That will be my online home from now on…

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment
By Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross
Modern Library, 197 pages, $24

There is no Freedom Without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism
By Constantine Pleshakow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 289 pages, $26

In the cascade of nostalgic remembrances that accompanied the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, one was particularly disconcerting: Angela Merkel’s. On the evening of November 9, 1989, Merkel, then a 35-year-old physicist living in East Berlin, had an appointment for the sauna. It was her regular weekly ritual, and she wasn’t about to disturb it just because the world she had always known was suddenly, very rapidly, crumbling. “It was Thursday, and Thursday was my sauna day, so that’s where I went,” Merkel told the Guardian newspaper.

Her reasoning was simple: Things had been tense for days. History was running its course. The champagne and partying could wait. “I figured if the wall had opened, it was hardly going to close again,” Merkel said.

Yes, disconcerting. Because how could anyone living at that heady moment — let alone the future chancellor of Germany! — not be the one shoving that history along. How could anyone sit in a steam room while it happened? Moreover, how could it have happened if people like Merkel weren’t out in the streets making it happen?

It’s a picture that doesn’t really jibe with the popular conception of that annus mirabilis that has dominated the imagination for the past two decades. People rose up and grabbed their democratic and free-market birthright, tearing apart the communist and authoritarian status quo that had dominated the Eastern bloc. They did not just sit in the sauna.

But maybe they did. What if the story of 1989 is not one of popular uprising? What if, instead, a decrepit and corrupt order had simply reached its timely end? What if all it took was a light shove and not a stampede? Two new books, both by eminent historians of the Cold War era, try to offer this new narrative just at the moment when fireworks are bursting over the Brandenburg Gate.

Steven Kotkin’s “Uncivil Society” and Constantine Pleshakov’s “There Is No Freedom Without Bread!” provide self-consciously revisionist accounts of what led to the events of 1989. Their books, Kotkin’s more so than Pleshakov’s, don’t really feel like original takes on this well-known history. With little new to offer factually, they provide instead an alternate interpretation of how the dominos fell as one state after another upended its status quo. For Kotkin, the idea that there was any significant opposition to communism in the Eastern bloc “falls into the realm of fiction.” The downfall was more a result of an economic catastrophe — the countries were run like “Ponzi schemes” — coupled with the natural death of an “incompetent, blinkered, and ultimately bankrupt Communist establishment.”

Pleshakov has a slightly more nuanced approach. He, too, dismisses what he calls the “stereotypical picture of the good masses overthrowing the bad regimes.” Each of the revolutions that took place in the fall of 1989 was the result of unique and complex domestic situations. In every instance, Pleshakov writes, “behind-the-scenes dealing with the old elites, compromises between the revolutionary leaders and the Communist old-timers, and, of course, chance shaped the revolutions at least as much as people’s anger did….”

But what about Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa and Adam Michnik? What about the great Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky? For that matter, what about those moments over the 40 years of communist domination of Eastern Europe in which people risked their lives to try and shake off that domination — Hungary in 1956? Czechoslovakia in 1968? Poland in 1981?

To be fair, both books see Poland as an exception. Communism never fully took hold there — only 1% of farms were ever collectivized — and the population’s Catholicism provided a counter set of values that sustained people, spurred on, of course, by an anti-communist Polish pope. If any country could be described as having developed a parallel society, a counter to the oppressiveness of the state, it was Poland. In the rest of the Warsaw Pact, there was nothing equivalent to speak of. Those revolutionary surges in 1956 and 1968? Their aim was “socialism with a human face.” The intention, these books argue, was never to supplant Marx completely. And at least in Hungary, it worked. Known as “goulash communism,” a kinder, gentler version of Moscow’s brand emerged, with a comfortable space provided for free enterprise.

With the exception of Poland, then, dissidents were inconsequential according to both Kotkin and Pleshakov. In the end, it was economic factors and a leadership deficit that led to the collapse — the realization by the 1980s that the planned economies of the socialist world just looked pathetic next to the booming capitalists next door. That and self-serving bureaucracies skilled only in the arts of suppression.

Maybe these books are a necessary corrective. They certainly return a sense of perspective to the historiography of the period, dulling a bit the bright memories. But they seem to want to do more. Both books also come across as annoyed rejoinders to those — neocons first among them — who see in 1989 the ultimate proof that their Manichean vision of the world holds true: Good people will always rise up to fight evil regimes, seeing democracy and free markets as the best of all possible worlds. Disabusing readers of this oversimplification seems the main motivation of Kotkin and Pleshakov.

But do they go too far? Left unanswered is the question of why in that critical moment Eastern Europe — and the Soviet Union, for that matter — did not go the way of China. If the problem was mainly economic, why not switch to a free-market system while maintaining an authoritarian regime? That same year of rolling protests also offered the example of Tiananmen Square. Authoritarian bureaucracies could shuck off their socialist economies while still holding on to power through ruthlessness. Why was this not an option for Ceausescu or Jaruzelski?

This is where Kotkin and Pleshakov, in their desire to reinterpret the story, really miss something of the spirit of 1989. Those dissidents, even if their numbers were small, helped shaped the way the collapse would look when it finally came. If the people at large were driven in the end more by a desire for the consumer goods they saw on West German television, the intellectuals were motivated by those freedoms enjoyed along with the McDonald’s hamburgers and washing machines. And, in the end, it was the dissidents’ wants that had to be fulfilled, their ideas that entered the vacuum, that answered the question: What will come next?

Even if our understanding of what took place that fall night in 1989 has become too clouded by nostalgia, we also should beware of swinging the other way and forgetting the real ideas animating that moment. It might not have been entire populations or even large groups of people who were willing to sacrifice themselves for democracy, but certainly a few did. And they acted as incubators, persisting in their beliefs, preaching them in their stuffy little living rooms and dreaming about them in jails, and waiting for the moment when — while some were enjoying their saunas — they could burst out and hear them echoed in the streets.

