The difference between occupation styles and political parties made it more difficult for the Western zones to articulate a coherent version of the future. Contrasting with French control, the prosperity and openness of the Anglo-Americans and the return of democratic emigrants such as Willy Brandt were attractive. The diversity of the religious and ideological offerings of the Western zones also appealed to youths such as Ursula Mahlendorf who were tired of Nazi regimentation. But the individualized denazification procedure in the West overlooked too many Nazis. This resulted in a succession of scandals, such as when Adenauer picked a chief of staff, Hans Globke, who had written a commentary on the racist Nuremberg Laws. The establishment of competing parties such as the bourgeois Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the working-class Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the business-based Free Democratic Party (FDP) also proved confusing. Only once widespread disillusionment with the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship in the East had set in, did the excitement about the freedom of choice help legitimize the democracy of the West.80
This ideological competition was decided by the currency reform of June 1948, which accelerated the recovery of the West and left the East behind. According to the liberal vision of economist Ludwig Erhard, the old Reichsmarks were devalued at the rate of 10:1 and each person received forty new Deutschmarks as start-up capital. A shocked population saw its savings, stocks, and bonds wiped out. Profitable black market dealings with cigarettes also dried up, since the new money had actual buying power. “Suddenly as if by magic many things could be bought,” Ruth Bulwin recalled. “The shop windows displayed unanticipated and long forgotten goods; much of what had been sold secretly under the counter at exorbitant prices now became officially” available. As a result, “people bought and intoxicated themselves with things they had long done without and spent the new money liberally.”81 Although it forced everyone to begin again with very little, the return to a competitive market helped jump-start the Western zones’ economies.
Yet the currency reform also deepened the division between the Eastern and Western occupation zones. First, the Soviets introduced their own money. The increasing tensions between the erstwhile allies had already stalemated the Allied Control Council and kept the prime ministers of the German states from preserving unity in their final meeting in 1948. Now “the barriers at the border crossings to West Germany descended, the Russians no longer delivered potatoes to West Berlin from their zone and switched off the power.” Due to the blockade, institutions such as Ursula Baehrenburg’s Berlin school were split into Eastern and Western parts. Moreover, Communist propaganda beckoned with offers of food and warmth, if the citizens of Berlin joined its side. But the Russians had not counted on the steadfastness of SPD mayor Ernst Reuter, who argued, “it is better to hunger than to give in.” US general Lucius Clay came up with the brilliant strategy of an “airlift” of Western airplanes regularly flying “provisions to supply the city.” As a result of this joint eleven-month resistance, “occupiers became helpers, and helpers turned into friends.”82
Still struggling with the aftermath of the war, young adults, above all, strove to have their lives “gradually return … to [their] familiar pattern.” In the first postwar years, Eka Assmus believed that “it was no longer a matter of politics. It was about survival” among the ruins. Joachim Fest remembered that “basically I had spent the past twenty years outside the sphere of normal life” due to Nazi pressure at home, in school, or the army, or as a prisoner of war. “We children never complained about the difficulties the Hitler years had imposed on us.” Nonetheless, the new “initiatives after the end of the war were quite fruitful,” according to Ursula Baehrenburg. “We were a young generation which after the difficult experiences was full of ideals and goodwill to build a better future.” After managing to survive the end of the war and the postwar chaos, the young adults had to start over again, coping no longer with extreme situations but with peacetime challenges. As Ruth Weigelt remembered her arrival in the West, “In the coming years a quite normal life awaited us with its highs and lows.”83
NARRATING NIGHTMARES
The individual memories described in these German autobiographies demonstrate that the impact of defeat fundamentally disrupted their lives and set them in new directions. Millions of soldiers, civilians, and NS victims had been killed. Hundreds of thousands of grieving widows, such as Anneliese Huber, had to bring up their children alone and hope to find a new partner. Millions of surviving POWs, such as Horst Grothus, returned from the camps physically or psychologically damaged, making it difficult for them to resume their civilian lives. Untold numbers of women who, like Edith Schöffski’s sister Anneliese, were raped, had to hide their shame and needed abortions, even if they were still in their early teens. Many millions of refugees who lost their homes in the East struggled to build a new life in the West, as Ursula Mahlendorf did. Finally, tens of thousands of Nazi victims, like Ruth Klüger, or gentile veterans, such as Gerhard Krapf, left the destroyed country.84 These biographical upheavals were the biggest rupture of lives in recent German history.
