Adolph Schalk’s The Germans
Part 1

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Part 1 of 2

Adolph Schalk
The Germans
London: J. M. Dent, 1971

The Germans are the most misunderstood people in the world. — Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

In 1974 I was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, doing my watch on the Main. At the PX, I wandered into the Stars and Stripes bookstore and browsed near the rack featuring The Stars and Stripes, Overseas Weekly, and the usual American mags. Stacked by the rack were a number of books designed for that rare GI who was interested in his host country. One, a sprightly volume entitled These Strange German Ways, explained local customs, folk traditions, and festivals. It was good material for the off-duty GI photo bug or bar-hopper. The PX featured obligatory goods for the GI shopper: usually alpine hats, cuckoo clocks, or foot-long beer steins; the GI souvenir swag. Outside, Arab merchants sold velvet rugs, inevitably bearing images of Elvis, JFK, or Martin Luther King. Such was life in Year 29 of the empire.

One book stuck out with a bright cover in black, red, and gold, and with the German eagle in its center: The Germans by Adolph Schalk. I liked its claim to explain my host country, and I bought a copy.

I enjoyed Schalk’s description of Germany and Germans in a breezy mix of journalism with touches of middlebrow profundity as well as a dash of Miltonic depth as the author explained the ways of God to man — or, in this case, Kraut to Yank. Being Swiss, Schalk wrote as an outsider, tactfully distancing himself from Germans proper, which was de riguer for most people then, as Germany still lived under the curse of the Second World War, Hitler, and having caused too much evil in the world.

A major theme of Schalk’s book was democracy. Can the Germans be democratic? Have they learned their lesson? Yes, there is an excellent culture, thought, technology, beauty . . . but can Germany be really, truly democratic? It was moral penicillin to expunge the bad days of Nazism (which, as Schalk reminded the reader, was only a 12-year stretch in a history of over a thousand years). Published in 1971, it remains a good period piece on the shape that Germany was expected to meld into to be eligible for membership in the “new” Europe at the time.

Although Germany had been split into two halves at the end of the war (actually three, counting Berlin; actually four, since Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia were officially under “Polish administration,” but in fact millions of Germans had been brutally expelled from those lands when Stalin, having gobbled up eastern Poland in 1939 after striking a deal with Hitler, pushed Polish boundaries west. He had no intention of returning what he’d grabbed, Roosevelt and Churchill unable and unwilling to challenge him), the book was primarily about West Germany; the Federal Republic, established in 1949.

A chapter, God and Man in East Germany, was informative if perhaps biased showing the defects of the German Democratic Republic. But East Germany only received a passing glance. It was a police state, under the heel of Russian oppression, had no glitter and heavy industry, and so was dismissed. The real Germany was ours. This was the standard Cold War credo; many Germans in the West still called East Germany Die Zone; the Soviet Zone, a dreary land of hammer-and-sickle tyranny.

West Germany’s economic miracle was praised and examined, as was the German politics and work ethic determination that built it under the direction of Ludwig Erhard: a porky, cigar smoking economist. Of course money from our Marshall Aid was a huge factor, and West Germany quickly rebuilt and retooled factories destroyed in the war or confiscated; the “allies” did a lot of this morally sanctioned looting. In a sense they did the Germans a favor, since the newly constructed factories and shops were up-to-date and primed to future industrial needs. The British, for all their righteous reparations, were soon at an economic disadvantage.

America was still at the top of its game, and basked in fifties and sixties glory. In the seventies, we got a rude awakening as industries were outdated, inefficient, and getting overseas competition, especially Germany and Japan (both rebuilt with an eye to the future). The big question in 1980 was how to get America going again: reform, innovation, or, yes…free trade! Cheap labor! Outsource! Downsize! We’re living with the results from that Fantastic Four.

So, Germany recovered, and material affluence soon overcame war and postwar privation. Schalk barely glanced over the horrible allied bombing that devastated Germany, but it was typical of the era; amnesia about the effects of strategic bombing were dismissed, both in economic and human suffering. Slaughter-House Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about the bombing of Dresden, was ignored by most Americans. It took the Vietnam War to bring massive protests against bombing civilian targets. True, communists had infiltrators, but there was genuine outrage in the world about the ruthless and, to most people, pointless bombing of Vietnam.

