The German way.(A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People)(Book Review)

A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People, by Steven Ozment (HarperCollins, 416 pp., $26.95)

GERMANS have contributed much more than their fair share to civilization but also to human misery. Gifted as so many individual Germans may have been, collectively they have provided a cautionary tale of how not to organize a society, a nation, and a state. Time and again, they have destroyed their lands and negated their achievements; time and again, some strong man has come to rescue them, only to leave worse carnage and numberless dead. Adolf Hitler, latest of the would-be rescuers, will cast his shadow over humanity for as long as memory lasts: The poet Paul Celan, himself a survivor of Hitler's mass-murdering, passed the unforgettable judgment, "death is a master from Germany." In view of this special past, it is reasonable to wonder whether Germany will ever be a normal country like any other, and how the concept of the good German is to be defined.

As befits a Harvard professor, Steven Ozment in his opening pages makes haste to attach the words "complex" and "complexity" to Germans and their history. For a full third of the book, he picks his way through the impenetrable thickets of the Dark Ages, when Germanic tribes encountered and mastered Rome, eventually evolving their own Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne and his successors. It was not their fault, we are to believe, that nation-building eluded them. Down the centuries into medieval times, the expanding ambitions of the Italians and the French trapped German rulers into defending themselves at the expense of domestic peace and unity. Martin Luther was the first strong man to come to the rescue. A genuine intellectual, he was nonetheless possessed by phobias, especially about Jews. His reform of German Catholicism was beneficial but also laid the basis for future religious and ideological strife, including the horrors of the Thirty Years War.

England and France by then were succeeding in forming unitary nation-states. In contrast, Germany remained a chaotic agglomeration of duchies and petty states, subordinate in the German-speaking sphere to Austria-Hungary. Frederick the Great was not quite enough of a strong man to assure the supremacy among all German speakers of Prussia. Next came Napoleon, who exploited the weakness of Germans so cruelly that they had no choice except to emulate French nationalism and aggression. Prince Bismarck, greatest of the strong men, founded modern Germany by means of forcing war successfully on both Austria-Hungary and France. By then it was too late in the day for the emergence of a German nation-state like any other; parliamentary democracy had no chance to put down roots.

Ozment's argument, then, is that the Germans admittedly messed up Europe disastrously for a long time, but other people--"the predatory foreigner," in his words--should carry the blame for this as much as the Germans do. The German character does not show signs of "a progressive genetic disease." German history in his view shouldn't be seen in blacks and whites, but in all sorts of recurrent dualisms that swing Germans extravagantly between contradictions quite outside moral judgments. In the German experience, then, war has an aspect of construction, and tyranny is preferable to anarchy; a love of freedom coexists with a need for order; a record of civility alternates with inhumanity, and ...