What India can learn from Germany

That country has been able to integrate different strands into a single flowing stream

It was surprising to see a massive menorah — the seven-branched Jewish candelabra — in the austerely beautiful 11th century Romanesque cathedral of St Kilian in Wurzburg, for the Bavarian church is a Roman Catholic place of worship. Our German tour guide’s explanation was a greater surprise. “Christ was a Jew until he was crucified,” Markus explained. “We must show respect to Judaism.”

Germany has changed since I first came here in 1960. It has come to terms with its past. The transformation is particularly appealing to a modern Indian, who is painfully aware of how the integrating process is now being undone. Our problems would be so much simpler if we came to grips with the full implications of Direct Action Day in 1946, acknowledged the forces behind Nathuram Godse’s murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and admitted the social and political passions that impelled the destruction of the Babri Masjid.

On my first visit to Germany 57 years ago no one spoke of the Holocaust in which six million Jews perished. The World War II had ended 15 years earlier but so raw were its wounds that it was barely mentioned. Memory escaped in flashes of bitterness. Sitting in the garden of his villa, an elderly landowner apologised for the quality of the wine he offered me because British and American officers had drained his best vintages when they were billeted in the house. Someone else mentioned three very special cranes Germany possessed, which could then be seen in London, New York and Marseilles.

A number of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries had been desecrated just before my visit, and I was interested in the social context. A neo-Nazi political party was also beginning to emerge. I told my escort, a one-armed ex-major in the German army, of my interest, and he took me to see a rabbi — possibly the only one left — in Hamburg. “The Jewish story in Germany is over,” the rabbi said mournfully. “Go to Israel if you want to learn of the Jews.”

He and my guide exploded in a furious argument in German of which I didn’t understand anything except that I caught the word “Buchenwald” every so often. Suddenly the rabbi turned to me and burst out in English: “Your friend’s home was barely two miles from Buchenwald. More than 56,000 Jews were killed there. Yet this army officer says he had never heard of a concentration camp — any concentration camp — until he read Allied literature after the war! That’s the German nation for you.”

No longer. Cruising slowly along the Danube, Rhine and Main rivers, they point out synagogues that were converted into Catholic churches, the site of ghettoes, Jewish cemeteries always outside a city’s medieval walls, and in Miltenberg, “Pearl of the Main”, the mikwe or baths in the cellar where Jews cleansed themselves ritually before attending a religious service. Miltenberg’s synagogue was ransacked, and young Nazis pelted the rabbi with his own sacred books.

Wurzburg, 120 kilometres south-east of Frankfurt and capital of Lower Franconia in Bavaria, is no exception. With its menorah in the cathedral and Shalom Europa museum built around a thousand old Jewish graves in the old city, it represents the new Germany that is honest enough and confident enough to talk freely of a past that is no longer shameful for it is no longer a secret. 

We went ashore at Nuremberg too, site of Nazi mass rallies and later of the war crimes trials, to see the huge stadium where rent-a-crowd fervour, massed spotlights lighting up the sky and Wagner’s sonorous strains combined to create Hitlerian magic. Today’s Germans don’t mince words about the theatrics.

It’s mandatory now to teach children about Nazi atrocities and Jewish suffering. They have to visit concentration camps and Jewish memorials and museums. A recent proposal to exclude Muslim children from this exposure has been strongly criticised. It’s right that all Germans should be able to face the future with a full knowledge and understanding of the country’s past.

Foreigners often express surprise at how wondrously Indians naturally internalised the Mughals, Lodhis and other dynasties from abroad. It’s our instinct. As P V Narasimha Rao said in Singapore, we absorbed all conquerors except the last. But some of that unifying work may have been undone in recent times as a narrow and pernicious ideology grappled with instinct. Current history presents dangerously daunting challenges to our healthy self-image. We have much to learn from Germany about integrating different strands into a single flowing stream.