German Students Reply to Martha Gellhorn

PERMIT me to thank you for your most inspiring travelogue about the New Germany. You have seen a lot that is wrong, you have presented these failings in our way of life to your readers without any compromise, and you have put your finger on the dangers inherent in these wrongs. It is, indeed, hard to escape the suggestive power of your opinions about what you think is the New Germany.

While reading your article I have been trying to find out why I constantly got the impression that you were speaking of our parents but not really of the young generation in Germany, which was, if not free of guilt, as you say, at least not participating in the wrongs of Hitler’s regime. I would like you to take this letter as the personal statement of a young student who, as a woman, as a refugee, and as a German, feels that she is being portrayed correctly in some details, but mistakenly on the whole.

You say at the end of your essay that the young Germans are unable “to put themselves in the place of others” — that is, you demand of us the faculty and readiness to understand other people and other ways of life in order that we may stop and consider ourselves with critical eyes. It is odd to notice that all those young Germans whom you seem to have liked have spent some time in England or America or were obviously influenced by the American way of life and thinking. Do you really believe that among those Germans who did not have the chance to acquire the “positive” characteristic of being Americanor British-oriented, there are none who are normal and are able to think critically? What makes a girl who dislikes crowded cafes and greasy people a Hitler maiden? Is it an either-Americanor-Nazi decision?

I can understand that you are proud to be an American, proud that America helped Europe to eradicate the traces of the war — and we love America for it. But to take the American way of life as the measuring rod and to apply it to a society which has evolved from an entirely different past and background is, in my thinking, a wrong approach. Only if you stop to compare the young generation in Germany with their contemporaries in America, and only if you look for those traits which make the young Germans different from their elders, only then will you find anything “New,” and only then should you begin to pass judgment on the “New Germany.” If you set out to find in a person only what he inherited from his parents, you will do him wrong. Judge the young Germans as personalities in their own right at first; then compare them with their parents. If you do it the other way around, you will end up writing a report on the parents. If you set out to find the old, you will find it in any nation. Don’t forget there are still Confederates in the United States after a good one hundred years, but not all Americans meet in Ku Klux Klan fashion.

I would try your patience too much if I were to enumerate all the misunderstandings and misrepresentations that I found in your essay which I think are the result of oversimplification, of painting everything in much black and little white, not using the middling gray of actual life. I would like to stick to a few points in my answer. The most amusing part of your report was the passage about the young German woman. Amusing, since I am convinced that you are wrong, and my amusement is not stained by that grain of truth that I find in some of your basically wrong statements. There are in Germany countless young women who want to or have to work outside the home. However, the German ideal of the woman as a housewife and mother — as you put it — is not only representative of Germany, but of Central and Southern Europe and France. Quite personally, I want to tell you that I believe it to be an interesting and satisfying task even for a woman with a university degree to devote her time first to her children and her family. This does not mean that her long period of studies was senselessly spent; for she would at least not resemble that caricature that you draw of our mothers who did nothing but “teach blind obedience, handing on this sin from generation to generation.” The young German woman graduate has learned to think for herself and is an equal partner of her husband. If she does not show quite the same intellectual drive and ambition toward emancipation as some of her Anglo-Saxon sisters, this is not to say that she is an “abject intellectual and a moral slave.” Thank you very much for the compliment, calling us the “Arab women of the West.” The Arab women of my age are lovely, thank you.

I was less amused but more alarmed at your remarks about the German refugees. Here some clarifying amendments would help. There are in the Federal Republic refugees from those areas which belong today to Russia or Poland. Your refugee friend whom you met in Munich seems to belong in that category. Then there are those refugees from the Soviet sector of Germany, which calls itself the “Deutsche Demokratische Republik.” You deny us (for I am one of them) the term refugee in its true meaning. You say that we were greeted with open arms by the citizens of the Federal Republic, and that we are better off. Permit me to add, however, what I know from my own experience, which is applicable to many a refugee student: I have been living all by myself in Freiburg since 1957 when I was seventeen years old. Last year I was allowed to visit my mother for the first time in six years. When I came to the Federal Republic with a small suitcase, I was shunted from one refugee camp to another (no open arms) for more than eight weeks. Families had to wait for years in such camps, sometimes two or more families in one room. During these weeks I had to undergo all kinds of examinations, prying into my political views in search of red spots and into my clothes in search of lice. I know that these things were necessary, but I know also that they are the manifestation of the fact that I emigrated as a German to Germany, in the true and tragic sense of the meaning. I did not leave my mother and my home of my own free will. Do you understand that I never can e;o back?

I do feel as an equal among equals, but I would detest to be regarded as a favored daughter of the Federal Republic. And I expect anybody with any journalistic ethos to present my situation in its true light, not left-handedIy, with either too little understanding or too much melodrama. I am convinced that most of the students from the Soviet sector think as I do. As for those who came from the areas now in Polish or Russian hands, I have not yet met any one of them who really would want to go back; in fact, those few Germans who are left in Wroclaw (Breslau) and environs are constantly submitting applications for emigration to the Federal Republic. Those who are still crying for a swap of East German territory for Russian territory are those few German students who belong to the ridiculously small refugee groups — on whom you seem to have centered your attention — or politicians who are catering to the votes of the older generation.

