EIt was just a tiny, pejorative sentence in a “taz” letter to the editor, but probably quite typical of a certain milieu feeling: “Who would read books by Ralph Giordano?” Should probably mean: Until the end of his life in 2014 as As a guest on political talk shows and as the author of “open letters” in newspapers and magazines, such gifts were probably written on the side. At the same time, the stringency and precision of his sentences, which by no means contented themselves with “I’ll tell you” opinion postulates, testified to the intellectual’s ability to analyze as well as to the writer’s accuracy of language.
Could Giordano’s appearance also have contributed to that sullen, Teutonic misperception? The radiant white hair, even in old age, the famous silk scarf and the discreet Hanseatic tone of voice belonged to a contemporary who in earlier decades would probably have been reviled as a “civilization writer”.
Born on March 20, 1923 in Hamburg to an Italian father and a Jewish German mother, Giordano had to experience even as a schoolboy how a supposedly awakening Germany turned away from all comments of Western civilization and even closed a big-city high school for him and his brother Rocco became a place of exclusion and humiliation. Later, the entire family had to go into hiding and then on May 4, 1945 in Hamburg-Alsterdorf stumbled out of a cellar hole where the rats had already approached the exhausted and almost lifeless people.
Even as an old man, Ralph Giordano never tired of explaining why he, the lifelong critic of reactionary militarism, could of course not be a pacifist either: since the defeat of the Nazis was due solely to the weapons of the anti-Hitler coalition and survival specifically the tanks of the 8th British Army under General Bernard Montgomery (who later became NATO’s Deputy Commander-in-Chief), which had already liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp a few days earlier. In his novel “Die Bertinis”, which was published in 1982 and was enthusiastically received by Heinrich Böll, Ralph Giordano tells this family story, which subsequently lost none of its impact even in its multi-part TV film adaptation.
About the “Second Guilt”
For a long time, Giordano’s enemies and despisers were mainly on the right, from subscribers to the “Soldatenzeitung” to some CDU members. For them, the author of the “Second Guilt”, a brilliant study on the post-war peace in Germany with the Nazi perpetrators, and the documentary filmmaker of “Heia Safari”, a confrontation with German colonial crimes that was broadcast in 1966, was above all a “nest polluter”. When, in the early 1990s, the then federal government did not take a clear position on the xenophobic riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen and the murders in Mölln and Solingen and Ralph Giordano, who had been personally threatened by neo-Nazis, publicly considered arming himself, he was in these circles the outrage great.
Even today, some will remember the debate at that time. It is half forgotten that Giordano, a convinced communist in the first decade after the war, had already settled accounts with Stalinism in 1961 in his book The Party is Always Right – and in doing so mercilessly dissected his own temporary blindness, “The Sharing of Humanitas”.
Later he was one of the first to address the Turkish genocide of the Armenians and the complicity of Imperial Germany – also in a TV documentary. (This time the death threats came from the extreme right-wing Turkish Gray Wolves.)
A public intellectual
Long before “contextualization” became a buzzword, or even a battle cry, to mix everything up with everything else, Giordano had worked as a writer, publicist, foreign reporter and public intellectual proved that references could be made and lines of tradition revealed without denying the singularity of Auschwitz or offsetting Stalin’s and Hitler’s victims against each other. It is no coincidence that Giordano’s objection to Ernst Nolte’s infamous attempt to outsource the Holocaust (“an Asian act”) was just as vehement as against those whom he described in the years after 1989, especially in the “taz”, as “leftists unable to mourn”. as lacking in empathy and unable even to perceive the mass crimes of communism.
The fact that the beginning reappraisal of the SED state could be freed from the reputation of being a “conservative project” is therefore also due to an anti-totalitarian left like Ralph Giordano, whose media presence was grounded in a personal credibility and a sharpness of argument that the opponents had at the time like Egon Bahr, Walter Jens, Uwe Wesel or Hans-Christian Ströbele could hardly keep up.
Biographically certified clarity
The same applied to his profound criticism of the so-called “peace movement”, which in January 1991, at the moment of greatest danger, refused to show solidarity with Israel attacked by Saddam Hussein and then in 1995 would rather sacrifice the Bosnian Muslims to Milosevic fascism than even one iota to abandon their concept of pacifism.
Ralph Giordano saw the worst German perpetrator tradition in precisely that abstraction from the concrete, accompanied by the tearful and brutal victim-perpetrator reversal. It is easy to imagine what he would have said about the current omissions by the Prechts, Welzers, Käßmanns, Schwarzers, Chrupallas, Weidels and Wagenknechts and with what biographically authenticated clarity he would have met the meandering murmurs of the upright Jürgen Habermas.
And not knowing the numerous books that the aforementioned letter-to-the-editor was so proud of? Well, Giordano’s probably most beautiful book “Israel, um Himmels sake Israel”, published in 1991, reads more up-to-date than ever today, since his solidarity with the country was also tied to that internal justice that had once been the power-critical prophets from Isaiah to Amos had warned. Whereby he, reporter, thoroughbred storyteller and esthete, of course, did not stop at mere admonitions, but rather let unmistakable people have their say in a dramatic landscape – just like in his books on Ireland, Masuria and Sicily.
And as much as he remained present as a chronicler with his own life experience in this gripping non-fictional prose – he would never have started his books with the currently so popular egomaniac-identitarian speech of “I as…”. And certainly not someone like Ralph Giordano in his emancipatory critique of Islamism, but also of Islam, would have speculated on the applause and the enticing number of clicks from the milieu of right-wing resentment. With good reason and without false modesty, one of his books, the continuation of his “Memoirs of someone who got away”, bears the title “On the achievement of not having become a cynic”.