The Unremarked Days

The previous chapter ended with the claim that countries that have lost themselves can find their way back. I want to spend this chapter making good on that claim, because the claim, by itself and without specification, is one of the easier consolations to offer and one of the harder ones to substantiate.

The history of countries that have undergone the kind of substrate damage described in the last chapter is, in most cases, the history of countries that have not, in any meaningful sense, found their way back. They have continued. They have, sometimes, adjusted. They have, sometimes, told themselves new stories about what had happened to them. Mostly they have not done the work that would have constituted finding their way back, and they have lived ever since inside the long consequences of not-finding. This is true of my mother land Sri Lanka and it is equally true of Australia - the land that made me more than I imagined I could be. The claim that recovery is possible is true, but the claim that recovery is common is not.

I want to take, in this chapter, the case that has been studied most closely by serious people, the case in which the recovery, while incomplete, has been the most thoroughgoing on the world-historical scale, and the case from which we can draw the most about what the work of recovery actually requires. The case is the recovery of West Germany after the war that ended in 1945, and the longer recovery of the unified Germany after 1990. I am going to be careful with the case, because the case is sometimes told in a way that flatters the people who tell it — as if the Germans, having seen what they had done, simply decided to be a different kind of people, and then suddenly became one. The actual recovery was not like this. The actual recovery was costly, uneven, partial, contested at every stage, and is in important ways not yet complete eighty years after it began. It was nevertheless real, and it produced, by the work of two generations, a country that bears recognisable continuities with the country that preceded its destruction while also having become, in important respects, a different country than it had been. It is the best worked case we have of the patterns this chapter is about, and I want to make sure I walk you through it slowly.

There are, I think, five requirements that any recovery of a substrate at this scale has had to meet, and that, in their interaction, are what made the German recovery possible. Each of them was met partially in the German case, and the partiality is part of what is honest to say about it. Some of what was not met has had consequences that the country is still living inside. But the five together describe, as well as anything I have read, what recovery has had to involve where it has happened. I want to take them in turn.

The first requirement is that there be something left of the substrate that has not been destroyed. A country whose entire formation has been corrupted has no platform from which the recovery could be conducted. The recovery has to be built by some part of the country that has retained, through whatever protection, enough of its older formation to be capable of the work. In the German case, there were several such reservoirs. There was the part of the church — small, harassed, and partly compromised, but real — that had maintained, through the regime years, a witness to what the regime had been doing. There were the families, in many parts of the country, that had taught their children in private a different account of what was happening than the account being taught in the schools and broadcast on the radio. There were the émigré scholars and writers and artists who had been driven out of the country and who, after the war, were available to return, or to be brought back into the country's intellectual life by remote contact. There were the older traditions of German thought and law and culture that the regime had distorted but had not, in twelve years, succeeded in obliterating, and that survived in the formation of older people who had grown up before the regime and could draw on what they remembered. The recovery, when it began, drew on all of these. Without any of them, the recovery could not have begun at all.

This is the first sober point to register about recovery. It depends on what has not been destroyed. A country that has succeeded in destroying its own reservoirs more completely has, by the very thoroughness of the destruction, made the work of recovery harder. There are some countries whose substrate damage has gone so deep that the materials for the work of recovery no longer exist within the country itself, and the recovery, if it happens at all, has had to be built out of materials brought back from outside or constructed largely from scratch over a much longer time. The German reservoirs, in 1945, were small but real, and the smallness of them was part of what made the early recovery uncertain at every step.

The second requirement is that the work of recovery be carried out across multiple generations, deliberately, with full understanding that the work cannot be completed in any one generation. The work the first generation of the recovery does is necessarily different from the work the second generation can do, and the work the third does is different again. The first generation includes the people who themselves carried out the actions that need to be repented of, alongside those who were too young to have participated but who grew up among the participants. The first generation's work is the work of beginning — of building the new institutions, of holding the trials, of writing the new constitution, of starting the construction of the public account of what had happened. It cannot be the work of full reckoning, because too many of the people doing the work were themselves participants, and a full reckoning would have required the destruction of the institutions the recovery was trying to build. The first generation does what it can do. It does enough to make the second generation's work possible.

