American Views Abroad

 
Weeks of relentless media probing into what happened thirty years ago in Germany when the Red Army Faction (RAF) was kidnapping and killing crossed roads with present day terrorism when German elite forces managed to foil a major terrorism attack on Wednesday. One interesting fact brought up in an in-depth interview former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt gave to Die Zeit was how, in the opinion of him and his wife, the media focuses its complete attention on the famous victims and of course, on the leading members of the RAF who have practically obtained cult status, but no attention at all is paid to all those bodyguards, drivers, policemen who lost their lives, no detail is given about what happened to the wife of the Lufthansa pilot so brutally murdered back then, for example. The first murdered victim of the RAF was a policeman who was killed just around the corner from here, now the site of a sprawling mall. Terrorism can seem so impersonal and far away until it suddenly hits home.

Germany is no stranger to terrorism and evil. In The Stasi on Our Minds in The New York Review of Books, May 31, Timothy Garton Ash discusses how Germany came to taking a very hard look at its own past and how the film The Lives of Others plays a part in all this.

'In the land of Martin Luther and Leopold von Ranke, driven by a distinctly Protestant passion to confront past sins, the forcefully stated wish of a few East German dissidents to expose the crimes of the regime, and the desire of many West Germans (especially those from the class of '68) not to repeat the mistakes made in covering up and forgetting the evils of Nazism after 1949, we saw an unprecedentedly swift, far-reaching, and systematic opening of the more than 110 miles of Stasis files. The second time around, forty years on, Germany was bent on getting its Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, its past-beating, just right. Of course, Russia's KGB, the big brother of East Germany's big brother, did nothing of the kind.'

Germany is not used to being complimented, but Ash concludes with the following:

'The Germany in which this film was produced, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is one of the most free and civilized countries on earth. In this Germany, human rights and civil liberties are today more jealously and effectively protected than (it pains me to say) in traditional homelands of liberty such as Britain and the United States. In this good land, the professionalism of its historians, the investigative skills of its journalists, the seriousness of its parliamentarians, the generosity of its funders, the idealism of its priests and moralists, the creative genius of its writers, and, yes, the brilliance of its filmmakers have all combined to cement in the world's imagination the most indelible association of Germany with evil. Yet without these efforts, Germany would never have become such a good land. In the annals of human culture, has there ever been a more paradoxical achievement?
www.nybooks.com/articles/20210
- posted by Gloria @ 5:25 PM