Schalk preferred to define the modern German dilemma, which was prosperity in search of a soul. Back to democracy.

Reading the book then, I was impressed at Schalk’s anecdotes and examples of West Germany, from the “new” German woman “Wir Emanzipierte Frauen” was what I learned in German class. The Nazi plan to stick women in the home and to be good mothers never really worked; some women in the 1930’s still moved into the workplace, and in the war, after using as much forced labor as they could to keep the war economy going, women were finally brought into factories, shops, and as anti-aircraft gunners.

After the war, most German women were content to be housewives, as were most women everywhere else, but Schalk, like any enlightened journalist then, paying obeisance to feminism, which was getting its legs in the seventies. It was, after all, democratic.

Schalk noted student unrest in Germany, but this was part of a European phenomena. In his chapter La Dolce Vite-German Style, he implied that the old, established moral patterns were shredded, but again, this has to be taken with qualifications. If there were sex shops galore and lots of porno cinema, it has to be remembered that Germany, like the rest of Europe, was always sexually open compared to America. France was, to Anglo-Saxon eyes, a very licentious place, but it be more honest to say the French views about sex are simply more realistic than licentious.

In Germany prostitution was legal. Women were, in effect, employees who had unions, inspected by the police for VD, and I think it a much more civilized approach then American hypocrisy where you pay off the Sheriff to look the other way. Seeking prostitutes may be a sordid life, but it is what it is. Having made use of prostitutes in Frankfurt, I had no complaints. Schalk didn’t dwell on it, but much of the tawdry sex life was a result of the inundation of GIs. We had 200,000 troops in West Germany, and sexual needs had to be met.

There were also a horde of foreign laborers, called “guest workers,” who also had needs. When I visited Kaiserstrasse, the red-light district, the overwhelming amount of customers were GIs and Turks.

As for guest workers, Schalk followed the standard explanation I got from many Germans: the numbers of Turks, Italians, Yugoslavians (in those days when we still had a Yugoslavia…and peaceful), Greeks, etc. did the scut work. “We don’t like them but we need them,” I heard over and over. Then came the second refrain “but we have it under control.” Germany did to an extent. They tried to keep families out, there were very slim chances to become a German citizen, because the Germans were choosy to whom they granted citizenship, preferring anyone with German blood, especially those trying to get out of the eastern bloc.

Schalk inevitably asked if this was really democratic, and was it a hangover of Nazism?

But the guest worker program worked very well. The worker problem was, I thought, inevitably a result of the Cold War and sealing off the east. Probably in an undivided Germany, Poland would have furnished much of the labor force, which it historically did.

Schalk reported on crime in Germany, and considered German police to be inefficient. He noted one case in the Rhineland where police, not wanting to handle a drowning, simply pushed the body across the river to another department and let them worry about it. But, in all fairness, American police do this a lot. Cops everywhere despise paperwork. In 1970’s West Germany, there was hardly any crime at all by American standards. I found it an incredibly safe place to walk about at all hours in any city.

Frankfurt was considered the crime capital of Germany, especially around the Hauptbahnhof (railway station), which was, you guessed it, the Turkish district. I noted that when serious crimes occurred, they were inevitably committed by foreigners, especially Turks. Once I was in a shop when a man grabbed some goods and burst out, a shouting clerk chasing him. The man was dark-skinned.

Schalk noted a case where a cab driver had been murdered by a guest worker. Cab drivers went on strike to protest, honking horns in noisy unison, demanding something be done about foreigners. Schalk took the liberal view of explaining how these cabbies, like most common people, “don’t think too far ahead” about the social causes of crime, and, again, how this was very undemocratic.

Die Vergangenheit (the past) was invoked uneasily as something to fear. It was so repressive, militarist and, yes, undemocratic. Fear of the past was also invoked in the popular German TV show XY . . . Ungelost (XY . . . Unsolved) , where crimes were reenacted or discussed, a description of the killer given, and viewers were asked to keep an eye out and contact the police if the perpetrator was seen. This was where the American series Unsolved Crimes came from. Schalk, yet again, wondered if the show’s popularity showed Germans would go back to fascist tendencies to report wrongdoers to the police…too much like Nazi mores. Not very democratic.

