Germany: Facing the Fears : Reunification: A symposium organized by the Goethe-Institut and UCLA questions how the new Germany will differ from the old, divided one.

Is Germany going to frighten the world again?

Jorg von Uthmann, a New York-based correspondent for a German newspaper, attempted to answer his own question with a reassuring assessment of the new Germany’s future.

“Germans have discovered that to dine in Strasbourg or to own a house in Tuscany, they do not have to conquer the soil.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth, then a wit in the back of the room called out a new option: “Buy it!”

The laughter was immediate and hearty, one more indication that fears of the newly reunified Germany’s economic power co-exist with--and for some, overshadow--fears of a militarist state.

Such fears were on the agenda of “Educating Fritz,” a symposium on German-American relations organized by the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles in collaboration with UCLA’s history department.

The three-day gathering of scholars, politicians, political activists and writers at the Beverly Hills library closed Sunday with more questions than conclusions. But the frankness of the questioning--with fears, prejudices and traumatic memories aired so openly--was an indicator to most who attended that the symposium was a success and such questioning is urgently needed.

Humor surfaced repeatedly, in spite of the fact that many panelists presented their remarks in the form of scholarly papers--heavily referenced and detailed--read in monotone. Humor, however, never obscured the seriousness of the occasion. The symposium took place, as one member of the audience reminded everyone at the closing session, “in the shadow of the Third Reich.”

Stereotypes about Germans were explored. Anton Kaes, a professor of German literature and film at UC Berkeley, listed such characteristics as aggressiveness, arrogance, recklessness, self-pity, insensitivity and a desire to be liked. He reminded the audience that such traits were attributed to Germans recently and at a high level, during a meeting between British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and some of her top advisers.

In book after book on the Germans, Kaes said, a radical distrust is evident. Three major wars in 70 years (1870, 1914, 1939), he said, have led many historians to describe “being German as an incurable disease.” Even Time magazine got into the act, he said, offering a cover story on a “prescription for Germany,” diagnosing a bad case of psychocultural aggressiveness, paranoia, and megalomania.

“Fear is on the agenda again,” Kaes said.

Several panelists alluded to the question: Are German and Nazi interchangeable terms? Many Americans and West Europeans seem to think so, according to several speakers.

Marion Countess Donhoff, an 82-year-old self-described “Prussian” whose family was active in the resistance against Hitler, gave a historical overview. Chief editor of the German weekly, “Die Zeit” since 1973, the countess said the Allied Powers refusal to distinguish between Germans and Nazis seriously damaged the opposition’s strength.

Looking toward the future of a reunified Germany, she acknowledged: “Our allies are scared. Each state is anxious that with such economic power, Germany may succumb to the temptation of converting economic power to political power.”

But Donhoff reminded the audience that two postwar generations have been educated to think in terms of freedom and tolerance rather than authoritarianism, based on education policies set by the British and Americans during the occupation, and said the majority of Germans do not aspire to dominate, but to merge into Europe.

“Don’t let judgments that were once justified become prejudices,” at such a crucial time, she urged, lest “they become self-fulfilling prophecies.”

Although scholarly in presentation, the symposium was open to the public. The general public, however, did not show up. Rather, people with some personal, and traumatic, attachment to the subject were drawn there.

Eleanore Boer of Los Angeles stood up and announced she had been a member of the Hitler Youth Movement in east Prussia, now Poland.

Grimacing and breaking into tears, she said, “It is a most horrible thing for a young person to realize all of a sudden you had been lied to. ‘You are nothing. Your people are everything,’ we were told.”

Calling out to her from across the room, while the scholars looked on, Anna Fischer, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, asked her, “Did you honestly believe you were ubermenschen (supermen)? I was a slave laborer. I was all the time thinking about the young people--what were they thinking? You were being indoctrinated about the evils of the Jews.”

The two women continued on for a few dramatic moments, Boer at one point singing some lines of a racist song that she shocked her mother with as a young girl.

“ ‘What are you thinking about when you sing that?’ my mother asked me. “I’m not thinking about anything. It’s just a song,’ and it was true. I didn’t think.”

Kurt Margulies, an Austrian-born Jew, who lost many of his family members during the Holocaust, repeatedly asked: “So, can there be another Hitler?” He is convinced there can be, and quoted Germans who, he said, had themselves predicted such a calamity if two conditions were met: reunification, and wide-scale unemployment.

“Absolutely not,” was the consensus of the experts in the room, whether Germans, Americans, Jews or Gentiles.

“Germany is really different (now),” Henryk Broder, correspondent for the Jerusalem Post in Germany and Poland, said. A German-born Jew himself, Broder said the question of another Hitler was irrelevant.

“The only question now important,” Broder said, “is how Germany will deal with its own history, its own future.”

His observation echoed that of another Jew, Michael Nutkiewicz. As director of the Martyrs’ Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust at the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, Hitler and the Holocaust are never far from his consciousness, yet hearing the same question about another Hitler on Friday, he said, “I find it an odd question at this point. It’s a question only an older person would ask. The most dangerous question I can ask of Germany is, ‘How tolerant is the society? Is it possible to become pluralistic? If not, how will they treat non-German elements?’ ”

Nutkiewicz said that one of the great ironies of postwar reality was that a similar conference could be held on Israel. “The postwar mentality, pluralism, statehood--they have very similar problems. . . . Both peoples, coming out of a very common experience, are incredibly self-critical, hypersensitive about history, and that’s all for the good.”

The one panelist who saw the most indicators in modern Germany of nationalism, fascism and totalitarianism was Petra Kelly, member of Germany’s Parliament and leader of the Greens party. She delivered a staggering negative list of signs and portents that added up to an indictment: Forbidden lyrics from the past heard being sung on Hitler’s birthday; omissions of any reference to the Holocaust in the reunification treaty; echoes of Hitler’s “1,000-year reich” in current references to the “next 1,000 years of peace and prosperity”; limitations on the immigration of Soviet Jews; deportation of Vietnamese students and workers from East Germany, with people speaking openly of being “Vietnamese-free”; and, “most painful, the West German merchants of death, who are without morals” in their dealing with Iraq, and, before, Libya, selling them chemicals for warfare.

Without denying any of it, Donhoff argued it was unfair of Kelly to offer her description as “the only picture” of Germany.

Taking Kelly on, political scientist Joyce Mushaben of Georgetown University told her, “Democracy presumes a positive concept of human nature. If you do not believe in the possibility of human change and reform, you should resort to an enlightened despot.”

Throughout the proceedings the Germans underscored their gratitude to America, starting with occupation policies that helped them rebuild and become the power they are today. With some irony, Americans, smarting over their current economic decline, were reminded of early plans, discussed seriously during the war, to decentralize Germany and turn it into an agrarian and pastoral society.

As much as the financial help, however, the Germans seemed grateful for the lessons in tolerance, freedom and the capacity to look to the future that Americans brought them.