DOING THE SPADEWORK FOR THE FOURTH REICH:

Germans Revisit War's Agony, Ending a Taboo (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, March 15, 2003, NY Times)

The photograph, a precious possession, shows gracious, dignified Holbein Street in Dresden before World War II, where the childhood friends Nora Lang, now 72, and Vanila John, 71, lived in apartments across from each other.

"It's nice that Dresden is being restored," Ms. John said, speaking of the many monuments in this once ruined city that are still being rebuilt, stone by stone. "But the old Dresden is gone forever — the houses, the homes and also the people whom I knew, who are gone, too."

Ms. John, who witnessed the nighttime firebombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force on Feb. 13, 1945--an attack that killed about 35,000 people and destroyed one of the most beautiful cities in Europe — was doing what many Germans have been doing lately: talking about their own suffering in World War II.

For the last few months in fact, television has been showing endless documentaries and discussions of the air war waged by Britain and the United States against Germany in World War II. While this is not exactly a new subject in Germany, there are at least two ways in which the discussion is different from the past.

First, the emphasis in today's articles and discussions is on what Jorg Friedrich, author of a best-selling book on the Allied bombing campaign, calls "Leideform," the form of suffering inflicted on the German civilian population.

In other words, a taboo, by which Germans have remained guiltily silent, at least in public, about their experience of the horrors of war, has been suddenly and rather mysteriously broken.

Second, the new awareness of the Allied bombings and the devastation they wrought has become an important element in German opposition to the expected American war on Iraq. What people like Ms. Lang and Ms. John, both antiwar activists in Dresden, have been saying is something like this: We have direct knowledge of the gruesome effects of war and we don't want anybody else to experience what we have experienced. [...]

Moreover, in what has stirred perhaps the greatest amount of criticism, here and there in his book Mr. Friedrich uses language that until now has been reserved to describing the Holocaust. He refers to the deaths in bomb cellars caused by the carbon monoxide produced by the fires raging above as "death by gassing."

He also uses the word "crematoria" to describe the fires' incinerating effect.

Where he describes attacks on cities that had, in his view, no military significance, he calls the havoc and deaths that resulted "massacres."

Hey, here's an idea: next time don't choose Nazi leaders. Unfortunately, one suspects that this kind of scab-picking and whipping up of anti-American sentiment, added to economic decline and a coming demographic crisis will maker it all the easier for the Germans to prepare themselves psychological for the next genocide they commit--this time against their Muslim immigrant population. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2003 4:27 PM