Christopher Caldwell claims Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is not a lecture to Europeans about how to handle their Islam problem. But his analysis leaves room for only one conclusion. White Europeans need to start fighting fire with fire, shed their exalted notions of multiculturalism and human rights, find religion and civilizational purpose, and, for good measure, dig back a few centuries to rediscover arranged marriage so they can start matching immigrants baby for baby. They might also consider sending all those Muslims—referred to occasionally as “invaders” and colonizers—back where they came from. Otherwise, in no time, Europe will cease to exist. Caldwell, an editor at the Weekly Standard, doesn’t admit any other possible outcome for the battle between the two caricatures he draws. When in one corner you have “an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture” and in the other a “culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines,” which would you put your money on?

That he arrives at such a Manichaean understanding is unfortunate, since it effectively short-circuits a nuanced conversation about some good and challenging questions. Caldwell is right to wonder about the inevitability of the mass immigrations that began on the Continent in the 1950s and continued unabated through the 1990s, when Europe relaxed many restrictions on refugees and asylum seekers. The reflex answers are well known: The postwar economies needed the manpower. Guest workers were doing jobs no one wanted. Europe, with its history of murderous nationalism and exploitative colonialism, had an obligation.

But where was the long-term thinking as hundreds of thousands of immigrants streamed in? The industrial jobs that guest workers filled were fast becoming obsolete. And few stopped to consider that these immigrants would choose to stay and build their lives in Europe rather than returning home, that Europeans were importing, as Caldwell puts it, “not just factors of production but factors of social change”—people who, among other stresses, might weigh down Europe’s cherished welfare system.

Most Western European countries now have a foreign-born population that tops 10 percent, and for Caldwell it’s their overwhelmingly Muslim identity that is the threat. He regards Islam’s role in Europe today in the same way cold warriors understood Communism in the 1950s: as an all-consuming force that will take advantage of the West’s freedom in order to destroy its values and way of life. Regardless of where they came from, whether the Maghreb or Turkey, and where they have settled, whether Denmark or Spain, Caldwell sees Muslim immigrants as adherents of an adversarial worldview, which seeks to establish what ethnographer Rauf Ceylan calls “ethnic colonies” in the hope of eventually conquering Europe “street by street.” Even benign Muslim institutions are “worrisome, no matter how innocent their ends or how peaceful their ethos.” Caldwell ties together many events since 9/11, from the Danish-cartoon uproar to the riots in Paris banlieues to the killing of Theo van Gogh, as symptoms of the same disease: a hostile Muslim population that will never assimilate and—through high birthrate and fervent belief—will Islamize Europe in short order.

He saves his true scorn, though, for Europeans. The Islamic ethos at least has traditional values and cohesiveness. Next to it, Europe is nothing but decadence and uncertainty. His analysis drips with disgust for societies that lack self-confidence, that are willing to fight, if at all, only for gay rights and sexual permissiveness. As he sees it, this is the legacy of a guilt-ridden postwar moral order that put the need for tolerance above all else, sacrificing “order, liberty, fairness and intelligibility” on its altar.

Caldwell presents his argument in such with-us-or-against-us terms that it hurts to acknowledge the places he is right. It is un-deniable that there is a disgruntled and dangerous sense of victimhood among Muslim immigrants, and a culture that secular Europeans can’t help but view as misogynistic. These developments both pose immense obstacles to integration. But do they mean that integration is impossible? For every “ethnic colony,” there is also a sign of slow but steady adaptation to Europe, whether in the realm of the cultural, the religious, or the sexual. Caldwell rarely mentions political power—in his reading, it’s irrelevant when a minority rules through intimidation. But it is not at all irrelevant on a continent where democracy remains sacred. For the most part, these large immigrant groups have almost no political representation and no ability to counter the anti-immigration laws currently sweeping Europe. But it’s also telling that those who have risen to power—like Cem Özdemir, the son of guest workers, who is now a chairman of Germany’s Green Party, and Rachida Dati, the daughter of a Moroccan bricklayer and now France’s justice minister—have done so as loyal citizens.

As for European society, it is much stronger than Caldwell gives it credit for. Multiculturalism has given back to Europeans what the twentieth century took away: an ability to feel good about one’s country. Letting in strangers, challenging though it’s been, has not only helped Europe overcome its history, it has forced an expansion, in vibrant and diverse ways, of what it means to be German or French or English. Moving in the opposite direction, a retreat into some pre-Enlightenment ethnically and religiously based idea of the nation-state is not an option—as Caldwell himself has to know. Too much has happened since.

Was there ever a more favorable time to be an American in Germany? I wasn’t here during the Berlin airlift as the sky filled with small parachuted packages of raisins floating down from U.S. bomber planes. So maybe then. But the symbolic weight of Obama’s win seemed to redeem us all in German eyes. On the eve of the election, the editor of Der Spiegel captured the consensus when he said that America was seen here by most as “a horrendous country that betrays its own values every few years.” Overnight, it seemed, this disdain had changed into jaw-dropping awe. My German landlord sent me an excited email in the early hours of November 5, writing, “A new period of american government style! I’m keen to see the changes in your home country!” The best part? That broken toilet my wife and I have been bugging him to change? “Now I’m refreshed and fit again. So on Friday or Monday the Hausmeister will pass to see and judge the toilet ‘system’ . . .”

Underneath all these good vibes, though, I detected something else as well: jealousy. The scene from Chicago earlier this month was so moving because it signaled that American democracy had matured. It was a giant collective stride—through tens of millions of pulled levers—toward overcoming our nation’s greatest birth defect. For Germans, as anyone spending time here could quickly tell you, there is a constant and obsessive self-examination of their own burdensome history. Not a night passes without a Holocaust documentary on television. Memorials abound. Schools have integrated the war into all levels of their curriculum. Yet, still, this heightened awareness does not seem to have lessened the fear of an ever-resurgent anti-Semitism. There will most likely never be a Jewish chancellor here to provide, in one fell swoop, an immediate rebuke to the past. But that’s not the problem. It’s the nature of anti-Semitism itself that always seems to be shifting. And a little-covered debate that roiled the German parliament this past month—overshadowed, as most things were, by the Obamania—showed once again the slipperiness of the particular prejudice Germans are fated to continue confronting.

