The Full Catastrophe (10 page)

When I met him, Papantoniou did not want to talk about the accusations involving the Swiss account—though he had declared his innocence when talking to the Greek press—and he did not want to speak about his time at the defense ministry. “You know, because defense has been blurred with all these accusations.” He laughed uncomfortably and added, “I don’t want to have my name
linked in any way to that story, which is not a very nice one.” This seemed to me an untenable position for someone who had served as defense minister, particularly following Tsochatzopoulos. After a few efforts to get him to discuss what he had found at the ministry when he arrived on the job, he said he had contributed to “rationalizing structures and policies.”

During our talk, Papantoniou rejected the notion that Greece had cooked its books to get into the eurozone. The 2004 deficit revision was a political maneuver by New Democracy to change the accounting methods on defense spending, he told me, in order to make the previous PASOK government look bad and to make itself look more fiscally disciplined. The revision, he said, had unjustly “maligned the reputation of Greece as a country that is cheating and so on.” Papantoniou then ruminated on the debt crisis for a while. Despite the difficulties Greece was facing, he said, euro membership remained the country’s best hope for progress. “The argument for a country like Greece to join the EMU”—the European Monetary Union—“to us sort of modernizers in Greek politics was that by forcing this country into a system of rules, it would help the country to improve itself and behave better,” he said. “And this remains the hope.”

3
The Resistance

With my rifle on my shoulder

In cities, plains and villages

I open the road for freedom

I lay palms for her and she passes

—From the anthem of ELAS
 (the Greek People’s Liberation Army)

I
n early March 2014, German president Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor with an oratorical flair that suited his ceremonial position, flew to Athens for a state visit. At seventy-four years of age, it was his first time in Athens, and on the evening of his arrival, he and his partner, Daniela Schadt, went for a stroll on the Acropolis. This was, Gauck said, a special moment for him. Growing up in East Germany, he had taken Ancient Greek in school and imagined what it would be like to behold this citadel of Western civilization. He paused with his partner for a photo in front of the Parthenon. He put his hands on a stone parapet and looked out over the Acropolis’s south slope, gazing beyond the Theater of Dionysus Eleuthereus and toward the Temple of Olympian Zeus. “It’s now so that the old man sees with his eyes what he before as a young man had dreamed about with spiritual eyes,” Gauck told reporters. It was a pleasant evening, but the trip would get far more difficult after that.

The following day, Gauck met with the Greek president and various Greek politicians, including the ninety-one-year-old Manolis Glezos, a member of the far-left Syriza. Glezos was a hero of the Greek World War II resistance, and famous in particular for a spectacular feat he pulled off one spring night seventy-three years earlier, a few weeks after the Germans had entered and occupied Athens. Glezos, who was eighteen at the time, climbed up to the Acropolis with a high school classmate and pulled down the large, swastika-emblazoned Nazi war flag from its place above the city. The following day, a notice went out in Greek newspapers condemning the culprits to death, but the young men were never caught, at least not for that particular act. The deed became known as the first act of resistance in occupied Greece, and Glezos later attained an almost demigod status, particularly among those who shared his leftist politics.

The German president smiled broadly when he met Glezos at the plush Hotel Grande Bretagne, across the street from the Greek parliament building. “It is a joy and honor to meet a hero, a myth that I see standing alive before me,” said Gauck, shaking Glezos’s hand. Glezos, on the other hand, had a stern look on his face. He wore a baggy, dark suit and no tie. His thin, long white hair was combed back to his shoulders and a thick white mustache reached the creases of his cheeks. Glezos’s elderly body was slightly bent, but he nevertheless looked younger than his age, and his wide blue eyes appeared sharply in tune with the world around him. Glezos addressed his response to the translator rather than to Gauck, breaching, it seemed, diplomatic etiquette. “I was expecting him at the shooting range of Kaisariani and he didn’t come.” The shooting range Glezos was referring to—named after the Athens suburb where it is located—is a memorial where the Nazis executed hundreds of Greek partisans and communists during the occupation. Among the people killed there was Glezos’s younger brother, Nikos, who was executed on May 10, 1944, for resistance
activities. That day, as Nikos Glezos was being taken away in a truck to the shooting range, he hastily scribbled a note on the lining of his cap. “Dear Mother. I kiss you. Greetings. Today, I’m going to be executed. Falling for the Greek people.” Nikos Glezos signed the hat, added his address, and threw it from the vehicle. Someone on the street found it and took it to his mother, who read it around the moment her son was shot dead.