The military inevitably was examined by Schalk. The sheer terror of a re-militarized Germany was done to death. After all, Germany had been considered to be a place where “militarism had run wild.” FDR proclaimed that after the war, “Germans would never again have to face the burden of bearing arms.”

Then the Cold War came, and we needed Germans in arms. A lot of them. After a decade of hemming and hawing, the Bundeswehr, successor to the Wehrmacht, was created. (Although an evil sounding word, Wehrmacht simply means : “Defense forces”). The military was under firm civilian control, although, as one examined it, it was much more NATO control..that is, American rule. All of the Bundeswehr was assigned to NATO. One informative booklet I read about this published in Germany stated, proudly, that German officers never say they are German officers…they are officers of NATO. There was a creepiness in this, recalling how in East Germany children were instructed never to say they were German . . . they were to say they were citizens of the German Democratic Republic.

Even as an adolescent, I noted a subtle creepiness to NATO worship. Germans called it Der NATO Staat, being more honest than we are. Peter Ustinov was more cynical. He said NATO was thirteen allies in search of an enemy.

The Bundeswehr wore American helmets (the NATO helmet), much of their equipment was American. The uniforms? As a professor of mine said, when the Bundeswehr was being formed, the government wanted to make their uniforms as dumpy, unmilitary and dull as possible, so naturally they modeled them on the U.S. Army. When the East German Volksarmee was formed and they wore in essence the old Wehrmacht uniforms, the West Germans smartened theirs up somewhat.

Being forbidden to build warplanes or heavy weapons again so as not to threaten the world ever again, the arms restrictions meant a bonanza for U.S. arms contractors, which Chalmers Johnson in his book The Sorrows of Empire pointed out.

In 1970, Schalk found the Bundeswehr wanting. It was inefficient. There were unions, troops couldn’t receive harsh discipline, many were unenthusiastic both in military discipline and unwilling to fight in another war, especially for the U.S. or against their brother Germans across the sealed border. During Vietnam, a slow, silent dislike of America broke out. A popular phrase among German draftees at the time was “Ohne mich, hoffentlich: ” hopefully without me.”

As Franz-Josef Strauss, the ultra-conservative defense minister of the time, lamented, Germany had to have a military strong enough to deter the Soviets, but not strong enough to frighten Belgium.

The Bundesmarine, the navy, seemed competent enough, although the massive U-Boat fleet that terrorized the world was only down to 8 subs.

The Luftwaffe had problems. Although pilots, now with NATO control, trained in the American southwest, which is much better flying weather than murky German skies, there was a scandal when the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter was added to their arsenal. German pilots had too many crashes, and 119.died. Although at the time Germany caught the most flak for Starfighter accidents, it was a troublesome aircraft, with many crashes and malfunctions reported across NATO and in the U.S. Air Force. Chuck Yeager, the master ace and Ur-astronaut, almost died when his Starfighter crashed.

Something Schalk didn’t mention was that Lockheed got the Starfighter added to the arsenal after bribing a number of German defense officials; the conservative, dedicated Strauss among them. And in postwar Germany one sees that democracy meant a slow sift of corruption and payoffs, especially of America to its newly created democratic ally. Or vassal. You didn’t say vassal then. In the seventies, we still wrapped everything in freedom, and Schalk plays the game.

That being said, Schalk closed on a semi-optimistic note that the German military musikcorps and chorus made lots of records and was very popular. German soldiers could at least still sing.

I need to note that the Bundeswehr picked up its efficiency a few years later, and Germany started making their own equipment…notably the Leopard tank, a mainstay of NATO (now, sadly being mauled by Putin’s Russian troops). Also, for the record, in the late seventies and 1980’s, in training maneuvers the Bundeswehr outperformed the American army many times. It was, through the 70’s to the 1990’s a good army. Now, it seems to be no army.

The German political system preferred politicians to be bland, uninspiring, and anything but charismatic. West Germany especially wanted dutiful nonentities in charge. Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar West German Chancellor, made it policy to have “no experiments.” His opponent, Kurt Schumacher, the socialist candidate, derided Adenauer as the Chancellor of the Allies. In a sense, though, every Chancellor is that.

As for charisma, if Europeans wanted that, they had Kennedy, and Germans adored him.

