TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070990/07090221.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10KB | 226 lines

                                                                                GERMANY, Page 72

Down Memory Lane


For the class of '56, no high points and no heroes, but pride
in having built a sturdy democracy and belonging to the
European family

By KARSTEN PRAGER/RECKLINGHAUSEN


    The table at Josef Niehues' house is elegantly laid --
sparkling glass, glistening silver, fine china, all arrayed
around a platter filled with white asparagus and ham, a
seasonal delicacy. But the seven men, immersed in conversation,
pay scant attention to either setting or food. The discussion,
about something that happened four decades ago, still rivets
their attention: Was one of their teachers then an apologist
for Nazism or merely an outspoken nationalist?

    The question -- never fully answered that evening -- will
recur, along with related themes, over a 1988 Riesling, as the
talk stretches into the early morning hours. The seven have
seen little of one another since their graduation in 1956 from
the Hittorf Gymnasium, a prep school in Recklinghausen (pop.
123,000), where the industrial Ruhr melds into the rich
farmland of Westphalia. The reunion, prompted by the visit of
a journalist classmate living in New York City, provides a
perfect opportunity to catch up. Here with intensity, there with
a curious lack of passion, their talk at Niehues' home in
Recklinghausen ranges over a lifetime -- and is echoed later,
in separate conversations, with former classmates living
elsewhere in West Germany.

    Eleven voices and plenty of topics. Pleasant and not so
pleasant memories of school days. Personal achievements and
setbacks. National guilt. Pride in a democracy and in the
European family. And finally, astonishment at something not
expected in their lifetime: impending unification. "We are part
of the rubble generation," says Hartmut Ruge, managing editor
of the daily Recklinghauser Zeitung. "A generation of moral
disorientation and guilt. Now there is normality."

    Eleven voices out of a class of 20 hardly amount to a
representative sample: after all, the class of '56 included no
women -- though Hittorf is now coeducational -- and, by the
standards of the '50s, its members belonged to an educational
elite. But their opinions -- serious, measured -- and their
lives -- steady, prosperous -- do reflect the country they
helped shape and that in turn shaped them. Raised in rubble,
they went on to bridge and rebuild: youngsters touched by the
fury of World War II; adolescents molded by the struggle out of
the ruins; adults rewarded with stability, their lives dominated
by a quest for acceptance -- and security. More than 40 years
later, Manfred Poeck, a transportation planner in Munich,
succinctly remembers the day after the war when, at eleven, for
the first time in his life, he was not hungry.

    He and most of his classmates had no specific plans when
they walked out of their school in March 1956. "We were just
feeling our way," says Wilhelm Wiethoff, a secondary-school
teacher. "For a working-class boy like me to have graduated
seemed enough." Making money did not figure high on anyone's
agenda. "We knew things would go upward," says Niehues, a
lawyer who considered following his father into public service
and instead found his place at Ruhrgas, a large utility. "We
simply wanted a well-ordered, good life, and we wanted to help
shape the future."

    Ruge, whose father was killed in the war, studied history
and political science, volunteered long enough for the army to
get his parachute wings and then turned to journalism.
Karl-Ernst Freitag and Artwin Priebisch studied marine
engineering, spent a couple of summers sailing the high seas,
only to drift into other endeavors: teaching for Freitag,
business for Priebisch. Harm Smidt leaned toward the law but
turned to the sciences and engineering and wound up a partner
in a firm dealing with environmental-impact studies.

    Two semesters of dentistry were enough to convince Klaus
Hoell that he should switch to business administration; he is
now an executive with Mercedes-Benz. After wondering whether
to attend university at all, Poeck moved into engineering and
an eventual partnership in a consulting firm. He spent several
years working in Asia and Africa, where he thinks he can
contribute more than at home. Dieter Klussmeyer studied law on
his way to the civil service post of district draft-board chief
in his hometown. Only Werner Marker, an ophthalmologist, and
Klaus Giersiepen, a lawyer, were certain of their career plans.