Gauck did his best to maintain his smile as a phalanx of Greek news photographers illuminated his face with flashes. Glezos and Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, then went into a conference room with the president. There, Glezos said, he read the German president a poem he had written for four comrades executed during the occupation. At the time of their murder, Glezos had been imprisoned with the men in Athens’s Averoff Prison, a drab stone mass that has since been demolished. The poem began:

One
Achtung,
two
verboten,
three
raus

and one and two and three and four times

the shrill voices rattle the silence’s calm

A building skinned the earth

And entered the flesh of the wound

Expressing penitence for the evils of the Third Reich is a persistent duty for any German president, and one purpose of this trip, Gauck told the newspaper
Kathimerini,
was to acknowledge Germans’ “moral debt” to Greece. Yet, while expressions of moral debt were welcome, what Glezos and many Greeks were really looking for was an admission of material debt. “What does moral debt mean?” Glezos told a Greek radio station before he met the German president. According to Glezos and others, in fact, the amount Germany owed Greece for occupation-era damages and debts was 162 billion euros, not including interest. That sum
would have halved Greece’s total debt, thereby going a long way toward resolving the country’s vast fiscal quandary. The Germans were not exactly open to the idea of paying the Greeks, though. Glezos said he presented his argument about Germany’s debts to Gauck in the room at the Grande Bretagne. The German president mostly “said nothing” in response, according to Glezos’s account of the meeting, only that he would relay the message to the German government.

The suggestion that Germany owed Greece money and not the other way around did not sit well in Germany. A summer 2013 article that appeared in the German tabloid
Bild,
the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, probably summarized the common German sentiment regarding the reparations claim pretty well: “Have these Greeks gone completely crazy?” To make its case,
Bild
published a graphic laying out the aid payments disbursed to Greece under the bailout agreements, which to that point amounted to about 210 billion euros. This was to emphasize who the real debtors were. The article ran on the occasion of another visit by a prominent German politician—finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. If there was one politician as disliked in Greece as the German chancellor, it was the cantankerous Schäuble, considered, along with Merkel, to personify punishing policies that had resulted in diminished wages, pensions, and economic output. Schäuble had visited Athens to declare German readiness to contribute 100 million euros to an investment fund that would help credit-deprived Greek businesses borrow money—a gesture, though relatively paltry, meant to illustrate that Germany was promoting more than just fiscal stringency, and was in fact doing something to help spur growth. “But instead of a thank you comes from Athens once again hate and malice,” the
Bild
article read.
In addition to the fact that one Greek newspaper greeted the finance minister with the headline “Heil Schäuble!” the main affront, according to
Bild,
came from Syriza’s leader, who during the visit made the unbelievable claim that Germany should compensate Greece for wartime damage. Schäuble had already shared his views on the matter with another German newspaper, saying Greece had no hope of getting reparations and that any insinuation otherwise was irresponsible. Greece’s leaders, he said, should advocate the reform path rather than “lead people astray with such stories.”

The Greek conservative-led government, however, maintained that it would pursue reparations in international courts. Around the time of Schäuble’s visit, the Greek finance ministry announced that, under orders of the prime minister, it had assembled a team to go through piles of documents scattered and decaying in various Greek ministry basements—the Greek government version of archives—and it compiled 761 volumes of documents that could presumably be used as evidence in a legal claim for reparations. A secret report on the findings had been sent to Greece’s quasi-judicial State Legal Council, which would determine the best course of action, the government said. Speaking in the Greek parliament, the foreign minister at the time, Dimitris Avramopoulos, recounted the suffering of the Greeks during the war, the “economic pauperization, hunger, assault, the theft and destruction of our cultural wealth, the arson and violence of the occupiers.” Greece would “claim what belongs to us,” he said. Times may have changed, “but memories do not fade.”

This was likely for domestic show. The conservative-led government did not want to upset Germany—its most powerful creditor, on whom it was completely reliant and with which it had allied itself. Months earlier, Prime Minister Samaras had hosted a visit of German chancellor Angela Merkel in Athens. It was the first such visit from the German leader since the crisis began, and
it marked an important turning point for Greece. Until then, some of Merkel’s political colleagues had pushed for Greece’s ejection from the euro. Merkel, by the time of her visit, had decided that this would be too risky for the rest of the eurozone. Greece had to be rescued, even if the Greeks didn’t deserve it. She therefore silenced Greece’s critics in her government and began to praise the Greek reform efforts, despite the fact that they were lackluster. The existing Greek government, after all, seemed to be her only conceivable partner. Syriza, the next strongest party in Greece, vowed to fight her and reject the bailout agreement, which it deemed responsible for the economic catastrophe. The ruling coalition, on the other hand, drew its support from the shrinking plurality of Greeks who calculated that the country was better off cooperating with Germany, because they feared the alternative could mean a still more catastrophic euro exit. These voters revered Merkel’s power—providing a political reason for Samaras to host the chancellor—but that didn’t mean they liked her. One would be hard pressed to find a Greek who did.