The second generation is the generation that confronts the first generation with the fact of its participation, and that demands the fuller reckoning the first generation could not undertake. The third generation inherits the partial settlement the first two have produced and either deepens it or allows it to erode. In the German case, the second generation, born after the war, came of age around 1968 and conducted, in their relations with their parents and in their public political work, the confrontation that the first generation had been unable to conduct with itself. The third generation has done the longer work of constructing the public memorial culture, the educational programmes, the legal and institutional infrastructure, that have made the inheritance of the period part of what every German child encounters as part of becoming an adult German.

This generational structure is not unique to the German case. It is, I think, structural to any recovery that has reached the scale of changing what kind of country a country is. Recovery cannot be done in a generation, because the first generation is too compromised and the second has not yet had the time. The work has to be designed with the understanding that the people doing it are working on something whose completion they will not see, and that the value of their work depends on the second generation's willingness to take it further, and on the third generation's willingness to consolidate what the second generation produced. The Germans, in the early years, understood this with varying degrees of clarity. The architects of the Federal Republic, several of whom had been imprisoned by the regime and several of whom had been in exile, were under no illusion that the work they were beginning could be finished in their lifetimes. They were trying to lay foundations that the next generations could build on.

The third requirement is that the public reckoning with what had been done be insisted on by enough people in enough places, that the alternative — the quiet burial of the past — could not become the path of least resistance. This is perhaps the requirement on which the German case differs most strikingly from the cases of other countries that have undergone substrate damage. In many other cases, the temptation to bury the past has prevailed. The country has chosen, in effect, to remember what was convenient to remember and to allow the rest to fade. The result has been that the substrate-conditions that produced the damage have been allowed to persist, lightly disguised, and the country has remained vulnerable to their reactivation. In the German case, the temptation to bury was present, and in the early years it largely prevailed. The West German state of the 1950s reabsorbed many former regime officials into its civil service and its judiciary, and the public conversation about what had been done was muted. What broke the burial was the work of the second generation, who refused, with great public energy, to allow the silence to settle. The work of insisting that what had been done be remembered, and that the people who had done it be named, and that the country's official institutions be held to a standard of acknowledgement that the country had previously evaded, was carried out across the subsequent decades. That dogged persistence is what produced, by the 1980s, a public culture in which the period of the regime was finally being confronted.

The forms this took were various. There were the trials of regime officials, which continued long after the initial postwar trials and which kept the question alive in the public conversation. Then there were the historical investigations, including the major historians' debate of the 1980s, which contested how the period should be understood and which forced a sharper articulation of what had happened than the earlier euphemisms had permitted. There were also the memorial sites, built at the locations of the camps and elsewhere, which made the geography of what had been done part of the country's visible landscape. The construction of a public memorial culture was slow but decisively inspired. For example, small brass plaques were set into the pavements of many German cities marking the homes from which Jewish residents had been taken, which made the period unavoidable in daily life rather than something one had to visit a museum to remember. Most consequentially, there were the educational reforms, which made the period a central subject of secondary education and which required every German student to confront, in the course of their formation, what the country had done. None of this happened automatically. All of it happened because particular people insisted on it, against resistance, across decades.

The fourth requirement is the deliberate construction of institutions designed to make the old patterns harder to reactivate. The German Federal Republic, in its founding, was constructed with this requirement explicitly in mind. The constitution, the Basic Law, was written in deliberate opposition to the weaknesses of the previous constitution that had allowed the regime to come to power. Certain rights were declared inviolable. Certain political parties were structurally constrained. The federal structure was designed to disperse power. The judiciary was given strong protections of independence. The educational system was reorganised. The country was integrated into the new European institutions in ways that bound it to other countries and made certain kinds of unilateral action structurally harder. None of these were guarantees of course, because institutions can be eroded over time, and the German institutions, like all institutions, have been under continuous pressure since their founding. But they were designed in awareness of the specific failure that had to be guarded against, and the design has held, with adjustments, for what is now nearly eighty years. The longevity is not accidental, but the product of careful institutional construction, carried out by people who understood very clearly and broadly, what they were trying to prevent.

