Kissinger: a man of three centuries

The death of Henry Kissinger at 100 on 29 November marks the final close of an era in international politics. Through the sheer longevity of his life, Kissinger formed a last link to the statesmen of the nineteenth century, echoing their lessons and anxieties as a refugee from the collapse of the European order in the 1930s and a practitioner who shaped its successor. The world in which the pre- and postwar eras still framed policymakers’ thinking is gone. Henry Kissinger was a man of three centuries, the last of a kind.

To his admirers, Kissinger translated his expertise in nineteenth-century European history into his work as national security advisor and secretary of state from 1969 to 1977, marshalling American power into a grand strategy in which separate spheres and crises became components of a larger picture. He approached that history and its lessons as a scholar, a statesman, and a German Jewish refugee, and when Kissinger wrote and spoke of figures like Klemens von Metternich or Otto von Bismarck, they were almost companions rather than subjects. Their century taught that history was a constant cycle between the forces of disorder and the responsibilities of the statesman. ‘The public life of every political figure’, Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, ‘is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.’

In the centuries that Kissinger studied and reacted to, the dilemmas and duties facing statesmen were always the same. Considering the grand forces of history and contemporary politics, Kissinger wrote at 91, in his book World Order that ‘reconstruction of the international system is the ultimate challenge of statesmanship in our time’. Through to the 21st century, that was his scholarly commitment and his political goal.

The fear of the alternative haunted Kissinger. History, he knew, held an innate capacity to destroy the ideals and orders built by people. In the economic and political disruption of the 1960s and 1970s, Kissinger saw US power decaying and feared that it ‘had passed its high point like so many other civilisations’. He warned that ‘History is a tale of efforts that failed.’ Even more candidly, he admitted, ‘I genuinely think that the next decade could either be a period that in retrospect will look like one of the great periods of human creativity, or it could be the beginning of extraordinary disarray.’

Kissinger’s reverence for the great European statesmen of the 19^th century is well documented. What is too often missed, however, is the warning that era offered to him for his own period in office. As Kissinger explored in his writing, the Concert of Europe system, so deftly constructed by Metternich and Castlereagh after the Napoleonic Wars, ossified. Otto von Bismarck, with a cold realism and ruthless ambition – ‘Darwinism sanctified by God’, as Kissinger described it – was then able to upend the balance of power to achieve German supremacy. Yet Kissinger also argued that, despite Bismarck’s genius, the German triumph precipitated the decline into decades of total war in Europe, as lesser statesmen followed the Iron Chancellor. ‘Germany, the heir of the Bismarckian tradition of authoritarianism, the Prussian concept of service to the State as an end’, Kissinger wrote, culminated in ‘the Nazi ideology of man’s ultimate realisation in the mass and the establishment of success as the only criterion of values’.

Many of Kissinger’s observations and actions, therefore, were rooted in his own encounters with disorder. In connecting Bismarck to the rise of the Nazis, Kissinger’s interpretation of the history of Europe in the 19^th and 20^th centuries was intrinsically connected to his own experiences as a German Jew, born in the Bavarian town of Fürth in 1923, who fled with his family to the United States and served in the US army during the Second World War.

Earlier this year I visited the memorial of Ahlem concentration camp outside the city of Hannover for a book I am writing on Kissinger’s early life. The site was suffocatingly small – just half the size of a football pitch – for the thousand or so prisoners confined to work in the asphalt mine at the foot of the hill. Today, the brick outlines of the barracks flow under the fence and into suburban gardens. There was a school field over to our right and houses loomed over us as we listened to the rabbi on the anniversary of the liberation.

On 10 April 1945, the 84^th Infantry Division formed an arc around the perimeter of Hannover, ready to seize one of the last German cities ahead of them. As the army closed in, a small group of soldiers stopped on the roadside outside the village of Limmer. They caught the stench before they saw anything; a shift in the wind brought the odour of faeces, vomit and decaying bodies down the hill to the soldiers as they threw a baseball to each other. Up to their left, a group gesticulated, bellowed, and jumped up and down. In a cacophony of Polish and German, they pleaded with the soldiers to come closer. ‘We are prisoners! Jews! Jews!’

Kissinger drove up to the gates of Ahlem with his commanding officer. The soldiers tried to give the prisoners food, but their stomachs couldn’t metabolise the fat and some died. Kissinger spoke to a young Jewish prisoner. ‘You are free now,’ he told him, but the words seemed so meaningless as he uttered them. ‘I haven’t lived in filth and squalor,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘I haven’t been beaten and kicked. What kind of freedom can I offer?’

