The American-born Kempe worked as a NEWSWEEK correspondent in Germany, and now, 44, he is the editor of The Wall Street Journal’s European edition. But he has had to work through his own version of the German Vergangenheitsbewltigung, or “coming to terms with the past.” In his fascinating search for “the new Germany,” he finds himself circling back, again and again, to the legacy of the Third Reich. Weaving together his own family story and interviews with ordinary Germans, he finds that “even German newborns are Hitler’s Offspring,” in search of an “ersatz father” because their own had “flopped as role models.” They have found their bearings, Kempe writes, by becoming “America’s Stepchild.”
Kempe knows that this will infuriate some German intellectuals, who see rapid Americanization as the bane of their times. But Kempe is right on target when he asserts that the United States infused the newly democratic Germany with “its naive but refreshing belief in self-improvement and new beginnings.”
Kempe is at his best chronicling private struggles. He insists that “German humor” is no longer an oxymoron. Are the Germans as bad as their stereotypes? “Anal is normal in Germany,” a psychiatrist says, mocking his own obsessive orderliness. Kempe sees signs of a willingness to defy convention, including many cross-cultural marriages. And he can empathize with the rites of passage of the new generation, who recall their first encounter with a Jewish person “as precisely as their first romance.” When Germans travel abroad, they must answer for the sins of their fathers, and some seek refuge in stories of “good Germans” who resisted the Holocaust.
In his family, Kempe had frequently heard about the uncle who saved the lives of Jews, but he learns that the truth is less heroic. His uncle, a shopkeeper, provided Jewish customers with groceries–even when they didn’t have enough ration coupons. By doggedly tracking down the records, Kempe also discovers that another relative was a bestial figure in Hitler’s Brownshirts, who later escaped conviction for war crimes on a legal technicality.
For every disappointment, however, Kempe finds a character like Marcus Bleinroth, his younger cousin. A German diplomat, Bleinroth concedes that “there is no German identity without historical guilt” but claims not to have a complex about it. “Perhaps it has given me a sense of heightened responsibility,” a belief that Germans “must play more of a positive role because of who we are,” he says. Kempe approves. He also warns against the propensity of many Germans to seek refuge in today’s dull normality. But his book demonstrates that at the end of a horrific century, dull normality will do just fine, thank you.