Two weeks ago was the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. German society, now expert at such commemorations, gestured in all the appropriate ways. Angela Merkel visited the newly renovated Rykestrasse synagogue. Mozart’s Requiem was performed at the Gendarmenmarkt. All the newspapers featured reviews of a new exhibit about the burning and pillaging that augured worse to come. The public centerpiece of all this memorializing was to be a standard resolution, a statement of concern, really—unanimously supported by all the members of the Bundestag—decrying anti-Semitism and calling for renewed vigilance. It almost didn’t happen. When a vote finally took place on November 5, it was only after the ruling coalition of Christian and Social Democrats and the extreme left party had engaged in a brutal round of accusatory historical regurgitation. Der Spiegel said everyone concerned in the episode “should be red in the face with shame.” In the end, to avoid what would have been a full-blown fiasco, two separate statements for the dueling factions were produced and passed.

Why did this no-brainer of a resolution create such problems for German lawmakers?

Since January, representatives of the five major parties in parliament had been working on the bill, which would establish a panel of experts to present regular reports on anti-Semitic activity in Germany. This had begun to seem even more urgent lately. A survey in September indicated an increase in such incidents, with 530 anti-Semitic acts in the first half of 2008, or—as it was dramatized here—an average of one Jewish cemetery vandalized every week. This was, in a way, a known evil. It’s been a long time since anyone, German or Jew, was surprised anymore by the works of the active but small neo-Nazi presence here. For the most part, besides their sound and fury, they do little more than annoy Germans concerned with polishing any remaining swastikas off of their good name.

The problems came from another direction. Early last month, the Christian Democrat representative proposed to add—to the standard elegiac language remembering the Holocaust—a clause that instantaneously upended the negotiations: “it must be recalled that Israel was never recognized by East Germany, that Jewish businesspeople were dispossessed by the East German government and had to flee, and that East Germany broke international law by delivering weapons to an anti-Israeli Syria in 1973.”

The political party that governed East Germany didn’t disappear after the wall fell. It became Die Linke, a small but vocal opposition force in the Bundestag. The Christian Democrats didn’t hide their objective. Bringing up the East German past was their way of sabotaging any chance of a joint resolution. After months of negotiating, the conservatives decided they would rather not add their names to any document, even one as anodyne as an anti-anti-Semitism resolution, if it also bore the signature of their socialist archenemies.

While the move might have seemed a cynical, political ploy on the part of the Christian Democrats—and was criticized as such, by no less than the Jewish community’s governing body—they had their history, for the most part, right. From at least 1967, the Communist world was officially anti-Zionist. East Germany, like its Soviet overlord, offered financial and propaganda support to belligerent Arab regimes. Cartoons in newspapers depicted Israeli soldiers as Nazis and the state sheltered PLO militants. The Zionist entity was an imperializing force, an oppressor whose existence should be mercilessly opposed.

The question was whether this history lesson belonged in a resolution condemning more clear-cut forms of anti-Semitism like swastikas and skinheads.

Here was an issue quite familiar to Americans in the past few years—and particularly so on university campuses, with their Walt and Mearsheimers. To what degree is there, as Abraham Foxman of the ADL consistently reminds us, a “new anti-Semitism” masking itself as anti-Zionism? Or, in the terms it was debated here in the past weeks, could one march in solidarity with Hezbollah, as some Left parliament members did during the summer war of 2006, attend a rally that demanded “Death to Israel,” and still claim in good faith to be an opponent of anti-Semitism?

The resolution was almost abandoned over this divisive question—the Left arguing that their legitimate criticism of Israel was being used against them as a cudgel and the Christian Democrats affirming that the German state had to be unambiguous in its defense of Israel. Eventually, fearing embarrassment, both sides agreed to a compromise: There would be two separate resolutions, but their language would be absolutely identical. The East German history was dropped. In its place, a statement that still angered enough of the rank and file leftists that eleven parliament members of their party refused to sign: “Those who take part in demonstrations where Israeli flags are burned and anti-Semitic slogans are shouted are not a partner in the fight against anti-Semitism.”

How to deal with Israel is, of course, not a new problem for Germany. While the Communist East maintained its anti-Zionist position, West Germany spent the post-war years rebuilding international goodwill through the hundreds of millions of dollars it threw at the Jewish state in the 1950s and ’60s. Even after the Six Day War, when the rest of Western Europe soured on Israel, West German governments were hardly ever heard to utter a critical word. If left-wing groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang were known to support their Palestinian revolutionary counterparts, the mainstream German public and their conservative and liberal governments never spoke in the harsher tones of, say, France. Reunification was, in many ways, a subsuming of the East by the West, a dynamic that was true also of the new Germany’s approach to Israel. This was evident as recently as the 2006 Lebanon War. A Pew poll found that even as Europeans’ views of Israel plummeted, twice as many Germans as French still viewed Israel more favorably than the Palestinians.

To listen to the voices out of the Israeli foreign ministry, this might be changing. Germany is “becoming more ‘European’ in its attitude towards Israel,” one official anonymously told Yediot Aharonot last month. Of particular concern to the Israelis is the German unwillingness to follow America’s condemnation of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions—a stance that might end up putting a serious damper on their Obama fever when the new president makes his first move on this issue. By including anti-Israel sentiment in their definition of anti-Semitism, Germans now have to ask themselves this tricky question: Given the Iranian president’s well-articulated views about Israel’s future place on a world map, could German accommodation of Iran be considered anti-Semitism?

The issues raised by the resolution were more than just political. As Germany becomes more “European,” abandoning some of its reflexive pro-Israel positions—Iran being only the most obvious example—the resolution perhaps represented a first awkward attempt at drawing a border between acceptable and unacceptable forms of criticism of the Jewish state. If the Left was offended, it was because it never cared much for these borders to begin with. But for the vast majority of Germans and their government representatives, it’s clear that figuring out how to oppose Israel without being accused of the “new anti-Semitism” is not so simple.

Asked about this dilemma, Andreas Nachama, a historian, rabbi, and managing director of the Berlin museum Topography of Terror, responded that if criticism of Israel were a measuring stick for anti-Semitism, most Israelis would also be considered anti-Semites. And yet, he continued, “it’s not so easy to distinguish” exactly what does cross the line. “There is here in Germany also a thoughtless, one could say unreasonable, critique of Israel, that does enter the realm of anti-Semitism.”

