Anniversary Season

Never mind the "Day of Unity"; two other anniversaries have more immediate lessons to teach about terrorism

Most Americans, and for that matter, most Germans probably weren't aware of it, but Sunday was German-American Day. Established in 1987 to mark the 300-plus year anniversary of the first arrival of German immigrants to the North American continent, 13 Mennonite families who would found Germantown, Pennsylvania, it's one of those little diplomatic gestures that usually go pretty much unnoticed, and deservedly so. This year, though, US President Bush used the occasion to utter a few kind words about the German-American friendship in general and Germany's help in tracking down al-Qaeda associates in particular.

That pleasant speech on Saturday was preceded just a few days before by a letter Bush sent to German President Johannes Rau, Bush's first direct contact with a German official on any level since Chancellor Gerhard Schröder fouled the air between the two countries by declaring that Germany would not be participating in a US-led invasion of Iraq (see Laughing Off the Brouhaha).

The occasion for those kind words was the "Day of Unity," the 12th anniversary on Thursday of German reunification, celebrated with a rather bombastic unveiling of the newly restored Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Bill Clinton, with whom, of course, Schröder gets along a lot better than with Bush, was on hand, a symbolic presence, perhaps, of a kinder, gentler America (Bush I's signature phrase) than the one under Bush II.

The last few weeks have been thick with anniversaries. September 5 marked the 30th year since eight Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. USA Today has called the tragedy "the birth of modern-day terrorism" but that anniversary was overshadowed around the world this year by another a week later.

Now here comes October 18, the 25th anniversary of the deaths of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, founding members of the Red Army Faction. One German TV station has already devoted an entire night of special programming to the "German Autumn" of 1977 when the showdown between the RAF and the German government resulted in gruesome deaths on both sides. First-generation RAF member Astrid Proll will be a guest star at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London for its season of RAF-related films and discussions and gives a painful interview in this week's Observer in which she gripes about terrorist chic and remarks that the RAF "took up a concept and followed it through in a very German-determined way."

One of the most common remarks heard from Americans immediately following September 11 last year was that they felt alone in the world, unfairly singled out for irrational hatred and vengeance. Hopefully, with US-German relations warming again, as everyone knew they would have to eventually, the grudge-bearing Bush administration will realize that it's got allies who know a thing or two about terrorism, both from without and from within. And if lessons can be passed on from bungled failures, there's an educational motherlode in 1972 and 1977.

Elsewhere

Not content with lambasting Schröder ("a hard-drinking, cigar-sucking playboy who brags about never reading books"), his supporters ("beer-can-clutching malcontents") and Germany in general as The Angry Adolescent of Europe on the cover of The Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell takes another couple of swings at Berlin and German women in The New York Press.

The current Artforum features a cover story on Kai Althoff and a piece on Adolph Menzel, "an improbable, cross-grained character who might have walked out of one of E.T.A. Hoffmann's eerie tales."

"Our goal was to fit the history of the Holocaust into the context of Western civilization so that people could begin to look at it as part of a larger piece." Suzy Hansen interviews the authors of Holocaust: A History in Salon.

Should We Adore Adorno? asks Charles Rosen in The New York Review of Books.