémoires should stage and narrate the

years between 1940 and 1945 to their younger generations and to

tourists from all over the world. And while there seem to be very few

facts left to unearth about the holocaust as the most extreme self-

unconcealment of humankind, a film like Quentin Tarantino‟s

“Inglorious Basterds” can still give millions of people today sleepless

nights as it obliges us to think whether understanding, forgiveness, and

reconciliation will ever be sufficient to put that past behind ourselves

and behind the lives of our children and grandchildren. Something

about that past does not come to rest, and it all starts with the

impossibility to pinpoint what this may be.

There are no final solutions to such problems, and even if I was more

optimistic, I would probably not try to tackle such a task in my book –

simply because I know that I am not good in the “edifying” or “ethical”

genres of intellectual writing. The starting point is much more personal.

As the recent birth of two grandchildren reminded me that my life is

entering its final stage, the stage of “old age” (and I do not think that

there is anything dramatic about that) I want to see how some basic

premises of the human condition may have changed [or not) between

the time of my birth and the present – “behind my back,” so to speak –

and how they may have changed while I was busy making an

academic career, raising a family, traveling, writing, trusting and

betraying others, making and breaking off friendships, enjoying life and

being sometimes scared by it. In pursuing this very personal and

therefore very narrow question that opens, at the same time, a

thematic horizon as large as one can imagine, I want to focus on the

description of a specific and specifically complex structure of

perspectives, forms of perception, and perhaps even obsessions, as it

29

was shaping up between the early post-War years and the mid- or late

1950s – astonishingly not only in societies and cultures that had

participated in the War.

For I believe – in more neutral words: it is my working hypothesis – that

this configuration of conditions has kept latent, until the present day,

what swiftly disappeared, as an irreversible impact of destruction,

during the immediate post-War years. There are three pairs of motifs

on which I will concentrate: the paradoxical couple between the

[claustrophobic] impression of having “no exit” and the [claustrophilic]

fear of having “no entry;” a growing concern with “bad faith” and an

eagerness to invent methods and settings that would “enforce sincerity

and extract truth;” and, finally, the longing for protection through walls

or three dimensional “containers” as opposed to the fear of getting

“derailed” on paths towards promised happiness and contentment. The

double point I want to prove is that this sixfold configuration was

specific, in its origin, to the post-War time, and that its containing

impact can still be felt in our present.

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