To describe such tribulations, many authors of recollections adopted the perspective of heroic victimization and described a struggle against an overwhelming fate. Their accounts reinforce the impression that the most intense period of German suffering lasted from the final stage of the war well into the postwar years.85 Testimonies by soldiers such as Wilhelm Homeyer or civilians like Ursula Baehrenburg stress the challenge of sheer survival in the final battles, the firebombing of cities, and the flight and expulsion from the East, during which they needed luck, cleverness, or help just to stay alive. During occupation, narratives like Edith Schöffski’s shift to dealing with the victorious soldiers and to coping with hunger, cold, and poverty on a daily basis. Further on, memoirs such as Erich Helmer’s engage the makeshift efforts to complete an education, find an occupation, and marry to start families, a tale of gradual normalization. Accounts such as Ruth Bulwin’s exude pride in having been able to overcome such extraordinary challenges, coalescing into a founding myth of postwar recovery.86
Many of these memoirists write with a stance of “diachronic disbelief,” contrasting the Nazi convictions of their youth with the democratic understanding that came with maturity. One such self-reflective author is Dieter Schoenhals, a former enthusiastic Wehrmacht soldier who later emigrated to Sweden to teach German Studies. He admitted, “Only after my return from prison camp did I become really aware how criminal the regime was that murdered and gassed millions of Jews for which I had been ready to sacrifice my life.” In writing, he forced himself “not to leave out anything” in order to warn his students against another war. Catholic youth activist Christel Beilmann also wrote a self-critical memoir, in which she stated, “1945 was for me the beginning of a liberation.” Only when she understood “what we did not know in God’s [realm] and the Third Reich” did she gradually realize the enormity of German guilt. This diachronic self-dialogue is typical of many memoirs and shows that the rupture of these lives initiated an astounding learning process.87
The memoirs also demonstrate that the younger generation grew impatient with their elders’ reluctance to admit personal culpability for the crimes of the Third Reich. Joachim Fest reported that incorrigible Nazis “continued to deny any involvement [of Hitler] in contributing to this collapse.” Horrified “by the details of the acts of inhumanity in the camps,” Ursula Mahlendorf “despised the many adults [she] encountered, including my mother, who claimed they had known nothing, or who denied the charges at Nuremberg as enemy propaganda, as victor’s justice.” When her teacher wanted her to reaffirm her belief in Nazi ideals, she blurted out, “No! You still don’t understand, do you? Loyalty to them? They were criminals, all of them.” Stunned by the personal report of Auschwitz survivor Jesse Rosenberg, Hans Tausch sought “an appropriate reaction to the horrible truth about National Socialism.” He wondered, “how would the directly guilty, how would our
entire nation be able to deal with this guilt?”88
Most of the autobiographies also show an almost desperate attempt to draw a positive meaning from the terrible experiences of their youth. In spite of the hunger and cold, these authors describe the postwar years as an exciting time of new departures in which they reached full adulthood, finally becoming responsible for their own lives. For many, such as Joachim Fest or Ursula Baehrenburg, this meant rejecting the advice of their parents: the older generation had discredited itself by its collaboration with National Socialism. Their coming of age involved providing the material basis for reconstruction with long hours of labor, a lack of food, and life in crowded, unheated quarters. Overcoming the Nazi heritage also involved, in Ursula Mahlendorf’s words, “personal regeneration through … reflection” and “taking responsibility for what we have done.” But the occupying powers presented diametrically opposed blueprints—Communism or democracy. While they were constrained by circumstances, the “Sunday children who had survived the war” once again had to choose.89
8
DEMOCRATIC MATURITY
During the summer of 1950 the Bulwins decided to build their own house in order “to escape their miserable quarters” in a former Labor Service barracks. For 500 DM in cash, they bought half an acre of forest land from a local farmer and then set out to cut down the trees. They dug the cellar with the help of neighbors, and filled half of it in again to stop the groundwater. When the building inspectors asked, “what are you doing there?,” they managed to pay the required fee and get an appropriate construction permit. Then they labored to pour cement for the foundation and erect the cellar ceiling as well as the exterior and interior walls. Only when things got too complicated did they hire craftsmen to build the roof and do the plumbing and electrical work. Saving every penny, they got a loan from a local bank, stretching their meager finances to about 35,000 DM altogether. On June 1, 1953, “we moved into our own home. What a day, what a proud feeling!” Such “personal initiative” and “mutual help” were typical of the years of reconstruction.1
It was a resolute and energetic spirit that inspired the rebuilding, since nobody else would “help the Germans out of the chaos into which we had gotten ourselves.” Those young adults who had been fortunate enough to survive the war understood that they could rely merely on their own efforts. Ruth Bulwin remembered the mood: “We had to get it done, we would force it to happen. Now more than ever!” Similarly, the newly married Hellmut Raschdorff recalled asking his pregnant wife who had awakened in the middle of the night whether she was in pain. She answered “no, but I am starving.” Living in a cramped room without running water, the couple looked forward to having their first child, even if the expectant mother had to quit her job and her husband’s manual labor in the forest hardly provided enough money to make ends meet. “It was not an easy time, but we faced the future with optimism.” Only after the currency reform “did things slowly improve.” Every purchase had to be considered twice, “but we were used to doing without.”2
By mastering such daily challenges, the Weimar cohort gradually gained a sense of maturity and independence. Though he admired his father’s Catholic convictions and his mother’s ability to deal with shortages, Joachim Fest’s “doubts as to the principles of existence coincided with the long-overdue process of detaching myself from my parents.” Still in high school, Ursula Mahlendorf “shared with my classmates a fundamental distrust of all adults” who were responsible for the German catastrophe. In heated exchanges with her favorite teacher, “I accused his whole generation. I articulated my age group’s feeling of having been shortchanged by our elders and of being berated for what they had failed to teach us.” Similarly, theology student Erich Helmer voiced his cohort’s “search for answers to the questions: What can still be believed? What is solid after the ground of reality has and is continuing to cave in everywhere?”3 By succeeding in finding their own way, these young adults gradually completed their maturation.
