Golo Mann: Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts

The world is a complex place. It is impossible to understand its present to any degree of completeness, still less to predict its future. Yet people must live in the present and make choices that end up determining which of the infinitely many possible futures will actually unfold.

History, the account of events and choices which happened before now, and how they influenced the subsequent times and eventually the present, may be a helpful but not dependable guide, as it needs to be rewritten in the light of which past choices actually turned out to be significant and which did not. In this sense, not only does the past determine the future, but also the future determines the past.

It is with this mindset that I read Golo Mann's German history of the 19th and 20th century. One cannot even begin to comprehend the present world and Europe without understanding Germany and its history, even though Germany at least for the time being has ceased to make history in the same sense it did for some 80 years after its unification.

I read the book in the original language; I don't think it has been translated in English. The author is a member of the talented but troubled Mann family: born in 1909, he was the third son of Thomas Mann. His siblings Klaus, Erika and Monika were also known authors, as was his uncle Heinrich. The book was first published in 1958 and became highly successful. The expanded version which I read was published in 1966, including a new chapter of post-WWII Germany up to the then present time. Golo Mann lived to see the reunification of Germany; he died in 1994.

The heritage of the author led me to expect a history written in beautiful, polished, and expressive German, which indeed turned out to be the case. I do not think it could be satisfactorily translated: its distanced, melancholy tone is not easily expressed in any other language.

Even if translated, I am unsure if, say, British readers would appreciate Golo Mann's historiography. Not only it is written from German viewpoint for German-speaking audience; also the meditative style that does not attempt to give easy explanations or clear answers might not be to the liking of readers who prefer to stick to the facts. For Golo Mann, factual happenings are just the overgrowth of history, unfolding as the chance result of multiple and mostly unknown undercurrents, some of which may make themselves visible in, say, culture and art. Still, he is no Marxist: it is people, their minds, and the choices that their minds make them to do, that make history happen.

Of course, German history of the period covered - roughly from the end of Napoleon wars in 1815 to the end of Adenauer regime in early 1960's - is in many ways a tragedy, bearing the question: where did it all go wrong? could it have been otherwise? At some critical points, Mann indeed stops to investigate these questions - but generally gives no answers. Yes, things might very well have gone otherwise - Bismarck's Germany might have lost to Austria in the decisive battle of the 1866 war (it was a close call), and subsequent events would have unfolded differently. How differently? Ich weiss nicht, writes Mann simply.

At the start of the book, Germany and the German nation (like everybody else) had been thoroughly shaken by the great events launched by the French revolution, including the dissolving of the Holy Roman Empire and the rearrangement of its myriad little constituent parts. Things were set in motion towards a future where the German nation would presumably organise itself in a state similar to France or England.

Yet this did not happen until the 1860's, and it finally happened in a fashion that proved to be disastrous. Bismarck's Reich was a haphazard creation that tried to preserve the privileged position of Prussia, itself not being a nation-state, in a larger national context. While he was himself able to control the forces unleashed by his creation, his successors were not: German Reich turned out to become an unstabilising element in the European system that radiated around itself a web of alliances set to contain its power, eventually leading to the disaster of WWI. Just how total the failure of Bismarck's creation ultimately was is tragically displayed in the fate of the widow of Bismarck's third son, as told by Mann: she committed suicide in the East Prussian family manor in 1945, hours before the Red Army troops reached it.

WWI was desired by nobody (except perhaps by Serbia) and ended in armistice that could not satisfy anyone. The Weimar democracy founded on the smouldering ruins of the Hohenzoller Reich never won the hearts of the nation, and did not stand the shock of the Great Depression. The way was paved for Hitler and his Nazi followers to gain power.

In recounting the following 12 years, also a part of his own memory, Golo Mann's tone becomes even more muted and melancholy. In much of the text, it is as if he can't bear to use Hitler's full name: the text calls him Der wilde Mann or Der Mensch or simply "H.". He reserves the use of "Adolf Hitler" in very few, significant contexts, as if he forces himself to look the monster in the eye and see it for was it really is. This is the case, for instance, when Mann recounts Hitler's last wish for the German nation in March 1945: that it should vanish, having proved itself incapable of fulfilling the destiny he had tried to lead it to.

It is in the Götterdämmerung of 1945 where Golo Mann initially ended his story. It was a logical end; for the Germany that emerged from the ruins was profoundly different from the one(s) that preceded it. Germany was no longer an independent force of world history, but a part of the emerging united Europe, tightly bound with the United States through a web of alliances and economical links.

No one really desired that the post-WWII Germany would become divided in two, least the Russians who would have preferred a unified Germany on which they could have inflicted their influence. Yet the forces that Hitler expected to throw his enemies at each other's throats, and allow his regime a miracle recovery at last moment, ripped the country asunder, giving birth to Adenauer's Bundesrepublik strongly oriented to the West, and eventually becoming with France the cornerstone of the EEC; and to its unhappy mirror image, the DDR, lacking any real cause of existence except its sibling.

Mann ended his expanded book at a point of time where no real possibility of reunification of the two could be foreseen. That world, as we know, is now already history: forces not anticipated in the book eventually led to its collapse, and the emergence of a new Europe where Germany again undisputedly is the strongest country.

I often wonder what Adolf Hitler would think if he were to raise from ashes and peek into the present map of Europe, with states such as Belorussia and Ukraine on it, and most of Eastern Europe countries belonging to a European Union with Germany at centre. He might wonder whether his suicide decision was too hasty: while Germany's boundaries would tell him that the great war was indeed lost, the rest of the map suggests that Patton did not stop on Oder, but continued all the way to Moscow as indeed he would have loved to do. Be that as it may, I think that the present state of matters only shows how strong the underlying processes of history really are. Even two lost world wars could not stop Germany becoming what it was destined to be: the leading European country, and the only true match to Russia.

On the last pages of his book, Golo Mann expresses his thoughts about possible futures. Shocking and sad as the divided state of Germany must have been for him, he dreaded the thought of reunification. What if the whole bloody movie would be rewound and replayed again, after the re-emergence of a unified German nation-state?

Fortunately, though, the unified German Federal Republic today is a successor of Adenauer's creation and as such discontinuous to Bismarck's or Hitler's Reich. It has little incentive to making world history again, having actually won the Cold War, and still having a lot to do to fully exploit its loot. Bismarck thought that his Reich had filled the appetite of Prussia; but he was proved wrong. The present Germany presumably has its stomach full. Or does it? History won't stop, and forces not presently understood are in effect, making future happen before our eyes.