Examining Germany's Past
Books Received

Examining Germany's Past

While watching television on my most recent trip to Germany last spring, I saw something remarkable: a segment on a humorous week-in-review show featured a politically correct Berlin motorcycle club that had made a weekend pilgrimage to Auschwitz. The cyclists tooled through the main gates under the "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes You Free) sign, engines roaring, deposited wreaths at a nearby memorial site, and returned, satisfied, to Berlin. "Concentration camps, labor camps, nuclear power plants-we want all our outings to have that anti-fascist touch," said one group member. "Next we're looking into retracing the routes of death marches." Like everything on the show, the vignette was presented without commentary, encouraging viewers to find the humor for themselves. The implicit question here was: "Did these guys get it right? If chopper parades to Auschwitz are not it, then what is the best way for us to deal with our past?"
The surprise here is that after decades of denial, someone is asking this question in public. Indeed, times have changed in Germany. In the half-decade since reunification, Germans have begun to ask themselves in much more open and constructive ways how they should take ownership of their murderous past.
In his important book, Marc Fisher '80 has chronicled the transformation of German society both through unification and the gradual but noticeable shrinking of the taboos against discussing the past. Fisher, who covered Germany for the Washington Post from 1989 to 1993, is as intrepid as any reporter could possibly be, taking us from the office of the chancellor into the graffiti-covered bathroom of an East Berlin high school. Some of the most fascinating-and chilling-reporting comes from Fisher's interviews with neo-Nazis and their families.
The result is the consummate "reporter's book." Unlike scholars, Fisher barely departs from the second half of the 20th century in attempting to explain modern Germany's often baffling behavioral and social norms and its attitudes toward the past. Although this approach is entertaining for a reader not already familiar with the German scene, it has its limitations as well.
Fisher wisely chooses to view Germany through what he calls "The Gap," the fundamental discord between the way outsiders view Germans and the way Germans view themselves. Many of them have swept the Holocaust, the question of who started World War II, and how much they supported Hitler under a blanket of euphemistic phrases such as "in those times," "our difficult past," and "Of course, we have our special heritage."
Perhaps not surprisingly for a people with a penchant for soliciting comments about themselves from outsiders, Germans have devoured Fisher's book. So far, opinion is divided. Some reject the book as biased and superficial. Others praise its well-placed jabs at some of Germans' own dissatisfactions about their country. The dichotomy somehow seems fitting for a country whose message to the outside world vacillates between "Tell me who I am" and "You'll never understand."
Near the end of the book, Fisher renders with grace and precision the scene he witnesses in the early 1990s in a Polish town, most of whose Jews were killed by the Nazis. A group of Germans returns as volunteers to clean up the cemetery and meet with the region's few remaining Jews. The encounter between the guilty Germans and the grizzled survivors produces little but a sense of how deep the gulf still is even 50 years later. It's a good thing that there were no Holocaust survivors at Auschwitz the day the German motorcycle club rolled in-what could they possibly have said to each other?
-Steven Dickman '84
Steven Dickman, a freelance writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the correspondent in Germany for the British journal Nature from 1987 to 1991.

Grips, Shots, Strokes, and Strategy

Squash, like lacrosse, is one of those odd, preppy games that until fairly recently one associated with private secondary schools and universities in the Northeast. Princeton (along with Harvard, Yale, and Penn) has long been a center of squash in this country, producing a disproportionate share of world-class players. So not surprisingly, Smart Squash: How to Win at Soft Ball draws on a host of experts associated with Princeton, including coaches Bob Callahan, Betty Constable, and Emily Goodfellow '76; and professionals Demer Holleran '89, John Nimick '81, and Frank Satterthwaite '65.
In a brief history of the game, author Austin M. Francis '56 traces the divergence of the two principal kinds of squash: the soft-ball game, which evolved in Britain and its colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the hard-ball game, which took hold in the United States a century ago. In the last five years Americans have at last adopted the soft-ball, bringing them in line with the rest of the world and making them more competitive in an international game that proponents are pushing to make an Olympic sport.
Smart Squash focuses on the skills and tactics needed for soft-ball squash, which (in contrast to the hard-ball game) favors finesse over power, is relatively easy for neophytes to learn, and produces longer rallies. Francis writes for both the tyro and the experienced player making the switch from the hard ball, and his instruction covers the gamut from fundamentals of grip, strokes, and shots to the complexities of match play. He discusses off-court preparation for matches, including conditioning and nutrition, and he can't resist a stab at that age-old question "Does sex before play improve your game?" (The jury remains out. A few physicians believe it helps, but Francis quotes a former champion who, based on tests he conducted on himself, advises abstaining for 48 hours before a match.)
Francis's prose is clean and sharp, and the illustrations by Carol Fabricatore and Mike Witte '66 nicely encapsulate much of his practical advice.
-J. I. Merritt '66

Books Received

In a Dark Wood: The Fight
Over Forests and the Rising
Tyranny of Ecology
Alston Chase *67
Houghton Mifflin, $29.95

Biology Takes Form: Animal
Morphology and the German
Universities, 1800-1900
Lynn K. Nyhart '79
University of Chicago Press,
$75 cloth, $27.50 paper

Future Libraries
Carla Hesse *86 and
R. Howard Bloch, eds.
University of California Press,
$40 cloth, $16 paper

Strategies of Deviance: Studies
in Gay Male Representation
Earl Jackson, Jr. *87
Indiana University Press,
$39.95 cloth, $15.95 paper

Multilateral Export Controls and International Regime Theory: The Effectiveness of COCOM
Eric H. Noehrenberg '88
Orders to Dr. Otto Bretzinger, Managing Director, Pro Universitate Verlag, Am Tiefenweg 11, D-76547 Sinzheim, Germany. $57.31 paper.

Developing International Software For Windows® 95 and Windows NTTM: A Handbook for International
Software Design
Nadine Kano '89
Microsoft Press, $35 paper

The Limits of Lockean
Rights in Property
Gopal Sreenivasan (philosophy professor)
Oxford University Press, $29.95