European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - March 11, 1990, Darmstadt, Hesse                                A crowds Greet West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl during his Campaign swing through Magdeburg on behalf of the East German a Dalliance for Germany party that is entering candidates in the March 18 election. Bonn torn by unification by Craig a Whitney new York times in the turbulent debate about German unification West Germany s intellectuals reflect a National mood of confusion a a troubled mix of anticipation anxiety and resentment. What Many of them resent is not Only that the rest of the world has reservations about the Prospect of one Germany again after 45 years of partition. They Are irritated by the undertone the suggestion that there Are still doubts even after so Long about the depth and permanence of the West German commitment to peace and democracy. A United Gorman nation feeling misunderstood and brooding with resentment about the outside world As it did under the Weimar Republic would indeed be a repetition of history that none of its neighbors want. But there Are internal causes for the confusion As Well a divisions Between West German generations and Between the intellectual traditions of the two Germany. The difficulties Are evident from the writings and comments of leading opinion makers in West Germany. One of the key factors is the distance that West germans too Young to have experienced or borne debate responsibility for the nazi crimes feel toward the horrors of Auschwitz the holocaust and world War ii. Few of those under 50 still fee the anguish that Gunter grass at 62 probably West Germany a Best known writer Felt in 1945 As a youth of 17, when american soldiers showed him photographs of the piles of spectacles shorn hair and corpses of the victims of Auschwitz. His first reaction he recently recalled in a lecture at Goethe University in Frankfurt was that it  have happened that germans could t have done this. Later he said he knew that Auschwitz could never be forgiven never be overcome a germans would Bear it like a Brand until the end of history. Auschwitz could not have happened then without a United Germany he argued and so Auschwitz forbids German unification now. Grass thesis is part of the intellectual debate though few West German leaders agree that unification led to Auschwitz indeed some younger writers resent this equation which they believe is an unstated premise of much of the foreign criticism As a personal insult. Many Young germans refuse to accept that they have been  Michael Naumann 48, the head of the Rowohlt Verag publishing House in Hamburg for example said that during a business trip to new York last month he it a found As he put it that Quot they think we re about to it reopen the concentration  Naumann who fled communism with his part jewish Mother from Kothen in East Germany when he was 12 in 1953, resented this suggestion from american acquaintances. Quot what you Are saying is that you Michael Are just like your father s generation Quot he said. West Germany a intellectual tradition unlike East Germany a did not pretend that nobody alive in West Germany after 1945 had had anything to do with the crimes that had taken place before. Many West German journalists and writers like their politicians and bureaucrats did not come pure from emigration like Thomas Mann or Willy Brandt but had tainted pasts As servants of the nazi regime a something that has been out raging left Wing West German intellectuals for 40 years. By its very nature the ambiguity a and the Federal Republic s commitment to democracy and the european Community a kept the question of responsibility in the air in West Germany. Indeed attempts to explain How the same people who had been such Good citizens of Europe since 1945 spat on All its values before then and nearly wrecked it forever were a Central theme of the first West German postwar books about Hitler. The author of one of the first of these Joachim c fest now 62 and a co publisher of the daily Frankfurter All Gemeiner Zeitung is one of those who Welcome unification now As the Victory of an open German society Over a closed one. But even Many West German intellectuals Are not sure of How to integrate the East German intellectual tradition into their own. For in the German democratic Republic As Monika Maron 48, a writer from that country wrote recently the official attitude was that the War crimes were the product of German imperialism. That did not exist on the soil of the first Quot socialist state in German history and therefore East germans were taught to feel no responsibility for it communist ideology May have been idealistic in the Early postwar Days when leftist writers like Bertol Brecht found their Way Back from exile to what was to become East Berlin. But by the mid-1950s, it was totalitarian and stalinist and until last fall East German intellectuals who questioned the official line there were either silenced imprisoned or expelled. Maron forbidden to publish in East Germany for 10 years was allowed to leave two years ago for Hamburg with her husband and her son. It is natural perhaps that she welcomes unification As a kind of liberation. But Many others in East and West say they would prefer liberalization in an East German state that remained economically and politically separate from West Germany in a Loose confederation that nobody seems quite Able to define. Unification most West German intellectuals prefer that word to Quot reunification Quot which they say implies a return to the prewar German state could indeed bring a repetition of history Naumann and fest both said though not the one the rest of the world fears. The communists who ran and repressed East Germany they said would have to be dec immunized in a process probably just As fallible and Ridden with compromises As Denali fiction was after the War. In Many conversations these Days German intellectuals deplore the political debate in Bonn about whether to recognize the East German Border with Poland As providing ammunition for those who fear Thal unification will revive German expansionism in the East. The debate is a typically German preoccupation with an abstraction that has almost nothing to do with reality most of them Felt. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was playing Domestic politics with the question of whether in Legal theory tha prewar German Reich somehow still existed thus preventing anything Short of a reunited Germany from finally renouncing Silesia and Pomerania and East Prussia and the sudetenland 45 years after they were lost forever along with the War itself. The real problems of reunification some thinkers believe will come from the effects of nearly half a Century of division across not just a Wall but a world. West germans have always Felt somewhat guilty about the deprivations and sufferings of their Brothers and Sisters in the East. Now they feel guilty even w e they ask How much unification is going to Cost them. Page 14 a a a the stars and stripes sunday