    Now, at Niehues' table, the subject is unification. Those
among them who visited the old East Germany remember, as
Giersiepen recalls, the "iron faces of the Vopos [people's
police]." When the Wall went up in 1961, they wondered,
fleetingly, whether the West would intervene, whether war might
even come. The crisis passed, and, preoccupied with starting
careers and families, they learned to live with Germany's
division. "I always thought history would take care of the
separation," says Hoell, "but maybe in 100 years." Born and
raised outside Berlin, he fled with his mother to the West in
1949; sneaking across the border, they stumbled, just short of
West German territory, into a Soviet soldier -- who let them
go. Standing outside his house today, near a sunny Swabian
vineyard, Hoell muses about going home sometime to the
Brandenburg marsh and lake country.

    Smidt is ready to make his move even now: he plans to open
a branch of his firm, Ecoplan, in Leipzig. He is well prepared,
having spent many a vacation since the early '70s traveling in
the East. "What pleases me," he says, "is that after 40 years
of totalitarianism, independent thinking remains in the East.
The people never identified with the communist state."

    A few weeks after the Wall had fallen, Giersiepen and his
wife visited Berlin. "You felt as if you had been touched by
the breath of history," he says. "I am happy, not so much that
Germany has come together -- we should not be too jubilant
about that -- but that Europe has grown bigger, that it no
longer ends at the Elbe, and that we are part of it."

    Some ambivalence remains about the details of unification.
Wiethoff is not sure the capital should be moved to Berlin.
"Berlin reminds me of the great Nazi marches of the '30s and
'40s, of Hitler's `Do you want total war?'" he says. "Bonn
stands for 40 years of tested democracy."

    As comprehensively as Hittorf had prepared them, there was
one notable gap in their education: modern German history. At
a time when the country was only beginning to come to terms
with its immediate past, textbooks dismissed the Hitler period
with conspicuous brevity. "I can't recall our discussing the
dark days," says Giersiepen. "It was a taboo time." Eventually
they caught up. Those who attended nearby Munster University
remember courses on the Third Reich being so crowded that
lectures were broadcast campus-wide on a public address system.
"What we heard led us to question parents and relatives about
the era," says Freitag. "They said they had not known or had
known only toward the end. We knew they should have known."

    Poeck recalls angry arguments with his father, who served
as a minor functionary in the Gestapo. "I have real problems
with our past," Poeck says, "a sense of deep shame." Others
speak with equal intensity, though with less personal
involvement, about war and Holocaust, about remembrance and
guilt. "We may have had nothing to do with it," says Niehues,
"but we belong to the people who let it happen."

    Clearly, the past colors perception of present and future.
"No one hesitates to say he is German," notes Niehues. But it
is never mentioned in the context of anything that could even
vaguely be read as old-fashioned nationalism. Instead they see
themselves and the country embedded in an integrated Europe.
Says Priebisch: "I think of myself as a European first, perhaps
because I have traveled a lot." He is about to leave for the
Soviet Union, where his company is launching a joint venture.

    If they are outspokenly proud of anything, it is the
evolution of the Federal Republic into a mature, confident
democracy, a state based on law and social justice, founded on
a "constitution worth living for and worth defending," as
Freitag puts it. The lessons of the Third Reich and of East
Germany under the communists have not been lost. "We have built
a society that can defend itself against the state's
overstepping its bounds," says Giersiepen.

    They have no political heroes, though they recognize what
Niehues describes as "some leading figures." President Richard
von Weizsacker gets high marks for, as Freitag says, "telling
Germans the truth about their past without insulting us." Willy
Brandt is praised as the architect of West Germany's
Ostpolitik, Helmut Schmidt as a "savvy world politician." Most
find kind words for Mikhail Gorbachev, without whom unification
would have remained a dream, but they worry about his staying
power. Says Giersiepen: "I used to be depressed by so many
things; there always seemed to be money for war but not enough
for human needs. Now, maybe, we can go on to things that
benefit mankind."

    Perhaps some things to benefit themselves and their
community as well. "We have developed a kind of perfectionism
that bothers me," says Hoell. "We could probably make do with
80% and live better." Working hard -- perhaps too hard -- has
been part of the price paid by a generation that Priebisch says
"was forced to perform, to build something from nothing." The
society, says Wiethoff, has a lot to learn. "It has to do with
prosperity, which has made us hard and asocial. We talk a lot
about our wealth and our clever politics, but what's the use
if the human dimension is missing, if there is coldness and
impatience and little contact with one another?" That too has
been part of the price for success. Creating a gentler balance
will be up to the next generation.