Der Pianist - I saw

Der Pianist - I saw "The Pianist" last week. If I didn't blog about it, it was only because the past week has been so crushingly busy.

The review in a word? Incredible. What a truly spellbinding, horrifying, wonderful, awful, incredible movie. It's among the great movies about the Holocaust - better, I think, than Schindler's List, Holocaust, and Escape from Sobibor (generally overlooked because it was a TV movie, even though it featured great performances by Rutger Hauer, Joanna Pacula and Alan Arkin and was based on a wrenching book of the same name), it's based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's riveting autobiographical novel of his own survival, and is one of few movies to genuinely do justice to a memoir of any type, much less a Holocaust memoir.

I read William Grim's piece on watching the movie in Munich, surrounded by Germans:

I have to admit that it is a strange experience to watch a Holocaust film in Germany. It's even stranger when you're the only American in the midst of about 200 Germans. But perhaps the strangest thing of all is to watch the reactions of the Germans as the events of the movie unfold. You hear a lot about how Germans are so ashamed today of the behavior of their countrymen during the Nazi period and about how much they've done to atone for their past sins. Don't buy that bill of goods. If the audience of the screening I attended is any indication of German attitudes in general, it doesn't augur well for the future. Remember, this wasn't an audience composed of skinheads from the neo-Nazi enclaves in Karlsruhe and the former DDR. This was a group of Germany's best and brightest: educated, middle class, sophisticated denizens of a major cosmopolitan city.

The article goes off into some assertions about German culture that are both dicey and thought-provoking.

Brief background: In college, I minored in History and German. History obviously fascinates me - and especially Germany's role in it. I speak the language, and am very familiar with the people and culture.

Now, when you grow up in America, you grow up in a society that's been assembled from the parts of dozens of other nations; an English legal system, a German educational philosophy, largely Anglo-Saxon language, predominantly North-European and Mediterranean religions, and folk traditions that are both as diverse as the nations from which most of us came, and yet that tend to gradually disappear over time as people assimilate into the larger American culture. It's hard to comprehend, for Americans, the notion of living in a genuinely homogenous culture.

Most European cultures are wrapped up in a single, unifying tradition; a shared language, a set of traditions, tales, myths and legends, a series of cultural roadmaps that you inherit at birth (and no other way; you can immigrate to Germany, but you can't "become German" the way that generations of Irish, Poles and Vietnamese have become American).

Germany's shared tradition - it's called "Volk", which literally means "people" in German, but has a vastly deeper figurative and cultureal meaning to Germans, the same way "Liberty" and "Freedom" have meanings much deeper than their Websters' definitions to Americans - is intimately tied to Germany's rural, pagan, insular collective memory, as well as the glories of its imperial history (Charlemagne's "First Reich" figured heavily in this story).

Part of that Volk tradition, as David Goldhagen explored in his book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", is deeply antisemitic. I won't go too deeply into explaining Goldhagen's book - you need to read it if you haven't. Goldhagen traces the roots of eliminationist antisemitism in German culture, and deflates the notion that German hatred of Jews sprang from the whole cloth in 1933; it's part of Volk, an embedded part of German culture.

Goldhagen, in the epilogue to his book, stresses that he believes that the war beat the anti-semitism out of Germany. It's a comforting thesis.

I wonder if it's right?

Did the sound thrashing the South got in 1865 beat the discrimination out of the southern states? Of course not. It went underground, and bubbled slowly back to the surface over the course of a couple of generations of neglect, to the point where America had to fight another civil war - one fought in the legislatures and courts, mostly - to finish the job legally, and to try to enforce it socially. Some would say the war's not yet won.

Now, ask yourself, as I'm asking myself now: If, after a hundred years, it's that hard to get rid of the noxious idea of racism in a nation built at its very core on the ideas of liberty and equality, how much harder must it be to do it in a nation built on a several-thousand-year-old shared cultural tradition of homogeneity, unity and exclusivity?

Not that Germans - maybe a majority of them - don't abhor the notion of antisemitism. But I wonder - how realistic is it to expect that thousands of years of Volk tradition could be extinguished by three years of bombing and eight years of occupation and fifty years of liberal democracy?

I'm genuinely curious. Jede Deutsche die diese Blog lest - was denkt Ihr euch?

UPDATE: Instapundit is getting some emails from people who disagree - Germany is mostly past its traditional antisemitism. But then, there's more commentary on both sides.

I suspect that it's somewhere in between - much as America is with its own past racism. There are still bigots, both overt and covert, in the US. I'd suspect Germany's not much different. Is it the majority? Time will tell.

(Via Instapundit)

Posted by Mitch at May 18, 2003 01:07 PM