It’s true that when Marc Fisher arrived in Bonn in 1989 to cover Germany for The Washington Post, things were not quite as calm as they are today. As he writes in a fine new book, “After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History” (386 pages. Simon & Schuster. $25), soon nearly everything changed. The wall fell and unification, at once joyous and messy, commenced. Then came the ominous outbreak of neo-Nazi violence; at one point, Fisher reports, President George Bush wandered over to Germany’s ambassador at a dinner and asked, “What is going on over there?”
This sense – of how turbulent recent history overshadows the daily effort that most Germans make to be ordinary–is at the core of the book. Fisher deftly covers every issue that matters in present-day Germany: the tension that still remains between easterners and westerners; how Germans see, and treat, foreigners; how Germans see themselves (in a chapter entitled “How Ugly Are We?”); the presence of neo-Nazis and what the world should make of them; the eternally awkward relationship between Germans and Jews. It also contains what may be the best single portrait of the canny Helmut Kohl, who against a lot of expectations is becoming the most dominant chancellor in postwar German history.
This is all serious stuff, and this is a serious book. But to his great credit, Fisher covers the ground breezily, unlike so much writing about Germany. His largely first-person account illuminates the country through everyday people. There are Elke and Ekkehard Hotz, once “communists loyal and true.” By the late ’80s they are defeated by the petty, grinding oppression they confront every day in the East. So when the autumn of 1989 arrives, and suddenly East Germans are able to escape to the West via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the couple also dare to chuck it all and take flight to the West, where they confront unexpected economic hardships.
Fisher captures the sometimes hilarious eccentricities of the westerners, who, over the years, may have grown too fat and happy for Germany’s own good. In a great chapter on Germany’s obsession with rules (the most obvious and often maddening manifestation of its urge for calm and orderliness), Fisher tells of driving on the autobahn one day and getting waved over by a frantic Mercedes driver in the next lane. Warily, the correspondent pulls over, rolls down his window and asks what’s up. To which Herr Mercedes asks indignantly: “Did you see that Audi pass me on the right?” Yes, Fisher concedes, he had. “Good,” the German exclaims, now delighted. “You are the witness. You will follow me to the police station and testify to this rule violation!” (Fisher follows the Mercedes to the next exit, but when the German hits the off-ramp the journalist zooms hack to the highway.)
Some critics may challenge Fisher’s emphasis on reportage at the expense of a world view; what the world wants to know, after all, is where it’s all going to go in Germany. Is it calm and ordinary, after all, or will those skinheads be back when the next economic downturn comes? And if so, how much do the rest of us need to worry about it? The author’s restraint here is the better part of valor. The answer to those questions is that it’s hard to say right now. Things are going pretty well in Germany, thanks mainly to a gradual easing of what had been an economic depression in the east. But as Fisher writes at the end of a chapter on neo-Nazi violence, “where the smell of ash has not yet faded, embers smolder.” Fifty years on, we trust the Germans. Still, we worry.
