“The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany”, by Jane Kramer

293 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0679448723

In The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany, Jane Kramer surveys the moral and political landscape of modern-day Germany, where the reunification of East and West has brought into conflict two vastly different memories of what it means to “be” German. A series of essays rather than a coherent narrative, Kramer cuts straight to the heart of Europe’s most politically and economically influential country, covering any number of people and places, such as:

• The self-styled anarchists that destroy a filmmaker’s Berlin restaurant to protest its so-called “bourgeois” nature, but whose ruthless call for “freedom” is simply German fascism repackaged
• The young East German who escapes to the West but doesn’t know what to do with himself once he gets there, an example of the deep passivity that is perhaps the Communists’ most troubling legacy to the new Germany
• The German holocaust memorial that reveals a revisionist desire to portray the country as a victim of World War II by, in Kramer’s words, “turning the twelve dark years of Hitler into twelve years of resistance to and occupation by Hitler; an abandonment, for the sake of settling the past into ‘history’, of the very plain historical truth that Germany had chosen Hitler”.

Kramer is a wonderful storyteller and an excellent reporter, but her greatest handicap is that she is basically an outsider reporting on a country she doesn’t even live in which leads, in turn, to her overcompensating in the form of inserting an “insider’s” tone into her essays (I could pay off my student loan if I had a nickel for every time she referred to “the kids” and “the scene” – as if she really knew anything but hearsay about German kids and scenes – or for the occurrences of “a lot of people say [X]” and “so-and-so likes to say [X]”). Meanwhile, Kramer’s lack of familiarity with Berlin comes out in embarrassing goofs such as placing the KaDeWe – that would be the Kaufhaus des Westens, Department Store of the West – on the Kurfürstendamm rather than on the Tauentzienstraße, or referring to Germany’s most important literary publishing house, Suhrkamp Verlag, as Surkampf. Too bad, for there is much important social and political history gathered in these essays. The book is definitely worth reading, but its weaknesses do begin to annoy one after a while.