So which is it? It’s safe to say, at the very least, that there is some confusion, even for German Jews. How much more so then for all the other Germans? Just when they thought they had gotten it all down—when to bow their heads, how to look Jews in the eyes, when to produce anger and when tears—it now seems something as elemental as the words, “anti-Semitism” might have to be redefined once again.

In the eighth century B.C., a hundred years before the Judeans were dropped by the river of Babylon, a different Jewish tribe, the Israelites, were also marched out of their ancient kingdom to begin a long exile. Unlike their Baghdadi brethren who would go on to write the Talmud, these Jews would spend the next 2,700 years isolated in the small mountain villages of Kurdistan. “They that were lost,” as the prophet Isaiah described them, mostly illiterate peasant farmers, their long history and distinct language almost completely unrecorded.

Lost, that is, until Yona Beh Sabagha, the very last bar mitzvah in the bustling Kurdish border town of Zakho. Little did he know it in 1950, but the burden of being the last would define his whole life. Kurdish Jewry in Iraq would soon end as 18,000 people left for Israel, escaping the backlash triggered by the Jewish state’s founding. With them, they took Aramaic, Jesus’ tongue and once the lingua franca of the Middle East, which persisted in Kurdistan even after Arabic conquered the region. As Yona experienced his family’s decline in Israel — his father, once a prosperous merchant in Zakho, was reduced to manual labor as members of the Kurdish community were maligned as primitives — preserving the dying language became his mission. The boy who spent every morning in Zakho’s synagogue watching his grandfather, the town cloth-dyer, lost in ecstatic prayer, grew up to become a respected academic who wrote the definitive dictionary of Neo-Aramaic, the last phase in the language’s evolution.

Yona Beh Sabagha’s son is Ariel Sabar, a journalist and now author of what could best be described as a biography of his father that is also part history, linguistics primer and memoir. “My Father’s Paradise” is a personal undertaking for a son who admits he never understood his unassuming, penny-pinching immigrant father, a man who spent three decades obsessively cataloging the words of his moribund mother tongue. Sabar once looked at his father with shame, scornful of the alien who still bore scars on his back from childhood bloodlettings. This book, he writes, is a chance to make amends.

The bulk of “My Father’s Paradise” centers on Yona Beh Sabagha’s transformation into Yona Sabar (a name change intended to echo the Hebrew word for native Israeli, sabra), moving from Kurdistan to the immigrant hovels of Jerusalem to Yale and finally to his life now as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Along the way, we hear of a unique 20th-­century Jewish upheaval, a community whose central trauma, after living peacefully with their Christian and Muslim neighbors, was being dispatched to a Europeanized Israel that failed to properly absorb them. Aramaic, that dying king of a language, also receives here a fitting eulogy.

As long as the focus stays on Yona Sabar, a last of the Mohicans for Kurdish Jews, the book is graceful and resonant. It falters only when the author extends too far beyond this narrative, imagining a bit too color­fully village life in Zakho or obsessively self-analyzing his dissonant relationship with his father. What holds our attention is that last bar mitzvah boy of Zakho, who, by helping to save Aramaic, managed to find a rare equilibrium between past and present. Or, as his son elegantly puts it, he “sublimated homesickness into a career.”

The owners of the Jets and Giants football teams decided last week to reject a bid by the German insurance company Allianz for naming rights to their new Meadowlands stadium. It seemed there was little else they could do after the New York Times reminded everyone that this was the company that, among other wartime sins, allowed the Nazis to take out an insurance policy on Auschwitz. New Yorkers (and the tabloids, screaming in their name) couldn’t understand how the owners—especially the Tisch family, fifty percent stake holders in the Giants—hadn’t anticipated the emotional blowback.

Here in Germany, no one really seemed all that interested in the story—neither the Jews nor anyone else. From over here, it’s the persistence of such a reflexive response that seemed unusual. The head of a major Jewish institution here hadn’t even heard about the brouhaha when I asked him his thoughts. After all, this isn’t the first stadium Allianz has tried to brand. One of the largest and best-known soccer venues in Germany is Allianz Arena, home of Bayern Munich. It was named in 2006 without so much as a single editorial in opposition.

It might sound a little flip to say that the problem of corporate Holocaust entanglement is passé here, but as a topic of cultural conversation, it feels a bit done. The large companies, including Allianz, have all paid hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution to survivors. They have opened their archives and allowed researchers to dredge up their past in all its unflattering detail. And in a society that, for the most part, is obsessed with what its grandfathers did, there now seems to be a consensus that one couldn’t drive a car, put money in a bank, get on a train, use a computer, take medicine, or even put on clothes (Hugo Boss made Nazi uniforms) if total purity on these questions were the objective.

This is not to say that reaching this point hasn’t been difficult. Coming to terms with the pervasive nature of German corporate complicity is an ongoing process. Take the rather extreme example of the dramatic new Holocaust memorial in Berlin. In 2003, just before the site was to be completed, it was announced that Degussa, a German company with a long history, would be providing the anti-graffiti substance to cover the memorial’s 2,711 concrete slabs. After Kristallnacht, when Jews were forced to pay a collective fine of one million Reichsmarks and used their last remaining gold and silver as payment, it was Degussa that willingly offered to melt it down. But even more damning was the revelation that a subsidiary of the company, Degesch, produced Zyklon B, the poison gas used at death camps.

The notion that the company that had made the gas chambers possible would now be protecting the prominent Holocaust memorial from defacement was an impossible thought for many people in Germany. The debate got very emotional. The central governing body of German Jewry spoke out against Degussa’s involvement. A prominent conservative Jewish journalist, Henryk Broder, wrote that if the German Jewish community approved of the memorial now it would be like designating “a pig sty as kosher.” A month-long moratorium was called during which construction on the site was halted. Then it came out that another of the company’s subsidiaries had produced the concrete that had already been poured for the foundation. The architect of the project, Peter Eisenman, finally published a statement in Die Zeit, strongly coming out in favor of using Degussa. And his reasoning was not just practical. It was also political. “It’s not about whether Degussa has a better product or a more advantageous offer,” Eisenman wrote. “It’s about the fact that, sixty years after the Holocaust, we can no longer allow ourselves to be hostage to political correctness.”

