A crucial civilization

It took Steven Ozment much courage to rewrite German history from antiquity to the present day — and beyond, if one includes his cautiously optimistic views on Germany’s future. The challenge lies not only in identifying and putting into perspective key elements of a crucial civilization in the heart of Europe; it also, and more importantly, lies in the predicament resulting from Germany’s perturbing role in the first half of the 20th century — first and foremost Adolf Hitler’s war of aggression and, under its cover, the wholesale murder of European Jews.

This has reduced, in the eyes of many, Germany’s long past to a tale of horrific deeds perpetrated within living memory. The result is twofold: There is on the one hand a general (one might say obsessive) fascination with Hitler and his cohorts, demonstrated on a popular level by relentless Nazi-reporting in the media; on the other hand, there is a not-so-benign neglect of things German beyond good technology.

The language used in the Iraq war — that the French should be punished, the Russians forgiven and the Germans ignored — points, in the latter’s case, to a deeper issue.

That Mr. Ozment has succeeded in telling, in just over 400 pages, a captivating although complex German story speaks for the author’s narrative talent and his ability to provoke the reader’s mind with his unconventional findings.

Mr. Ozment belongs to a newer trend in social history, one that attempts to bring a bit of balance to a postwar, moralizing historiography — mostly American, British and left-liberal German — that was long disposed, in the author’s words, to circle around a magnetic Nazi pole. In this restrictive view, Germany’s past is turned into a hunting ground for Nazi forerunners and hapless democrats.

Instead, Mr. Ozment chooses a chronological approach to history, reading it from past to present, not from present to past, explaining developments not from their outcome, but from their formative steps. In this more objective, non-ideological approach, neither Nazism nor the Holocaust was predetermined in German history.

In his search for the causes of Germany’s derailments in the past century — the stated purpose of his book — Mr. Ozment follows converging tracks as history unfolds. The first cause, a sense of driving frustration, originated, according to the author, in distant days when the Romans affixed the “barbarian” label to Germanic tribes, creating a lasting resentment for what Germans considered an unfair portrayal by hostile neighbors.

That grudge, doubled with the feeling of recurrent failure (although it was assimilated Germanic tribes who shaped post-Roman civilization), was to be confirmed in later centuries by Germany’s inability to create political unity, and the incapacity of Germans to defend their borders against enemy invasion. It may come as a surprise that throughout most of its history, Germany was more the aggressed than the aggressor.

As to what has been called Germany’s deficit in democracy and, as its corollary, Germans’ obsessive discipline and subservience, Mr. Ozment turns to what he perceives as Germany’s own mix of religiously inspired inner freedom, civic sacrifice and the respect of good governance.

For Germans, to quote Mr. Ozment, “it is not freedom, once attained, but discipline carefully maintained, that keeps a people free.”

Concerning Germany’s relationship with Jews, hardly anything, the author says, points to “congenital” German anti-Semitism. Germany had the largest Jewish community in Western Europe and its Jews, all things considered, did well — probably better than in most other Western lands. Mr. Ozment concludes that fascism and Nazism were something new in German history, “neither reducible, nor derived whole cloth from what preceded them.”

It took the convergence of three crises of hitherto unknown magnitude (what Mr. Ozment calls “the perfect storm”) to bring Hitler to power: first, economic crisis, with inflation run amok and massive unemployment; next, political crisis, with a Weimar Republic increasingly unable to satisfy basic economic and security needs; and, not least, the spiritual disorientation of a traditional but changing society in the wake of a philosophical “deconstruction” of religion in previous decades.

All that against the backdrop of an unaccepted defeat in World War I and a punitive, humiliating peace. The swiftly installed Nazi police state, massive intimidation, misguided idealism, another world war and henchmen with modern technology — together these brought about horrors that still haunt.

In his thoughtful conclusion Mr. Ozment looks at contemporary Germany and evaluates its future. The verdict is optimistic but contains a warning: “Today the canary sings in the German mine, assuring everyone that the mine is currently safe. One development that might stop that song is criticism intent on making National Socialism and the Holocaust, with their attendant war guilt and reparations, the book-ends of German history.”

In this view, the best hope of a people for its future is not to be distinguished by sackcloth and ashes, but by normal nationhood. Germany, with its tradition of citizens’ responsibility to society and disciplined freedom, may even, according to Mr. Ozment, offer a solution to the problem of waning authority and self-absorbed freedom, as faced by liberal democracies of a more permissive brand.

There is some irony in the title “A Mighty Fortress” for a book that portrays a serially defeated, long divided and frustrated nation. Yet Martin Luther’s choral, from which the title is derived, symbolizes also a people that has survived, often against all odds, and which still inspires awe and grudging respect among its peers.

At this point, however, one is tempted to narrow somewhat the author’s overall diagnosis of Germany as a chronically problematic, often resentful and essentially insecure nation. Mr. Ozment’s views may well rest on both his Western perspective and, more importantly, on his primary motivation (i.e., uncovering the reasons for Germany’s contemporary disasters).

With a still-selective approach, he might not have shut out periods of German history that knew happier, more “normal” times. Defeats and frustrations in the West, for example, were matched for centuries by political and cultural expansion in the East.

By the same token, in his otherwise brilliant philosophical run-through from Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Nietzsche, Mr. Ozment seems to focus on the darker, not the lighter side: on the gradual “deconstruction” of God and its fatal consequences, not on Kant’s vision of the ideal republic or a peaceful world-community prefiguring the United Nations.

The author rightly goes into details when history seems to call for more explanation. But the European “Dark Ages” may need more light. And fewer minutiae on Gothic and Merovingian meanderings, and a little more information on German-American relations (the United States, after all, twice changed the course of German history in one generation), would have been welcome. A discourse on the ideology of “Germanness” in 19th-century culture would have been better served with quotations from less obscure prophets.

A number of factual errors and other inadequacies could have been avoided; they do not seriously interfere, however, with the work’s general findings. More primary sources (not least in German) and an index would have been useful.

Overall, Mr. Ozment seems most at ease with the late German Middle Ages and the German Renaissance. His writing on the Nuremberg humanists, on Albrecht Duerer and Lucas Cranach, on the Reformation and on early German revolutionaries is masterful. His comments have acumen and color throughout.

“A Mighty Fortress” is a highly stimulating book and a pleasure to read, combining serious scholarship with verve and good storytelling. Above all, it sheds new light on a highly controversial, always fascinating subject that certainly merits revisiting.

Cornel Metternich, a former German diplomat, is currently an associate at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University.