I remember the guy working the front desk at the Hotel Alex in Berlin – the night I was there with 23 American students at the end of a two-month study trip I was leading. It was very late at night on the 3rd of July, and that Snowden thing was just starting to blow up. I asked the guy working at the front desk to call us some taxis to get us to the airport the next morning and told him who we were and why we were there. My students were learning German and studying German history in May and June. Some of us were flying home and others would stay for another month.
And so the guy working at hotel Alex said, “Well, that’s great they are visiting Germany for the summer. I won’t be visiting the States, however. Even though I speak English. I won’t be visiting because I am unhappy with the American political behavior in Syria, in Pakistan, and with the government spying.”
I was open for him to say just about anything after uttering the words, “unhappy with the American…”, but he chose our foreign policy in Syria, Pakistan (because: drones) and spying. I nodded and felt nothing, maybe a sort of Mitleid, I think I understood his outrage. So this is what I should expect from this whole Snowden leak now when I am in Germany. Was this a boycott? Who can blame them? Haven’t I felt that impulse to resist lately? No. Maybe yes.
He asked me, “What do your students think about it all?” To which I replied, after a short pause for air, “Well, they don’t learn about much of that in the American media. That’s what it’s like to live in a hegemon and not in a country like Germany.” I thought, why I am I making excuses? Do I really think that we are helpless as we sit in the belly of the beast? No. Maybe yes.
He was reading the Berliner Morgenpost. I could see Snowden’s sunlight-free face on the front cover. I continued, “My students know enough to read the foreign press online to get that information about the US behavior outside our borders. After reading, they just sort of put it in their pocket. Who can bear to know all that information, since there’s so little they can do about it?” The guy working at Hotel Alex began to shake. He was furious.
“Well, Germany, you know… the lesson of the war was … we have had to work to stop engaging in aggressive tactics against other countries. Because of our history, we are very careful to remain….transparent. To work through diplomatic channels. To stay out of other countries militarily. To question the power of our government through resistance. Don’t your students care to oppose this sort of action by their government?” And I thought, but did not say, “No. Maybe yes.”
I was grateful he used the phrase “students” and never “you Americans” or simply “you.” But the implication was there, that I should feel (individually) responsible for this action that my government (who represents me) has undertaken in my name. Of course I know the weighty context of that line of questioning. And for a moment it felt the stakes in this conversation had gotten so high – as if I were standing not in hip and fun Hotel Alex, but rather in Hotel Terminus, trying to deflect blame and throwing humanity under the bus with my equivocation.
I remembered in Ophuls’ film seeing retired American intelligence officials describing how great it was that Klaus Barbie (the Nazi they rehabilitated and employed post-war) had no moral qualms about doing the “dirty business” of interrogating and spying which they were unwilling to do. These American officials were supposedly the “good guys,” but it was they who provoked most of my outrage with their cynical recycling of Barbie’s monstrous skills. Ophuls’ frustrated attempts to question people he interviews in his documentary and his futile pursuit to get anyone to admit to Barbie’s guilt (neither the Germans nor the Americans who aided him did so) made me entirely fed up in the end. Was it a bad film? No. Maybe yes.
And then the guy at Hotel Alex smiled, smirked, and then smiled again decisively at me. “Let’s call those taxis, then, to get you home. Okay?” I said, “okay.”