The fifth requirement is the patience to allow the work to be incomplete. This is, in some ways, the hardest requirement, because it requires the people doing the work to accept that what they are doing will not produce, in any visible time, the result they would most want to see. The result they would most want to see is a country in which the substrate-conditions of the damaged period have been fully eliminated and the country is, in the deepest sense, a different country than the country that produced the damage. This result is not attainable. What is attainable is a country in which the substrate-conditions of the damaged period have been partially counteracted, and in which the work of counteracting them has to be continued by each generation, because the conditions can return if the work is allowed to lapse. The work is not the building of something that, once built, will stand on its own. The work is the maintenance of a counter-pressure against tendencies that the country's history has shown to be present in it, and the counter-pressure has to be sustained.

The German case has shown, in recent years, why this fifth requirement is what it is. After several decades in which the work appeared to be going well, the rise of new political movements with rhetoric and dispositions that echo, in certain registers, the rhetoric and dispositions of the earlier period has demonstrated that the substrate-conditions had not been eliminated, but only counteracted. The counter-pressure was holding them down. As the generations who had done the heaviest work of the counter-pressure have begun to die, and as the immediate memory of the period has begun to recede into history rather than into living experience, some of what was held down has begun to come up again. This is not a refutation of the recovery, but a demonstration of what the recovery was. The recovery was the construction of a counterpressure, and the counter-pressure has to be maintained, by each generation, against what would otherwise re-emerge. The work is permanent, because no generation is permanent and therefore it must be reconstructed and reinforced for and by each generation that follows.

I want to take from the German case, as I close this chapter, what I think is most generalisable to other cases of substrate damage and recovery. Recovery has, where it has happened, required that there be something left of the older substrate to build on and that the work be done across multiple generations with full understanding that no single generation can finish it. The public reckoning must be insisted on against the temptation to bury, and institutions need to be constructed in deliberate awareness of the specific failure to be guarded against. And finally, the people doing the work must be willing to accept that what they are doing is the maintenance of a garden rather than the construction of fort. Where these conditions have been met, recovery has been possible. Where they have not, recovery has not happened, and the country has lived ever since inside the long consequences of the substrate damage it did not undertake to address.

There are other cases we could have explored. The work of post-Franco Spain, post-apartheid South Africa, post-junta Argentina, post-civil-war Sri Lanka, post-civil-rights United States, each offer a case of attempted recovery from substrate damage. Each of them shows the operation of the five requirements in different proportions, and each of them is, like the German case, incomplete. Some of them have been more incomplete than the German case; some have failed in ways the German case has not failed; some have succeeded in ways the German case has not yet succeeded. The variability of the outcomes is itself instructive.

The important lesson to internalise is that recovery is never automatic. It is what some of these countries have, with varying degrees of success, attempted, with or without the understanding that attempting is the work. The work's success or failure depends on whether and how well the five requirements are met.

I want to ask you, in closing, the question this chapter has been preparing. The country that has formed you, whichever country it is, has at some point in its history undergone substrate damage of one kind or another. The damage may have been the long damage of a colonial period; it may have been the damage of a civil war whose effects have not been fully addressed; it may have been the damage of a particular regime, now ended, whose substrate-conditions persist; it may be the damage now being inflicted, in real time, by the conditions described in the previous chapter. The country may, or may not have, undertaken the work of recovery.

If it has, the five requirements would have been met to varying degrees. If it has not, they have not been met, or have been met only in token form. You know enough about your own country to make this assessment honestly. You also know enough to identify, within your country, the people and the institutions that have been doing the work of recovery where it has been done, and the people and the institutions that have been resisting it.

The question for you is whether you are in a position to be part of the work, in whatever way is open to you given who you are and where you are placed. The work has many positions; it is not only the work of those at the centre of public life. The teacher, by teaching the country's history honestly, can do the work. The journalist, by insisting on naming what is being done, can do the work. The parent, by raising children with awareness of what the country has actually done, can do the work. The friend, by insisting, against the social pressure of the moment, on saying what the moment's mood is forbidding, can do the work. These are all positions in the long work of a country finding its way back. You are in some of them already, if you are doing the small daily things this book has been describing. You may be in a position to do more. The next chapter is about the work you can do in the smaller institutions you actually have access to, which is, in the end, the level at which the recovery of any country is carried out.