Mr. Heilbrunn's Planet: On Which the Germans Are Back

Jacob Heilbrunn's account of the rising New Right in Germany reminds you of those prefab tales that America's European detractors like to serve up to the choir back home after a quick sweep through the country ("Germany's New Right," November/ December 1996). Grab a few income statistics purporting to show that the rich are getting richer while the poor, what else, are getting poorer; visit a public school in the Bronx and conclude that nobody can read but everybody packs a piece; turn a pile of garbage into a towering symbol of urban decay; use a panhandler on 42nd and 8th as Exhibit A for America's mounting homeless crisis; finally, add some quotes from a leftish U.S. columnist inveighing against bigotry and injustice, and what do you get? A cheap indictment of the United States that "proves" what readers in your target audience have always "known": the United States is barbaric. Pandering to prejudices, such a piece will cast as much light on America's central realities as a trip to the garbage dump will teach people about a country's museums, colleges, literature, and economic system.

The events and names Heilbrunn uses are part of a tale that just might have had a sliver of reportorial credibility three years ago. But to a reader who knows a bit about Germany, these 19 pages about Rainer Zitelmann, Botho Strauss, or the Historikerstreit now seem like 9,000 words on the 1993 Kentucky Derby. If you are an aficionado, you may still remember a few of the losing horses, but reading about them today as if they were the grandsons of Secretariat leaves you scratching your head.

What does Heilbrunn want us to believe about post-reunification Germany? "A change is taking place in Germany, not at the political but at the intellectual level . . . A profound move to the right has been taking place among Germany's best-known novelists . . . The German new right consists not of skinheads in jackboots but journalists, novelists, professors, and young lawyers . . . Underlying new right positions is a deep hatred of the westernization of Germany under the influence of the United States," and so forth. Naturally, this is perfect fodder for those who will always worry about Germany. Never mind that "Greater Germany," seven years after reunification, remains the Federal Republic writ large: placid, sluggishly centrist even in the face of Depression-level unemployment; embodied in all its normality by the heavy, slightly oafish figure of Helmut Kohl, chancellor since 1982; a state that instead of throwing its weight around keeps insisting on more European integration while walking very softly when it comes to carrying the stick of military power in places like Bosnia. In short, Germany is boring. But since so many suspect it, there must be another, the real, Germany hiding behind this implausibly friendly giant -- a country secretly polishing ye olde jackboots, dreaming of lost glory and new power, and ready to claim its No. 1 position loudly and insistently, with an Erich von Stroheim accent, of course.

SMALL FRY

Enter Heilbrunn. Whom does he trundle out to prove or insinuate the more enticing story? Let us take his favorite in the rogues' gallery of the German neo-right, a certain Herr Rainer Zitelmann. "The German new right," Heilbrunn writes, "does not have a politician like [the rightist Austrian populist] Jîrg Haider. What it has are intellectuals like Rainer Zitelmann of Die Welt, founded by newspaper magnate Axel Springer. Zitelmann is the impresario of the new right."

What Heilbrunn either does not know or fails to tell us is that Mr. Big, which he never was, is strictly yesterday. In 1993, when Heilbrunn apparently conducted, and concluded, much of his research -- you never quite know when the conversations he quotes took place -- Zitelmann might have looked like an "impresario." He was head of Die Welt's weekend culture section, which he purposely and insistently used as a platform for neo-rightist lore -- his own stuff and that of his comrades in the Fatherland-saving business. Too bad for the American reader that Heilbrunn does not bring the story up to date. For, alas, Zitelmann, the master intellectual, proved too much even for the editorial staff of the right-of-center daily. After 50 editors signed a petition against the paper's "slide to the right" under Zitelmann, the "impresario" was dismissed from his editorial position.

In due time, Manfred Geist, the editor in chief who had brought Zitelmann to Die Welt, was also relieved and replaced by a centrist, Thomas Lîffelholz. Heilbrunn's "impresario" of the new right was not fired outright, which is very hard to do under German labor law, but shunted into a staff position; when last heard from, he was apparently selling insurance on the side. So much for the multiplying tentacles of the new right.

Nor does the story end here. Like a metastasizing cancer, Heilbrunn wants us to believe, Zitelmann allegedly used his position in the media business to implant the right authors and their books into Germany's collective consciousness. Before his disastrous move to Die Welt, Zitelmann was an editor at Ullstein Verlag, a sterling name that goes back to the Jewish publishing family of the Weimar Republic. But in another misreading, Heilbrunn calls Ullstein Publishing at the time "mainstream" -- which is correct, if you are willing to call The Washington Times mainstream, too.