The truth was also that it was nearly impossible to find another German company involved with chemicals or metals whose hands were any cleaner than Degussa’s. History, it was clear, stained everything here. And it’s not just Jews who carry the burden. Just the other day, I was standing in front of the Bundestag and looking at the bronze letters above the front portico that read, “Dem Deutschen Volk” (“For the German People”). They were placed there in 1916 against the Kaiser’s will as a gesture toward the democracy that would find expression in the Weimar Republic. It seemed a clear and untainted symbol of a healthy German nationalism before it was yanked away and sickeningly distorted by the Nazis. A historical plaque inside the Bundestag gives a short history of those bronze letters. They were produced by a foundry owned by the Jewish Loevy family, most of whose members were killed during the war.

Germans and today’s German Jews have no choice. The Holocaust is embedded in everything and will not be removed. But this also means that as a society they cannot avoid engaging this past, as uncomfortable as it might be. This conversation began in the 1980s, reluctantly at first, and continues today.

American Jews do have a choice. If the notion of naming a sports stadium after an insurance company that once melted Jewish tooth fillings is too nauseating, they can simply chase the company back across the Atlantic. The story and the difficult questions it raises then quickly disappear. It’s still possible, of course, that blocking Allianz was the sensitive thing to do. But Americans also managed to avoid some hard questions about the degree to which the past, even an extremely painful past, should dominate and dictate the present. Is Allianz’s name on a stadium going to erase the memory of what they did in the war? Does it imply forgiveness? Will it lead to forgetfulness? Is there a statute of limitations on corporate guilt? And what, really, does it mean to live with the memory of the Holocaust as not simply a force that must always be submitted to but one that must also at times be overcome?

Golda
By Elinor Burkett
HarperCollins, 496 pages, $27.95.

My moment of eye-openng disillusion with Golda Meir came early on in Elinor Burkett’s new biography of the female premier, titled simply “Golda.” The year was 1950, and Golda Meyerson, as she was then known, was nearing 60 and had just returned from her stint as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. Her son, Menachem, off studying the cello in Yugoslavia, was having marital problems with his new wife. She was pregnant and insisted the couple return to Jeru-salem to have the baby. Meir assumed her daughter-in-law was trying to sabotage her son’s promising music career, so she decided that, as punishment, she would ignore her first grandchild. The baby girl that was born that year, Meira Meyerson, had a mild case of Down syndrome. Meir refused to see her. The child, she demanded, should be institutionalized. “Golda was like a stone,” an old friend confessed to Burkett.

That Israel’s fourth prime minister was a stone is not news. Any of the half-dozen biographies already published, or even her own ghostwritten 1976 memoir, “My Life,” attest to what could generously be described as an iron will. And for a woman who shoved her way into the innermost circle of Labor Zionist leadership, a notoriously egomaniacal group of fiery political men, one can almost forgive her some spitefulness and coldness along the way. Certainly, one wouldn’t want to judge Meir any more or less harshly than her male cohorts. What Burkett tries (and succeeds in) doing is taking a sympathetic but unapologetic look in order to discover what happened when her life intersected with power. It’s not pretty. Anyone expecting the “part Superwoman, a dash of Emma Goldman, a smidgen of Nelson Mandela, all wrapped up in the warmth of our grandmothers,” as Burkett describes the popular image of Meir, won’t find her here. In her place is a tragic, lonely, sickly figure, a terrible mother who cuckolded and neglected her husband, alienated her loved ones and often terrorized her closest friends.

Meir, like most of Israel’s founders, never sought power for power’s sake. She was a true believer. And if her personal life was ground beneath her ambition, it was only because she wanted desperately to shape the Jewish state. From her earliest contact with Labor Zionism, as a young Russian immigrant to America living in Milwaukee, the ideology gripped her like an addiction. Her move to Palestine in 1921, dragging behind her a reluctant husband, Morris Meyerson, and her persistence through the trials and tribulations of backbreaking and humiliating kibbutz life was first testament to her intense desire to live out the Zionist dream. Soon she was making her way into the labor movement and its all-powerful flagship union, the Histradrut, propelling herself to power on charisma and fundraising skills. She became Zionism’s best saleswoman — especially to American Jews. By laying on a powerful guilt trip and providing inspiration on cue, Meir could milk an audience better than anyone. She knew “where their fears and dreams lay buried, what made their emotions vanquish their intellects,” Burkett writes. By 1948, with the new state desperately in need of money to buy arms, Meir, now in the inner circles of power, almost single-handedly saved Israel, raising tens of millions of dollars.

Her outside charm — always ready with a witty comeback — was matched with a dictatorial style on the inside. She didn’t exactly bring nuanced decision-making to the government offices she ran through the 1950s and ’60s. Her time as head of the Labor and Foreign ministries were marked instead by the pursuit of single-minded goals, often without a thought to reality or an ear for opposing viewpoints. Which is not to say that her inflexibility didn’t lead to great successes. She gave Israel one of the most progressive Social Security programs in the Western world. When, as foreign minister, she found herself overlooked by David Ben-Gurion on important dealings with Europe (namely, building the atomic reactor at Dimona), she opened a whole new channel of diplomacy, to Africa, which through the ’60s was a symbolic coup for the cornered state. As Uri Avnery, the longtime Israeli leftist, described her, Meir had a “complete intolerance, complete disdain for any other opinion, a kind of primitiveness which was her strength.”

Even as she aged, battling never-ending maladies — while still smoking multiple packs of Chesterfields every day, drinking endless cups of coffee and hardly sleeping — Meir still wielded her authority relentlessly. By the time she became prime minister, she represented the power center of an older generation of politicos who refused to be pushed off the stage by a rising group led by Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon, themselves too divided to challenge her. Almost by default did she become the country’s leader, the last woman standing.

