The Full Catastrophe (11 page)

At times, the antagonism turned aggressive. During a conference of German and Greek mayors in Thessaloniki, protestors, some yelling “Nazis Out!,” attacked German consul Wolfgang Hoelscher-Obermaier, pelting him with water bottles and iced coffee. The assailants had been incensed by the comments of another German, Hans-Joachim Fuchtel, Merkel’s special envoy to Greece, who earlier had told reporters: “One needs three thousand Greeks for work which in German municipalities is performed by a thousand workers.” Greeks tend to be incredibly sensitive to frequent accusations—often coming from Germany—that they are lazy, and in fact view themselves as quite industrious. In a 2012 Pew survey of eight European nations, people in seven of them said Germany was the most “hardworking.” Only Greece differed with this assessment, saying that Greeks, in fact, were the most hardworking. (Actually, Greeks, according to an OECD report, do work longer hours than all other Europeans, though this does not equate to high productivity.) Fuchtel’s statement—perceived as an insult to Greeks’ work ethos—was covered with great interest by the Greek media and stirred a lot of fury. Fuchtel later said he was referring to “unproductive structures” in Greek municipalities, and did not mean to imply anything about the Greek work ethic.

Some attacks against German targets were far more serious. One early morning at the end of 2013, gunmen opened fire on the German ambassador’s residence in Athens with two Kalashnikovs, spraying some sixty bullets in front of his gated suburban home. A few of the bullets ended up in the room of the ambassador’s teenage daughter, the Greek media reported. An organization calling itself the Popular Fighters Group later claimed responsibility for the attack, delivering a long anticapitalist, anti-imperialist manifesto declaring war on the “German capitalist machine.” The group also claimed to have launched a rocket at the headquarters of Mercedes-Benz outside of Athens, though the rocket missed and instead landed in a nearby field. Leftist terrorist groups have long operated in Greece—since the fall of its military dictatorship
in 1974—and have often targeted Americans. The most lethal of these has been the Revolutionary Organization 17 November, which over nearly three decades killed twenty-three people, including the CIA’s station chief in Athens and other American officials. In 2007, one terrorist group fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the U.S. embassy. Now German targets were becoming more of a focus. While these terrorist acts were by no means supported by the Greek public, they were undeniably another manifestation of the rising discord.

Greece’s debt crisis was testing European unity, and the results weren’t looking particularly good. As European leaders spoke of the importance of solidarity and further European integration, resentments between Greeks and Germans, between the debtors and the creditors, were growing. The vast differences weren’t limited to sentiment; they were materially evident in the economic and fiscal conditions of the two nations. As Germany enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate since its reunification, Greece was experiencing the highest unemployment in Europe. As panicked investors bought German ten-year government bonds at interest rates so low that investors were essentially paying Germany to hold on to their money, interest rates on equivalent Greek bonds peaked at around 37 percent. This meant that, for Greeks, borrowing from the market was impossible, while for Germans it was profitable. Germany was able to both increase spending on some social programs and have extra money left over to attain a fiscal surplus, while Greece’s debt burden continued to rise despite the fact that it was deeply slashing its expenditures.

In Germany, these differences were largely seen as evidence that Greece ought to try to imitate German policies in order to achieve the same result. In Greece, you could frequently hear an opposing idea: that these disparities proved the Germans were benefiting from the euro at others’ expense. Germany, in other words, was plundering Greece again, but this time without an
army. It was in this environment that Glezos, “the fighter for democracy” or “the symbol of national resistance,” as his admirers called him, appeared to be trying to finish a fight that he had begun when he tore down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis. Contemporary Germans, Glezos often said, bear no guilt for the sins of their forefathers, and the demand for restitution was not driven by bitterness or vengefulness. Still, sometimes a clear tinge of acrimony seeped into his words, one that reflected the tension of the times. “They say we owe them,” Glezos said at one point during a visit to the Peloponnesian city of Nafplio. “They owe us. We don’t owe anything to anyone. In particular, we don’t owe anything to Germany, which owes us for the death of the Greek people.”

On a sunny morning in late April of 1941, the Germans entered Athens from the north in a single-file convoy of tanks, cars, and motorcycles. Shorty after their arrival in the city center, they raised a war flag over the Acropolis, the “Holy Rock,” as Greeks call it, the place where “human culture found its beginning,” as Hitler once put it. The German flag’s red and black over the city in lieu of the Greek blue and white confirmed that the “barbarians”—Greeks’ term for the invaders—had arrived.

