And with this apologetic flourish the old lawyer concluded. He should have held an introductory address which without any discussion ought to have brought him thus far, but he was not able to hold out against the vehement opposition which kept invading his carefully composed speech and breaking it apart. It was fascinating to observe how this practised and well-bred man simply did not dare to use the customary style of parliamentary retort against this excited opposition. In fact we often meet in the older generation a physical dread of youth and this is one of the reasons why the older ranks of political and public life deal so restrictively with youth and at a safe distance.
In the following discussion the young audience listened without interest as the SS men spoke about the bloody First of May in 1929 and about the bloody internecine strife among the parties of the left. The student-lawyer had a special problem. His ‘taint’ lay ten years back in time. He had become a Pg (Partei genosse, Party member) in 1936 at the age of twenty-three and then in maturer years had ‘denazified himself, but now he was being summoned to appear. The lawyer replied that of course it would be desirable if all young people were to receive individual treatment but that nothing could now be done about that.
The student: ‘We young lawyers were forced to join the Party. Who would have helped us if we had refused? Many young lawyers in Hessen have now been put on the street with their families and left to whistle for work. Without the younger generation there is no democracy, but if we are treated like this then we just lose all interest in doing anything at all for democracy.’
At this stage the rich young fellow brightens up and calls out ‘Bravo!’ The lawyer consoles his young colleague by pointing out that only the accused of Class One, that is, war criminals, can be punished with exclusion from work, but a young woman protests and claims that employers who have perhaps themselves been Pg turn up their noses when they hear that an applicant for a job is a young Pg. These employers are afraid of the newly introduced management councils, representing the new industrial democracy, which she maintains are much worse than die Spruchkammern.
And she is no doubt right. The whole of Germany either laughs at or weeps over this business of denazification, this comedy where die Spruchkammern play a lamentable double role as the friend in need, those courts whose lawyers apologize to the accused before judgement falls, these enormous paper-mills where it can happen that an accused person in this Germany of paper shortages turns up with a hundred testimonials proving his unimpeachability and wades through thousands of meaningless and trivial instances while the really important instances somehow vanish through a secret trap-door.
This young generation melting away into the Stuttgart night faces a worse fate than any previous one, and in the little drama in which it took part this evening it has perhaps not told the truth about itself or the truth about the events in which willingly or unwillingly it participated, but one thing is clear: it has told the truth about what it thinks of itself and what it thinks of a generation by whom it is both feared and despised in this sad prelude to winter, when big red placards on the walls of ruins promise a reward of fifty thousand marks for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the attack on Stuttgart’s Spruchkammer.
The Course of Justice
There is a lack of happiness in post-war Germany but no lack of entertainments. Every day the cinemas run their films to packed houses, all day until nightfall, and they have introduced standing-room in order to meet the demand. On their programmes we can find Allied war films, while in the meantime American experts in militarism search with magnifying glasses for militaristic tendencies in German literature. The theatres probably have the best repertoire in northern Europe and the most eager public in the world, and the dance halls, where for the sake of hygiene the Allied military police make a couple of raids per evening, find their square metres of floor-space overpopulated. But amusing oneself is expensive. Theatre tickets cost cheap time and dear money. Free amusements are rare and must be taken where they are to be found.
A fairly common amusement, in its way, in the American zone, is to attend a Spruchkammersitzung, that is, a session of a denazification court. The man with the rustling sandwich-paper, who with unfailing interest watches case after case rolling past before his seldom wearying eyes, is one of the regulars in the naked courts in half-bombed palaces of justice which lack even a relic of the sadistic elegance with which justice otherwise loves to surround itself. It would be wrong to think that the man with the sandwiches is drawn to the court to savour the tardy triumph of definitive justice. He is more likely to be a theatre enthusiast who has come here to satisfy his craving for the stage. At its best, that is when the prosecutors and the defenders are sufficiently interesting, a Spruch-kammersitzung is really a stately and engrossing piece of drama: with its rapid shifts from past to present, its endless questioning of witnesses where not one tiny action on the part of the accused in the course of the relevant twelve years is considered too trivial to be passed over, the performance can seem like an example of applied existentialism. The atmosphere of dream and unreality in which this ransacking of a whole nation’s regrettable or terrifying memories is carried out has literary associations too. We could well have been transported to the scenes of Kafka’s The Triaclass="underline" these court-rooms with their half bricked-up windows, their bomb-damaged furniture, and their position high up under the holed roof, are like an illustration from reality of the desolate attic offices where The Trial unwinds.
It is characteristic of the entire situation that a matter so fundamentally serious as denazification should immediately become an event for a theatre critic. But for a stranger, of course, these brief trials, as a rule concluded in a few hours, generate a special interest because with a rare sharpness they give a picture of conditions in the Hitler years, of the motives of those who became Nazis and the courage of those who did not. From the questioning of the witnesses we can feel a cold draught from the time of terror, a fragment of history so far invisible can flare into life for a few short, charged moments and make the air tremble in the raw court-room. For anyone not personally caught up in those desperate years these trials have a terrible documentary fascination, but as a means of denazification they are quite useless. On that point we must accept an opinion universally held by the Germans themselves.
There is indeed a touching unanimity as to the ridiculous and infuriating forms taken by this process. The former Nazis talk provokingly about a barbaric collective punishment. Others think that fines of a few hundred marks are hardly the depth of barbarity but maintain that it is a pure waste of labour keeping this giant apparatus functioning for the sake of minor Party members when the big ones run free. The conveyor-belt technique also undoubtedly gives a dangerous air of the ridiculous to the whole principle of denazification. It was typical of the resulting attitude that in their election propaganda the Communists, parodying the title of Fallada’s well-known novel — Kleiner Mann — was nun} became Kleiner Pg — was nun? — should turn to the small fry of the Nazi Party whose dislike of denazification they tried to collect. According to current usage, moreover, Spruchkammer is no longer called Spruchkammer, but either Bruchkammer (Bruch meaning ‘kaputt’) or Sprichkammer (Sprich meaning ‘talk’).