The tragedy of her life story was that she took charge of Israel just at the moment when the first threads in the slow unraveling of the Zionist dream could be seen. She had arrived not because she was a thinker on foreign policy or on economics, but because she was a workhorse and a bulldozer. But Israel, at that critical, turbulent turning point following the Six Day War, needed imagination. She could not get her mind around the new economic realities or the anger seething in the Sephardic community, or the long term manifestation of what it meant that the lines between Israel and its occupied territories were quickly being erased. The surprise attack of October 1973 was another case of this blindness. Instead of cutting through the hubris of Dayan and his cohorts and mobilizing the army when an attack seemed imminent, she let herself be lulled by those sons of her Zionist revolution, men she instinctively trusted.

The country turned on Meir after the Yom Kippur War. As Burkett intelligently points out, she came to represent an Israel that had advanced with blinders on. A remorseful people couldn’t get rid of her fast enough. But in this rejection, Burkett also sees another layer to the Golda story, an intriguing one. The hardness, the dogmatism, the fact that a woman with more will than intelligence could succeed the way she did, also begs the question: Was she as much a product of the Zionist enterprise as a contributor to it? Did that great ideological project require people who could be cruel and uncompromising the way she could be? Golda and her blacklists, Golda and her relentlessness, Golda and her deep, confident laugh at the world — this was also Israel in those early years.

Meir was no feminist and resented being turned into an icon of her gender’s achievement. She would probably see no significance in the fact that Israel might soon be electing its second female prime minister in Tzipi Livni. But Meir’s name inevitably comes up every time the idea of Livni as leader is mentioned. There are certainly deep ways in which these women are connected. Meir’s public appeal, both to Israelis and to the world, was her authenticity, which is another way of saying that Israelis saw themselves in her. The same word, “authenticity,” is thrown at Livni. Meir preferred clarity to artful diplomatic ambiguity; Livni does as well. Meir was described as a nudnik. So, too, Livni. But the similarities end there. Meir, as Burkett’s book allows us to see so well, was very much the product of her generation. She never deviated from the path set out at the turn of the century with the arrival of second and third waves of pioneers. Even as prime minister, 70 years later, she still clung to a fundamentally unaltered worldview. Livni grew up in a right-wing Zionist milieu — her parents were both in the militant Irgun — and fully embraced the visions of greater Israel. But she eventually came to question that brand of Zionism, one that rejected compromise and avoided any alteration of the Zionist dream. Like the current Israeli consensus, she has now long understood that the grand ideological plan needs to be scaled back in order to ensure its own sustainability. She’s a different type of female leader for a new generation of Israelis, one that wants to hear hard truths and not simply be reminded that the world is against them. This biography is then not just the story of Meir, it’s an elegy for a long-dead generation of founders, the staunch first Israelis who knew how to actualize their dreams but less so how to confront reality.

Haaretz is a lefty paper, but it is one of three major dailies in Israel. As Gal Beckerman noted in his fascinating inside look at Israeli journalism in the May 2005 Columbia Journalism Review:

Haaretz’s news and editorial pages have serious impact. No one in the power elite can afford to ignore its daily, unsigned editorial. Like the New York Times, Le Monde, and the Guardian, it sees itself as a player, one with a distinct perspective on the country’s often existential dilemmas.

You don’t have to be Jewish to love Beckerman’s piece, which is long, but worthwhile.

Rian Malan’s one and only meeting with J.M. Coetzee took place in the early 1990s. Malan greatly esteemed his fellow South African writer, and when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, he declared that the laureate had “described, more truly than any other, what it was to be white and conscious in the face of apartheid’s stupidities and cruelties.” But what had struck Malan when he came face-to-face with Coetzee was, as he told The New Statesman in 1999, his asceticism. Coetzee was “a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once.”

The writer is always a result of the man. With Coetzee, this intensity of focus and denial of his own ego have allowed him to create characters whose internal conflicts are perfectly attuned to those of white South Africa. From Waiting for the Barbarians to Disgrace, his novels are complex allegories in which psychology is presented not in its messy, everyday incarnation, but under the intense magnification of the author’s microscope. His protagonists are invented for the specific purpose of illustrating a moral crisis.

I’m not saying that Coetzee’s characters are representational stick figures. But they don’t seem like people you would sit down with to drink a beer. Rian Malan, on the other hand, does seem like such a person—you might take a drag from his cigarette, too. Yet his moral crisis was no less acute than Coetzee’s. And in his only book, My Traitor’s Heart, published just as the drama of apartheid’s final demolition was taking place in 1990, Malan’s project was no different from Coetzee’s. He meant to answer the question posed in his epigraph, taken from a Boer reggae song: “How do I live in this strange place?”

My Traitor’s Heart was as much the result of Malan’s character as Coetzee’s work was the result of his. Malan was and still is charismatic and rakishly good-looking, a drinker, loved by women, and obsessive in his intellectual pursuits. He wrote his book at the age of thirty-five, after years of traveling the world and living a hobo’s existence. Not much has changed since then. A recent Guardian profile described him as living on various friends’ couches. In 2005, he released an album of himself singing original folk songs, which the British paper described as a “part Tom Waits, part Serge Gainsbourg, all in Afrikaans.”

But Malan hasn’t produced another book. Since the publication of My Traitor’s Heart, he has mostly attached himself to crusades. In 2000, he wrote an investigative piece about Solomon Linda, the Zulu singer who composed the original version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (“Mbube”), only to be shortchanged of royalties when the song became an international classic. Malan’s most recent obsession—disputing the official tally of people living with aids in South Africa—even cost him his marriage.

Yet, after all these years, My Traitor’s Heart has lost none of its emotional power. Whereas Coetzee’s novels have always felt like finished products, Malan’s memoir was one of process: the book embodied his own struggle to see his country and its people as they actually were, and not as he wished them to be. To read it now is to experience the bravery of a young writer determined to stare unblinkingly at the ambiguity and complexity of what he found around him—including his own racism.

Born in 1954, Malan grew up in the liberal, northern, white suburbs of Johannesburg, where opposition to apartheid rule was taken for granted. He was quick to absorb the values of this milieu. After reading a Life magazine article about Che Guevara in Bolivia, he decided that he, too, wanted to be a Communist and help the persecuted blacks, though he never actually came into contact with any beyond the servants in his home. When he lost his virginity to a black woman whose name he never learned, it was a point of pride, to be bragged about at school. He even had a blues band and sang about black oppression.