During her visit to Athens, Merkel was greeted by some 40,000 protestors, among them a small, grinning old man who walked around in front of parliament with a poster that read:
GET OUT OF OUR COUNTRY YOU BITCH
. The protestors were kept at a distance from the chancellor as a large swath of the city center was closed to traffic and pedestrians, except for those with security clearance. Inside the blocked-off area, thousands of police officers lined the streets, one stationed every ten yards. Snipers peered from the rooftops. Helicopters hovered overhead. As this went on, and as the sound of street battles between protestors and police echoed in the downtown Athens air, Greek television showed Merkel and Samaras going for a casual stroll and chatting outside the presidential mansion. One television commentator on a channel friendly to the government remarked at how amiable and relaxed Samaras seemed. It is safe to assume he was not asking her for World War II reparations.

While Syriza, with Glezos as the vanguard, made the reparations demand a main part of its platform, the then Greek government felt the need to pay lip service to the issue. So did all major Greek parties, for that matter. Golden Dawn, too, demanded reparations, even though its ideological predecessors were the ones who had inflicted the damage. The parties did this because it was immensely popular with Greek voters. According to one 2012 poll, 91 percent of Greeks believed their country should use all necessary means to obtain reparations. More than three-quarters of those polled said Germany was working on building a “fourth Reich.”

Opinions like this underscored the vast gap and, often, the antipathy that had developed between the Greek and German electorates as the debt crisis strained European cohesiveness. Germans largely viewed the Greeks as overspending, irresponsible, and corrupt, more deserving of punishment than of help. After all, the German word for debt—
Schulden
—closely resembles the word for guilt,
Schuld.
The expression
“Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, ist die Deutsche Mark nicht wert,”
or “He who does not value the pfennig is not worth the deutsche mark,” also summarizes German attitudes on fiscal responsibility rather well, and during the boom years, Greeks were certainly not valuing their euro-cents. Merkel tried to alleviate her electorate’s moral and fiscal unease with the penny-denigrating Greeks by emphasizing the painful reforms demanded of them. As Merkel repeatedly put it to her voters, the Greeks had to “do their homework” in exchange for German financial support.

To many Greeks, however, doing their homework meant losing their jobs or seeing their incomes dwindle. If this was the price for Germany’s help, many preferred not to have it. Inevitably, allusions to that previous instance of German domination became frequent, and images of Angela Merkel with a Hitler mustache or swastika armband began to appear rather often on the covers of Greek magazines and newspapers. In Greece, I often heard resentment toward Germany couched in terms of war. I heard it on
the playground with my son, in the supermarket, and in taxis. “This time, it’s an economic war,” or “This is worse than what they did to us during the war.” The latter statement was a particularly ludicrous assertion—one that dishonored those who endured the massacres and famine of the wartime occupation—but one I nevertheless heard often.

As Greece’s troubles deepened, so did crass, cross-party expressions of anti-German sentiment. One morning in early 2012, the popular commentator Giorgos Tragas, a round, graying, right-wing populist, began his radio show with this greeting: “Citizens of the German protectorate, good day!” With suspenseful background music, he added: “We don’t have a government. We don’t have a democracy. The will of our people applies nowhere. We don’t have our own laws. We are slaves. Vassals. A colony.” His voice rose to a scream. “From Thrace to Laconia, the foreigners are trampling our country. The Germans are torching again! They are burning Greece again!” This was an ordinary morning for Tragas, who also appeared on Greek television giving an ironic Hitler salute. Tragas referred to the Greek parliament as “collaborators,” Angela Merkel as the “dog of Berlin,” and he was fond of splicing into clips of her speeches archival sounds of Nazi rallies and German crowds yelling
“Sieg heil!”
Nazi symbolism also became a fixture of Greek street protest. I once walked by the German embassy in an upscale part of central Athens and noticed two large banners hanging on the residential building across the street from it. One depicted Hitler’s face, a swastika, and a Greek flag covered with a splotch of blood.
APRIL
27
,
1941
,
THE GERMANS ENTERED ATHENS
.
WE RESISTED
, it said. The second banner depicted a stern-looking Angela Merkel superimposed over a German flag and pointing her index finger.
IN 2013
, it said,
THE GERMANS ARE IN ATHENS AND WE
’
RE SLEEPING
. Certainly, German embassy workers did not particularly enjoy being greeted with a sizable image of Hitler’s face every morning when arriving for work. Greek authorities eventually had the banners removed.