Another point: you criticize the Germans in that they identify their government with their country. I think that you do it more than we do when you constantly identify Hitlerism with the Germans of today. What else are you doing if you write: “these small slights were a trifling penalty for the history of their country”? In this sentence you postulate that we who were incapable of real guilt for the Nazi crimes should now be justly sentenced for the wrongs of the Hitler regime. You identify us and our parents with the Hitler regime, then turn around and say that the young Germans identify themselves with the present government. I think you do a bit too much equating here.

A grave mistake crept into your passage about the German national anthem. You write that the second and third verses were forbidden by the Allies as too aggressive, and reinstated right after Germany achieved its sovereignty. It was the first verse, not the second or third, which caused the irritation of the Allies. It has been and is being misunderstood, last but not least by German nationalists of all ages and hues, of whom there are still some around, as you pointed out. The anthem was written in 1841 by a man who was very much committed to the Zeitgeist of his time. At the time of the composition Germany was not a state, but a loosely connected federation of more than thirty states, dukedoms, monarchies, all jealous of one another. “Deutschland” was a language unity transcending all political borders. The second verse is also a true child of romanticism. The third verse contains that which should move and concern every German who is thinking about Germany, and any person who is writing about it. In 1952, the late Professor Hcuss (Bundesprasident at that time), whose political integrity is beyond any doubt, ordered this verse to be sung at all official functions, and it is still the only verse which is actually sung. Your statement of the case is, to use your own parlance, absolute rot. We welcome criticism, but we ask for some open-mindedness and understanding of our earlier history and national symbols even if they have at one time been misunderstood and misused.
GRETCHEN SCHMIDT

I have never been to the United States: I have only read about your country in the papers. But if I were asked to write an article in the vein of Martha Gellhorn, it would be quite easy. I should go over for a few days, have a chat with Lincoln Rockwell, interview a couple of Greenwich Village beats who are sick of America, who like Fidel Castro and curse the squares who don’t dig dirt; then I’d have coffee with Barry Goldwater’s computer and have a good fright from its vision of future politics, have luncheon with the John Birch Society, have it out with some members of the Ku Klux Klan, finally look at random into any university and attend a bad seminar (one lesson is enough to hate it) on Klopstock’s “Wesen und Wandel,” preferably conducted by an American instructor who how typically German — prefers Löwenbräu to Budweiser; and then with a sigh I should sit down and write an article about the “New America.” Oh, yes, I’d certainly slip in a few nice things about the hospitality, to give the report an objective look.
HANS BAUER

Just a few points where Martha Gellhorn seems to be misinformed. One cannot compare the American fraternities with the German ones, except maybe that in both there is a lot of drinking going on. They have different general objectives and histories. Then, her division of Burschenschaften and Verbindungen —and her supposition that the ones practice dueling and the others don’t — is absurd. There are still both fraternities and Burschenschaften which have kept this relic of the past, but only very few. Actually, dueling without protection of the face has been forbidden at most of the German universities; at the University of Freiburg all fraternities and Burschenschaften are forbidden to wear any badge, hat, or other distinguishing feature on university premises. This is how the university and most of the students feel about fraternities. It is an open secret that many of the members of these fraternities have joined them because of better connections in their future positions. Or they might just be wanting to have a gay time. Why do people in the Lhhted States join fraternities? Martha Gellhorn’s statement that 60 percent of the students in Munich voted for the reactionary Bavarian party threw me into convulsive giggles. I bet the Bayernpartei would have been glad to get one tenth of the student vote. Martha Gellhorn might, however, have been speaking of the CSU (the Bavarian part of the CDU, Erhard’s party), but then I would as a journalist be more precise in my terms, and also I wouldn’t be so rough on Erhard and call him a reactionary. (Must journalists always be nasty?) As to the political opposition, Der Spiegel has been in good company. Have you ever heard of Die Zeit? It does not rake up quite as much muck as Der Spiegel, but it is the organ for such “new voices” as Uwe Johnson, Gunter Grass, HansMagnus Enzensberger — the “New Germany” which Martha Gellhorn didn’t want to see. Most of the student papers are in opposition, if not to the current government, at least to the professors and the university authorities. I miss that typically German reverence for authority. I he statement that the socialist student groups do not receive financial support because of their leftist tendencies is absolute nonsense. What happened was that the socialist student faction split up into so many splinter groups that even the Socialist Party (SPD, Willy Brandt s party) did not want to have anything to do with the caterwaulings of its young ‘uns. A club or group has to be firmly established and acknowledged by the university before its members become eligible for financial support, and they get it regardless ol religious or political creeds, excepting the Communists and Neo-Nationalists, which, I think, is a mistake. A democracy ought to be able to swallow a couple of cranks.
LUDWIG ZIMMER