West Germany was essentially a two-party system, the CDU versus the SPD. The former were conservatives, the latter socialists. The CDU, the Christian Democrats, was aided by the CSU, the Bavarian conservative party, and in West Germany, Bavaria had much more of a voice than in the old, Prussian dominated Germany. One has defined the party differences between the CDU and SPD as that of steeples versus smokestacks…social conservatism against labor issues.

If Germans adored Kennedy, the closest they had to a German Kennedy was Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin during the 1961 crisis that ended in the Berlin Wall, leading to Kennedy’s famous visit.

Schalk spent a lot of copy building up Brandt, who offered West Germany a chance to expunge the guilt from the Hitler era. Brandt was a lifelong socialist, fled Nazi Germany for Norway. As many Germans were said, with Brandt as Chancellor “we are somebody again.”

One of the controversies during Brandt’s rule was his visit to Poland in 1971, and, laying a wreath honoring victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, knelt before the memorial. Many Germans thought this outrageous., considering the loss of German territory to Poland after the war. Such views could be seen as reactionary and unfeeling, but when I read a broader history of WWII deviating from the official version, I read of the atrocities Poles committed against Germans after the First World War, there were cases where the Freikorps, the post-WWI German private army, fought Polish incursions against German communities, and how thousands of Germans were killed by Polish forces. When the Poles came into Silesia, they obliterated any traces of German history, even bulldozing German cemeteries. To me, this is a pathological hatred that stuns me. Schalk acknowledged many refugee communities in the west criticized Brandt, and he had to walk carefully with these groups. Expelled from their centuries-old territories in the east and in Czechoslovakia, they were very bitter about it.

But all of this was unknown to most people in the West. Germany was Hitler, Hitler was the most evil man in history, and that settled it.

Brandt and his policy of detente, which opened relations to the east, was seen as a breath of fresh air into West Germany, which had remained a faithful Cold-war ally to American policy: the side-kick to the sheriff who showed up if needed and had no independent thoughts.

Brandt’s high-tide was in the early seventies. In 1974, Gunter Guilliaume, one of Brandt’s most trusted aides, was revealed to be an East German agent and Brandt had to resign.

Brandt was replaced by Helmut Schmidt, a far more stern and effective leader, then by Helmut Kohl. Both were good leaders and, of course, dutiful followers of American policy and NATO rules, and, as Germans have been, enthusiastic supporters of the European Community.

They almost seem like knights compared to the rule of Chancellor Merkel, “Mutti (Mommy) Merkel,” whose only legacy seems to be the willful destruction of the German nation.

Schalk inevitably talked about the Jews. West Germany was fairly well drenched in guilt and, under Adenauer, began a policy of reparations to Israel that still continues.

(on his website, Miles Mathis noted that Adenauer was actually Jewish, which explained part of the reparation settlement. Helmut Schmidt was a Mischling, that is half-Jewish. Also, he served in the Luftwaffe in WWII, as did many half-Jews, noted in Bryan Mark Rigg’s Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers).

West Germany’s small Jewish community was subsidized and given preferences, not only economically, but socially. As one Jewish youth said, “when I wear the Star of David, I get more dates.” Many Germans boasted of their visits and work on Kibbutzim in Israel. The sixties and seventies were the great age of good Israeli PR.

It has to be mentioned that there were only a few thousand Jews in West Germany at this time. East Germany had even fewer, and in the east no reparations were paid, because the German Democratic Republic claimed it had nothing to do with Nazism, and so owed the Jews nothing. This policy echoed the Soviet Union, and like Moscow East Germany firmly supported the Palestinians and was very anti-Israel. Many Palestinian fighters (or terrorists: take your pick) were trained in East Germany.

The Jewish humorist and author Harry Golden visited Germany. Escorted by his German-Jewish guide, shocked the man when he walked over to German youths and said “ I’m a Jew from America and want to say hello.” In Germany, you just don’t go up and press the flesh. His host stood, open-mouthed. “You Americans,” he said, “are very uninhibited.”

As it was, the youths were friendly, admitting that they knew nothing of Jews. “At home,” one said, “we’re not supposed to talk about them.”

