Dear Enemy: Germany Then and Now

Dear Enemy: Germany Then and Now James Bacque and Richard Matthias Muller Fenn Publishing Company Ltd, 2000 It is rare in life, and just as rare in books: a sustained conversation - articulate, sensitive, insightful, adult, caring, and carried on with never-failing courtesy, affection and mutual respect. Such a conversation as the one here, conducted in correspondence over a four-- year period and reduced to letters that occupy not quite 200 pages, offers the reader one of life's truly luminescent moments, not unlike hearing Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony or Bruchs' Violin Concerto for the first time. know of no book that matches Dear Enemy as an exchange of pure intelligence, delightfully expressed. To the qualities just mentioned must be added those of honesty and good will. It may be that intellectual honesty is a rare alpine flower during any period of history; but in our politically correct time, during which an intellectual incubus lies so heavily over us, it is rarer still. That perhaps more than anything else is what makes this book so compelling. James Bacque is a Canadian scholar who very much believed in the Allied cause in World War II, which was being waged just as he grew out of his infancy. Even now, many years later, he says, I want, desperately need, our Victory to mean and to have meant something. What? To save Europe, suppose, to bring to life democracy, freedom, civility, truth.... Certainly it was this passionate conviction that moved millions on the Allied side. His inquiries led him, however, to a ghastly discovery: that those ideals had been mocked and shamed by Allied conduct during and after the war. Curtained off from reality by heavy layers of silence, few people in the United States and the other allied countries know of the atrocities committed in their name. Not as an expression of alienation against a civilization whose best ideals he embraces, but as an honest man's reaffirmation of those ideals, Bacque wound up writing Other Losses about the death of 700,000 German prisoners of war while they were in American hands, and Crimes and Mercies (reviewed in the spring 2000 issue of this journal) about the fate of German civilians under Allied occupation between 1944 and 1950. Richard Matthias Muller brings equal idealism and intelligence to the conversation, but from across a great divide. A slightly older man than Bacque, he had been old enough to belong to the Hitler Youth and then to have been a Nazi and a soldier in the Wehrmacht. At the end of World War II, he was one of the prisoners in the American camp at Remagen, which is one of the camps that Bacque wrote about and where Miller was almost starved to death. Since the war, he too has been a scholar, and is author of On Germany (1965) and Normal-- Null (in which he expresses a theory of moral expectation). His perspective is by no means pro-Nazi, but he does lend some insight into the thoughts and feelings of Germans before and during the war. The two men met through a friend in 1991 and began a correspondence, opening vast and verboten topics that reflected their very different perspectives. It wasn't long before they saw that the correspondence was so substantive that it should be made into a book. Needless to say, the very occurrence of a humane correspondence between these two former enemies, who once hated each other as their societies fought each other to the death, has at its heart a premise that is bound to receive increasing acceptance as more and more time passes, but that today, even 55 years after the end of the war, is ahead of the curve so far as many people's sensibilities are concerned. …

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