Reparations

I recently finished reading a book called The Good German by Joseph Kanon in my history class. The novel is set in Berlin during the summer of 1945, right after the war in Europe had ended. It follows an American journalist named Jake Geismar who travels back to Berlin after working there before the war to look for a married woman he was in love with, but he soon gets caught up in an international murder mystery. But more interesting than the plot, for me, was the tough questions the book raised about what kinds of reparations there should be for the Germans who were part of the Nazi machine during the war. 


What should happen to a Jewish woman named Renate who worked for the Nazis as a greifer, someone who spotted Jews, her own people, living in Berlin and informed on them to SS officers, who would then take these Jews away to work, starve, and die in concentration camps? But what if this woman's elderly mother was threatened with being sent to camps, and by working for the Nazis, this woman would be able to save her mother and feed her infant son with the payment she received from the Nazis? Renate says, "You would do anything for a child..." 


What about a talented German scientist named Emil who worked under the Nazis designing rockets, but was also put to work figuring out things like the bare minimum number of calories (1100, it turns out) Jewish prisoners in work camps needed to be productive and avoid starvation for a few months? Should he and the dozens of other brilliant scientists living and working in Germany during that era have been prosecuted and locked away for the rest of their lives? Or should they have come to America or Russia to work on the space programs of these two emerging global powers? It would be a shame to let minds like that go to waste...


At one point, Jake says to Emil, "Everybody in Germany has an explanation. And no answer."
"To what?" replies Emil. 
"Eleven hundred calories a day. Another number."
"And you think I did that?" 
"No, you just did the numbers." 


Was Emil simply a tool of the Germans, following orders because he had to work to feed his family? Or was he consciously contributing to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent people? Did he have a choice? 


Even though a retired German police officer named Gunther Behn says, of the Nazis, "I worked for them too. We all did," Kanon does provide a model for a good German. He comes in the form of Emil's father, Professor Brandt, who was also a mathematician who worked at the same institute as Emil. The Professor says that when the Nazis started systematically firing Jews who worked at the institute, he resigned in protest, and refused to work for the Nazis throughout the war. Kanon suggests that the best thing to do was separate entirely from the Party, and refuse to work for this machine, even if they might just replace you with someone else to do your task. 


Another frustrating and saddening aspect to Berlin in 1945 was the fact that there were so many people who were guilty of war crimes, but so little manpower behind the effort of prosecuting them and bringing them to justice. In addition, both the Russians and the Americans were competing with one another to bring these German scientists back to their own respective space programs. Because of the sheer magnitude of what happened to the Jews--the enormity of the crime--it seemed as if the entire country was responsible, and it was overwhelming to think of bringing everyone to justice. Kanon, narrating, says "If you made the crime big enough, nobody did it." 


Ultimately, in The Good German, Kanon stays true to his spy/mystery/thriller roots, and provides a fast-paced action adventure. But more importantly, he challenges us to make the tough decisions and be the prosecutor of these Germans we meet in the novel. In one chilling, and telling statement that stuck with me throughout the book (as it was near the beginning), Kanon, sweeping over the ruined, destroyed landscape of Berlin, states meditatively: "This is what happens when one man overreaches himself."