Refractions From The Sins of the Fathers

By MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL Michael Blumenthal is a poet and novelist whose most recent book is The Wages of Goodness (1992). He lectures at Harvard University and is currently a Fulbright fellow in Budapest.

For the son of German-Jewish refugees who escaped, by the skin of their teeth and the vicissitudes of luck, the ravages of the Nazi Holocaust, it is easy -- a bit too easy, I suspect -- to feel an almost visceral dislike for the Germans, to be unwilling, in matters moral, to ever give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, it was not merely a handful but millions of Germans who at least part-knowingly acquiesced in what still seems the unspeakable: the organized, systematic gassing and torture of 11 million innocent Jews, Gypsies and others that have left scars that may take all of remaining human history to heal, and memories that ought never be erased.

So the Germans, either justly or unjustly, are held to a higher burden of proof when moral and racial matters, such as the current treatment and status of Germany's estimated 1.4 million refugees, are at stake. And though the sins of the fathers are, rightfully or wrongly, visited upon the sons, it is also a fact that the victimization of the fathers may lead to a certain moral blind spot in the sons. So, in judging the present emotion-filled crisis of the refugee presence in Germany, it seems to me all the more necessary to strive for an evenhandedness and objectivity in our judgment, lest yet another tragic lesson of history be re-enacted in our time -- namely, that all ethnic and religious hatreds and tragedies perpetuate and reinforce one another.

Whether the "new" generation of Germans -- those who by the mere fact of their postwar birth cannot in any way be held responsible for the sins of their ancestors -- deserve to be held to a different standard than the rest of us is, no doubt, a question best answered by moral philosophers and theologians. For myself, an affirmative answer would once again apply the kind of racial double standard that has time and again led to tragedy. For it is morally simplistic, if at times inviting, to use the irreparability of the German crimes of the Nazi era as a justification for dismissing whatever $ efforts individual Germans may be making at reparation and repentance today. (How much more moral, we might ask, were America's sins of slavery, and how adequate have our own efforts to "repair" them been?) There is a certain easy solace, I fear, in labeling one crime as history's worst, one people as history's most egregious villains. It allows the rest of us, by implication, to be subjected to a lower standard of morality, to enjoy an easier sleep.

So it is useful, I think, to cast a "cold eye" on contemporary Germany's record vis-a-vis Gypsies and others before we judge it too harshly, to understand where Germany and most contemporary Germans -- for example, the 350,000 who recently marched against racism in Berlin -- stand before we pronounce our easy and self-righteous j'accuse. We might remember, for example, that the German constitution has for decades included one of the most liberal and generous policies toward political asylum seekers anywhere in the world.

That policy has guaranteed to all who merely utter the word Asyl, or asylum, on German soil (expected to reach 500,000 by the end of this year alone) the right to be sheltered and fed during the months, and sometimes years, while their cases are reviewed. We might consider that in any nation with more than 50% of the labor force suffering some sort of "voluntary" or involuntary unemployment, as is the case in what was formerly East Germany, the presence of so many unemployed refugees, supported at government expense, would be the target of economic unrest and accumulated rage. We should remember that for every anarchic German throwing eggs and tomatoes and paint bombs at President Richard von Weizsacker the other week, there were thousands more standing up -- rather than by, as they did during the Nazi era -- to proclaim their shame at their country's past and their repugnance for this particular aspect of its present.

We should look at all this before -- in our haste to condemn the Germans and relieve ourselves of our own moral burdens -- the sins of the fathers now become, in the utmost of ironies, the sins of someone else's sons.