In contrast to academic self-congratulations for the successful development of the Federal Republic, the largely apolitical memoirs barely mention the founding of the West German state. The fusion of the Western zones, the restoration of federal states, the constitutional convention at the Herrenchiemsee, and finally the creation of the Bonn Republic between 1946 and 1949 were elite events that hardly touched the daily lives of ordinary Germans. This “skeptical generation” wanted nothing to do with the parties reconstituted from Weimar, which seemed to be “old boys’ clubs and has-beens.” To Ursula Mahlendorf’s friends, “politics was a dirty word and any form of group association suspect. Politics meant the Nazi Party, Nazi politics.” Only gradually did such constructive measures as financial aid to refugees and restitution to Jewish victims demonstrate that politics could also accomplish something constructive. Due to the widespread “count me out” reaction, it took the FRG’s superior performance in providing space for normal lives to make it accepted as the postwar framework in the West.4
The “internal democratization” of ordinary Germans was therefore a lengthy process that took several decades to accomplish. It helped that the prior alternatives of the Second and Third Reichs had failed disastrously, and that the establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” behind the Iron Curtain did not look inviting either. As a government system, the Federal Republic was “a donated democracy,” imposed from the outside after the defeat of Hitler. Only a minority of German democrats who had hidden in “inner emigration” or returned from “outer emigration” after the war actively fought for its establishment. Overcoming the poisonous legacy of authoritarianism required winning countless psychological contests and institutional battles. According to Martin Sieg, “a whole state had to learn how to implement the idea of democracy convincingly.”5 Only with positive experiences such as rising prosperity did the instrumental acceptance of the parliamentary system turn into an affective bonding to self-government.
PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS
The political framework for reconstruction was the Federal Republic of Germany, founded as a merger of the American, British, and French occupation zones in 1949. This second German democracy sought to resume the prior tradition of decentralized self-government while avoiding the defects that had undermined the Weimar Republic. Restored via citizens’ participation from below and cast into federal form, it contained strong constitutional safeguards against the resurgence of dictatorship through the civil rights provisions of the Basic Law. Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher, and Theodor Heuss, the fathers of this Bonn Republic (named after its capital in a sleepy university town on the Rhine River), were acutely aware that they were but a minority in the population and had to win over a skeptical majority of citizens through a better performance than in the past. They sought to stabilize democracy by restoring the rule of law, alleviating social suffering, providing economic prosperity, responding to citizens’ wishes, and accepting millions of refugees.6
The West Germans were fortunate to have constructive occupation powers that used just the right mixture of coercion and assistance to reestablish democracy. Though the discovery of the Holocaust made their initial policies punitive, the Western victors shifted toward reconstruction in the fall of 1946, easing restrictions on industrial production and eventually ending the dismantling of factories. While the French had to be coerced to go along, the occupiers ultimately realized that they had to cooperate in order to restore a semblance of trade and communication between their zones and gradually worked toward their merger in a Western state. One psychologically important signal was the inclusion of western Germany into the Marshall Plan aid that helped to reignite the West European economies. Moreover, their efforts at ideological reorientation also offered intellectual access to fascinating innovations of modernist culture.7 When the Federal Republic wanted to become part of the West, most of its neighbors were willing to reintegrate it gradually into the international community.
The surprisingly rapid r
ebuilding after the war required much hard labor, which eventually became a source of collective pride. In the early postwar years, the removal of the rubble, the gathering of crops, the reconstruction of transportation, and the rebuilding of housing involved great physical effort in order to reassemble an infrastructure for normal existence. In factories, many people worked under “appalling conditions” for ten to twelve hours per day, six days a week, with bosses quite intolerant of slackers, since there were enough unemployed willing to take their place. While young adults were mercilessly exploited at work, they also slaved at home to improve their living situation and grow vegetables, fruit, or tobacco in their gardens. There was little gender difference: young women were also expected to supplement the family’s income before they had children.8 In retrospect, the visible achievements of this enormous effort gradually restored German self-confidence.
Finding the right career in the postwar chaos was difficult because it required guessing about an uncertain future. Some young adults were able to follow family tradition, like Horst Andrée, who became a forester, or Hermann Debus, who became a skipper on the Rhine River. But other paths were blocked by the allies. Horst Grothus, for example, was prohibited from designing airplanes. While some young women such as Anneliese Huber were able to follow their inclinations and work in a pleasant business office, others were, like Edith Schöffski, compelled to accept boring employment as a saleswoman in a store rather than following their dreams. Erich Helmer wrestled long with his conscience before resolving “to become a theologian,” whereas Joachim Fest gave up his Renaissance interests and turned into a historical journalist. Often the choice was a matter of persistence and luck in getting a transatlantic fellowship, as happened to Ursula Mahlendorf.9 Though the decisions were nerve-racking, virtually all of the memoirists considered them correct in retrospect.
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