“Isn’t that absurd?” Malan writes in My Traitor’s Heart. “Nobody laughed. We were utterly oblivious to the irony of it, which says something significant about those English-speaking, bourgeois, northern suburbs. They were in South Africa, but somehow not really of it. The rest of the country was a racist Calvinist despotism, but the northern suburbs were liberal, permissive, governed by the ruling philosophical orthodoxies of the West.”

But Malan could not so easily escape the Afrikaner legacy. It was embedded in his name. A Malan, he wrote, “has been present at all the great dramas and turning points in the history of the Afrikaner tribe.” His great uncle, Daniel François Malan, was a major architect of apartheid during his tenure as prime minister, which ended the same year Rian was born. And even while the author was growing up, a Malan was the minister of defense. The family name was frequently and angrily evoked in the streets of the townships: “Voetsek, Malan!” (“Fuck off, Malan!”)

The first hundred pages of My Traitor’s Heart are pure memoir, gliding down the straits between the Boer history of Malan’s name and his own constructed identity as a “Communist.” Straight out of high school, he got a job working the crime beat for The Star, which at the time was the largest daily in South Africa. Being a journalist for one of the liberal, big-city papers was as close as one could get to being a revolutionary without actually manning the barricades.

“Almost every day, I tucked my spiral notebook in my pocket and ventured forth to study the way South Africans killed each other,” Malan recalls. It took him out of the bubble in which he had grown up and introduced him to his own country—to all its people, to black men he was able to respect and see as equals, but also to men he feared. When the Soweto riots erupted in the summer of 1976, Malan was overwhelmed by the violence of the black response. It forced him to confront his own allegiances. He was against apartheid and for black freedom, but he was also terrified of joining in their fight, and terrified of the hatred directed at him from even his new black friends.

Just then he was conscripted into the army. The two-year dispensation from mandatory military service he had received from the newspaper had run out. Malan decided that he had to leave. In My Traitor’s Heart, he could have passed off this decision as a brave act, a rejection of the regime, but instead he writes:

I ran because I wouldn’t carry a gun for apartheid, and because I wouldn’t carry a gun against it. I ran away because I hated Afrikaners and loved blacks. I ran away because I was an Afrikaner and feared blacks. You could say, I suppose, that I ran away from the paradox.

Malan spent the next few years in exile, traveling around Europe and eventually the United States, where he worked odd jobs and usually presented himself as a banished Afrikaner dissident. But he could not escape the paradox of his relationship to South Africa. It troubled him and would not let him become someone else.

Meanwhile, in 1984, P.W. Botha’s parliamentary reforms—which gave the vote to “coloreds” (those of mixed race) and Asians, but still not to blacks—ignited violent protests all over South Africa, which would continue intermittently for the next several years. Malan could no longer stay on the sidelines. So he did what any aspiring writer would do: he wrote a book proposal and shopped it around. The book would be a family history of the Malan clan, or as he described it later in a Washington Post profile, a “multiracial, generational saga…a Boer Roots.”

The exile returned with his book deal. But he soon felt an “increasing sense of dismay that what I was writing about really wasn’t relevant to this terrible drama.” He needed to confront the country in all its complexity; he needed to confront himself. And the best way he knew to do that was to venture out as a crime reporter again, to “seek a resolution of the paradox of my South African life in the stories of the way we killed one another.”

The second part of My Traitor’s Heart, the bulk of the book, is a compilation of these tales. And it is here that Malan’s reporting is instructive for any writer trying to find a way to capture the truth of a conflict without simply pitting one side’s narrative against the other’s.

Take the story of the Hammerman. In the early 1980s, the white residents of Zululand were terrorized by a series of murders that seemed to have emerged out of their darkest nightmares. Someone was sneaking into their homes late at night and bludgeoning them to death in their beds. The murderer, when he was finally caught, turned out to be thirty-five-year-old Simon Mpungose, a Zulu.

Malan was present at his trial, and like many others, initially viewed him as a clear-cut victim of apartheid. Declaring himself ready to die for his sins, Mpungose took the stand and, as Malan writes, gave “as moving and powerful an indictment of South Africa as had ever been spoken.” Denied a chance at an education or a steady job, the accused had spent his life in and out of jail for petty theft, including a stint in the infamously brutal Barberton prison. Before his most recent parole, he had a dream telling him that it was his duty to smash the heads of white men—that this was his fate. So frightened was Mpungose by this vision that he asked the warden to deport him from South Africa, or even to keep him in prison. His request was ignored, and when he was released, he began his killing spree. The narrative seemed clear to Malan at first. A man made insane by the oppressive environment had been transformed into a murderer.

But then Malan ventured into Zululand to find out if there was a deeper truth to Mpungose—and discovered a dark and twisted family history that started with an act of incest. The murderer was undoubtedly oppressed by apartheid, but he was equally haunted by this transgression, which to the Zulu was a stain that could never be washed away. Mpungose, writes Malan, was “an abomination in the eyes of his own people: the son of a man who should have been strangled at birth. In short, there was far more to this story than what the white magistrate and jury could see in the courtroom. This is how Malan sums up the Hammerman:

As I read the Hammerman’s moving courtroom testimony, Simon sprang to life in my imagination, fully fleshed and three dimensional, a victim and a martyr, a potentially good man made monster by apartheid. And then I went into the hills, and ducked into the huts of Simon’s kin and found myself in a parallel world, a kingdom of unconquered consciousness that had somehow proved invulnerable to the white man’s guns, his corruptive culture, and his truculent missionary faith….Who was the Hammerman? In the end, I could not say.

What could possibly conclude this sad but passionate book? The third and final section of My Traitor’s Heart is a parable: the story of Neil and Creina Alcock, white South Africans who decided that they would live in Africa on Africa’s terms, making a home in a parched region of Zululand called Msinga. There they devoted their lives to creating a cooperative farm and revitalizing the arid landscape.