At the time, Manolis Glezos was about to enter college in Athens to study business and economics. He was slender, wore a narrow black mustache, and exhibited a tendency to defy authority. In school, he was a member of an antifascist student group that had written slogans on the blackboard against the authoritarian, far-right 4th of August Regime of General Ioannis Metaxas, which ruled in the years preceding the Axis invasion. Now, with Athens under Nazi occupation, Glezos’s subversive acts would grow more daring. The night the Germans arrived, Glezos recalled many years later, he went out in his working-class Athens neighborhood
of Metaxourgeio with a friend to survey the scene. He noticed that wooden German-language traffic signs had been put up for the benefit of the occupying troops. Glezos thought the signs ought to be destroyed and, without informing his friend beforehand, knocked one down. The friend then decided it would be a good idea to leave, though Glezos stayed and continued to knock down signs. As he was doing this, he heard the footsteps of someone approaching in the street, and hid in a doorway. The passerby was an old man who had seen what Glezos was doing. “Bend down so I can kiss you,” the old man said, Glezos recalled. The man kissed him on the forehead. To Glezos, it felt like all of Greece would support resistance.

Over the next couple of weeks, Glezos repeatedly met a friend and like-minded classmate, Apostolos Santas, to discuss what actions they could take against the occupiers. They thought about stealing a pistol from a German soldier, or setting a tank or a plane on fire. At one point, they threw Molotov cocktails at some parked German vehicles, but their incendiary-making skills proved deficient, and nothing happened. Finally, what seemed like a very good idea came to them. From their frequent rendezvous point near the Greek parliament building, they could clearly see the Holy Rock and the German war flag fluttering above it. The pair decided they would climb up one night and take the flag down.

A few weeks later, on May 30, Crete was succumbing to German paratroopers after a bloody ten days of battle. The Germans were declaring the Third Reich’s enemies in Greece defeated. “So that’s how you are?” Glezos thought at the time, he told me more than seven decades later in his living room. “We’ll show you that today, the fight begins.” Late that night, under a crescent moon, Glezos and Santas climbed the steep north slope of the Acropolis, pausing in a cave, before reaching the surface near the Ionic-order temple, the Erechtheion, where Athena and Poseidon were worshipped. When they saw the ancient temples of the Acropolis in the faint moonlight, Santas later said, they became emotional
with the thought that they were the “descendants of our great progenitors.”

The pair found no guards, and crept along the citadel’s perimeter to the eastern precipice, where the flagpole stood. They yanked on the cables keeping the war flag in place, and after quite a bit of difficulty and some climbing up the pole, the banner finally fell on top of them. The two friends kissed, embraced, and did a quick dance before heading back down the way they came, with the flag. They threw most of the banner down a dry well, keeping one piece of it—a corner decorated with an Iron Cross—as a memento of the feat.

The next day, a notice appeared in Athens newspapers announcing the offense: a waving German flag had been torn down and an investigation was taking place. The culprits would face the death penalty. Printing this was a mistake on the Germans’ part, Glezos said later. Otherwise, no one would have known about it. Instead, the act became famed across the nation and abroad, blemishing the sheen of German invulnerability. While Glezos was imprisoned a few times during the occupation, the Germans never found out who took the flag down until after they withdrew. Greece, after the war, fell into another one, a civil war between the communist partisans that had fought the Germans and the right-wing, anticommunist government backed by the United States. Even after that war ended in 1949 with the communists’ defeat, the ideological conflict underlying it lasted for a quarter century, during which time communists were persecuted or exiled to distant Greek islands. Glezos, for his political activities, spent a total of sixteen years in prison or exile, and was twice condemned to death as part of the Greek government’s fight against what it called “red fascism.” He may well have been executed had not the Acropolis feat won him international acclaim and advocates like Jean-Paul Sartre, Picasso, and Charles de Gaulle, who once called him “Europe’s first partisan.” In 1963, while out of prison for at least a while, Glezos traveled to Moscow to receive
the Lenin Peace Prize. The same year,
New York Times
journalist C. L. Sulzberger, in an article about the Greek communist threat, called Glezos “heroic but dangerous.”