‘That is humanity in the 20th century,’ he concluded. Kissinger had fled Germany as a Jewish refugee seven years before and now, in the grounds of Ahlem, he was witnessing the full horrors of the Holocaust. A ‘stupor of suffering’ had erased the boundary in the camp between freedom and imprisonment, movement and stasis, life and death. Kissinger wondered, ‘who is dead and who is alive, the man whose agonised face stares at me from the cot’ in the barracks, or the prisoner, ‘who stands with bowed head and emaciated body?’

Kissinger was only 21 at the time of the liberation of Ahlem. ‘But age in our generation is not measured in years’, he had once written as a young, lonely refugee in New York, ‘experiences are our standard, fate our criterions [sic].’ The experiences of flight, war and the Holocaust formed the foundation of Kissinger’s devotion to international order and his antipathy towards instability. The Second World War, Kissinger believed at the time, marked a caesura between historical epochs, when civilisation’s end was predicted and humanity’s malevolent capabilities were fully exposed. ‘The generation of Buchenwalde [sic] and the Siberian labor-camps can not talk with the same optimism as its fathers’, Kissinger concluded in his undergraduate thesis in 1950.

That visceral fear endured in Kissinger’s worldview through his work as a scholar and policymaker. The malignancy of the camps and the menace of nuclear weapons were a spectre over American power in the Cold War. ‘Our generation has succeeded in stealing the fire of the gods’, he wrote in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, ‘it is doomed to live with the horror of its achievement.’ From the Second World War, the horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb became the fulcrum of modernity, dividing it from a more innocent past. In this new era, under its shadow of apocalypse, Kissinger believed, order had to be ensured in politics through an effective balance of power among the strongest states.

As John Lewis Gaddis wrote, ‘to seek stability and sustain it in a chaotic world, even if temporarily, was for Kissinger as close as historical figures ever come to heroic achievement’. Kissinger’s most consequential act as national security advisor and secretary of state, the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China following an extended period of isolation lasting nearly 25 years, was a goal motivated by such convictions. ‘In the years ahead, the most profound challenge to American policy will be philosophical’, Kissinger wrote in 1969, ‘to develop some concept of order in a world which is bipolar militarily but multipolar politically.’ By engaging with China and incorporating it into the international community, President Richard Nixon and Kissinger sought to establish a framework that could prevent conflicts and sustain an equilibrium between the great powers.

The fixation on international stability in Kissinger’s worldview also contributed to the controversial acts of his tenure in office. Criminality is a subject historians are poorly qualified to settle; morality, however, is not. Reverence for Kissinger’s work on China and the Middle East should not exclude our reckoning with the consequences of the Vietnam War, the struggle for the independence of Bangladesh, and the millions impacted by a United States blinkered by great power politics. Kissinger’s deep understanding of international politics and the tragic casualties of American foreign policy should also not be weighed as two sides of a ledger. They flowed from the same source, one that placed the calculations of the strongest states above the fate of lesser nations, and they are forever to be entangled.

Kissinger disliked talking about his childhood experience in Nazi Germany or during the Second World War, but one can sense in his more private statements the immensity of their effects on him. In 2007 he spoke to a group of survivors of Ahlem. ‘That is when one saw the bestiality of the system and the degradation of human beings and there is nothing I am more proud of my service to this country than having been one of those who had the honour of liberating the Ahlem concentration camp.’ It was an untypically emotional speech from Kissinger, as he invited the survivors onto the stage. ‘And it is something we must not forget. It’s an obligation we all have. I don’t talk about it much, because people won’t understand it who haven’t been through it. But I salute the survivors here, and I’d be honoured if they came up here and had a picture taken with me.’

As I stood in the grounds of Ahlem, 78 years after the liberation, there were no survivors or liberators among us. Kissinger was the last living link to the camp.

History slips away so easily. The debates about Kissinger’s legacy should not hide a deeper loss underway with the passage of time. In the course of researching my book, I interviewed a man from Fürth who, as a child in 1935, had watched the Führer speak from a train. Whipped up by Hitler’s speech, brownshirts stampeded through the town, trampling the young boy. He fled to the UK three years later, but the rest of his family were killed in the Holocaust.

Kissinger and that man took divergent paths and led very different lives, but they began in the same German town, members of the generation of Jews who were persecuted, expelled and murdered by the Nazis. We can venerate and decry Kissinger, but we must remember the man he was and the boy he had been, and hold on to the responsibilities of commemoration with which we will be left when his generation is gone.