I The Thousand Year Reich had come to an end after twelve bloody years. The “belated nation,” which had drawn the short straw when it came to dividing up the overseas colonies of the world and so colonized inwards with the expulsion and destruction of the Jews (this was the writer Heiner Müller’s thesis), had become the scourge of the world, a disgrace among nations. Germany’s dream of expanding eastwards, with military villages and farming communities all the way to the Urals and protectorates everywhere, the evil utopia of world domination envisaged by its Führer, was over. It happened so fast that all anyone could do was rub their eyes. Had these Germans lost their minds? After the war, the previously hyperactive nation with its vision of world domination turned inwards. Now the Volk ohne Raum, the nation deprived of its longed-for Lebensraum, was to focus instead on the last unspoiled bit of Heimat, or homeland, left to it — the Feldweg, “the field path” or “country path” extolled by Martin Heidegger, the philosopher of the hour, in a short but widely read essay in 1953. Martin Heidegger, forerunner of the eco-movement, secret hero of the Greens? Something abiding had to be found, something tried and tested, unspoiled, something that by its very nature spoke of Heimat and made defeat bearable as a kind of renunciation. Because, as the philosopher declared, “The Renunciation does not take. The Renunciation gives. It gives the inexhaustible power of the Simple. The message makes us feel at home in a long Origin.” This was the new program, an ecological manifesto avant la lettre, in a mixture of romanticism and the objectivity of the moment, as only a German could write it. There was the lark on a summer’s morning, the oak tree on the wayside and the roughly hewn bench, on which “occasionally there lay […] some writing or other of the great thinkers, which a young awkwardness attempted to decipher.” And right there was the vision of a world into which those weary of civilization could withdraw from the catastrophe of modernity. Only they, these few, the abiding, will someday be able, through “the gentle might of the field path…, to outlast the gigantic power of atomic energy, which human calculation has artifacted for itself and made into a fetter of its own doing.” The “jargon of authenticity” was what another German thinker, Theodor Adorno, called it, in his critique of ideology based on what he described as linguistic atavisms at odds with modern life — a reckoning with Heidegger’s philosophical style. His book by that name was perhaps not the last word on the matter, but it was formative in its polemic. The representatives of the Frankfurt School shelved Heidegger as a problem of linguistic aberration, of anti-modern prose. But the thinking behind Heidegger’s work was not to be got rid of quite so easily; the seminal eco-sound of his philosophy could not be switched off as one switches off the radio. Zeitgeist or not: the debate read like a commentary on the economic miracle, the era of motorway construction and the booming automobile industry with its Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMWs, all made in Germany. Who was on whose side? Who cared about the objections of the newly emerging discipline of sociology, about Adorno’s critique of language, set against the logic of origin in the words of the ontologist Heidegger, who had become suspect as a teacher because he had praised the Führer in his Rector’s speech at the University of Freiburg in 1933, believing in the Platonic discourse of “tyrannous education”? The fixation on overcoming the density of populated spaces had, once and for all, been driven out of the little men of the master race, the descendants of poets and thinkers, who wanted to rule over the peoples of the world. Their territory — which on a map of Europe of 1939, after Germany had gained Saarland and annexed Sudetenland and subsequently all of Austria, stretched as far as East Prussia on the border with Lithuania — had now shrunk to the potent core that the victorious powers divided among themselves. A yeast dough that could no longer rise, that from now on had to be content with what was left of the burned cake. An area between the North Sea in the West and the Oder River in the East: so little room for such a mighty people. Eighty million people who had to learn their lesson. Several different generations who had to grasp in school, in geography lessons, that this was it, once and for all. No more urge for expansion; all outward movement in terms of territory was at an end. Hitler’s last feint had not been credible even for a second: his attempt to present himself as a protector against the oncoming inundation of Bolshevism, the core of his morale-boosting speeches — his view that Mein Kampf was only the expression of a “final argument about the reorganization of Europe.” The survivors of his adventure were left with only one option: to turn back into a smaller space, to turn within, to find diligence and modesty. In this, the Germans were well-practiced: fantasists, born dreamers, for whom, once they had repressed their national feelings of guilt, only the worship of silence remained. The silence after the final bell tolls. “It reaches out even to those who were sacrificed before their time through two world wars,” said Heidegger. What this really meant was silence about one’s own memory of the dead that tried to pass over the millions of deaths of others in silence, too. A new nation was thus born, a divided one, lifted from the cracked baptismal font by the victorious powers — with the Marshall Plan affiliation with the West on the one side, and on the other side integration into the Eastern bloc under the control of the Soviet Union — forty years of decreed division. Yet after this Cold-War-limbo between the former
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