I met Glezos at his home in a tree-lined suburb of Athens on a Sunday morning in the spring of 2014. When I arrived, he rose off the couch in his pajamas from underneath a mound of newspapers, shuffled over to a desk cluttered with books, and cleared a space for me to sit down. He then signed a copy of one of his recent works,
The Black Book of the Occupation,
which contains a grim registry of the massacres, executions, and hangings that took place in Greece during the World War II occupation, beginning in June 1941 with the leveling of the Cretan village of Kandanos, and ending with the hanging of a man and woman in April 1945 on the island of Kos. After signing the book, Glezos outlined for me the argument he said he made to the German president at the Grande Bretagne, breaking down into categories Germany’s debts to Greece (he refrained from using the term “war reparations,” which he deemed misrepresentative of Greek claims for damages inflicted during the occupation). The categories were stolen archaeological treasures, damage to the economy, a forced loan, and further subcategories stemming from these. He spoke with the rote, drummed-up passion of someone who had given a presentation on the matter hundreds of times. At one point, he stood up to retrieve a folder containing a reichsmark bill, the currency used by German soldiers in occupied Greece and elsewhere. The bill, a fifty, featured images of a Prussian castle and a somber woman in a white headscarf. Glezos pointed to Gothic script on the bill that said
Reichskreditkassen,
or “Reich credit office,” and added: “Do you see a signature?” There was none. He waited for me to answer no before proceeding. “It’s fake,” said Glezos, tapping his finger on it, “counterfeit.” Barbers, said Glezos, preferred to give German soldiers free shaves rather than accepting the bills—which were pegged to the local currency. Honoring the bills would have in effect amplified the loss, said Glezos, because change would be
given in Greek currency, drachmas, which, at least during the beginning of the occupation, still had some worth. This was another way the Germans stole from the Greek people, Glezos said. I looked at the bill through Glezos’s magnifying glass and asked him where he’d found it. He sat in silence for a moment without looking at me, seemingly irritated with the question. “Say I stole it from the Germans,” he said. Glezos’s younger wife, Georgia, who was sitting on the couch reading a newspaper, emitted the raspy laugh of a heavy smoker. “I was a fighter during the occupation,” Glezos went on, starting to raise his voice. “So I could look and find whatever. I had a lot more and lost them.” I then asked how he’d lost them. This seemed to him like another stupid question, and he raised his voice further. I was angering Greece’s hero of the resistance. “I was caught three times during the occupation! What could I have done? My mother was afraid and burned them.”

Georgia intervened. “Quiet down please, Manoli!”

Glezos at the time had announced his candidacy for the European Parliament, and the fact that he was doing so at ninety-one added to his admirers’ devotion. His “special reason” for running, said Glezos, was to bring to Europe the “escalating struggle for the claiming of Germany’s debts to Greece.” While the struggle was escalating, Glezos wanted me to understand he had been raising the issue for a long time. In fact, Glezos said, he had brought it up to East German leader Walter Ulbricht during a visit to the German Democratic Republic in 1965. Glezos at the time was a national parliamentarian for the United Democratic Left—which was formed as a proxy for the banned communist party. “Don’t think that because I’m a communist and you’re a communist, that you won’t pay for everything you did in Greece, what the Third Reich did,” Glezos said he told Ulbricht. “You owe us.” Like Gauck, Ulbricht remained silent, according to Glezos’s recollection.

This point about visiting Ulbricht reminded me of the intrinsic differences between Glezos, his party, and Germany’s current leaders. Both Merkel and Gauck grew up in East Germany, and
both, to varying degrees, have defined their political careers in opposition to it. That is particularly true of Gauck, who rose to prominence as a dissident of the East German regime. Glezos, though no advocate of authoritarianism and a professed believer in direct democracy, had been on the opposite side of that ideological fight. Syriza, while encompassing a broad cross section of leftist ideologies, from Trotskyism to ecosocialism, largely traces its roots to a rupture among Greek communists following the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Communist Party of Greece remained unyieldingly loyal to the Soviet Union, and today it pretty much remains that way as it continues to persist with a stable allotment of Greek parliamentary seats. A milder spin-off faction with a European communist orientation evolved into a big part of what is today’s Syriza. While Syriza is not awaiting the resurrection of the Soviet Union like its orthodox relative, traces of the Cold War ideological split nevertheless remain. For instance, following the Maidan uprising in Kiev, Syriza leaders expressed concern that Europe and the United States were destabilizing Ukraine for their imperialist purposes. After Russia annexed Crimea and began fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine, Alexis Tsipras visited Moscow and decried Western sanctions against Russia while warning of neo-Nazi elements in Kiev. In an atmosphere of renewed tension reminiscent of the Cold War, Syriza was taking the side of an old comrade.