Schalk thought this an indictment of Germany. They didn’t talk about the Jews. Well, they did and do. He noted that November is Volkstrauertag: similar to Veteran’s Day, but also honors victims of fascism. There are innumerable recollections of German atrocities, especially those committed against Jews.

In the book a visit to Dachau was expected. It was the most readily visible symbol of Nazi terror, since Auschwitz was behind the Iron Curtain and not readily accessible to westerners. Schalk was humbled visiting the glum memorial, and was disturbed by what he described as a “holiday atmosphere.” There were happy crowds, concession stands, and no sense of historical shame or guilt. People treated it as mere day sightseeing. But of course twenty-five years after the war, that is a natural human occurrence. German guilt was always a factor in West Germany, Schalk noted and, subtlety approved of this.

As is to be expected, German history was always scoured and derided. German historical views followed the usual western liberal view that, because Germany never became democratic.

It was in the throes of militarism and, later, Nazism. This was the standard line emitted by William Shirer in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, very much considered the standard text on Nazi Germany by Americans who, after all, finally called the shots in Europe. Schalk noted how German children barely knew any German history, showing more familiarity with Disney characters than kings, poets, or philosophers. This was, after all, a western trend, the result of endless media saturation. The extra emphasis on German guilt was peculiar to West Germany, but I sensed it was beginning to creep into American history, as standard American texts in the sixties were slowly being filtered with increased references to slavery and “racism.”

What West Germany was getting at the time of Schalk’s book, we started getting in the eighties. He also observed that, oddly enough, for a communist, revolutionary society like East Germany, a historical consciousness was emerging. Prussia, once despised, was now being referred to as a prototype of a socialist society. Figures like Martin Luther were shown in a favorable light. It’s interesting that when Germany united in 1991, the eastern provinces have retained an essence of German nationalism that the west seems to have discarded, except perhaps in Bavaria. East Germans, as Schalk noted, would sneer at West Germans as being materialistic and easily propagandized by American media. “Someday,” they would say, “you will blame us for having lived here.”

In some respects, the East Germans had the last laugh. Yet Angela Merkel, from East Germany, has been Germany’s most dangerous Chancellor. Her flooding Germany with foreigners are steadily destroying the national character.

Schalk admitted that the obsession with German guilt might have long-term consequences in stifling any kind of national feeling. As it was, the Germany he wrote of, 1970’s Germany, was prosperous, a dutiful follower in the western camp, and had lots of money; much of it seemed to go into reparations and foreign development, but it wasn’t buying affection.

A chapter on foreigner’s views of Germany began with Tacitus, who praised the barbaric nobility of German tribesmen (partly to shame the assumed decadence of his Roman public) to Madame De Stael, whose De L’allemagne (Germany), published 1818, introduced German romanticism, and was promptly banned by Napoleon, who preferred classicism and considered romantic thought subversive.

Ironically enough, although Napoleon was disliked in Germany and bete noire of Prussia, he did Germany a great favor by abolishing the Holy Roman Empire and cutting the 350 political entities down to a manageable few dozen, paving the way to political unification.

As it was, no one Schalk interviewed liked Germany. French, Italian, Scandinavian, British…it recalled one of the late Gonzalo Lira’s podcasts where he said a major problem Russia had in the Special Military Operation was that everyone hates Russians. Lira also sighed that Germans are also hated.

The Soviet Union especially drummed up hatred for West Germany. Soviet propaganda claimed in Germany, youths can drop coins in public machines and hear the speeches of Adolf Hitler.

There were other negative bits, but Russian leaders were impressed by Brandt, and for all the official hatred of the West German people and its “imperialist, revanchist state,” many Russians were curious about Germany, wanted to do business with it and were very interested in German innovation and technology.

Schalk reminded readers that in the 19th century, Russia and Prussia had been strong allies to bring down Napoleon and keep order in central and eastern Europe. Peter the Great, in his relentless quest to modernize Russia, went to Germany and even worked in a German shipyard to learn shipbuilding techniques (A German operetta, Lortzing’s 1837 Zar und Zimmermann, was based on this). As the Russian poet Gogol remarked; “The moon was built in Hamburg.”

Only two peoples seemed to openly like Germany. One were the Arabs, and Schalk noted Germans were uncomfortable when Arabs smiled and happily gave them the Nazi salute.

The other people were the Americans.