By the time Malan went to visit, looking for answers, Neil had already been killed while trying to broker a truce between two local warring tribes. All the farm work had come to naught. Malan found the thin, weathered widow living in a mud hut, persisting in spite of all these setbacks. And Creina’s life offered a sliver of a solution to Malan’s paradox. He was forced to see that he had always been two people, “a Just White Man appalled by the cruelties Afrikaners inflicted on Africans, and an Afrikaner appalled by the cruelties Africans inflicted on each other, and might one day inflict on us. There were always these two paths open before me, these two forces tugging at my traitor’s heart.” The example of Creina Alcock, who had taken “the path that led into Africa, the path of no guarantees,” did not seem easy or even desirable. But Malan came to the conclusion that it was the only real path open to him.

In the end, it is Creina’s words that serve as a fitting coda for the book, and anticipate the relative stability of post-apartheid South Africa, which nobody could have imagined during the turmoil of 1986: “Trust can never be a fortress, a safe enclosure against life. Trusting is dangerous. But without trust there is no hope for love, and love is all we have to hold against the dark.”

My Traitor’s Heart angered many people in South Africa, both black and white. The author spared no one. He was seen as both a self-hating Afrikaner and a self-admitted racist. For Malan, this was the only way to come to terms with his country and with himself: to find a way to live in that strange place. What his book still provides today is an example of how to write about the strange places, those that cannot be easily represented, that are too often perceived as one thing or another, but are really both. My Traitor’s Heart was most definitely the work of a young man. Malan ranted and raged in its pages. But he never abandoned the idea that there was a paradox in South Africa’s history, and that truth resided in wrestling that paradox to the ground and staring it in the face.

Is there a stranger place for Western eyes than Africa? Even those writers and journalists who don’t have the tortured connection to the continent that Malan has—or especially those who don’t—tend to describe it in simple terms. It is a place of goodness, of noble savages, or one of darkness, disease, and war. In neither case is the continent seen for what it is. Too often, it acts as little more than a backdrop against which the Westerner finds or loses himself. Malan understood the problem and tried desperately to cut through this self-imposed blindness. His insight about the Mpungose trial could be applied to most people writing about Africa:

This is the trouble with white people in my country. Our eyes are sealed by cataracts against which our white brains project their chosen preconceptions of Africa and Africans. Some whites see danger, some see savagery, some see victims, and some see revolutionary heroes. Very few of us see clearly.

Very few of us see clearly. Malan tried, and his book is an expression of just how painful the attempt can be. This might be why he has never written another one, nor attempted anything quite as ambitious or personal as My Traitor’s Heart. Unlike Coetzee or Nadine Gordimer, who have also written with honesty about the white person’s place in Africa, Malan declined to don a fictional mask: he put himself on the examination table, let it get messy, scrutinized his conscience just as he did those many corpses. After all that, and after discovering that he must remain attached to a place that will forever try to spit him out, what more could he say?

“It depends what your definition of ‘win’ is,” said Keith Olbermann on MSNBC last night as he watched the Ohio returns roll in. And, in a phrase, Olbermann delineated the journalistic quandary. How to reconcile what clearly looked like a win for Hillary Clinton—with the obligatory rain of confetti and triumphal speech—with the reality that her victories in three of the four primaries yesterday did not really even dent Barack Obama’s commanding lead in delegates, the factor that, more than any other, will determine who secures the nomination in Denver.

As I wrote earlier this week, the days leading up to Tuesday’s contest saw pundits moving away from delegate-counting and talking more about momentum and whether Hillary could recapture it. This was a framing of the race that clearly favored Clinton, since no matter how well she did last night, there was no way she was going to overtake Obama in hard numbers. Her last, best hope was to start looking like a winner again, even if she wasn’t any closer to reaching the magic delegate number. With tangible victories, she could spin a new narrative that portrayed Obama as unable to seal the deal and herself as more capable of beating John McCain.

But for a few caveats uttered last night, the press’s focus on momentum held. And it allowed Hillary to come out looking good.

Even John King, the numbers nerd of CNN, with his big map breaking down counties into their delegate yields, had to admit that for Clinton last night, “more than it’s about math, it’s about stopping Obama’s momentum, changing the psychology of the Democratic party.” And it’s a feat that, in the eyes of the commentators watching her popular vote victories, she managed to pull off.

Just look at some of the newspaper headlines this morning for evidence that her new “momentum” is now at the center of the coverage, with reminders of Obama’s strong delegate numbers appearing only in the body of the articles. “Clinton Victories in Texas and Ohio; Says Campaign Has ‘Turned a Corner,’” reads the home page of The New York Times Web site in a typical headline. The Washington Post is slightly more even-handed, with its “Democratic Race Unsettled,” and, further down on its home page, “Big Wins, Tough Math.” But probably the more accurate rubric for this moment would have been the one CNN chose to scrawl across its screen this morning: “What Happens Now?”

The shift to a momentum-watch favored more than just Clinton and her campaign—it’s hard to imagine what the Russerts and Blitzers would have done last night without a “win” (or a death-blow) to watch for, and then declare. It’s become the ritual of these primary evenings, one that is hard to upend. There is a neat, three-act structure: pore over the exit polls, wait for numbers, then rush to project a winner. There was no way the pundits were going to spend much time qualifying the “win” and explaining its context—that just isn’t good TV. Though, to be fair, there was a bit of this tossed into the mo’ mix.

The most important question, which Malcolm Crowley at The New Republic was prescient enough to ask yesterday morning in a blog post, is what happens “the day after,” that is, today? Does the press shift back to zeroing in on delegate math or does it come down to perception, which candidate appears to have the strongest wind at his or her back? As Crowley wrote, “Whoever wins that argument is what will decide whether Hillary survives to fight another day.”

Considering how much more exciting—and easy—it is to focus on momentum, especially with so far still to go until the next significant primary, in Pennsylvania on April 22, the press would be wise to keep reminding itself of the much more reality-based measure of delegate counts. Not that this is the only factor to consider; momentum, after all, could affect the decision-making of the critical superdelegates. But the math, as we are occasionally reminded, “doesn’t lie.” Or, to be a little more colorful about it, as Joe Scarborough said to Pat Buchanan last night on MSNBC after Buchanan declared that if Obama doesn’t win, “the soufflé falls”: “I don’t know if the soufflé falls, because the chef still has more butter in the pantry.”