On Being a German-American

by INGEBORG KAYKO

1

REMORSE for something one has done is always a jolt to one’s personality. Necessary as the emotion may be, we resent it: we do not relish having wedges driven into our selves. Yet there is a difference not only of degree, but of kind, between remorse for a thing done and remorse for what one happens to be. Only the latter is a dangerous acid, corroding one’s personality.

Eleven years ago I left Germany. I became an American citizen, and I believe I do more than lip service to the spirit of this country, for my decision to stay here came only after I had fallen in love with it, as Faust loved his vision of a better land. Yet every voice raised in the daily papers, or by living people, against the nation from which I came goes like a knife into the center of me.

There are those who draw a line between the German people and the Nazis, but their number is decreasing, perhaps under the pressure of public opinion, perhaps because of a change in their insight. What distinguishes a German from a Nazi, apart from the label of party membership? The few overt dissenters, lodged in concentration camps, are not to be judged guilty; the leaders and the instigators of infamy and cruelty can also be singled out. But what of the majority of people who have dumbly accepted Nazi authority because they have never learned anything except to obey? What of those who in their minds adhere to the doctrine of racial superiority, and of their title to the riches of the earth, who vet have never had an opportunity to show personal inclemency to a Jew or a non-German? More than half the people must be in this group. I might have become one of them. The trend of opinion in this country has begun to find them guilty, too: non-resistance to evil is also evil.

Kind people often say to me: Why do you worry? You are not responsible for what your (sic) people are doing now. You are an American.

To some naturalized citizens, this may be sufficient, but it is not to me. Legally and politically, I have unequivocally ceased to be a German. My intellectual inventory is various, with the German heritage undoubtedly looming large; if I could expand it beyond the given capacity, I should like it to resemble that of Thomas Mann, and I believe he is considered to be more cosmopolitan than Germanic. Is he therefore, intellectually, an American? Am I?

The state of being an American is a unique thing in history. One is a Frenchman, a Norwegian, an Italian, for the reason of having been born in a particular country where one’s ancestors, as far as one knows, have “always” lived. Immigration is negligible, and those movements of populations that took place a millennium or more ago are of interest only to historians and anthropologists.

But it is of interest to many Americans to know where their ancestors came from, even Several generations ago; it is a vital question when one is a naturalized citizen, an American by act of law or, if you like, by an act of faith. There is the thing Louis Adamic has called the “old-country complex,” alive even among those who arc to all intents and purposes loyal citizens. And there is the spiritual homelessness of many of the literate, who continue to recognize their own world, let us say, in Tolstoy or in de Maupassant, but to whom Hawthorne or Thomas Wolfe has nothing directly to say.

Precisely, when and how does one cease to be a Swede, an Italian, a German? Is it enough to acquire citizenship and to enter politically and socially, as well as one can, into the American way of life? If one carries endeavor further, studying American history, going in quest of the peculiar essence that can be felt, but not easily defined, as the specifically American in the several arts, does one thereby confer the new status upon oneself more deservedly, more rightfully?

One may do other things. One can outlive homesickness until it recurs only in mild attacks and after long intervals; I have not yet met the naturalized citizen who was quite without it. One can alight upon a spot of earth as resident or owner, or as spiritual possessor by virtue of selective affinity; such an experience came to me in Southern Florida when I knew, in the midst of a drive across the state: Here is where I have always belonged. But does one cease to be what one has been before, in a sense deeper than the legal and political?

I for one do not believe one does. It would take an act of God to cancel the sum of all my yesterdays; and if that fantastic thing could come to pass, perennial amnesia wiping out the first eighteen years of my life, and also the subsequent years of gradual weaning away, I should have no self left to live with.

The self with which I am living now feels it is American, and yet it feels responsible for whatever atrocities are committed by the Germans in Norway, in France, in Greece.

2

ONE who has not experienced it can scarcely imagine what it means to feel united by an unbreakable bond with a race which intelligent spokesmen of the civilized world censure, to put it mildly. I am not speaking of those who advocate wholesale extinction of the German people: I have in mind people of breeding and education, among them lovers of that German culture which is now a thing of the past, who ask themselves and the world, in deep concern, whether the Germans are curable, how the world can be protected against another onslaught of German militarism, how the obvious criminal strain in the nation as a whole, not in its ill-chosen leaders only, can be held in check or eradicated.

Not long ago Sigrid Undset published an article in which she reinterpreted almost two thousand years of history to the effect that the Germans have always been robbers and exploiters, grasping the fruits of other nations’ labors. Even if I ascribe half of the import of that essay to her grief over the torture her homeland has undergone of late, a disturbingly significant half remains.

During the perusal of such publications there arise in me a shame and a despair the nature of which I cannot name; I only know they are destroying the core of my being. I have found myself wishing I had not been born a German, and I have retracted that wish as an act of impiety toward my father and mother. There are times when I cannot read German books; it does no good to tell myself the authors died long before Hitler was born. Is this merely part of that ugly inferiority complex, Germany’s national obsession, particularly virulent after 1918? I do not believe so; in the pre-Hitler era, I never felt that being a German was either a handicap or an excuse for pride.

As if I were one of a family of criminals, perhaps no evildoer myself, yet enmeshed in the guilt of kin through a logic inaccessible to reason, I have felt myself adjudicated and condemned for every act of baseness and inhumanity committed by individual Nazis or groups of them. What except sheer luck prevented me from being persuaded, as my schoolmates whose background I shared were persuaded, that Nazism was the only hope for Germany? If one of them, instead of me, had had the good fortune to be exposed, early enough, to a more beneficial environment, should I not today be in his station, a criminal at whom the finger of the world is pointing? If there ever existed a possibility that I might become guilty toward humanity, as other Germans have become, then I am guilty now.

I can resolve to act and live as decently as I may, and to put aside all feeling of community with the nation that no longer is mine, but this avails nothing. I can reason away personal guilt, but the feeling of responsibility for what millions of Germans have done remains; and not merely for what they have done, for that might be calculable, but for what they are. And for this elusive and terrible responsibility there is no relief.

There remains the precarious hope that one day the Germans may experience a regeneration. We can impose military compulsion on them, we can police them for decades to come, but we cannot teach them democracy or any other system, we cannot show them how to live. Shall we put our trust in that other soul in the nation, never politically creative and now all but buried? It may be that it will assert itself once more and devise for the Germans a way of existence which will allow the rest of the world to look upon them without revulsion or pity, contempt or alarm.

But the results of such a renascence, if it is indeed possible, will not be apparent until generations hence, and during my lifetime I shall only share the guilt, without any hope of rehabilitating myself.