Discovering German Patriotism

German playwright Thomas Brussig was recently quoted on website SignandSound.com (It renders into splendid English the thoughtful essays that are the glory of German daily journalism.) that he had stooped to the widespread shtick of the World Cup of painting his face with the colors of the German flag, red, black, and gold. He had succumbed to the new German patriotism.

Not the immediate Post-War denial of Nazism and the Holocaust. Nor the bitter overreaction of Joshcha Fisher’s generation to this deal. Nor the astonished wonder (and surprised pride) of the Economic Wonder that attested to the ultimate soundness of the German economy. It reminded me of my flight shortly after President Reagan’s Bitburg debacle when my seatmates were three generations of German, Opa had been a war prisoner and still an Aryan freak, his mainly silent son who turned out to be a successful entrepreneur, and his utterly charming teenage daughter (who almost made you agree to Aryan superiority!)

So long before I settled in Germany in 1998 to write a book on the Bauhaus, I had decided the Krauts had already saved themselves. It puzzles me that writers are still worrying about the humanity of their tribe! In the intervening years, I have been fascinated by “discovering” astonishing Germans, dead and alive, that Germans know almost nothing about!

Take Dr.Marie-Elisabeth Lueders. I stumbled onto her story in the University of California Press reader on the Weimar Republic, namely her 1927 “FORM” critique (from a mother’s perspective) of Mies van der Rohe’s apartments at the Weissenhof Siedlung outside Stuttgart. She found no room for children’s wet outdoor garments! And the kids got pneumonia from the cold floors continuously (if inadvertently) refrigerated by the winds between the excessive glass. And open the kitchen door and the same wind blew out the stove flame! In other words she argued, Mies was not making architecture but ART. His pride and joy on the roster of Starchitects he had assembled was Corbusier. Last year, Corbu’s apartment was demoted to a Visitor Center, otherwise uninhabitable!

Wow! I enthused. Where did this broad come from in Kinder, Kueche, and Kirche Germany? I ordered her autobiography by interlibrary loan from the state capital, Erfurt. Its title (“Never Fear!”) intrigued me. Strange,that my research library –the world famous Duchess Anna Amalia Bibliothek—didn’t have it. It turned out she was the first woman to get a Ph.D.(in Politics) in 1910. She directed Women’s Work and Childcare (two interrelated responsibilities!) in World War I. She became a member of the Weimar Parliament until Hitler silenced her and twice incarcerated the troublemaker. She ran a woman’s academy in Dusseldorf to pass the time creatively. After World War II she returned to politics in Berlin.

The kicker? For several years I was unable to find any German who had ever heard of her. I mean educated people in a University town. What a relief, when I read in Die Zeit that last year the new Bundestag Library was named after her. Finally. That’s sensible patriotism.

Now take an Admiral whose name and address I have mislaid. He was a Berlin butcher’s son, and I asked him how he moved up so far in status to become the head of the German Annapolis. He explained that there had been so many Nazis in the Navy command that an ambitious young man could rise as fast as his energy allowed. But it’s not his secular success that interested me. I ran into him in Warnigeroda, a port city adjacent to Rostock.

The Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch, whom I greatly admire, spent some time there, as far as I can see because the nude Baltic beaches nearby appealed to his sexual identity in ways that Norway didn’t. “My Admiral”, as I fondly call him, had spent some years in Oslo as part of the NATO command, where he had cottoned to the quirky painter, and vowed to make a museum of the home he lived in summers in Warnigeroda. That’s where I met him, looking over his work of love. But the real story gets more interesting. He decided that the old Admiral portraits that filled the walls of his Annapolis were out of date. He started hanging modern paintings there, and eventually on German warships! Now that’s German patriotism, if you ask me.

One final discovery. Franz Itting, a self made electricity entrepreneur in the tiny South Thuringen village of Probstzella. (Thuringer Landes Zeitung feature writer Sabine Brandt unconvered this local genius for me.) He eventually had sixteen villages connected to his generators. Big Deal? He paid his workers more than the going rate. And he built cheap housing for them. And in 1927 a Folk House so the whole community could celebrate and relax together.

They called him “Rote Franz”, red Franz for his Social Democratic ideals. Needless to say Hitler put him in the klink. For not being rightist enough. When the DDR took over, they decided he wasn’t left enough. So they put him in jail as well. Did Franz lose his idealism. Hell, no! He snuck out of the DDR through Berlin and set up another electricity company over the line between Thuringia and Bavaria. His daughter Sonia is currently trying to get her inheritance rights back and the Folk House restaurant is back in service with its hotel soon to follow.

I could go on with my spare time project, “Germans I Would Have Loved to Have Known”, an expanding list of offbeat innovators who have slipped through the cracks of contemporary Germany. My ideal of Patriotism is to retrieve these idealists and make them accessible It is a scandal that MittelDeutschRundFunk has not done a feature on Franz—although you can scan a piece on Hitler and the War every other week. Remember Hitler and feel glum (and superior). Discover Franz Itting and you’re challenged to change your life for the better. Harder to do, too.

Indeed I’ve found a zillion reasons to be patriot proud of Germany, none of them having to do with the World Cup!